May 2012

Dear MTAC South Coast Members,

Wednesday, May 23, 10:00, Fields’ Piano (NOT May 16 as erroneously listed in my April message) is our end of the year branch meeting featuring Jyoti Hench and her pedagogical master class “Keep your mind on the music: Performance psychology for young pianists.” Results from the Contemporary Flare festival will be available at the meeting. We look forward to seeing all of you there!

I would like to thank Laura Chang, our CM Path B chair for such an excellent job of organizing this year’s Path B evaluations which took place Sunday, April 22^nd and her studio. Students had a good time and enjoyed Susan McCormick’s evaluating.

I would also like to thank Jennifer Puhls, Branch Honors chair and Emily Hung, our Composers Today chair for the excellent job they did in organizing and running the joint recitals on Saturday, April 28 at Field’s Pianos. Congratulations to teachers and students on fine performances!

Sunday, May 6 was our branch’s Senior Recital. Dr. Xiaole Li did a wonderful job with the program, the recital itself, the programs and the refreshments afterwards. This year our recital only had four participants and though few in number acquitted themselves well with impressive, musical performances. Xiaole wanted to make this event even more special and invited teachers to play after the seniors performed; this was an added bonus for students as the adult performances were brilliant and inspiring. Special thanks to Dr. Deborah Brener and her violinist partner Antoinette Mahoney, Dr. Xiaole Li and her colleague, Ms Naomi Sen on their musical and artistic performances. Xiaole played her own lovely composition, “Two Dragons” as a tribute to the lucky year the seniors are graduating in! Congratulations to our graduating seniors and best wishes for your continued university studies and the hope that music will always play a special and important role in your lives!

Our Contemporary Flare Festival will take place on Saturday and Sunday, May 19 and 20. Our chair, Anna Kim, has worked very hard to organize and schedule students for this fun event. The registration process was facilitated by our website creator, Andy Huynh, who designed a new and very user friendly event registration for our branch. He worked closely with our Vice President, Melody Lu and our Festival chair, Chi Asada to get it ready in time for the Contemporary Flare. Many, many thanks to you four for such excellence and commitment to our branch! I was sorry to hear that we had such a low enrollment this year especially since this is our most popular event. Teachers, we need your participation in our branch sponsored events if our branch is to stay strong and healthy. Please make a resolution for the 2012-2013 year to encourage your students to enroll in our events – we absolutely cannot succeed without your help!

I am happy to announce that our Concerto Competition is underway for Saturday, June 9 at Fields’ Piano. We opened it up to both Long Beach and Orange Coast Cities. We have seven participants: four pianists from our branch; two violinists and one pianist from OCC branch. We have a distinguished panel of jurists: Dr. Wojciech Kocyan and Dr. Mikhail Korshev for piano and Dr. Aroussiak Baltaian for violin. A sincere thank you to Andréas Eckstein for his thoroughness and perseverance in making this event possible.

A very special thank you to Andréas Eckstein for designing a handsome advertisement for our branch that will be placed in the MTAC Convention 2012 program. Our branch secretary, Laura Chang will be submitting all the beautiful South Coast event programs that Andréas has created for us this 2011-2012 year to the MTAC “Media and Publication Awards”. While I cannot see the future, I can tell you that we stand a very good chance of winning first prize. As I have said before, I would bet money that no other branch has such professional and masterfully crafted event programs. You make our branch look very good indeed, thank you Andréas!!

Make sure that you check our website often for updates and general information.

Musically yours,