Primo:
Secondo:
Marko at his piano lesson.
Marko's last competition was in the role of Secondo in a Grade 5 Duet in Vancouver's North Shore Music Festival, the first two lines of which are shown below.
Primo:
Secondo:
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Marko's certificate of participation for that duet.
And the evaluation.
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Marko had been scheduled to take the Toronto Conservatory Grade 6 exam at age 11:04.
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Here are the first two lines from two of the five pieces that Marko had finished preparing for that Grade 6 exam.
However, at that point it seemed that Marko was juggling too many balls at one time, and so he dropped piano from his curriculum, and as part of that retrenchment cancelled his Grade 6 exam. In the summary table on the Pilot Study page, an estimated 87% is entered as a grade he was about to earn, on the ground that that was the grade he and his duet partner had recently been awarded at the North Shore Music Festival.
In any case, from the point of view of estimating what is within reach of a twelve-year-old in a TBT program, it would seem a conservative goal that if Marko can be considered to have comfortably qualified himself to take the Grade 6 Toronto Conservatory piano exam at the age of 11:04, then TBT students could even more comfortably qualify themselves to do the equivalent given that they would have an extra year and a half to do it — which is to say while they were still 12.
The reader is reminded that the equivalent of Grade 6 piano by the age of 12 is not represented here as anything approaching high musical achievement, but is simply the base level expected of all TBT students, and deliverable by all of them with ease and pleasure.
For any student with a particular interest in music, nothing would stand in the way of achieving a higher mastery and at a more advanced level.
But then again, the same can be said of all TBT expectations — that they represent only what is within reach of all. Students who become enchanted by piano or literature or foreign language or mathematics or physics or chemistry or computer science or whatever, will find their breaking away from the pack being applauded and supported. Breaking away in Art is what Kirsten can be seen doing when she draws the bones of the hand.