PIANO Lessons
Musical Toolbox offers private, one-on-one Piano Lessons for kids ages 5 1/2 and up. Together, we patiently work on developing a solid understanding of basic musical concepts brought alive by technique and creative expression. The curriculum is greatly informed by the Feierabend Conversational Sol Feg program as well as the best songs from the Simply Music and Suzuki Method for added awesomeness. For links to find out more about these programs visit the About section of this website. Lessons are offered on Thursdays and Saturdays during the 2023 - 2024 school season and are scheduled through the Pioneer Valley Symphony’s Music Instruction program at Artspace in Greenfield. For more info, check out https://www.pvsoc.org/education-programs.
Voice Lessons
Liz’s offers in-depth vocal study to mature teens through adult - age students. She guides her students in a practice of freeing the voice through sensitive awareness of the body. This can take lots of concentration and is for the brave Somatic Adventurer. These lessons bring consciousness to the subtle workings of the physiology of the breath, the diaphragms and vowel and consonant articulators; opening student’s minds and bodies to the potential of Voice. Many of the exercises are based on Yogic Pranayam, the therapeutic release work of the Roy Hart Theater and the somatic practice of Continuum.
Liz Tonne’s performance practice explores the imaginative edge of the human voice synthesizing abstracted song and text through an array of both traditional and extended vocal techniques. Tonne was a Boston based improvisor throughout the 1990’s and early 2000’s and in numerous groups that helped define Boston’s electro-acoustic aesthetic. As a member of the pioneering ensemble, undr quartet, she contributed to the presentation of a new wave of sonic minimalism referred to as lowercase music.
She was additionally a member of The BSC, a group of electro-acoustic musicians translating an orchestral form of improvised music under the curatorship of Bhob Rainey. The BSC performed selections from John Cage’s Songbooks at The Philadelphia Museum of Art in the festival Cage: Beyond Silence in 2013. As well as performing as improvisors at The New England Conservatory of Music, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room and the Philadelphia Phoneme Festival, The BSC were Artists in Residence assisting masters degree students in composition at Wesleyan College and Princeton University. Further exploring the world of Cage, Tonne performed Ryoanjii and additional pieces from Songbooks in duet with percussionist Tim Feeney at Cornell University in 2011.
Pre-Covid projects included collaborating with artists Jeff Gibbons and Gregory Ruppe on their installation, Grubnik + Suzanne which exhibited at the Nasher Sculpture Center during the 2018 Dallas Soluna Festival and the performance of Tonne’s solo piece Louder than an Angry Ocean at the Words/Matter Exhibition at the University of Texas’ Blanton Museum of Art and the HUT series in Northampton, MA in 2019. Contemporary work has included contributing to an ensemble of international musicians performing Dave Dove’s Sounding untitled for the Self-guided Listener, a site specific response to the acoustic qualities of Dan Flavin’s untitled (Marfa Project) at the 2021 Chinati Weekend Open House in Marfa, Texas as well as lecturing as a Visiting Artist at The Herb Alpert School of Music at CalArts.
Liz continues to learn about vocal work through teaching offering guidance rooted in Yogic Pranayam, the therapeutic release work of the Roy Hart Theater and the somatic practice of Continuum. With her students, Liz shares her background in vocal training under Craig Wich of the Boston Conservatory of Music, Vocal Sound Healing under Jonathan Goldman and her deepening Continuum practice under the tutelage of Megan Bathory-Peeler.
About Musical Toolbox
Welcome to the website for Musical Toolbox, a small music education studio dedicated to building musical skills through movement, keyboard and singing. Liz Tonne (or ‘Miss Liz’) is the primary instructor at the studio. Her approach to teaching combines a number of different methods learned over her more than two decades of teaching with the goal of leading her students to be expressive, musical, and confident in their individual paths as musicians.
Many years back, Liz injured both her arms in an overly excited Bach binge. She subsequently rebooted her keyboard technique through studying the Taubman Approach and has studied with Taubman/ Golandsky specialists Julia Bady and Yoriko Mizuno Fieleke. She brings careful attention to technique, even at the most elementary level of playing, to her teaching.