Writing in Huffington Post a week ago, Elizabeth Weinfield lauded a trend in music performance – that of tuning instruments to the frequencies that were more standard when older pieces of music were written and played.  A while back I wrote about learning of temperaments – different ways of tuning instruments to make them sound […]

I learned last night of an old friend’s passing; she died last week at 42.  I hadn’t seen Melissa for 20 years or more, but she was a significant part of my young adulthood, part of a group of friends that came along at exactly the right time for me, helping me see and come […]

Over a year ago I posted about evening practice sessions being problematic for my tone production, memory, and playing in general – I observed that for whatever reason my morning and early afternoon practice sessions are better.  I think that since I wrote that post the daytime/nighttime disparity has evened out somewhat, but it certainly […]

There’s a distinguished list of violin concertos that comprises a part of the standard repertoire for great players – most play them all.  Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Sebelius, Mendelssohn. Plenty of other notable concertos exist – Mozart’s 5, Max Bruch, the modern Russians.  I’m not sure why, but aside from Mozart many of these great composers […]

I ran across an interesting story yesterday on Huffington post by science editor Jacqueline Howard that looks at some new research showing links between personality traits and musical aptitude and appreciation.  She’s primarily reporting on a new study in the Journal of Research in Personality, by lead author David Greenburg, wherein Greenburg finds that “personality […]

It began with melodrama, and morphed to silent movies.  In the absence of the spoken word, music has long created interest and drama for all manner of entertainments.  The affected Big Emotion of the era before method acting took root was always greatly enhanced by a good score.  Music started it – we could have […]

BWV 822 is Bach’s  Suite in G Minor for Harpsichord, and part of it has also been arranged into a Suzuki Book Three song for violin, Gavotte in G Minor.  Content with my progress on the Bach Minuet I’ve been working up for weeks now, Teacher started me on it yesterday.  This new Gavotte is […]

I watched the video embedded below on the New York Times this morning; it features a collaboration between three megastars – the producer Diplo, the electronic master Skrillex and the pop phenom Justin Bieber.  I know virtually nothing about any of them, though I did read a nice writeup on Skrillex several years back in […]

I have worked up my first duet from the Suzuki Duets book – I know I wrote about that little D major ditty that I played along with just fine right out of the box, but I’m not counting it if it doesn’t take any work (I failed to mention that the entire part is […]