Hristina Blagoeva

My flute teaching develops expressive artists of the flute and helps unlock the musical and creative potential in each student. As an instructor of flute, this entails encouraging students to explore classical music from all eras, music of the Baroque masters through to contemporary compositions. It also entails teaching them various approaches, techniques and skills to playing the flute in the different settings of solo, chamber and orchestral music, and contemporary music repertoire with extended techniques. I create a unique connection with each individual student, and offer a variety of approaches for solving technical and musical problems. I aim to strike a balance between providing effective guidance for my students while letting them discover their own unique musical voice.

In my flute teaching I utilize various pedagogical tools such as placing a strong emphasis on body use guided by concepts from Body Mapping and the Alexander Technique. For example I assign my students various stretches and awareness practice to help them explore how various body positions and alignments affect tone production on the instrument. Through mindfulness of their body use my students achieve ease in their playing. I have students use breathing bags, breath builders, and the Pneumo Pro training device to receive immediate feedback on their breathing practice. Students also utilize recording technology to carefully observe and analyze their playing and posture leading to quick and efficient improvement of their skills. As a result of my comprehensive teaching efforts, my students have gone on to acceptance into summer festivals, prominent music programs, and are award winners, such as a recent student winning the LISMA International Soloist Competition and performing at Carnegie Hall, and other students being accepted at the Interlochen Arts School, SUNY Purchase, SUNY Fredonia and Potsdam.

I meet each student at their level while always planning one step ahead, so that each week students are progressing further along the path towards their own artistic fulfillment. For example, I have students keep practice journals, where they document and follow their own successes and frustrations in practice each week. They then share these with me in lessons, and I develop practice strategies unique to each student to help them achieve their individual goals and overcome obstacles to achievement. Students with little to no prior experience in flute prior to studying with me are now preparing advanced recitals, won first chair auditions in ensembles, and have been accepted to prominent music programs across the country.

I emphasize refining fundamentals such as tone quality, intonation, rhythm, technique and tone colors, as absolute necessities. My teaching has two aims: giving students the ability to identify these elements in their own playing, and giving them various approaches to continually refine them. I use a wide array of tone and technical studies by Wye, Taffanel and Gaubert, Moyse, Reichert, as well as recent methods of Bernold, and Lisa Garner Santa to develop tone, technique, dynamic and vibrato control and variety. Students use etudes as a means to combine technique and musical expression and further develop their playing (utilizing methods by Altez, Kohler, Boehm, Jean-Jean, Karg Elert among others). Through a variety of works from the baroque to contemporary era students build a repertoire and learn orchestral excerpts that they refine in mock auditions.

Each individual needs their own plan, and I craft a long-term multi-year program for each student. As they succeed step-by-step their confidence grows, as ultimately they will be able to apply the tools I give them by themselves, preparing them for their musical life beyond their academic studies. Students leave my applied lesson teaching with strong fundamentals on their instrument and the tools to succeed as professional music teachers and performers.

My classroom music teaching methodologies focus on the skills that students need to succeed as professionals in the 21st century. My history courses survey the musical landscapes of various historical eras, and provide a comprehensive outlook on the music and its cultural and social contexts. I give students the tools they need as scholars to make accurate observations and cutting insights about the musical world, and appreciate the historic and artistic significance of music from antiquity to the present.

I utilize readings from standard texts such as A History of Western Music (Grout) with primary source readings from historical eras. For example, when studying the Classical era canon students analyze Sturm und Drang readings by Goethe and Schiller to help understand works of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven with the goal of revealing how these composers were influenced by the cultural aesthetics of their time. I also contextualize Western Music history by including overviews of world music traditions such as India, Polynesia, Indonesia, Eastern Europe, and Africa, among others. Class is most successful when students are open to discussion, engaged with the material, and free to express themselves as individuals. To achieve this, I host Harkness-style discussions either in-person or through an online messaging board, giving students open-ended questions on exigent topics. For example, when approaching the Beethovenian symphony in my Western music class I ask students to discuss a time that they became disillusioned with a “great” figure in their own life, much as Beethoven did with Napoleon as the dedicatee of his epochal Eroica Symphony. Students work through examples from their own life, and connect the build up of the “great” figure with the monumentality of Beethoven’s symphonies in comparison to previous efforts by Mozart and Haydn. They are then challenged to judge if the very build up that created this heroic vision was connected to their own disenchantment with it. A discussion of the historical and social context of Beethoven’s symphonic achievements becomes a conversation about the nature of “greatness”. Students are given the tools to make critical analysis that cuts through the mere content of the course.

An important aspect of my teaching is culturally responsive curriculum, and valuing and incorporating the diversity of my classrooms. In my Jazz History course, I emphasize jazz music’s history as a vehicle for championing the voices of underrepresented groups in popular culture. I assign students to write personal narratives about hardships they have overcome, and have them share these with the class. I overlap this with a discussion about students’ cultural heritages, and music that is important to them. I then share biographies of musicians like Charlie Parker or Charles Mingus who persisted through great personal difficulty to create individualistic art that was hugely influential on generations of musicians. Students relate the music and the lives and times of these musicians to their own lived experiences, connecting with the course material in a personal way.

Students leave my classes with improved writing and reading comprehension skills, effective abilities as communicators, and ultimately as scholars capable of creative and intellectual expression. Combined with a strong foundation in knowledge of key concepts, composers, and repertoire of music history, students are prepared to contribute to the field as professionals in music or elsewhere.