49 - Reminder

"Music isn't just a pleasure, it's a transient satisfaction. It's a need, a deep hunger; and when the music is right, it's joy. Love. A foretaste of heaven. A comfort in grief. Is it too much to think that perhaps God speaks to us sometimes through music? How, then, could I be so ungrateful as to refuse the message?"

~Orson Scott Card

53 - Contact!

Affirmations do help, for sure.

The good:

Played from memory.

The bad:

It was so incredibly shaky, I couldn't quite believe it. Partly b.c it was my first time playing this piece in front of an audience, but also b.c I knew that I hadn't really practiced enough. The good news is that now I have played this piece in front of an audience now, so hopefully the next time I play it, it'll be better.

Onward and upward!

54 - Woodshed

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness, of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappoint and never-satisfied love."

~Benjamin Britten

My affirmation:

"I am going to perform brilliantly with accuracy, passion and clear dynamic contrast."

55 - The Stories We Tell Ourselves...

"Submerged" was the word I was hunting for last night, with 10 minutes to go until I had to post. "Submerged" because it so perfectly captures how I feel right now.

It's been a long time since I've had to memorize anything for anything (vocab and KStudy excluded) and while I'm in the process of trying to learn this Sonata by heart, I find myself asking myself how exactly I go about doing that. I find that it's helpful to break it down into chunks and for me, I create a story that goes with each chunk.

The Sonata opens with an invitation to come on a journey, we've saved up money, and the women wear hoop skirts and turn on pointe. Then it links to a section with the family patriarch and his lady getting onto the ship, next come the two brothers rough and tumbling, then the men and women are courting on said ship, and then, the final victory as the ship pulls into port. And that's the first half of the Sonata in my brain.

Great blog on overcoming performance anxiety, which I hope to do this Sunday...

Ship Ahoy!

56 - Summer is for... music.

I'm currently subsumed with trying to learn this bad boy for Sunday.

In between teaching summer session and doing my regular job, I'm holed up in my apartment, sitting straight-backed in a vinyl cushioned chair and practicing for hours on end. Living the dream, I tell you. Living the dream.

93- What You Leave Behind

Helped a good friend move tonight. And by "help", I really mean that I sat on the bed reading a magazine, while she talked out her plans. She is on the cusp of some major publication news and packing for a three week vacation/trek to Vietnam, while orchestrating her own repatriation back to Canada.

"Is it strange that I don't feel anything right now?" she asked.

"No," I answered. "I think that's probably really normal. You don't have time to feel anything right now. You're too busy doing it."

Her apartment had boxes waiting to be shipped, cords, cooking implements, sheet music, half a dozen of pairs of salsa shoes, and old journals. How to decide what to keep and what to throw away? In these moments of transition, we decide what's really important... and what doesn't really matter all that much at all. Sometimes the choices shock us. Sometimes they're reassuring. Sometimes they're difficult, but sometimes they happen as naturally as breathing. My hope is that we all of us leave this season in our lives as better versions of the people we were meant to be.

What I didn't tell them in the interview...

My dirty little secret: I'm looking forward to having my own apartment so that I can practice (violin, piano hopefully, marimba, kazoo, etc.) at all hours of the day. Oh, yeah. I try not to do that now in order to avoid waking up my ridiculously hard working good lady mother.

I'm carrying on my violin on the plane as my one "personal" item. Helpful hints and advice have included wrapping the instrument up in a bag to prevent cracking due to loss of humidity, and remembering to remove extra strings from the case, lest they be confiscated as the dangerous weapons that they so clearly are...

My college violin teacher tells a story about practicing his violin in the student apartments one afternoon (quietly and with the mute on). Some old guy starts banging on his door and yelling at him to stop making such a racket. My teacher is baffled as he can't see how he could possibly be making that much noise. The next day, that same old guy comes knocking on his door again and apologizes saying "I'm very sorry, it wasn't you."

I'm prepared to feign innocence if questioned about a "racket". Complete deniability is essential.