Category Musical Passion
Magnificent
My week away was magnificent, but devoid of music of any kind. I was in New York, and occasionally I thought about the palpable lack of music in my environment, mostly Chelsea and the lower west side. “Not even a street musician?” No, not even a street musician. The closest I got to music was […]
Passions: Music Beats Politics
I’ve long been shackled to politics – here in Chicago at least we had a primary with some interesting local races that actually centered on issues versus personalities. The elections have been important and offered a refreshing reminder of what politics should be all about. But the national dialogue is anything but. One side effect of […]
16 Bars
Joseph Haydn wrote over a hundred symphonies; he is sometimes called the father of the symphony (also of the String Quartet). His London symphonies, a dozen of them written between 1791 and 1795, were his last. They solidified his reputation as one of the era’s most prolific composers of the form. According to Wikipedia, Haydn’s […]
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 […]
Violins of Hope
During the holocaust, prisoners arriving at concentration camps brought along some of their possessions. Musicians, naturally, brought instruments. Last night I happened upon a news segment that detailed some of the experiences of prisoners and music. One survivor arrived at the camp with her mother. She was very young at the time, but she recalls […]
Fur Elise
Beethoven died in 1827. Forty years later, Fur Elise was published, resurrected from an 1810 manuscript by Ludwig Nohl, a noted 19th century music scholar. The manuscript from which Nohl worked has been lost, and the provenance of the piece is in dispute, but Wikipedia does not entertain that Beethoven might not have been the […]
Fun Little Pieces
A friend recently gave me two books of violin music; he has stopped playing the violin to focus on the viola. One of the books is scored for piano as well. I’ve started playing a little bit out of the solos book that does not have accompaniment – I have to choose the songs wisely; […]
Accounting for Christmas Taste
I’ve always loved traditional music. When I was a kid and kids my age were supposed to be favoring the “black shirt bands” – at least that’s what I called them – I just could never see what everyone saw in the music; I definitely couldn’t hear anything lovely either. While over the years I’ve […]
“She Played a Scale.”
My wonderfully musical sister sent me to a blog post on Saturday called Why I’d Spend a Lot More Time Practicing Scales If I Could Do It All Over Again. In it, music performance psychologist Noa Kageyama discusses scales as the quintessential practice tool. To sum up his thoughts, scales provide a structure within which […]
The Terrific Twos: An Anniversary
Two years ago today – October 14, 2013 – I began this blog and started down a new musical path as an adult. Of course it’s quite easy to start something like playing the violin or writing a blog, and it’s also quite easy to lose motivation just out of the gate. On that October […]
Ryan Libel 