Category Memory
Reading Music and Shifting
Violin music is often annotated with fingerings that, amongst other things, indicate when position shifting is necessary. Suzuki books do a lot of marking fingerings for beginners, but other scores do it too. As I’ve progressed, I’ve gained more and more ability to do shifting on the fly – while it’s been slow going, as […]
Memorization and the Play-Through
Getting to the spot in a new piece of music where I can play it through without stopping is always a thrill. After yesterday’s lesson I am much closer on this newest piece – we worked through the remaining section of the Third Movement of Seitz’s Fifth Concerto, a flowing stretch of slurred sixteenth notes […]
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 […]
Bell – Then and Now
I’m pretty sure I saw Joshua Bell in Wichita in 1994. But until a minute ago I was pretty sure 1994 was the 25th anniversary season of the Wichita Symphony Orchestra. It was not – I just learned that 1994 was the 50th anniversary season of my hometown symphony. 1994 was also the year I […]
Memory: A Theme and Variations
Suzuki Book Three opens with a Gavotte by Martini – the Suzuki Book doesn’t cite the source work’s title, but the site I found the other day sources it to Martini’s Sonate D’intavolatura per L’organo e il Cembalo Sonata No. 12: V. Gavotta. The piece is a theme and variations kind of number, and I’ve […]
A Milestone
My memories from when I played the violin as a child are limited and specious – I very much wish my recollections of those third through sixth grade years were stronger. But one thing that sticks well in the brains of humans is anticipation, and as a youngster, I definitely remember anticipating this important thing […]
Musical ABCs
We started in on the Progressive Scales book yesterday – a book by Linda Rose that’s all about teaching Music Proper. I had already started reading it – the book opens with a description of all of the scales, majors, minors, relatives, melodic, harmonic, natural (apparently some are considered enharmonic) – it’s all a bit […]
And All the Boys Sing Mahler Eight
While in Wichita last week, I mentioned my interest in digging up more information on the boys choir in which I participated when I was about ten years old to my mother. So on Christmas morning we took a few minutes to go hunting through our family ephemera for whatever we could find. Though we […]
Picking up Where I Left Off
The week away did not seem to have much of an impact on my playing. Most surprisingly, I seem to have been able to return to my newest piece, a Bourree by Handel, right where I left off. My brain seems to have kept it in place, which was not what I expected at all, […]
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 […]
Ryan Libel 