New Strings!

I changed my strings today! I'd forgotten how wonderful new strings sound. It was like I'd suddenly improved a lot - all just from the new strings! I use Larsen soloist for my A & D strings, and Piastro Permanent for the G & C strings. The strings had been sitting there for a few months waiting for me to take the time to change them. Actually, I decided to wait until a few weeks before our concert. I need all the help I can get!

Yesterday at my lesson we continued to work on improving the form of my left arm and worked on using it more, especially for speed work. It's amazing how good form improves tone. We were laughing about why my teacher hadn't gotten me to do this before. I feel like I've been constantly making changes to improve form, and I suppose that I haven't been ready to work on this part of my form prior to building up form and technique with other things.

Chamber group this morning was fun. We had a piano quartet again, although people straggled in during the morning. Cello2 (who I'm playing the Popper with) arrived first, so we spent some time reading through some Offenbach cello duets, Op. 52 Nos. 1 & 2. When our violist showed up I switched to the piano and pretended to be a violin for a Hiller string trio. When our violinist showed up we read through a piano quartet by Novak. It had some good moments; the 2nd movement was nice; the 3rd movement felt like a counting exercise (it kept changing from 6/8 to 3/4 to 6/8 to 2/4 to 6/8 to 4/4....so keeping together was pretty challenging). After that I pretended to be a violin again. Our violinist had found a (or perhaps I should say 'the') Puccini string quartet, so I played violin 2. The quartet was pieced together from a variety of manuscripts. He apparently wrote the quartet as a student composition, and none of it survived together. There was even an alternate version of the trio in it. We really liked the last movement of it. Once we finished that we were done for the day.