Liam Franciliso is our Student of the Month for November. He is nine, he studies guitar with Teacher Ethan at our Fremont location, and he has been taking lessons for about five months.

Five months in, he already knows the song he wants to learn someday.

Student of the Month Questionnaire – Liam Franciliso

How long have you been taking guitar lessons?

“About 5 months”

What piece are you looking forward to learning someday?

“One piece I look forward to learning someday is an acoustic version of Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’ because it is my mom’s favorite song. Being able to play it for her would make the experience even more meaningful and special.”

What is your most memorable experience at CCM?

“One of the most memorable moments in my guitar lessons was learning to play my first chords and realizing how much I had improved through practice.”

What advice would you give a guitar student just starting out at CCM?

“Learning guitar is a journey that requires patience, practice, and passion. Don’t be discouraged when something feels difficult at first.”

Do you play any sports, or do anything else outside music lessons?

“I am a Taekwondo black belt and a triathlete.”

What is your favorite food?

“Chicken Adobo and Rice. Filipino Food.”

Do you have a pet?

“None. But I would love to have one.”

What do you want to be when you grow up?

“Mechanical Engineer.”

Liam in a lesson with Teacher Ethan.

Parent Spotlight – Shane Franciliso

We also asked Liam’s dad about the last five months.

What are you most proud of Liam accomplishing?

“The love for music continues to grow with Liam’s every guitar lesson, along with the confidence that comes from learning new skills, overcoming challenges, and recognizing his progress. Each accomplishment inspires him to keep practicing, express his creativity, and enjoy the journey of becoming a better musician.”

Why did you decide to give your child a musical upbringing?

“Introducing Liam to music means more than just teaching him how to play an instrument; it is an investment in his personal growth and development. Music cultivates discipline, patience, perseverance, creativity, and self-expression. These vital life skills can be carried into adulthood, allowing individuals to confront problems with confidence, form meaningful connections, and sustain a lifelong love of learning. Most significantly, music provides a constructive avenue for emotional expression as well as a source of delight that can benefit him for many years.”

What advice would you give a new parent starting in the program?

“I would advise parents to let their kids enjoy playing the guitar without putting too much pressure on them to be flawless. It takes perseverance, discipline, consistency, and patience to learn an instrument. Honor their modest achievements, promote consistent practice, and let them experiment with music they truly love. Above all, provide a welcoming and encouraging atmosphere that boosts their self-esteem, fosters their creativity, and deepens their passion for music. In addition to honing musical abilities, the objective is to foster resilience, self-expression, and a lifetime love of music.”

Congratulations, Liam

Five months of guitar, a Taekwondo black belt, a triathlete, and a plan to be a mechanical engineer. And an acoustic “Enter Sandman” waiting to be learned, for his mom.

Congratulations from all of us at The California Conservatory of Music, and our thanks to Teacher Ethan.

Book a free trial lesson at The California Conservatory of Music today!

If your teenager has played seriously for years and is applying to selective colleges, many of those colleges offer a way to send that playing along with the application. It is called an arts supplement, or music supplement.

It is optional, it is open to students who are not planning to major in music, and several schools describe ways it can help. Here is what they say, and how to do it well.

What an Arts Supplement Is

An arts supplement is a recording your child sends along with a regular college application. It is different from a conservatory audition, which is how students get into a music degree. A supplement is for students who play seriously, whether or not they plan to major in music.

Stanford’s music department says plainly that students who submit an arts portfolio “are not required to major in the arts at Stanford,” and Yale’s music faculty review recordings from applicants “whether or not they wish to major in music as undergraduates.”

How It Can Help

Your child’s playing can be heard by musicians. At several schools, music faculty review recordings, not only the admissions office. Yale’s music department says “it is Yale music professors who review selected audio recordings and scores, not admissions officers.” At Stanford, portfolios are reviewed, at their discretion, by “the Office of Undergraduate Admission and the arts faculty.” At Duke, a supplement is “evaluated by a Duke University faculty member,” and at Dartmouth, supplements may be reviewed by arts faculty, and the evaluations are added to the application file.

