Subzero cold snaps do amazing things for music students. We had three days in the middle of this week without school. About half of my students were still able to come to their lessons, and probably because they didn’t have a lot to do since everyone was mostly stuck inside all week, they were astoundingly well prepared. (A lot of great practicing happened here as well).
A few months ago I needed to switch my email program from Mac “Mail” to Airmail due to some terrible disaster that I never did figure out. (All of the sudden my main email stopped coming into the program and it just wasn’t able to be remedied no matter what I did). This month I figured out how to set up Airmail so that almost all of my different email accounts came to the same program, which did wonders for my email efficiency. I am so happy!
I learned about the contemporary living choral composer Eriks Esenvalds from Latvia. Mmmmmm.
While watching videos of choirs from the United Kingdom, the Southern United States, and Latvia rehearse and perform Esenvalds’ music, I observed that how vowels are physically shaped in the faces of choral singers is very different throughout the world. Even though they may actually be making the same sound, their faces look sometimes so different because of the natural or first language or dialect they are coming from. I should have probably realized this before, but it was just so obvious when I was watching, and so very interesting to me.
At the Adler Planetarium I learned all about the early space program and the emergence of NASA. It was amazing and so interesting to see an actual Gemeni spacecraft on display, and I somehow had never paid very much attention to all of the Gemeni missions that happened before the Apollo missions into space. I learned so much, but some of the big takeaways for me were how primitive some of the equipment used in all of those early space missions seemed today (rotary phones!) and how all of the math calculations were done by HAND using some kind of gigantic binary calculator and a slide rule because calculators were not digital, and computers were just being developed and not trusted to complete the math correctly. It was really interesting to learn about the women who were pioneers in the early days of NASA, and I really loved learning about some of the thoughts and perspective of the first astronauts’ families about their journeys into space.
The Banana asked me what a “veldt” was (it was in the title of a short story in a list of stories she could read for extra credit). I didn’t know, so I looked it up, and it turns out that a veldt is an open grassland in southern Africa. There’s your vocabulary word for the day!
I’ve played complex music written by Bach on the piano for a large portion of my life. I love Bach. I love how there’s always something new and interesting to discover about the music, and I never feel bad about being a slow learner of Bach’s music because it’s the kind of music that just gets better the more time it has to percolate. Careful learning always pays off, and the music always ends up making sense after disciplined practice. What I didn’t realize until this month when I started learning the accompaniment to a complicated Bach violin piece that The Banana is learning, is that I have always played well-edited versions of Bach’s music with fantastic fingerings already written in. And it turns out that even though I’m usually really good at coming up with workable fingerings on the piano when I need to, it feels like there are about 20 different ways you can finger some of these Bach passages, and all of them work OK, but discovering the one that really works the best with everything that is going on can be an arduous task. I will persevere. But I now have learned to REALLY appreciate the geniuses who edited all the fingerings of my other Bach music.
On the cello I learned some intonation tricks (leading tone notes need to be played more sharp than you would think).
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