It’s been a long time since I’ve needed to memorize choir music. In college we rehearsed each day and memorized everything, but in the high quality choirs I have sung in for the past fifteen years or more, we have had long rehearsals each week, but only once a week. We have learned large volumes of music well, but we have not memorized it because there simply isn’t time when only rehearsing weekly. This Christmas season, however, we have needed to memorize just one small short piece because of some special circumstances at our upcoming concert. The process of memorizing sometimes feels stressful to me, but when I sing music that is memorized I sing so much better. Even the alignment of my posture changes without the heavy folder. The way I watch the conductor changes. How I think about the vowels placed within my voice changes, and all those changes are for the better. So, Yay for memorizing, even though it’s not always practical.
It seems like ridiculous common sense, probably because almost everyone else is “with it” enough to have done this or to have found a different solution, but this month I realized that posting the phone numbers for all three school buildings on a sticky note next to my computer made my life so much easier. There have been a lot of calls to school buildings this fall to excuse kidlets for appointments or for other necessary communication, and every time I needed to call one of the schools I found myself looking up the phone number on the school website. Duh. A sticky note with all the phone numbers for school makes things so much faster and easier when I’m making those calls at the crack of dawn.
I learned so much about the basics of harp playing just by observing two of The Banana’s harp lessons. I love watching amazing teachers teach. I always learn so much about what they are teaching, and I learn how to be a better teacher myself. I kind of feel like we get double the knowledge for the price of one lesson when I get to watch my kids in their music lessons.
At the cello I’m making a little more progress with vibrato, some tricky trills, and I’m improving a lot in playing things in fifth and sixth position.
You can make a lot of fast progress when you force everyone in the family to work together helping clean the mess in the backyard storage shed. The storage shed was such a disaster, but after a couple of hours, almost everything had some kind of a place again. When we started construction on our mudroom, everything that was in that space got hauled into that storage shed in a matter of hours in an emergency fashion, and the place has been a disaster since then. Some items were moved back to the mudroom when it was completed, but because everything had been stacked in such random order, there was no rhyme or reason to anything in the storage space. It was a priority to get things organized this summer, but that didn’t happen, so instead, after the first snowfall, there were we were finding a place for everything! It all worked out in the end. Cooperation is key. (Good mittens helped, too.)
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