lwl
-
Posts
1669 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Blogs
Events
Downloads
Gallery
Articles
Store
Posts posted by lwl
-
-
Try playing a bow that's better than yours -- in fact, try playing several bows that are better than yours, since not every bow is going to suit you well.
If you find that strokes that are *impossible* on your other bow are *easy* on this one, you should upgrade if you can afford it -- your old bow is holding you back.
If you merely find that this other bow makes things *easier*, you will have to choose whether or not you want to upgrade -- this will be largely a financial decision.
I know, for instance, that I'm capable of using a better bow than I have, and that it would improve sound and ease and other things -- but I don't want to spend the kind of money it would cost me to upgrade. My bow is perfectly adequate for the things that I do.
-
Lydia Mordkovich.
She was a student of Oistrakh's.
I have yet to hear anything she's recorded that I like, honestly -- her sound is much too rough for my tastes, althoug some of that might be poor sound engineering.
-
Er, in what way have I proved your point, Tenor1? I thought my point was in sharp disagreement.
Violin was my first instrument. Despite having no musical background -- I had never even heard a violin prior to my first lesson, and heard no music around the house other than the music in television shows -- I don't think I had trouble picking up the instrument, and I don't think I suffered from it having been my first musical exposure.
My sister and I are both lucky enough to have perfect pitch -- we never went through a stage of not knowing whether or not something was in tune. I've never particularly noticed younger beginners playing out of tune more than older beginners, though. (Parents can help -- but plenty of adults don't have "good ears" that accurately discriminate pitch, either!)
My parents were good Suzuki parents -- they sat in on practice sessions and on lessons (in my case, 'til I was twelve, was years past my last Suzuki lesson, and had a conventional teacher -- a conservatory prof, actually -- who finally threw my parents out of my lessons). Parental involvement makes tons of difference, whether you're a Suzuki kid or not.
Plenty of three-to-five-year-old kids can conscientiously follow directions, and an increasing number of them can also read, since it's become commonplace for parents to teach their children how before sending them off to school.
-
My younger sister began the piano at three and violin not too much later, both via the Suzuki Method. She learned to read notes fairly soon after beginning (but by that age she could already read books just fine). I don't think it's been a negative thing for her at all.
I started the violin when I was five, also via Suzuki, and read notes within a few months of starting the instrument. I don't think the early start age hurt me, either.
Nor do I think that either of us picked up the instrumental or musical skills at a slower pace than we would have at, say, age 7, though probably slower than we would have at age 9. But I think starting early granted advantages in practice time, experience, etc. that those who started later did not have. After all, if you're almost through the Suzuki books by the time other kids start to Twinkle, you have a huge head start that is, I think, quite valuable.
-
I think I'm not really a performer by nature -- there's something deeply unsatisfying about ending months of preparation with a one-shot deal. For me, I think the pleasure is in the act of preparation itself; I enjoyed the rehearsals with orchestra and what I learned about the music and the process of making it, and so for me the culmination of all this effort was really more the dress rehearsal than the performance itself.
The day started for me at 7 am when a joint in an external pipe of my house burst. Investigating the sound of gushing water, I opened the back door (without my glasses, which I am pretty close to blind without, and entirely groggy), and was promptly drenched by ice-cold water, which was spraying in all directions. Eventually I was shocked into sufficient wakefulness that I remembered to turn off the water main. This, of course, left me with the problem of not being able to shower or anything (a real problem, given that my stomach tends to rebel intensely on performance days).
Thus the morning was spent on trying to get the pipe repaired, and then at a friend's place with a spare bathroom. By the time I showed up for the concert I had already had enough stress for the day.
Nonetheless: I'm reasonably pleased with how I played in the performance. Not absolutely technically sterling, but out of thousands of notes, I don't think I missed more than a handful (most of them thoroughly unexpected, in the 'easier' bits, where I think I had concentration lapses), though I'll have to hear the performance CD archive (and may cringe when I do). I don't know what the musical results were like -- autopilot and a haze of adrenaline, and an attempt to breathe with the phrases and that's about all I can do.
Certainly I know I'm capable of playing better than I played -- but when are we ever lucky enough to play as well as we really can, in front of an audience? So my disappointment, such as it is, is mitigated by reality.
I did have one serious moment of panic -- I had xeroxed a page and taped it to the music so I could spread out three pages at once, in the middle scherzo movement. Unfortunately, I opened the music to the *wrong three pages* -- and had a major ut-oh movement when I glanced at the top of the second page. Autopilot carried me through, but the main scherzo theme repeats and every time it goes into something different, and that moment of panic wiped out my recollection of what came next -- I had to hear the orchestra play the first beat of the next section before I remembered what I should be doing (fortunately nothing complex). I finished up the section from memory, trying to figure out a good place where I could turn to the correct pages, but there are no rests -- so I picked a place where the measures repeat a few times, and dropped a bar to turn the page and tried to make it look natural. I don't *think* anyone in the audience, other than my teacher, noticed...
(The lack of rests is a real annoyance, I discovered. I broke bow hairs in the third movement and had to live with them, since it's nearly ten minutes of continuous music with not even one beat of rest where the darn things can get cleared.)
The orchestra sounded magnificent. I'm thrilled I got the chance to do this; the work was worthwhile, I learned a lot,
My wrist is a bit stiff and sore today, but usable. I managed to play the performance without noticing the pain -- I took a couple of Aleve spaced out through the day.
At the end of yesterday evening, when the stuff wore off, though, I couldn't pick up something the weight of a hardcover book with my left hand. Sigh.
-
Who has recorded this work and been reasonable faithful to the printed rhythm?
