My week away was magnificent, but devoid of music of any kind. I was in New York, and occasionally I thought about the palpable lack of music in my environment, mostly Chelsea and the lower west side. “Not even a street musician?” No, not even a street musician. The closest I got to music was […]
Apparently I passed the Bach Gavotte in D Major – in yesterday’s lesson Teacher took us onto the final piece in book three, a bourree, also by Bach. If I was enamored of the last Bach gavotte (and I am) then this new bourree is totally spectacular. I’ve been looking forward to it since starting […]
Bach’s Orchestral Suite is lovely – it’s the most challenging and complex piece I’ve worked on to date, and I can feel my playing slowly growing into it. While I’ve been working on it for close to two months now, it was only in this week’s lesson that we began to talk about phrasing and […]
Last night Michael and I were having one of those very important conversations – we spent a few minutes brainstorming about whether music or rocket science is harder. Here’s a list of ideas: Playing the violin is hard; interplanetary travel is also hard. Getting a rocket into the sky is quite tricky and does not […]
I’ve long been shackled to politics – here in Chicago at least we had a primary with some interesting local races that actually centered on issues versus personalities. The elections have been important and offered a refreshing reminder of what politics should be all about. But the national dialogue is anything but. One side effect of […]
Othello is a masterful psychological thriller, with jealousy in the driver’s seat. Both male leads, Othello and Iago, are so jealous of Cassio that they become willing to kill when each believes the young lieutenant has wronged them, for quite different reasons. Add the psychological complexity of the work to the racial and military framing […]
Joseph Haydn wrote over a hundred symphonies; he is sometimes called the father of the symphony (also of the String Quartet). His London symphonies, a dozen of them written between 1791 and 1795, were his last. They solidified his reputation as one of the era’s most prolific composers of the form. According to Wikipedia, Haydn’s […]
I’ve been warming up with scales for a while now. I think one major benefit to the practice is becoming accustomed to hearing the correct pitch. Moving stepwise through the notes makes it easier to hear when I’m out of tune. It’s also a way to mark progress – as I slowly get better, the […]
I’ve been making steady progress on the D Major Gavotte, but to hear me trot it out for Teacher yesterday you never would have known that. In the middle of playing it she stopped me and asked about my posture, which was apparently quite off-kilter. I realized when she brought it up that I was […]
It’s been a while since I’ve written about my progress on shifting positions. I have continued to work with a book of exercises, so far on third position only, quite slowly. The exercises are designed to help me learn to hear the notes up the fingerboard as I read the music. I’m up to about […]
Ryan Libel 