Violin Lesson #51

Happy anniversary to me!!!!

It has been a year this week since my first violin lesson. I am not playing Mozart yet but I am well on my way :)

I only had five days of practice this week, which is a little disappointing. It's important to maintain a good balance in everything. That means sometimes I have to sacrifice violin time. My lesson this week was earlier, at my request, so I could be home to get the children from the neighbour. I really appreciate the flexibility with the scheduling of my lessons.

I need to keep going with my exercises. They are more important for my progress with pieces. Laura is very strict with them because a) any examiners I play in front of will be strict, and b) I want to learn to play well.

For some reason I am finding it hard to keep the flat of the hair of the bow on the strings. My wrist twists sometimes and produces an effect Laura can hear even when she is not watching me. There is nothing for it but to be aware of it and fix it when I notice it. Laura says things like that happen from time to time and it is not a major concern. This issue is mostly what is holding me back with Wave Machine.

The sticker sheet came out for Medieval Tale. It was one of my best performances of that piece. There were a few times where the bow was "wobbly" and produced an uneven sound, especially on the long notes, but the rest of the song was really good.

On the weekend I played The Old Fiddler Man and Medieval Tale. Both sounded great. I was able to play downstairs and without the mute so I could really go for it. I'm pretty sure the neighbours could hear it too since I could hear them outside. Oddly, after playing Medieval Tale a few times I stopped, and could hear nothing.Apparently they had gone inside. I like to think it had nothing to do with my playing :) Note to self: learn some Serbian tunes (for the neighbours).

I didn't spend much time with Raggle Taggle Hippie. Laura gave me plenty of good advice about it though so I look forward to making a decent amount of progress with it. The best advice was to play each phrase with small bow until I am used to how it feels and learn the fingering, then practice it as I would play it when playing the song - with nice long bows. The advice reminds of this article.

To take the place of Medieval Tale I have a song called First Base. No, not that kind of first base. The baseball kind. It has double stops in it and is in ragtime style. This will be fun.

Two more things - Firstly, Laura has been invited to play in China with an orchestra she played with previously. How cool is that? One of my aims is to play well enough to be asked to join an orchestra, and if possible, tour with an orchestra. I don't know that I would do that full time, but once would be marvelous. Secondly, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra was in Brisbane this week. Laura was fortunate enough to go to the first show. The second show was broadcast on ABC Classic FM. I listened to it at work the next day. Not only did they play beautifully, but they had someone associated with the orchestra talking to the radio host before and after they played. And during the interval they had a fascinating overview of the orchestra. They began in 1888, the same year as Tchaikovsky wrote his Symphony No. 5. I gather this is one of their "signature" pieces. This is one they performed during the broadcast, and what the radio audience could not see was the conductor actually stopped conducting  towards the end of the symphony and the orchestra just kept on going.