A strong evaluation can count in your child’s favor. Amherst says a strong faculty evaluation “can be a positive factor,” though “only one of many factors,” and describes the supplement as something that “may help your application, but will never hurt it!” Harvard says supplementary materials help “when they reveal unusual talent.”

It shows what the application alone cannot. On the application itself, years of lessons, practice and performances become a line or two in a list of activities. A recording lets the college hear the playing.

It can show what your child would bring to music on campus. Some colleges consider what a student would add to their ensembles and music program. Bowdoin says its music supplements are “primarily used to gauge an applicant’s fit for departmental ensembles,” and Occidental considers each applicant’s “capacity to contribute to Occidental’s music program.”

There is no penalty for sending one. Stanford says “students are never penalized for submitting or not submitting an Arts Portfolio,” and Occidental says a supplement “will never hinder” an application.

No school promises a particular result. Stanford calls the portfolio “one factor among many.” Think of it as a chance for the college to hear something your child has spent years on.

What Stanford, Yale and Brown Ask For

Three things in that table are worth planning around.

SlideRoom is not universal. It is a platform some schools use. Brown does. Stanford and Yale do not; each uses its own system.

Stanford needs video. An audio-only performance recording cannot be used, and performance video more than a year old is not accepted.

Send recordings through the school’s process, not to the faculty. Stanford says recordings sent directly to the music department cannot be reviewed, and Yale asks applicants not to contact faculty to request personal auditions.

Stanford’s portfolio is open to instrumentalists and singers alike, whether your child plays piano, violin or guitar, or sings. It describes its instrument list as “detailed but not exhaustive.” Singers submitting Western classical repertoire should note that Stanford strongly encourages at least one piece in English and one in another European language.

Colleges That Accept a Music Supplement

These colleges invite an optional music supplement from applicants whether or not they plan to major in music. We checked each school’s own page in October 2026. Policies change from year to year, so confirm on the school’s page before your child records.

• Where the school says music faculty review the recordings: Stanford, Yale, Duke, Cornell, Amherst, Williams, Bowdoin and Occidental
• Also accepting a music supplement: Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, Columbia, Swarthmore, Wesleyan, Pomona and Georgetown
• MIT accepts one from advanced performers who plan to keep playing at MIT, with a letter from their teacher.

What about the UCs? The University of California application does not take a music supplement unless your child is applying to a music major. UC Berkeley and UC Davis say they cannot accept extra materials, and at UCLA and UC San Diego a recording or audition is part of applying to the music major itself. San José State works the same way.

The Deadline to Plan Around

If Stanford is on the list, plan for early December, not January. For the 2026–27 cycle, Stanford’s regular decision deadline is January 5, but applicants sending an arts portfolio submit the Common Application by December 5, with the portfolio materials by December 10. Stanford’s restrictive early action route with a portfolio is earlier still, in mid-October.

Yale runs the other way: its supplement is due about a week after the application. Deadlines differ from school to school, so check each one separately.

Two more steps to get right. Your child needs to answer “yes” to the arts question on the Common Application, which is what unlocks the upload tools. And the recording is uploaded only after the application is in, but it can be made months earlier, within a year of the deadline for Stanford.

What Makes a Strong Recording

Contrasting pieces, chosen to show what your child does well. Stanford and Yale both ask for two or three contrasting pieces, and Stanford’s advice is simply to “choose pieces that best demonstrate your abilities.”

Whole pieces or movements rather than excerpts, and nothing from a method book. Yale says this directly.

You probably do not need to hire an accompanist. Stanford is clear that recording without accompaniment, or with pre-recorded accompaniment played through a speaker, puts a student at no disadvantage. What is not accepted is accompaniment added afterward through editing. For guitar and piano students the question rarely comes up; it matters more for violin and voice.

