Author Archives: Ryan Libel
A Little Movement
I’ve been doing my best to practice vibrato every day, but it’s been very slow going, dare I say frustrating? But both Monday and Tuesday during practice I admit that I was making some progress. Tiny, itty-bitty amounts of progress. The movement is welcome – I’ve needed a little clue that I’m not on a […]
Violins of Hope
During the holocaust, prisoners arriving at concentration camps brought along some of their possessions. Musicians, naturally, brought instruments. Last night I happened upon a news segment that detailed some of the experiences of prisoners and music. One survivor arrived at the camp with her mother. She was very young at the time, but she recalls […]
Blazing, and the Imagery of Shapes
As we worked through my new Bach Gavotte in my lesson yesterday I kept thinking, “Really, all of this!?” We began with the piece last week, working up the first three lines slowly in that lesson. Teacher told me, as she often does, that I could go further during the week on my own if […]
What Makes the Sound of Music?
Linguists have argued about the neurological bases of speech and music for a long time, with most evidence and argumentation coming from anthropology and evolution – all cultures produce music, all cultures have language – these adaptations must be good for something. Noted neuroscientist and linguist Steven Pinker, for example, has called music “auditory cheesecake,” […]
Noticing the Bow
“The bow is the breath of the instrument,” Teacher said to me way back when we started our journey. “Just like with your voice, the breath is all-important.” I didn’t really understand that when I started playing the violin again. So much goes into proper sound production on the instrument that isolating the parts wasn’t […]
Teaching Creativity
The Sunday New York Times contained a popular article (it was in the popular list, anyway) entitled, “How to Raise a Creative Child. Step One: Back Off.” Regular readers will know that I’m interested in pedagogy – how to teach and how to motivate people to learn. The column, by Adam Grant, is about learning […]
Memory and The Suzuki Way
Memory and learning are horribly unfair beasts. Very little is understood about the way humans store information, but what we do know is that most learning is associative – that is, we attach bits of information, or associate them, with other bits of information we already know. A corollary to that idea is the fact […]
Fur Elise
Beethoven died in 1827. Forty years later, Fur Elise was published, resurrected from an 1810 manuscript by Ludwig Nohl, a noted 19th century music scholar. The manuscript from which Nohl worked has been lost, and the provenance of the piece is in dispute, but Wikipedia does not entertain that Beethoven might not have been the […]
Fun Little Pieces
A friend recently gave me two books of violin music; he has stopped playing the violin to focus on the viola. One of the books is scored for piano as well. I’ve started playing a little bit out of the solos book that does not have accompaniment – I have to choose the songs wisely; […]
Ryan Libel 