Category Preliminaries
New Stuff: Ringtone, Shoulder Rest
Jenny Yun is a violinist and Youtube video maker who creates nicely (not overly) produced recordings of the Suzuki repertoire. She dresses well, stages her videos in well-appointed rooms, employs a professional accompanist, and even does some of them in a recording studio. She can also really play the violin. On top of that, I […]
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 […]
Milestones and Legends
Well I’m late to my own birthday party. I launched Musical Me three years ago Friday, on October 14, 2013. As this chronicle – now approaching 500 posts – attests, my musical journey has been fulfilling in all the ways I hoped it might, though it’s true that my posts over the past year have […]
About My Blog
I hadn’t updated my “About My Blog” page since I created the blog, and at the time I wrote the original I was still in “my late thirties.” Since that changed last week, the page needed to as well! So yesterday I wrote a new one. I hope you’ll give it a read. Thank you so […]
The Pros and Me
Last night Michael asked me, in the sweetest way possible, what it is that Teacher and (since we were listening to the Suzuki CD) folks like William Preucils do that I can’t do that makes their playing sound so good. My immediate reply, conjuring the unsupported-by-research figure of Malcolm Gladwell, was, “Thousands of hours of […]
Cheating E Flat Major
Ever since posting a memorial to my friend that included the song “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miserables I have been stuck with it coursing through my head. It’s a beautiful song, so yesterday I decided to see if I could play it. I looked up music online and l found some potential vendors, […]
Vibrato Report
I’m working on vibrato. It’s challenging, and I’ve developed some questions that I need to consult with Teacher on, which is to be expected whenever I try new things on the violin. One of my main questions is when I should turn it on and off. Eventually it will be on all the time, on […]
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 […]
Back to School?
The New Horizons String Orchestra is an organization that formed at the Eastman School of Music to allow non-professional, non-traditional student musicians the opportunity to participate in orchestras. It’s a nationwide organization, with instantiations in 90 or so different locales. Locally, there is one at DePaul University just down the road from me in Lincoln […]
Ryan Libel 