You do not need a studio. Yale accepts live recital recordings as long as they are clear.

Keep it focused. Brown and Columbia both ask applicants not to send collections of award certificates. The recording is the point.

Our View

This part is our opinion, not any school’s published policy.

Choose the piece your child plays well over the piece that sounds impressive. A listener who plays the instrument hears the difference between a difficult piece held together and a simpler one genuinely under control, and in our experience the second makes the stronger recording.

Record early and more than once. A recording made without time pressure in the fall is almost always better than the same student playing the same piece in a rush in December.

And think of the recording as a product of playing well for years. The students who end up with something they are proud to send are the ones who have kept practicing steadily, and the supplement is a chance for a college to hear that work.

Before You Apply, Check the Schools’ Own Pages

Everything above comes from the schools’ own admissions and music-department pages, checked in October 2026. Where a school’s pages disagreed, we followed the admissions office. Requirements change every year, so confirm every date on the school’s own site:

• Stanford: application deadlines, Arts Portfolio in Music and the Arts Portfolio FAQ
• Yale: supplementary materials and the music department’s guidance on recordings
• Brown: music supplement
• Other schools named above: Amherst, Columbia, Harvard, Duke, Dartmouth, Bowdoin and Occidental

Book a free trial lesson at The California Conservatory of Music today!

Midori is our October Musician of the Month. She was born in Osaka, Japan, on October 25, 1971, and the reason she is here is a concert she gave when she was fourteen.

Three Violins in One Performance

On July 26, 1986, Midori played at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Leonard Bernstein was conducting his own piece, the Serenade after Plato’s “Symposium.” She was fourteen years old and playing a three-quarter size violin, because she was not yet big enough for a full one.

In the fifth movement, her E string snapped.

She walked over to the orchestra’s concertmaster, Malcolm Lowe, and he handed her his violin, a Stradivari. She carried on with the piece.

Then that string broke too.

The associate concertmaster, Max Hobart, passed his violin forward to Lowe, who passed it to Midori, and she finished the performance on a third instrument. Bernstein kept conducting. The audience did not find out until afterwards quite what they had watched.

Two days later, the New York Times ran the story on its front page under the headline “Girl, 14, Conquers Tanglewood With 3 Violins.”

What Is Actually Worth Noticing

The part children remember is the broken strings. The part worth talking about at home is everything else.

She did not stop. She did not apologize to the audience or wait for someone to tell her what to do. She solved the problem in front of her, twice, and kept the music going.

And she was not alone in it. Two grown professionals handed over their own instruments mid-performance, without discussion, because a fourteen-year-old needed them more than they did at that moment. That is what an orchestra is. It is worth pointing out to a child who thinks of music as a solo activity where you are on your own.

What She Did Next

Midori had made her debut with the New York Philharmonic at eleven, as a surprise guest at their New Year’s Eve concert, invited by the conductor Zubin Mehta.

What is less well known is what she did with the career that followed. In 1992, at twenty-one, she founded Midori & Friends, which brings tuition-free music education into New York City public schools. It has now reached more than 330,000 children. She went on to found Music Sharing in Japan, which takes live music into hospitals and to communities that rarely get concerts, and Partners in Performance, which she paid for with her Avery Fisher Prize money.

In 2007 the United Nations made her a Messenger of Peace, a role she still holds.

She is fifty-four, she still performs internationally, and she teaches. She holds the Dorothy Richard Starling Chair in Violin Studies at the Curtis Institute of Music and joined the violin faculty of The Juilliard School last year.

Listening With Your Child

Start with Paganini’s Caprice No. 24, which Midori recorded. It runs about five minutes and it is a theme with variations, which makes it unusually easy to follow.

Learn the tune first. It is short and it arrives immediately. Play the opening fifteen seconds twice and ask your child to hum it back.

