Category Playing with Others
A Birthday Song
Today I made it to 44. Happy birthday to me! Yesterday I played the violin for three hours. Perlman says nobody needs to practice more than that. Quarantine times are strange – you might imagine I’d play for hours everyday, but in truth I go days without playing, then I play marathons. You might also […]
Duet and Progress
The Bach Concerto for Two Violins is supposed to be a duet, so yesterday Teacher and I started on that part of the project. We played through the first page or so twice, and I think it went well! Playing duets with her is always fun, enabling me to appreciate my progress on the instrument […]
Family Time, Music Time
We’re back from our annual trip to visit family in Kansas – this year we took my father-in-law along, which was a special treat. He enjoyed getting to meet my nieces and nephews, my in-laws, and my two grandmothers, with whom he’s developed a bit of a correspondence concerning their maladies over the past couple […]
A Vivaldi Duet
Every once in a blue moon, Teacher brings the duet parts for the Suzuki pieces so she can play along with me; this past Tuesday was one of them. It’s always fulfilling for me to play like that, making real music, and this Vivaldi concerto movement was the most fun I’ve had with chamber music […]
Christmas Lesson
Due to Teacher being quite busy this time of year, we had my lesson on Monday this week. The week before, I showed Teacher that I had downloaded some simple Christmas tunes, and she suggested that we could spend a good chunk of this week’s lesson playing duets, so after playing my concerto through once […]
More Paganini
Niccolo Paganini was one of the greatest violinists ever to live, and a prolific composer of works for the instrument. Born in Italy in 1782, by the time of his La Scala debut in 1813 he was living a rock-star lifestyle, touring Italy and Europe extensively. He was also plagued by disease and mental health […]
“You’re the Musician!”
Well last night was a first – over the past couple of weeks I’ve been working with a small group to develop a karate performance piece we’ll be presenting in an informal performance tonight for our own school. We’ve been rehearsing in the evenings, and we’re using music for the piece. It’s percussion, providing a […]
Moving Right Along
Teacher has a non-Suzuki book of duets that has second violin parts for almost all of the Suzuki songs. She couldn’t help but notice that I enjoyed our experience playing last time, so we kicked off yesterday’s lesson by playing two of them. First up was the Martini Gavotte, the one I have written about […]
Violin Dreams
I don’t remember my dreams too often, but I wrote once before about a dream that involved my violin, and last night I had another. Details are sketchy, but I was roaming a dream-world warren of rooms dodging children and other people as I tried to find a place to play uninterrupted. As the others […]
Family Music
We’re just back from our annual Christmas trip to see the family in Wichita, KS – the weather on the return leg of the journey turned our one day road trip into two, with an unplanned stay in ice-blanketed Cameron, MO on Monday night, but otherwise the trip was wonderful and we had a great […]
Ryan Libel 