Category The Suzuki Method
O’Connor in a Haystack at the Jazz Record Mart
Supremely Gifted Musical Sister and her husband, also Supremely Musically Gifted, are in town for a few days, and we’ve had a great time. One to-do on their Chicago list was a trip to Jazz Record Mart – a little bit of heaven for enthusiasts like my brother-in-law. Their hotel is within easy walking distance […]
Hearing Scales
My new gavotte, by Lully, is coming along – I’m only about five lines in. The piece has a very minor feel/sound, overall, which I’m finding lovely and really enjoying producing. Other pieces have included sections of minor sound, but this is the first full-on minor piece I’m playing, and it sounds great and it’s […]
Day by Day and Year by Year
I didn’t practice Thursday or Friday last week – not a terribly uncommon occurrence. While I almost always practice at least five days a week, it’s unfortunate that my most likely to skip days often are the two following my Wednesday lessons – days that tend to be longer for me at work. The final […]
Shared Experience and Challenges
Well, this Gavotte is magnificently difficult. I talked to Teacher yesterday about other people’s view of the piece – perhaps I mentioned before that she says kids tend to hate it. She says she likes it (she does not necessarily love them all) but that many, many people get it “good enough” and then never […]
A. Thomas and his Gavotte from Mignon
According to Wikipedia, Ambroise Thomas was a French composer, primarily of operas, who lived a long life in the 19th century. The son of musicians, his early music education and jump on his performance career doubtless paved the way for his lifetime of moderate success. For the majority of his life, he enjoyed a robust […]
Chunks and Strings
My new Gavotte is coming along well enough. I started the piece in the middle, and now I’ve gone back to the top. It seems pieces of music can all be broken down into little chunks that make sense, kind of like a sentence can be pulled out of a paragraph as a standalone unit. […]
Hat Trick: Gavotte
Gavotte, by Gossec, is still one of my pieces – I play it all the time, almost daily, and I’m making incremental progress. The song is somewhat stark in the way it reveals the limitations of my playing at this stage of the game – I get to choose between speed and precision; I cannot […]
Reading Music
I’ve been thinking about reading music the past couple of days, and about the Suzuki method and how it works. I have a missing piece – or, rather, the opposite of that – in my ability to evaluate the Suzuki method. Unlike most Suzuki beginners, I did learn to read music many years ago. Way […]
A Pesky Triplet
I’m plugging away at Paganini – The Witch’s Dance is fun and challenging. I have only worked with teacher on the piece in one lesson, however, and while we played it through and I understood the broad-strokes, the devil is always in the details (that reminds me; I need to write about Paganini and the […]
Le Streghe, by Paganini
Paganini’s Opus 8, Le Streghe, is the source of The Witch’s Dance, my new song. A Wikipedia article on his fifth concerto notes that the melody also makes an appearance in that piece’s first movement – I must admit that while somewhat familiar with the fifth concerto, as I’ve started playing the theme I utterly […]
Ryan Libel 