Then listen for the disguises. Every variation is that same tune wearing different clothes. Ask your child to raise a hand each time they recognize it underneath.

Ask which variation is the hardest. Children are good at this, and their reasons are usually musical ones. Fast is the obvious answer, but it is not always the right one.

Try This at Home

This one comes straight out of the Tanglewood story, and teachers use a version of it.

1. Ask your child to play a piece they know well, all the way through.
2. Somewhere in the middle, clap once. Or say their name.
3. The only rule is that they keep going.
4. Try it again with a bigger interruption. Drop a book, open a door, let the dog in.
5. Afterwards, ask what it felt like to carry on.

Most young musicians stop the moment anything goes wrong, because in practice at home there is never a reason not to. Recitals are not like that. The skill of continuing is a separate skill from the notes, and it can be practiced at the kitchen table in about ten minutes.

Midori had that skill at fourteen, and it is the reason anyone remembers that evening.

Book a free trial lesson at The California Conservatory of Music today!

Most of the parents who bring a child for their lesson at CCM have never played an instrument themselves, and many of them worry that this leaves them on the sidelines. The good news is, it doesn’t! The things that make the biggest difference at home are things you can do without reading a note of music.

Here is what they are, and how we know.

What separates the families who thrive

The most useful study on this compared 337 families, all of them learning violin one-to-one. The researcher surveyed the child, the parent and the teacher, then looked at each household as a unit instead of studying the children on their own.

Two of the groups she identified were made up of parents who were equally involved. The same hours, the same effort, near-identical scores on every measure of support the study took. The children in one of those groups were the happiest and most confident in the whole sample. The children in the other were the least.

The difference was not how much. It was how. In the group that struggled, the teacher gave instructions and the parent made sure they were carried out at home, which left the child as the only person in the arrangement without a say. In the group that thrived, all three talked to each other and the child had some say in how practice went.

One more finding is worth knowing before you draw the obvious conclusion. The families where almost nobody talked to anybody, where the parent stayed out of it entirely, did the worst of all. So this is not an argument for stepping back. It is an argument for a different kind of involvement, and every part of it is available to a parent who has never held an instrument.

Ask your child what they want from you

Some children want a parent in the room while they practice. Others find it unbearable. Both are completely normal, the answer changes as they get older, and most parents never think to ask.

It takes one conversation, and it saves a surprising number of arguments.

Keep them in the conversation about practice

Your teacher sets what needs doing and how often. Inside those boundaries, there is usually room for your child to have a say in when and how, and children who get that say tend to push back less.

“When are you going to fit it in today?” gets further than “go and practice now.” It is the same expectation. It just arrives as a question.

Give practice somewhere to happen

A guitar in a case under a bed gets played less than a guitar on a stand in the corner. A keyboard that has to be set up is a keyboard that gets set up less often.

This sounds too small to matter. It is one of the biggest differences between the households we see, and it costs nothing but a decision about where things live.

Protect the relationship with the teacher

A lot of the work is being done by whether your child likes and trusts their teacher. You can help that along simply by taking an interest in it, and by talking to the teacher yourself.

Two minutes at pickup tells you more than any practice chart, and it tells your teacher things about your child that never surface in a lesson. If something is not working, we would always rather hear it early.

Be the audience

This is the one most often skipped, and the one the research keeps pointing at. The phrase in the study is that the parents whose children did best remained “a supremely interested audience.”

It means asking to hear the piece. Sitting down while they play it. Saying what you noticed rather than whether it was good, because “that bit in the middle sounds completely different from last week” proves you were listening in a way that “well done” never will.

You do not need to know whether they played it correctly. You only need to know it is not the same as it was in September, and any parent can hear that.

What fifteen years has shown us

Research describes averages. It cannot tell you what a Tuesday evening looks like in your house. This part is ours.

The families who last are almost never the ones with the strictest practice regime. They are the ones who treat lessons as an ordinary part of the week, the way swimming or soccer is, and who keep turning up when the week has gone badly.

