The Weekend Report

Our gig on Friday night went pretty well. Our whole group (9 of us!) doesn't rehearse together because of schedules - part of the group practices on Fridays and part of the group plays on Sundays. We also didn't do a good job of figuring out our program until Friday morning. I got some of the music Friday night. Oh well. I think we sounded pretty good in most cases and little rough in some spots. Two of the violinists played the first movement of the Bach double violin concerto and they were on fire! It was lovely listening to them. We played an eclectic mix of things - some Mozart, Copeland, an arrangement of "Hey Jude", a few rags, some Irish tunes - the audience appeared to enjoy it. One gentleman even came back; he listened to us that last time we played (the gig was part of a series of Art Walks that have been going on all summer). We've also had some other people inquire if we could play for them.

My lesson (moved to Friday morning) was interesting. I now have a CD with chords playing about every minute, some form of 7th chord (major, dominant, diminished..) in a variety of positions, in a bunch of different keys. The exercise I have this week is to play a scale or something against the chord, to really fine tune my intonation against the chord. One thing that I noticed when I was playing against a major 7th chord was that the 4th note in the scale had to be tuned down just a hair to sound good against the chord. The purpose of all of this exercise is to give me a chance to practice tuning against something else during practice time. The only time I get to do this is when I'm playing with a group, and I can't very well do this exercise with my groups.

The other exercise we did was taking Pablo Casals recording of the Sarabande from Bach's first cello suite (the G major one) and dissected the first few measures. This is a similar exercise that I wrote about in a previous post, for the Janos Starker recording of Bach's Arioso. Only this time I have homework (I hate homework!) - I'm supposed to listen to the Casals recording and mark up what I think he is doing - bow changes, dynamics, etc. - with the stated purpose of training my ear to listen better.

I think my objection is mostly to having to do the homework, not the actual assignment itself. And I don't mind practicing, either. I'm not sure what the difference is, but in my mind there is a difference.