Category Practice Notes
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 […]
New Year Slowdown
I had my first lesson yesterday after a break of over a month – the longest hiatus to date that Teacher and I have passed in our five years. During that time, travel for a funeral and for the holidays and other end-of-year happenings conspired to keep my practice at bay. I probably only practiced […]
Musical Me: Five Years of Practice
This month marks the five-year anniversary of Musical Me. I conceived of beginning to play the violin and of chronicling my musical pursuit via this blog whole-cloth on a dreary Monday afternoon in October 2013 as I mourned a dead cat and too much wasted time in my life. The writing and my playing were […]
Allegro
As I warmed up for my lesson yesterday, I managed to get through my Wohlfahrt etude that’s all sixteenth notes in 4/4 time at 120 bpm – allegro! I must say doing so felt like an accomplishment. But allegro with an etude and allegro with real music are different things – even getting there in […]
Breaking 100
Perpetual Motions are all about speed. My current Perpetual Motion, the second piece with this title that I’ve played, is the second to last piece in Suzuki Book 4. The first was in Book 1, a very basic piece that I haven’t gone back to in a while. My focus of the moment is bringing […]
Another Week, Another Lesson
Teacher brought back the bow tool for yesterday’s lesson – as I did last week, I worked with it for about half the time, then we removed it and tried to maintain the improvements to my hold. I noticed after using it during last week’s lesson that I did maintain more of a focus on […]
Progress
Three months into playing it, I’ve now worked all the way through the third movement of this Vivaldi concerto. It’s been a lot of fun, and remains challenging. I don’t think I’ll spend quite as long polishing this one before moving onto the next piece as I did the first movement – Teacher and I […]
Aspiring to Vivaldi
The third movement of the Vivaldi Concerto is coming along. While my progress is not as slow as it was as I learned the first movement, which was a huge level up from previous pieces, it too presents exceptional challenges. There’s work in second position, third position, and even a shift in between third and […]
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 […]
Ryan Libel 