STEP, expanding its regional influence
Rich musical experience can be realized by the collective ideas of individual teachers and the dense network of local community.
PTNA Piano STEP, the concert style evaluation, has been expanding its number of venues and participants since 1996 and now it is organized at approximately 400 venues throughout the nation. From its origin, it has been kept deeply rooted in local communities, while PTNA Piano Competition is organized at the strict national standard. Each venue (Station) is organized by local piano teachers and they freely put individual ideas and plans to use, in order to encourage paricipants to have rich musical experience.
One of the local organizers, Mrs.Mari Kumagai, a teacher living in Saitama prefecture, established the Kawaguchi Station in 2006 to hold STEP annually. Her efforts of promoting STEP in local community is outstanding. She asked directly to public schools in the city of Kawaguchi, 0.5 million of population, to display the STEP posters and to encourage the active parcitipants at their school. (Those who take part in STEP are given certificates every five times). Board of education in Kawaguchi even cooporate in this movement and called to the principals of each public school to commend the achievements of their students at the school assembly.
Despite its short history, Kawaguchi Station got high reputation. This autumn, she is going to organize STEP by splitting into two days to accept larger number of participants.
In Tokyo, Prof.Tetsuya Akiyama organized STEP with two big educational schemes; analyse and concerto performance with orchestra. Since the musical analyse had been less studied in Japan, Prof.Akiyama tried to put this scheme in STEP, so as to encourage young pianists to play the pieces with analytical thoughts. This scheme gains popularity and next December, he will put another analyse project into practice at larger scale.
Despite the decline of child birth rate, the number of participants are increasing at those venues, thanks to local piano teachers and their continuous efforts for promotion.
