This year’s Festival involved effort from the entire store, not just the piano/keyboard department. According to Sue, the Festival can’t be truly successful without help from all the store's employees. “The Clavinova Festival is a real labor of love. A tremendous amount of work goes into it, but the rewards are very great,” says Collier. Brook Mays began preparing for the Festival months ago, with a teacher camp hosted by Yamaha Specialist Philip Keveren, giving the teachers basic information on utilizing the technology of the Clavinova; Lori Frazer taught a similar camp for the students and their parents. “We really want to emphasize communication with the parents,” says Collier. Other preparations included the placement of several CVP107 units in teachers’ studios so that the teachers and their students would be comfortable with performing on the digital pianos.

Clavinova Festival participants at Brook Mays, TX performed in front of a standing-room-only crowd.

Participants had the choice of having their performances judged by guest adjudicators. They included Yamaha District Manager Mark Peterson; Keyboard Specialists Dan Rodowicz and Philip Keveren; Samuel Holland, head of the piano department at Southern Methodist University in Dallas; and Guillermo Martinez, teacher at Texas Christian University and Texas Wesleyan University. The adjudicators critiqued the perfomances in a very positive and encouraging way. “The Clavinova Festival is designed for students to share music with their friends and be a positive experience,” says Collier. “I love working on this Festival. We continually get good feedback.” Cindy Myerchin, Festival Coordinator for Scott’s Music in Grand Forks, ND echoes this sentiment. “This year’s Festival was twice as large as last year’s,” she says. “Some of our participants came from almost two hours away!” Since this was Scott’s Music’s second Clavinova Festival, the process went much smoother. “The whole day went ahead of schedule; the kids were trained how to use the Clavinova digital piano’s features prior to the Festival, so I didn’t have to help all 106 participants set up for their performances,” says Myerchin. “We never had a problem the whole day.” She adds that the Festival was non-competitive because Scott’s Music wanted to get as many people involved without having the pressure of a competition. In preparing for the Festival, all piano teachers in the area with eight or more students were sent letters inviting them to enroll their students. More than ten teachers signed up and participated in seminars given by Lori Frazer; they were also loaned Clavinova CVP105 and 107 digital pianos for their studios.

“This year, we saw more of a focus on the Clavinova as an accompaniment instrument,” says Myerchin. “Several of the participants recorded to disk the music they played on the Clavinova; at the Festival, they popped the disks into the Clavinova and sang along or played accompaniment on violin or guitar.”

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