One of our own parents put it better than we would have. Asked what advice she would give someone just starting, Rohan’s mother told us their mantra is simply to keep showing up to class, week after week. Progress in music is not made of perfect weeks. It is made of a long run of ordinary ones.

Try this tonight

Ask your child to play you the piece they are working on. Not the finished one they can already play well. The one still in progress, the one that is a bit of a mess.

Then ask one question about it. Which part is hardest? What are you meant to be fixing? What does your teacher keep saying?

Most children talk for longer than you expect, because it is rare for an adult to ask.

Where this comes from

Claims about research should be checkable, so here is what the above rests on.

Creech, “Learning a musical instrument: the case for parental support,” Music Education Research, 2010. The study of 337 parent-pupil-teacher trios, and the source of the phrase “a supremely interested audience.”

Creech and Hallam, “Learning a musical instrument: the influence of interpersonal interaction on outcomes for school-aged pupils,” Psychology of Music, 2011. The same families, and the paper that sets out the limits: a 42 percent response rate, teachers choosing who received the survey, and no students who had already stopped lessons.

Both studies followed violin students in Britain, and both are surveys taken at a single moment, which means they show what travels together rather than what causes what. Whether the same pattern holds for piano, guitar or voice has not been tested at anything like the same scale. We treat it as a strong hint rather than a proven rule, and it matches what we see.

Book a free trial lesson at The California Conservatory of Music today!

The piano is younger than most people assume. The violin had already been around for about a hundred and fifty years before the first one was built, and unlike the violin, we know exactly who built it.

Who Invented the Piano?

The piano was invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori, an Italian instrument maker born in Padua in 1655.

In 1688 he was hired by Grand Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici to look after the Medici family’s harpsichords in Florence. That was the job: tuning, repairing, maintaining and moving a large collection of keyboard instruments. He was not a composer and he was not famous. He was the man who kept the instruments working, and he had a workshop and the time to think.

This is worth pausing on, because the violin has no equivalent. Ask who invented the violin and the honest answer is that nobody did, exactly. It emerged gradually in northern Italy across the early sixteenth century through the work of many makers. The piano is the opposite. One man, one workshop, one invention.

When and Where Was the Piano Invented?

In Florence, around 1700.

The firm evidence is an inventory of the Medici family’s musical instruments drawn up in 1700, which lists something new: “an arpicembalo by Bartolomeo Cristofori, of new invention, that makes the soft and the loud.” A court musician named Federigo Meccoli separately recorded the same year for the same instrument, which gives us two independent contemporary witnesses.

So the piano is about 325 years old.

Why you will see 1709 quoted everywhere

Search for this question and a great many sources, including some very reputable ones, will tell you 1709. That date comes from a different event. In 1709 the writer Scipione Maffei interviewed Cristofori and saw the instrument, and he published a description of it, complete with a diagram of the mechanism, in 1711.

1709 is when the piano was written about. 1700 is when the records show it already existed. You will also occasionally see 1698, which rests on a single diary whose authenticity scholars now doubt.

Why Is It Called a Piano?

Maffei called it a gravicembalo col piano e forte, which means “harpsichord with soft and loud.”

People got tired of saying that, so it was shortened to pianoforte, and then shortened again to piano. The instrument is named after what it could do rather than what it was, and the name we kept is the half that means “quiet.” The largest, loudest instrument in most houses is named with the Italian word for soft.

What Made It Different From a Harpsichord

A harpsichord plucks. Pressing a key lifts a wooden jack carrying a small quill, which catches the string on the way past and plucks it, rather like a tiny guitar pick. A pluck is a pluck. Press the key harder and you get the same volume.

A piano strikes. Pressing a key throws a hammer at the string. Throw it faster and the note is louder. Press gently and it is soft. That is the whole idea, and it is why a pianist can shape a phrase and a harpsichordist cannot.

