Monthly Archives: April 2014
Running without Rufus
As I set out to run yesterday, I thought my iPod Shuffle was all set – its battery tends to be pretty remarkable. I wrote about refreshing my playlist for the new season a few days ago, and yesterday I was excited to get out on the gorgeous though slightly chilly Chicago lakefront path to […]
Unexpected Delivery
Nana sent me a CD. It’s of the family-compiled variety, and the first track on it is “The Dream Man’s Train,” a song with a provenance unlike any other I know. My great-grandmother (Granny Pat) used to sing it to us kids as kind of a lullaby, and Nana tells me that Granny’s mother passed […]
Graduation Piece
Teacher tells me Dr. Suzuki chose this final piece in Book One as a sort of graduation piece. In addition to being by far the longest piece I’ve worked with to date, it’s by far the most complicated too. It’s called Gavotte, by a Classical French composer named Francois-Joseph Gossec. Gossec does not have the […]
Running with Rufus
Maybe it was the Boston Marathon in the air, but something about Monday just felt like the start of my running season, though I could still feel my lingering cold. I decided I could go for a long walk instead, so I set about freshening up my iPod Shuffle’s playlist. I use the Shuffle almost […]
Playing vs. Practicing
I’ve been under the weather for the past week, very slowly getting over a cold, and though I’ve kept up my practice, during yesterday’s session I realized that I was playing instead of practicing. Prior to yesterday I hadn’t thought about what that means – to me it means that I was playing without worrying […]
The Limitations of Da Da
So now that I’m playing songs that I recognize, I’ve tried to tell people about them with mixed success. These are not tunes that are known by their titles – Minuet 3 and Happy Farmer mean nothing to anybody except those of us who have played through Suzuki Book 1! I do not have the […]
Happy Farmer
Robert Schumann is the latest great to end up in my burgeoning repertoire – his tune Happy Farmer is the second to last piece in Suzuki Book 1. Yesterday in my lesson Teacher introduced me to the first three lines or so, and I thought we were going to stop, but we just kept plowing […]
Impact
As I stepped out to drop the trash down the chute yesterday afternoon I ran into our neighbor across the hall, a generally nice veteran in his 80s who of course mentioned my violin playing. He has complained to me before about noises on our floor, so I know he can be a bit sensitive […]
Your Brain on Music
My building’s laundry room has a swapping bookshelf – you can take or leave as many books as you want. Of course I’ve done my share of both – my most recent find is “The New Brain,” by Richard Restak, M.D., a 2003 book published by Rodale on the changes wrought by modernity on the […]
Joyful Noise
About a block and a half from my condo there’s a tiny little one room church that rents space out of a building that also houses a convenience store and a hair salon. Sometimes I go on a little walk on Sunday mornings, and I often see people entering the church – smiling young families […]
Ryan Libel 