Author Archives: Ryan Libel
De Sarasate and a Whistler
I’m a big fan of Whistler – over the years I’ve seen galleries of miniatures, of women, and of his distinctive draftsmanship. I’ve also twice fawned over his Peacock Room at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery. His work with composition and light and color and interesting subject matter are all eminently compelling. Of course I’m not […]
Hat Trick: Gavotte
Gavotte, by Gossec, is still one of my pieces – I play it all the time, almost daily, and I’m making incremental progress. The song is somewhat stark in the way it reveals the limitations of my playing at this stage of the game – I get to choose between speed and precision; I cannot […]
Evil Music
The height of political madness is over for this moment – every cycle we continue to waste more and more money on political ads to help us decide who to send to Washington and to statehouses to do nothing. We sell ourselves to others sometimes, but more often than not the ads end up selling […]
Allusive Power and The Four Seasons
Two weeks from tomorrow I’m going to see Anne-Sophie Mutter and the Mutter Virtuosi. Part of the program is Vivaldi’s masterpiece The Four Seasons, so I’ve been learning more about the work in an effort to maximize my appreciation of the performance. Vivaldi was a Baroque composer, priest, and musician. He wrote The Four Seasons […]
The Shriner, a Drummer
Long ago I worked for a Shriner. We were involved in law enforcement – private contractors, if you will, operating out of the Shriner’s home basement office. I was the office grunt for the mercenary operation; we provided electronic monitoring to people who had some resources and who gamed the system well enough to avoid […]
Inbox Delight
I came home from a long day yesterday to find a lovely present in my e-mail inbox – the accompaniment tracks I asked my pianist sister to record for me! Of course I played my violin before I dealt with e-mail last night, so I didn’t play with them yesterday. How lovely will it be […]
Reading Music
I’ve been thinking about reading music the past couple of days, and about the Suzuki method and how it works. I have a missing piece – or, rather, the opposite of that – in my ability to evaluate the Suzuki method. Unlike most Suzuki beginners, I did learn to read music many years ago. Way […]
Two Weddings: to “Happy”
Another wedding (sort of) last night brought my second encounter (according to Michael) with what might be the first pop song that I’ve noticed in years. The song is so popular anyone reading this will already know it – Pharrell has over a billion YouTube views – over 500 million of them for this song, […]
A Pesky Triplet
I’m plugging away at Paganini – The Witch’s Dance is fun and challenging. I have only worked with teacher on the piece in one lesson, however, and while we played it through and I understood the broad-strokes, the devil is always in the details (that reminds me; I need to write about Paganini and the […]
Le Streghe, by Paganini
Paganini’s Opus 8, Le Streghe, is the source of The Witch’s Dance, my new song. A Wikipedia article on his fifth concerto notes that the melody also makes an appearance in that piece’s first movement – I must admit that while somewhat familiar with the fifth concerto, as I’ve started playing the theme I utterly […]
Ryan Libel 