Lanka’s first ‘E -Concert’ created by Dr. Priyeshni Perera
View(s):Sri Lanka’s very first E-Concert with Melbourne Music School in Australia was held in December last year under the guidance of Dr. Priyeshni P. Perera, a professional music lecturer. ‘We collaborated with a music school in Melbourne and had a mini e-concert via video-conferencing, with our violin, recorder and voice of my students. The kids from both ends played some Christmas music together virtually and shared their ideas and comments etc. It was very interesting…….’ she said. The students from Dr. Priyeshni P. Perera’s school and the students of the Music School of Melbourne get-together on e concert for Christmas Carols and hymns. This shows where the future of music heading for.
Dr. Priyeshni Peiris Perera
Priyeshni
, is a full-time lecturer of the Western Music Department at the University of Visual & Performing Arts, Colombo 7. She’s currently the only person in Sri Lanka to hold a Doctorate in Music Education (piano) as well as the highest professional qualification offered by the ABRSM (U.K); The Fellowship of the Royal Schools of Music, London (F.R.S.M – UK) in Piano Performance, for which she was self-trained. An eminent scholar and performer, Sri Lanka is yet to experience the wealth of knowledge and expertise she brings to her work as a performer, researcher and music educator.
The ‘2011 Power of Music Conference’ demonstrated the growing interest in research into music’s powerful social role and its inter-relationship with other fields such as Neuroscience, Psychology and Biology.
Approximately 300 delegates from more than 30 countries around the world gathered at the “2011 Power of Music” conference, jointly collaborated by the Musicological Society of Australia and the International Conference on Music and Emotion. It was held from Dec 1- 4, 2011 at the UWA, Perth, where international experts (University professors in the fields of musicology, Music Therapy, Music and Emotion studies, Music theory, Ethno-Musicology, Psychology, Anthropology, Neuroscience, Aesthetics and Evolutionary Biology), presented their research in the form of spoken papers, lectures, workshops, and recitals.
Dr. Priyeshni P. Perera presented a lecture-recital hand–in-hand alongside scholars and professors from acclaimed Universities, such as The University of Cambridge (U.K), The Sydney Music Conservatorium, (University of Sydney) and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (U.S.A). Her presentation was titled, ‘Teaching Emotional Expression to Music Students Utilizing Twentieth-Century Repertoire.’ In this presentation, she demonstrated how a Psychological Model of the renowned Music Psychologist, Patrick Juslin’s ‘GERMS’ model, can be used as a base to facilitate Musicians to effectively communicate Emotion when performing music. To underpin this argument, she demonstrated how this model can be used to create “expressive and emotional performances” in music by performing a wide array of 20th Century piano repertoire composed by reputed American and British composers.
‘I was invited to give a workshop presentation on “Piano Performance & teaching” at the Music Education Asia conference held at the University of Singapore’ she added. Dr. Priyeshni P. Perera has previously held teaching appointments at the University of Tennessee (USA) and Texas Tech University (USA) where she has taught piano and music theory to undergraduates. In Sri Lanka, she supervises students in the Bachelors and Masters Degree programmes in Western Music and coaches upper-level undergraduates in Piano Performance, Music Research Methods, and Psychology of Music and Music Therapy courses.
Dr. Perera returned to Sri Lanka after completing a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Texas Tech University (USA) where she was awarded the ‘AT & T Chancellors Fellowship’ and the ‘Texas Tech President’s Fellowship for Outstanding Academic and Professional Achievement’ to specialize in Music Education (Piano). ‘My students performed at K-Zone Carols in Dec. and at the MTV ‘good morning show’ on Christmas Day. Apart from teaching music my main aim is to prepare our children for futuristic music and this type of E concerts that will be the major attraction in future. Eighty percent of our students passed with high distinction at the London Exams in 2013’ she expalined.