While I do know these songs I’m scrambling to prepare for the Chamber Music Festival tomorrow, I am not playing the melody. My part in Simple Gifts is not too bad at all – I can basically sight read it smoothly and without major problems. Amazing Grace, however, is quite a bit more complicated. During […]
I received the music for the Chamber Music Festival last night, and I’m itching to practice. Happily, they are tunes with which I’m quite familiar – Amazing Grace, for which I’ll be playing the violin 2 part, and Simple Gifts, for which I’ll play violin 1. Neither of my parts is the top melody line […]
I have been accepted into the Saturday Chamber Music workshop in Naperville despite my late registration, but I still have no music. The coordinator e-mailed me late last night and indicated she would send me music this morning. I sure hope so! I really need to get going on it. Serendipitously, Teacher moved today’s lesson […]
Due to my back pain extravaganza, I registered quite late for the chamber music festival I mentioned a while back. I missed the deadline, and while Teacher said that would probably be OK (she checked with the organizers) the main practical effect is that I have not had the same amount of time with the […]
It’s rare to get away with stealing a Stradivarius, but that’s exactly what happened with Roman Totenberg’s 1734 Ames Stradivarius in 1980 – the thief, a currently unnamed and deceased man suspected by Totenberg all along until the musician’s death, left the instrument to a family member who had it appraised back in June only […]
I have been so fortunate for most of my life as far as health goes – occasionally my back has given me fits over the years, but it’s been relatively minor, causing minimal impact on my day to day. As I wrote in my last post, however, minimal is not how I would describe the […]
Well I haven’t played since last Thursday, a whole week. The reason is I’m nursing a seriously messed up back. I have been alternating between flat on my back and walking pitifully since Friday. I did get some pain meds from the doctor, but the healing has been slow going. Yesterday I went back to […]
I had a musical weekend, of my own making at home. I played for two and a half hours each day on Sunday and Monday, and I watched a couple of videos I want to share. The first is Ray Chen playing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, a fun, worthy performance. He’s extremely engaged with the audience […]
I’m still plugging away at this Bach minuet plus minuet – in yesterday’s lesson after Teacher checked my etudes we went to start in on the piece, but I stopped us to confess that I’ve been having a lot of trouble with the G melodic minor scale. I’m working with this scales book, but for […]
Ryan Libel 