Just started working on this, and discovered when I tried playing with a metronome that I'm doing very strange and inaccurate things to the rhythm based off hearing what it sounds like on record...
Also: What recordings are complete? (no movements omitted)
[This message has been edited by lwl (edited 09-24-2001).]
-
Perhaps this is a question better answered by one of the other Maestronetters present.
[This message has been edited by lwl (edited 09-23-2001).] -
Link for that auction:
http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?V...item=1465131070
For that matter: Shouldn't estimates from an auction house (which is essentially what the seller is behaving as) be the *auction* estimated price, and not the *retail* estimated price?
-
It's hard to tell. He was pretty angry at me. I'm not sure if it was just a particularly violent gesture and the baton slipped out of his hand, or what.
-
A past violin teacher of mine, commenting on my delivery of a passage at extremely high velocity but without absolutely accurate intonation: "Fingers like lightning! Never strike twice in the same place!"
-
He threw a baton at me once, when I was principal second.
-
Yup, Tham did. I played with the prep orchestra for two and a half years (I joined mid-year, initially), and the concert orchestra for, hrm, three or four years, I think. Concertmaster of the prep orchestra, and then principal second of the concert orchestra, midway through those years. I quit halfway through high school, though, when I started doing enough freelancing professionally that I didn't want Monday nights tied up being yelled at by Mr. Tham.
-
Sadly, any number of great musicians have been terrible human beings. Ditto music-lovers.
-
I have strong ideals -- but I am also deeply cynical, so I suppose that makes me a realist.
There are all of these things that people *should* be and *should* do, but the fact of the matter is that, barring extraordinary circumstances, people tend to behave in petty, self-centered ways. And even when they act in ways they believe serve some greater good, their end-result conduct is often not admirable.
I have strong ideas about how I want music to sound, and I am particularly enchanted by the charge and synchronicity of group performances. But I am also aware that the physical effort, the sheer skill, needed to produce in reality what one hears in one's head is absolutely enormous, and often the results fall short of what is desired.
-
Any of you participated in, or attended, memorial concerts in the past week? Care to share the experience, if so?
-
Gut isn't any easier to tune -- it's just that you're unlikely to be making the small adjustments that fine tuners are meant to handle.
Wound gut, like Eudoxa and Olive, consists of gut wound with metal. The Eudoxas also come with a steel E, and the Olives with a gold-plated steel E. (Thus you will still need an E fine tuner.) Wound gut behaves pretty similarly to synthetic strings (notably Obligatos); the response time is somewhat slower and it can take a little more effort to get an initial bite into the string. The strings are at fairly low tension, but still designed to be tuned to an A-440; they'll feel a bit soft under the hand (but not vastly more so than Obligatos). Since they're metal-wrapped, they look just like synthetic strings; they just have a natural gut core rather than a core of synthetic fibers.
Unwound gut, like Damien Dlugolecki and Pirastro's Chorda, is designed for a baroque set-up, and often meant to be tuned to a lower pitch, such as an A-430.
-
I'm trying to get an accurate count of who is coming to dinner afterwards, so reservations can be made. Please post here, or email me privately, if you're planning on it. Thanks.
-
quote:
Originally posted by U of I violist:Glen Ellyn! I went to Glenbard West High School. (I'm a newbie though, I'm a sophomore at the U of I in music ed)
Cool.
I grew up next to what's now Danada -- went to Wheaton Central. My mother tutors math for a lot of students at Glenbard West.What youth orchestra did you play in?
I got started in DuPage Youth as a fourth-grader -- played with them a number of years (I think I unfortunately started the trend towards younger and younger kids in the orchestra). I played in Chicago Youth, too, plus the Classical Symphony one summer, and Wheaton a couple of summers. (I'm told there've been some good new youth orchestras that've arisen recently, though.)
[This message has been edited by lwl (edited 09-15-2001).]
-
quote:
Originally posted by U of I violist:But I started in a youth orchestra in 7th grade-12th, and played in the Wheaton Symphony Orchestra for the past two years.
Hey, U of I violist, where are you from?
I played in that orchestra for a number of years, about a decade ago -- I grew up in Wheaton.
-
Larsens? Corelli Alliances?
-
Interestingly, Daniel Barenboim apparently does all string bowings himself -- and he's a pianist.
-
I also like using the high E as the reference for high notes. But I also think that eventually you just "know" how many lines there are, either by some subconscious reading of intervals or by the recognition of the distance above the staff. Generally, for big jumps, I will write in the note name, just as a reminder.
On the other hand, I *hate* those hand-copied orchestral parts, because the distance between the lines above the staff is not constant! That forces you to actually count how many lines there are, and in really badly-written parts, it can be unclear to a first glance whether the note is sitting on a line or is between them. Yuck.
-
It can take several hours to bow a piece, speaking from experience. First you have to know what you want it to sound like (which often means guessing what the conductor will want it to sound like, too), and then you have to come up with bowings that will hopefully feel comfortable and useable to everyone (not necessarily easy when dealing with a community orchestra).
-
The first volume is significantly easier than Kreutzer -- I did Mazas prior to Kreutzer. Lots of good stuff for tone production and the like.
[This message has been edited by lwl (edited 09-09-2001).]
How do u teach 5yr olds?
in The Fingerboard
Posted
Tenor1, how do you tell who's talented and should start early, unless you DO start them early?
Also, I'm puzzled what was meant by "prefer one-on-one teaching" -- Suzuki IS a one-on-one method, though most programs also incorporate periodic group lessons (usually used to teach ensemble playing, theory, and have fun).