A song from early in Book One has again become my new song – Long Long Ago, by T.H. Bayly.  Dr. Suzuki modulated it downward for Book Two; it’s gone from A Major to G Major.  So I’ll spend a week making that sound good enough, and then next week Teacher says we’ll get into the interesting variation on the song that seems to be the main point of bringing it back – I’ve looked ahead and imagined how it will sound.  I think it will be nice – it’s the kind of variation I’ve long heard instrumentalists produce –cutting the length of the base note in half and tacking on a note at a specified interval that embellishes the base note.  I look forward to joining those “instrumentalists” and doing that myself next week!

Long Long Ago was written by one of those great, wily English characters – T.H. Bayly.  Wikipedia doesn’t have much, but Bayly managed to make a decent living with his writing and his marriage to a society woman.  His songs and writings were popular in his lifetime (the late 1700s through mid 1800s), though most of them have not weathered the test of time.  I suppose he worked in what we would consider the “pop” genre.  When pop gets old we call it folk.

That and more from the magnum opus “Perpetual Lessons in Loosening Ryan Up” were the order of the day in yesterday’s lesson.  Teacher was impressed with my Hunter’s Chorus; it’s all coming along.

I also gave her a violin ninja sticker.  She loved it; apparently ninja is an old nickname of hers.  Who knew.

Thanks for reading.

Ryan