I have been begging and wishing for new piano lessons. It’s been a long time since I started playing piano and it felt fantastic to have the gift of new lessons from my grandpa. He gave me a late birthday present of six months with a renown teacher in my city, Shane Bowles. I wanted to learn more about him before I met him and I found this article.
Bowles will perform Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto. He is a piano major at USU and studies with Gary Amano, with previous study from Jeff Manookian. He also studied with Endre Hegesus in the 2001 summer program at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, Hungary. His solo appearances include a performance of the Beethoven Third Piano Concerto with the Utah Valley Youth Orchestra in New York’s Carnegie Hall, and Liszt’s Hungarian Fantasy with the Utah Symphony in the 2000 “Salute to Youth” concert. Bowles was a quarter finalist at the 1999 Gina Bachauer Young Artist International Competition and received an Honorable Mention for his performance at the 2001 Jefferson Young Artist Piano Competition in Denver, Colo.
Wow.
Have to say that I was excited to meet Shane and a little scared too. I haven’t been playing for a while and though my teacher was good, you never know if you got the same schooling as the next teacher you work with. It wasn’t long before I learned that I had developed a good number of bad habits.
The lesson was short and fast paced, Shane had me play all sorts of variations, from scales to sight reading, to trying to come up with my own tune on the spot. That was the best part of the lesson. He saw that I enjoyed to play music I created on my own, so he walked me through an incredible exercise, adding note by note until we had an original tune. It was awesome!
Life has been hectic around the house and school work was starting to suffer, so I backed away from blogging for a bit. Today was just so cool, I had to talk about it. My lessons are now on Fridays and I admit…this is the most fun I have had in years!
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