Category Lesson Notes
Perfection: The Enemy of the Good
I practiced yesterday, but only for about 45 minutes. My long day at work kept me from it until after 7 pm, so I decided to play for a few minutes while Michael was making dinner. I’m not much into playing after 8 pm – it seems that the earlier in the day I play […]
Book Four
Suzuki Book Four arrived yesterday – I ripped the CD into iTunes but have yet to listen. I hope to get to that tonight after I get home from a long day at work. The book opens with some tonalization exercises, including the well-known Brahms Lullaby, which looks totally approachable. Teacher hasn’t spent a lot […]
A Bach Bourree Finish
Apparently I passed the Bach Gavotte in D Major – in yesterday’s lesson Teacher took us onto the final piece in book three, a bourree, also by Bach. If I was enamored of the last Bach gavotte (and I am) then this new bourree is totally spectacular. I’ve been looking forward to it since starting […]
It’s Called a Gavotte
Bach’s Orchestral Suite is lovely – it’s the most challenging and complex piece I’ve worked on to date, and I can feel my playing slowly growing into it. While I’ve been working on it for close to two months now, it was only in this week’s lesson that we began to talk about phrasing and […]
Rough Lesson
I’ve been making steady progress on the D Major Gavotte, but to hear me trot it out for Teacher yesterday you never would have known that. In the middle of playing it she stopped me and asked about my posture, which was apparently quite off-kilter. I realized when she brought it up that I was […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Living Room Duet
I wrote before about getting the book that provides second parts for some Book One and Two songs and working up Minuet One from Book One. I’ve not said much to Teacher about it (in fact until Monday I hadn’t played it in a couple of months), but I had worked it up previously to […]
Ryan Libel 