Julia's Piano Studio - Cambridge Music Teacher

Julia's Piano Studio - Cambridge Music Teacher 📍Local Cambridge NZ Piano Teacher & St Peter's Cambridge | Est. 2023 📧 [email protected]

Julia's Piano Studio - Julia Yoo is a celebrated Piano Tutor, with a Bachelor of Music (Honours) and a diploma in Paino and Grade 8 Violin qualifications. Julia has performed as a soloist with the Dunedin Symphony Orchestra and delights in helping students reach their full potential

27/08/2026

RIP Yayoi Kusama (1927-2026)
Yayoi Kusama wasn’t only a painter — she was a poet and songwriter, too. In this footage, she reflects on her fraught relationship with her parents, who fought bitterly against her becoming an artist, before reciting a short song she composed for them. The verse imagines their souls rising above the clouds, dissolving at last into light and earth — a meditation on loss, forgiveness, and transcendence. She closes with the philosophy that shaped her entire body of work: that everything — moon, sun, earth — is one endless field of polka dots.

She passed away at age 97 in Tokyo.

Credit to Louisiana Museum

26/08/2026

Every soloist needs someone who’s got them.

Yuja Wang was only 17 when she first performed with the San Francisco Symphony — no entourage, no publicist, just “Hi, I’m here, what do we do?” 11 years later, that partnership is still going strong.

Here, the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony, breaks down what makes it work: the soloist is the one doing the flips and somersaults through the air — he’s the one catching. Watch them dig into a Schubert Rondo, refining and chasing exactly the right shape together.

“Once the music speaks, everything else goes away.”

Credit to KQED Arts

24/08/2026

This is a fortepiano — the direct predecessor of the modern grand piano. Smaller, quieter, and with the black and white keys reversed from what we’re used to today.

This particular one is a copy of an instrument built in 1785 by Matthäus Heilmann in South Germany — exactly the kind of piano Mozart would have played (in fact he was more of a harpsichordist earlier in his career), and the sound world Beethoven and Haydn wrote for too.

Instead of pedals, it has three knee levers:
🎵 A moderator — pushes cloth between the hammers and strings for a soft, veiled tone
🎵 A sustain lever — the ancestor of the modern right pedal, but used as a special effect rather than constantly, for legato
🎵 A “bassoon” stop — brings leather strips into contact with the bass strings for a raucous, buzzing sound, likely used in dance music

Hearing the instrument this music was actually written for completely changes how you think about it — small leather hammers, a simple action, and a completely different relationship between finger technique and pedal use than modern piano playing.

22/08/2026

This is a Ruckers mother-and-child virginal — a 17th-century keyboard instrument with a second, smaller instrument built right into it, tuned an octave higher.

The “child” could be pulled out to play duets, or set on top of the “mother” to add a jangly, buzzing color to the main sound — a Renaissance-era layering trick, centuries before anyone had a mixing desk. Antwerp instrument makers were doing this in the 1600s.

Piece: Henry Purcell, Menuet in A minor
Copy of a Ruckers mother-and-child virginal — André Extermann, Givrins, 1998-99
Musical Instruments Museum, Brussels, inv. 1999.012
Keyboard: Anne-Sophie Van Haeperen
#1600

22/08/2026

Hayato Sumino’s Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No.2 — Cadenza 💃

Music is limitless.

22/08/2026

“Trust me, I do not want to practice.” Yuja Wang with BBC in 2024. official

/Yuja initially chose piano to avoid dancing, a pursuit her mother encouraged, but eventually developed a genuine love for the instrument. “Practice is not just about playing the right notes, but about exploring and exaggerating to find new possibilities in a piece.”

She highlights the ephemeral nature of music compared to painting. Yuja also explains that intense focus allows her body to instinctively respond to her mental commands during performance.

Yuja tells stories and create colors - she feels she knows Chopin as a person and was particularly influenced by Hugh Grant’s portrayal of him in the movie Impromptu, which solidified her “super dashing” and “romantic” idea of the composer. She also notes how Chopin’s harmonies are still evident in pop music today.

Yuja admits she doesn’t enjoy the process of practicing but desires the “goal” of fulfillment. She views her career as an endless, “Sisyphean” effort because the challenges persist, as she, the world, and even the pianos themselves are constantly changing. Despite the challenges, her enduring love for music keeps her going.

21/08/2026

Chopin taught his students to sit at the front of the bench and reach the extremes of the keyboard with each hand, elbows hanging in complete freedom. Done correctly, this trains the mind to feel the natural path of both hands across the keys — and lets the body sense its center of gravity at every joint. From there, a simple drill: play one key with the third finger and feel the full weight of the arm travel through it, from pianissimo to fortissimo, while every other finger stays relaxed. This is the “Chopin feeling” — positions supported by bone, not gripped by muscle. Most tension at the piano comes from the brain ignoring two things: how each finger articulates at the knuckle, and how to hold weight through it. Without that awareness, the big muscles of the back, shoulders, and thumb tighten to lock the forearm in place — and you can see it the moment a student reaches for the far ends of the keyboard.

Credit to Chopin Method

Address

Cambridge
3434

Telephone

+64210437066

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Julia's Piano Studio - Cambridge Music Teacher posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category