Busy!

It's been a busy week - got in some extra practice time because I actually had Martin Luther King Jr. day off as a holiday. Trying to fit in everything I want to practice is tough.

We had our first orchestra practice for the new year! The program is very nice - Holst 2nd Suite; Butterworth "A Shropshire Lad", and Vaughan Williams Pastoral Symphony. I was really confused about which part I was playing - the cellos go divisi a lot and sometimes it was by stand and sometimes it was inside/outside...so a lot of the time I wasn't sure if I was playing the correct part.

This Wednesday I'm playing a gig at work with a flautist. We were supposed to play at the office holiday party, but the party got postponed because of all of the snow Seattle got around Christmas. We had to find some new music to play because Christmas carols in January didn't really seem like a good idea. So Friday we played some music together for the first time, to pick what we'll play on Wednesday. We're going to play some dances from Febonio op29 "Rustic Airs and Dances" (I've never heard of Febonio before!), and a Beethoven duet that was originally written for clarinet and bassoon. fortunately, today I was able to run through everything with the violinist in my chamber group...not much time to get it ready for Wednesday.

Today's chamber group was a duet for a while, then a string trio. The string trio we read was a keeper! It was 3 string trios by Hyacinthe Jadin (a male, not a female). We were pretty excited about every movement in every trio!

and last but not least...my lessons continue and we just started playing a Kummer duet op156, duo #4 - we played through all of the movements at my lesson on Friday and hopefully soon will be able to play it at speed. I have my list of things that I'm working on..
--loosening my wrist while bowing, right now really working on dotted rhythms and a quick snap of the wrist and getting the short note to articulate
--detached bowing (on the string and off the string)
--arpeggios: this week need to work on nailing the shift down from the root to the fifth of the chord when descending)
--shifting exercise from Sevecik op8
--trill exercise (based on Cossman)
--vibrato
--scales: work on controlling bow pressure so that sound volume stays consistent (my teacher pointed out the it looked like I was easing up at the tip and at the frog...and hence producing inconsistent volume/tone)

oh..and don't forget to have fun playing...!