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 […]
Can you have just one Groupie? I think I might. Last night on my way into the building the lone female on our maintenance staff in the building was stationed at the front door. We’re quite friendly, often chatting in the laundry room and in passing all over the building – the building front door […]
Another lesson, another milestone – well, it is to me, anyway. She’s been teasing me with it for a while, but yesterday we spent most of the lesson on introducing me to some techniques for producing vibrato on the violin. On one hand I’ve been itching to get going on it, but on the other […]
My wonderfully musical sister sent me to a blog post on Saturday called Why I’d Spend a Lot More Time Practicing Scales If I Could Do It All Over Again. In it, music performance psychologist Noa Kageyama discusses scales as the quintessential practice tool. To sum up his thoughts, scales provide a structure within which […]
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 had a great lesson last Wednesday – I played through Humoresque for Teacher and we started some refinements on it. The piece has so many little moments where subtleties make a big impact. Dynamics are just the tip of the iceberg. No piece I’ve worked on to date so fully explores the nuance of […]
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 […]
Yesterday’s lesson was welcome. We worked on the final four lines of Humoresque that I had yet to work with, so now I have all the pieces and can put the whole thing together. The toughest parts of the piece – two slurred sections that are done in third position – are in these four […]
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 […]
Ryan Libel 