Category Lesson Notes
Are You Kidding Me with This?
In Musette, the final note is a D, which I’ve typically been playing on the A string because, well, that’s what the music would seem to indicate and that’s all I’ve known how to do. I was thrown for a wonderful loop during my lesson yesterday when, the second time playing through the piece, Teacher […]
Lesson Day
It’s been two weeks since my last lesson, and I’ve had a four day weekend in the meantime as well. We have stayed put all the while, so I’ve managed to get plenty of practice time in. In fact, I feel I’ve had a very productive two weeks with my violin, despite still feeling my […]
Book Two and an Unwelcome Interlude
I’m plowing ahead in Suzuki Book Two, which Teacher tells me shouldn’t be too tough until we get about halfway through. Book Two is apparently all about tonalization, or making the instrument sound beautiful. In fact the first thing I worked on in the book about three weeks ago was not a “song,” rather it […]
Cradling the Neck
Since my first lesson, Teacher has been working with me on the proper violin hold. She’s been showing me the same thing week after week and my progress has been small and incremental. In last week’s lesson, however, I had a bit of a breakthrough, and over the past week I feel I’ve finally been […]
An Asterisk Is an Asterisk
Gavotte by Gossec is coming along. It’s the “graduation piece” for Suzuki Book 1, and I’ve just started in on my third week with it. I’ll probably get the rest of it next week. It’s complicated and wonderful, with slurs a-plenty (four note slurs!) and circle-bows and grace notes and string crossings and intervals the […]
When Wrong Sounds Right
To begin each lesson, Teacher asks me to play some song from some ways back, relatively speaking, in my repertoire. I have them all memorized, of course (it’s the Suzuki Way), and I do play them all through at least once every time I practice. When I’m practicing, I start with Twinkle Twinkle and work […]
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 […]
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 […]
No Lesson
Teacher e-mailed me a few days ago and begged forgiveness for canceling this week’s lesson. She’s got a gig in the far suburbs all week and has to be there early. I haven’t really skipped any lesson weeks until now – we’ve moved days a few times, but have always managed to get one in. […]
No New Music
My Austin long weekend kept me from too much practice last week, so my new song languished. Of course we worked on it in yesterday’s lesson. I’d been struggling to hear what the last couple of lines of my minuet are supposed to sound like, so the first thing I asked was for Teacher to […]
Ryan Libel 