There was an instrument that already responded to touch, the clavichord, but it was so quiet you could barely hear it from across a room. Cristofori’s achievement was getting volume and touch sensitivity in the same instrument.

The clever part: letting go

The obvious way to build this does not work. If the hammer stayed attached to the key, it would rest against the string after striking it and kill the sound instantly. You would get a thud.

Cristofori’s solution is called an escapement. A sprung lever drives the hammer most of the way to the string and then releases it, a fraction of an inch before contact. The hammer travels the last stretch on its own and bounces straight off, leaving the string ringing freely.

The way to explain it to a child is that you do not push a ball into a target. You throw it, and you let go before it arrives. Cristofori worked out how to make a key throw a hammer.

He added a second piece too, a check that catches the hammer as it rebounds so it cannot bounce back and hit the string a second time. That basic principle, a hammer released just before it strikes, is still how a piano works today.

The Oldest Piano That Still Exists

Three of Cristofori’s pianos survive. The oldest, built in 1720, is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The others are in Rome, from 1722, and in Leipzig, from 1726.

The 1720 instrument has 54 keys. A modern piano has 88. It also sounds much closer to a harpsichord than to anything in a living room today, because the strings are thinner and the hammers harder.

Bach Complained, Then Sold Them

Maffei’s 1711 article was translated into German and reprinted in 1725, where it was almost certainly read by Gottfried Silbermann, an important organ builder in Saxony. Silbermann started making pianos in the 1730s.

Johann Sebastian Bach tried one around 1736 and did not like it. According to a contemporary account, he complained that the touch was too heavy and the treble too weak.

Silbermann kept working. By 1747, when Bach visited Frederick the Great at Potsdam and played the improved instruments there, he approved of them. Two years later he was acting as a sales agent. A receipt signed in Bach’s own hand, dated 9 May 1749, records him selling a “Piano et Forte” to a Polish count.

Bach’s first reaction to the piano was a complaint. His last was a sales receipt.

How It Became the Piano We Know

It took about seventy years for the piano to overtake the harpsichord. Johannes Zumpe’s small, affordable square pianos, made in London from 1766, did more than anything else to get them into ordinary homes. Broadwood built its last harpsichord in 1793.

The nineteenth century did the rest, and almost all of it follows from one invention: the cast-iron frame, patented by Alpheus Babcock in Boston in 1825 and applied to grand pianos by 1843. A wooden frame can only take so much pull. An iron one can take far more, which allows thicker strings at higher tension, which means a much bigger sound.

Everything else follows. Felt hammers arrived in 1826. Cross-stringing, which runs the bass strings diagonally over the others so they can be longer, was patented in the United States by Henry Steinway Jr. in 1859. Sébastien Érard’s double escapement of 1821 let a note be repeated before the key had fully returned, which is why fast repeated notes are possible at all. Piano makers settled on 88 keys during the 1880s and 1890s.

A modern grand holds around twenty tons of string tension, all the time. That is what the iron is for.

Three Things to Tell Your Child

The piano’s name means “quiet.” Its full name was “harpsichord with soft and loud,” and the bit we kept was the soft.

The oldest piano in the world is missing 34 keys. Cristofori’s 1720 instrument in New York has 54. The one at home has 88.

Even Bach changed his mind. He complained about the first piano he tried and was selling them thirteen years later.

A Note on the Violin

If the piano arrived around 1700, the violin had taken its modern shape in northern Italy somewhere between about 1520 and 1550. That is a head start of roughly a hundred and fifty years, and the oldest surviving instruments tell the same story: the oldest dated violin is from 1564, the oldest piano from 1720.

We have written about that story separately in a brief history of the violin, which is a rather different kind of history. Nobody signed the violin’s invention. Cristofori signed his.

Book a free trial lesson at The California Conservatory of Music today!

Paul Dukas is our October Composer of the Month. There is a good chance your child already knows his most famous piece of music without knowing his name, because it is the one with the broomstick.

