The new Seitz movement – the First of the Fifth Concerto – is difficult, but also quite fun to work on. Last week’s lesson took me just a little over halfway through it. The section I started last week brought a shift from D Major to E Major – my first time working in the […]
Somehow, three months after starting it, I managed to play through the Seitz from memory for Teacher in Tuesday’s lesson, and she declared it passed. I had to be honest, of course, and told her that particular play-through was the second time ever I’d accomplished the big doubled sixteenth note section of the piece without […]
Tuesday’s lesson brought a new etude from Wolfhart – there are sixty etudes in this book, and two years in I’m now on number three. They are lovely sets that Teacher uses to practice sight reading and bowing – each etude can be played with many bowing variations. The first two were in C-Major, so […]
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 […]
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 […]
Mame presents the story of an upper-crust woman who gains custody of her nephew after the death of her brother. The family clearly had money – the boy and his nanny arrive in the New York party pad of Auntie Mame and first meet her as she’s hosting a soiree combining prohibition booze, top entertainers […]
I had a lesson yesterday – my first in three weeks. I’ve been playing well enough recently, but I was out of town for a long weekend just prior to the lesson, so I worried about being rusty. Happily, rustiness wasn’t much of a problem. I’ve very nearly memorized the Seitz concerto, the first piece in […]
Northalsted’s Market Days is one of the biggest street festivals in Chicago. Now, straightaway, I want to admit to having a complicated relationship with Chicago’s many summer street-fests. On the surface, they are a source of pride and fun for many of the city’s neighborhoods, offering local businesses and artisans a chance to strut their […]
Maurice Ravel was a French composer living in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, regarded as one of the greatest ever to come out of France. He was also a classically trained pianist, though he apparently never distinguished himself on the instrument. I learned more about him yesterday reading Wikipedia as I listened to […]
Ryan Libel 