The Ohio Conservatory

The Ohio

Conservatory

The OCM offers a variety of educational opportunities including: Piano Classes, Theory & Musicianship Classes, and Instrumental Private Lessons. Each year the students participate in several group events including: recitals, performance, exams, concerts, masterclasses, workshops in composition, conducting, folk dancing, accompanying, technique, music history and much more. Every June, the OCM holds “The Maestro’s Music Festival” – a musical extravaganza. It’s the only place in Ohio where you’ll ever actually meet Beethoven. We can start children as early as age 4 and continue to age 80.

The Ohio Conservatory was founded in 1996. In 1999 the Conservatory moved to the University of Akron where it leases piano studios and a piano lab through the College of Fine & Applied Arts.

The Conservatory offers a unique and exceptional music program that begins students at age 4 or 5 and combines traditional private instrumental music lessons with classes that include soflege, ear training, note reading, keyboard, movement, listening, writing, and theory and performance. You would be amazed at what 5-year-old ears and fingers can do!

The Conservatory offers many other activities during the year: master-classes conducted by visiting artists, student recitals both at the school and at the community venues, practice days, exams in which students play for outside adjudicators, and many specialized workshops (conducting, folk dance, performance, etc.). The season ends with the annual Maestro’s Music Festival – a week-long celebration of music, with concerts by world-class performers with Maestro’s friends – Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Rachmaninoff, Prokofieff, and others – all present in person! There are workshops, instrument demonstrations, master-classes, student recitals, school choir and rhythm performances, movies on musical subjects and much more. One-year students recorded a professional CD of lullabies for children. One year Conservatory students age 5-46 performed the music for a live ballet danced by a young company invited to the festival from Toronto. One year there was a party at the home of Johann Sebastian Bach – everyone brought desserts and Bach’s many children were there dancing and singing. Every year there is a wonderful party, performance, event, or festival to conclude the season.

WHY MUSIC

As a discipline, music completely engages every aspect of human capability – spatial, analytical, mathematical, aural, grammatical, athletic and emotional. Music is read; music is listened to; music is played; music is written; and music is comprehended both grammatically and emotionally. It is the most comprehensive training a brain can receive. To give children the ability to create, to perform, or simply to appreciate music, is the inestimable gift of a lifetime.

The Ohio Conservatory was founded to provide a more comprehensive musical environment than a private lesson alone can provide. The school allows not only more time spent in instruction per week, but a social atmosphere in which children can form friendships and share experiences.

Educational Program: Keyboard/Musicianship Classes comprise from 6 to 14 students and are held in a piano lab so that each student has a keyboard. Students are encouraged to begin as early as age 4 or 5. The classes cover solfege, ear training, note reading, keyboard, movement, listening, writing, theory, and performance. Our program may sound ambitious for pre-schoolers and kindergartners, but at the end of the first year, 4,5, and 6, year-olds read notes, play complicated piano pieces and have better ear training skills than most teenagers. A minimum of 5 performance opportunities is available each year. Classes with adjusted curricula are offered for children beginning at later ages. At least one private lesson per wee is required in addition to classes and extra activities.

Tricia Thomson holds a Masters Degree in piano performance from New York University. She has also studied at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Maryland, The Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and The Hochshule fur Musik in Vienna, Austria. She is director of The Ohio Conservatory where she teaches more than 100 students a week, using innovative and highly successful teaching methods honed over 20 years of teaching in Toronto and New York City.

Tricia has also been a filmmaker since 1981. Working with children, both as a filmmaker and as a teacher, she has discovered a remarkable fact- that children are capable of more than anyone imagines. The average child can do, understand and appreciate quite extraordinary things. Although great art of any kind requires mastery, it is nevertheless accessible to anyone who is exposed to it – not because it is easy, not because it is undemanding but because it speaks to the heart and mind. It makes us feel human and provides experiences that lift us up beyond ourselves. Tricia believes that the arts are necsessary to a culture because they are its spiritual and intellectual food and drink. Both ordinary and gifted men possess genius. Sometimes genius lies in the ability to create - but more often in his ability to experience.

Great art and great artists do not spring up in isolation. They are both a result and an expression of the culture in which they live. All art is built upon what has come before. To create art and to understand it requires context of shared experiences, ideas, feelings, sensations, language and thought. Tricia has been a concert pianist, a teacher and filmmaker. The Ohio Conservatory combines her fervor for all three disciplines with her love for children. With the Conservatory she is committed to helping to create a shared cultural background and experience for both children and adults, and to helping cultivate a community that creates and cherishes great art.