The Piece You Already Know

Dukas was born in Paris on October 1, 1865. In 1897, when he was thirty-one, he wrote The Sorcerer’s Apprentice and conducted its first performance himself.

He took the story from a poem Goethe had written exactly one hundred years earlier. An old sorcerer leaves his young apprentice with a chore: fill the water basin. The apprentice is impatient, so he uses a spell he has overheard to bring a broomstick to life and make it carry the buckets for him.

It works beautifully. The only problem is that he never learned the words to make it stop. He tries to stop the broom himself and ends up with two brooms instead of one, both of them fetching water. The workshop floods. Then the master comes home, says the right words, and the broom goes quietly back to its corner.

Disney animated it in Fantasia in 1940, with Mickey Mouse as the apprentice. Dukas never got to see it.

Listening With Your Child

This is one of the best pieces of orchestral music to listen to with a young child, because you can follow the whole story with your ears. It runs about ten minutes.

Listen for the broom. When the spell works, a low, lumbering tune starts up in the bassoon. That tune is the broom. Ask your child to put a hand up every time it comes back.

Listen for the moment it goes wrong. The broom’s tune arrives twice at once, and then more. Ask your child how the music tells you there are more brooms now, when nobody has said a word.

Listen for the flood. The music gets faster, louder and more crowded as the water rises. Ask whether it feels like the room is filling up.

Listen for the master. When he returns, the music stops almost dead. Ask your child what that silence means, and why Dukas might have chosen to make the loudest part of the piece end so suddenly.

That last question is a real composition lesson, and children answer it better than adults do.

The Teacher Behind a Lot of Music You Know

Dukas spent much of his life teaching. He ran the orchestration class at the Paris Conservatoire from 1910 to 1913, and from 1927 until his death in 1935 he was professor of composition there. He also taught at the École normale de musique in Paris.

His students are the surprising part. Olivier Messiaen studied with him. So did Maurice Duruflé. And two of the most important composers in the guitar’s entire repertoire came out of his teaching: Joaquín Rodrigo, who wrote the Concierto de Aranjuez, and Manuel Ponce, who wrote much of the music Segovia played.

For a school that teaches guitar, that is a direct line. A student here working on Ponce is playing music written by someone who sat in Paul Dukas’s classroom.

He Kept Only What He Thought Was Finished

Dukas held himself to a standard most composers would find unbearable. He wrote a great deal and published very little, throwing away anything he did not think was genuinely finished. Barely a dozen of his works survive.

There is something worth telling a student in that. He was not a composer who published everything and hoped. He worked on things until they were right, and the small number of pieces that made it through are still played a century later.

Beyond The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, two of them turn up constantly: the fanfare from his ballet La Péri, which brass sections everywhere play, and a short piece called Villanelle that he wrote as an exam piece for the Conservatoire horn students and which horn players still play today.

Try This at Home

The broom has its own tune. That is the whole trick of the piece: give a character a short melody, and the audience knows who has walked into the room without being told.

After you have listened, try this together:

1. Pick something in your house that moves. The kettle, the dog, the washing machine, someone coming down the stairs.
2. Make up a short tune for it. Four or five notes is plenty.
3. Play or sing it loudly when that thing is busy, and quietly when it is resting.
4. See whether anyone else in the house can guess what the tune is about.

If your child plays an instrument, they can do all of this on it. If they do not, humming works perfectly well. Dukas’s broom is only a handful of notes, and it has been recognizable for a hundred and twenty-nine years.

Book a free trial lesson at The California Conservatory of Music today!

Rohan Carlzon is our Student of the Month for October. He is ten, he studies piano with Dr. Chelsea at our Sunnyvale location, and he has been with us for about two and a half years.

We sat him down with a few questions.

Student of the Month Questionnaire – Rohan Carlzon

How long have you been taking piano lessons?

“About two and a half years.”

