Category Practice Notes
Practice, and Thanksgiving
I had my first lesson in the new place this past week, but the room where I will likely land to play permanently, a sunny corner of the dining room, is currently our staging area and the only remaining room that’s encumbered by boxes. Instead, I set up for our lesson in a corner of […]
Moving and Winter
My playing has suffered as settling into the new place has taken precedence. I did practice for a bit one of the first nights we were here, last Saturday – it was lovely to stroll around our empty new place and play the violin. But since then, the movers came and went and we’ve been […]
What’s a Canon, Again?
I continue to practice Pachelbel’s Canon in D daily – it’s really fun for me to play. Though I’ve always found the piece to be beautiful, I’ve never worn it out for myself (I think others have, but they are not in my living room!). I need plenty of practice with the whole thing, but […]
Faster
As I approached this Seitz concerto I was a little bit stunned. Listening to Preucil play the piece on the CD prior to starting in on it the thing seemed a bit impossible. While the Suzuki recording star always records the tunes faster than I’m able to play them at first, the speed and complexity […]
Canon Go-Round
About eighteen months ago I bought and downloaded some sheet music for Pachelbel’s ubiquitous Canon in D. I remember writing a post about my early exploration of the piece when first I downloaded it, so I looked it up just now. The post was optimistic – I thought I would be able to work up […]
Seitz Report
It’s interesting to me that on certain days certain sections of my current Seitz piece – movement three of the second concerto – seem harder than others. It’s also interesting to drill down on what hard means. There’s playing the notes, there’s memorization, and there’s musicality. There’s also technique independent of what I need to […]
Back to Boccherini
I’ve come a long way since the end of Book Two, but I basically left the Boccherini Minuet, the book’s finale, in the dust sometime in the middle of Book Three. For whatever reason I haven’t been as motivated to keep it active as I have with some of the other Suzuki pieces. Because I […]
Brain Acting Out
Last night as I warmed up with scales I was not getting the notes. I would play the G major scale and play C# instead of C. Conversely, I would play C instead of C# in the A major scale, a basic reversal. Then, while playing the C major scale I’d play F# instead of […]
Exhilaration
Good teachers know a lot. At mine’s suggestion, during my practice session yesterday I tried to play with abandon, just like we talked about in our Tuesday lesson. Play joyfully! Don’t worry about the notes! Get my heart into it! Just let go! We were talking about a concerto, after all, not an etude. The […]
Revisiting Beethoven
Beethoven is represented exactly once in the Suzuki repertoire in Books One through Four – his famous “Minuet in G” in Book Two. I loved it when I learned it, but recently I haven’t given it much attention at all. In some ways it’s a tough one – there’s a position shift down and it’s […]
Ryan Libel 