Dvorak’s Humoresque is a catchy tune – the romantic composer worked in the last half of the 19th and early 20th centuries and was very famous, with many of his works garnering much attention in his lifetime. He was even well-paid. Of course popularity can sometimes mean imitation, but satirical variation isn’t necessarily what was […]
The music looks quite complicated, and maybe I’ll admit that at this point in my playing I think 32nd rests are a little silly. But since discovering it, I’ve been quite taken with Dvorak’s famous Humoresque. It’s the fourth piece in Book Three of the Suzuki repertoire, and Teacher started introducing me to it in […]
The latest rhythmic/bowing pattern with which I’m playing my Wohlfahrt etude is causing me some problems, so I need to slow it down – we work these etudes with many different patterns; I think this is the eighth for me. Interestingly, perhaps, I’m still on the first etude of a book of 60 of them […]
I’m in the middle of reading Musicophilia, a 2007 book by Dr. Oliver Sacks I downloaded for Kindle after reading his obituary in the New York Times about a month ago. The book is making me aware of some structural brain differences found in professional musicians versus the rest of the population. Sacks points to […]
In 2011 The Museum of Modern Art in New York curated a minor exhibition of Picasso’s work featuring musical subject matter entitled Picasso Guitars 1912-1914. At the time, Greta Berman, writing in The Juilliard Journal, discussed Picasso’s famous and ubiquitous musical subject matter, and especially the fact that Picasso was not a particularly musical man. […]
We were in Iowa City over the weekend for the 50th birthday celebration of a friend. Like the rest of the state of Iowa, he’s a huge Iowa Hawkeyes football fan, and for his birthday party we had a big tailgate party at their house followed by a march to the nearby stadium for a […]
I’m pretty sure I saw Joshua Bell in Wichita in 1994. But until a minute ago I was pretty sure 1994 was the 25th anniversary season of the Wichita Symphony Orchestra. It was not – I just learned that 1994 was the 50th anniversary season of my hometown symphony. 1994 was also the year I […]
Last Wednesday I arrived home from work and was chatting with Michael about my violin lesson that morning, and telling him that Teacher is encouraging me to be more expressive in my playing. It’s not as if I stand there like a robot; I do move with the music to a certain extent, but Teacher […]
Suzuki Book Three opens with a Gavotte by Martini – the Suzuki Book doesn’t cite the source work’s title, but the site I found the other day sources it to Martini’s Sonate D’intavolatura per L’organo e il Cembalo Sonata No. 12: V. Gavotta. The piece is a theme and variations kind of number, and I’ve […]
The New Horizons String Orchestra is an organization that formed at the Eastman School of Music to allow non-professional, non-traditional student musicians the opportunity to participate in orchestras. It’s a nationwide organization, with instantiations in 90 or so different locales. Locally, there is one at DePaul University just down the road from me in Lincoln […]
Ryan Libel 