What is your favorite thing about playing piano?

“Some songs sound harder than they are, and it’s always nice to play cool music.”

What piece are you looking forward to learning someday?

“Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven.”

What advice would you give a piano student just starting out at CCM?

“Practice more than I did.”

Do you play any sports, or do anything else outside music?

“I skateboard, rock climb, and I play chess. I also like video games and to play D&D.”

Do you have a pet?

“I have… the one guppy that survived… THE FISH PLAGUE.”

What is your favorite food?

“SUSHI.”

What do you want to be when you grow up?

“I want to be an astrophysicist or a computer scientist.”

Parent Spotlight – Imane Chraibi Carlzon

We also asked Rohan’s mother about the last two and a half years.

What are you most proud of Rohan accomplishing?

“Seeing him enjoy decoding music, and get into creating melodies.”

Why did you decide to give your child a musical upbringing?

“Music is so central in our family life yet none of us is a musician. I now regret giving up on piano after struggling with decoding music, and I want him to have this skill that can bring him joy anytime in life.”

What advice would you give a new parent starting in the program?

“There are weeks with a lot of practice, and weeks with less, and it’s fine. Our mantra is to just keep showing up to class week after week. It is also worth discussing with the teacher what kind of music your child is into, or let them explore composition if that’s what they are curious about. That flexibility went a long way for Rohan.”

Congratulations, Rohan

Two and a half years in, writing his own melodies, with the Moonlight Sonata somewhere ahead of him. That is a very good place to be at ten.

Congratulations from all of us at The California Conservatory of Music, and our thanks to Dr. Chelsea.

Book a free trial lesson at The California Conservatory of Music today!

This September we are delighted to feature Zaara Shareef as our Student of the Month! Zaara has been taking voice lessons at our Sunnyvale location for four years, since 2022, with Teacher Gaby.

She sang “Skyfall” at a recent recital, and several parents went out of their way afterward to tell her family how much they had enjoyed it. Ask Zaara what she likes most about singing and she will tell you it is discovering new ways to improve her voice, which is a fairly serious answer from an eleven-year-old.

Read more about Zaara’s experience at CCM below!

Student of the Month Questionnaire – Zaara Shareef

What is your name?
Zaara Shareef.

How old are you?
I am 11 years old.

Who is your teacher?
Ms. Gaby.

How long have you been taking voice lessons?
Four years, since 2022.

What advice would you give to a voice student just starting out at CCM?
To always arrive to your lesson on time and always practice after your lessons!

What piece are you looking forward to learning someday?
Not a particular piece, but I want to try different varieties of songs.

What is your favorite thing about voice lessons and singing?
Discovering new ways to improve my vocal skills.

What is your favorite food?
Burritos.

Do you have a pet?
Yes, I have two cats.

Do you play any sports or do any other activities outside of music lessons?
Yes, I play the piano and I enjoy playing volleyball.

What do you want to be when you grow up?
I want to be either a lawyer, a governor, or the U.S. President.

What is your most memorable experience at CCM?
I love the recitals. I especially love how all the parents clap for me at the end. It makes me feel I did an awesome job, which I always do.

Parent Spotlight – Nuzhath Jahan

Regarding voice instruction, what are you most proud of your child accomplishing?
I am incredibly proud of how Zaara’s voice skills have grown. Her recent recital performance of “Skyfall” was wonderful, and it was touching when several parents shared their appreciation for her singing afterward.

What advice would you give a new parent starting in the program?
Encourage your child to practice regularly, even for a few minutes a day. With consistent practice and encouragement, they’ll build confidence and see improvement over time.

Why did you decide to give your child a musical upbringing?
I’ve always loved music, but I never got the chance to learn it myself. So I wanted my kids to have that opportunity — to not only enjoy music, but learn it, grow through it, and hopefully bring joy to others through their music.

Congratulations, Zaara!

Book a free trial lesson at The California Conservatory of Music today!