Category Musical Passion
Beethoven: Touching Enlightenment and the Work
I’m reading a big Beethoven biography, which is providing great context for his work. Significantly, Beethoven was born and raised in Bonn, a place where enlightenment thinking took root and blossomed. Beethoven’s intellectual milieu holds a great interest to me, since his music seems to me to tap into something universal about humanity. The biographer, […]
Studying Beethoven
Beethoven’s Sonatas for Piano and Violin were some of my early favorites as I embarked on a journey of discovery about my new instrument five years ago. The Kreutzer and Spring Sonatas in particular – numbers nine and five respectively – have become some of my favorite music for the instrument. I’ve been able to […]
Birthday
It’s a birthday – 42. Like others lucky enough to have landed on this age, I can’t help but consider Douglas Adams’s supercomputer from his fabulous Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In the universe Adams created, the computer is a mammoth device constructed over eons with one purpose – to reveal the answer to the […]
CSO’s Upcoming Season
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s 2018-2019 catalog arrived, along with a letter suggesting that due to my attendance habits I would benefit financially from a subscription. When I received the same catalogue last year, I considered subscribing for this current season, but in the end didn’t. That reluctance caused me to miss out on this past […]
Violin Grasshopper
I’m acquainted with a seven-year-old who has been playing the violin for a few months. I’ve talked about my passion for the violin with him and his dad on several occasions – once I even helped them through a broken string crisis. So we’re kind of violin buddies. On Thursday, his dad asked me if […]
The Mortal 80s
We hosted a dinner party last night, and as we often have for gatherings of our contemporaries, we chose music from the 1980s as the soundtrack – peppy, yet nostalgic. I think Google Play picked a list it called “80s to sing along with” or some such. None of us were singers, but at multiple […]
Deeper Appreciation
It probably goes without saying that the more you know about something the more you can appreciate it. As I approach this new movement of the Vivaldi concerto, its layers of musical wonder are being made manifest to me – I see in the work beauty that, prior to playing it, I could never have […]
New Year’s 2018 – Notes on Focus
One year ago today, I published my 500th post on Musical Me. Today’s post is my 545th. I started this blog both to chronicle my project to learn to play the violin, and to foster disciplined writing. The twin pursuits emerged as an epiphany one Monday afternoon back in October of 2013, each conceived as […]
L’estro Armonico, Vivaldi’s Opus 3
L’estro Armonico, Harmonic Inspiration, is a work of Italian Baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi published in 1711. Popular in the composer’s lifetime, as were many of his works, the collection of concertos has been transcribed countless times since its original publication. L’estro Armonico contains twelve concertos, which, according to Wikipedia, were written in a 7-format. The […]
Art and Science
Lately, Teacher has been working with me on dynamics. Loudness is, of course, one of our universe’s seemingly infinite continuums. The loudest loud can always be shouted down by something else; the softest soft can be softer. An infinity stretches between. Within the oeuvre of just one man, dynamics help create the delicate dance of […]
Ryan Libel 