Sheer Heaven

Today I took the time to just listen to Beethoven's 5th Piano Concerto, The Emperor. It is probably one of my all-time-favorite pieces of music.

Just Good 'Ole Singing

For the past several years I have been teaching music standards in general music. We learn rhythm, melody, texture and harmony through games, movement, playing instruments, creating our own music. It's all good, but I realize that I have not been "just singing" with the kids very much, except to prepare for Winter Sing or the district-wide fundraiser in April (Shop and Dine). So I thought I should end each class with a song or two that I will teach to the entire K6 population. So far this year we have learned Simple Gifts and This Land is Your Land. Last year we all learned Puff the Magic Dragon and De Colores I am working on a list of "must-know" songs. I think we'll start on Garden Song (Inch by Inch) soon.

Singing is good for the soul.

Private Studio

As of yesterday, I am up to 3 private students, with room for more!

Back to my String Quartet

It's been too long since I last paid any attention to my string quartet. When I write this fifth and final movement, it will be time to go back and revise all the movements, then find a quartet to play it. Perhaps by this summer?

When I started composition lessons in Chicago, my teacher had me write a narrative about what my first piece was going to sound like. Of course, it ended up not following that, but it gave me a starting place. Today I wrote a narrative for Tenaya, the lake in Yosemite high country that we love. We'll see how the music ends up reflecting these thoughts and plans....

"For Tenaya, I represent the light reflecting off of the lake in a shimmer as the wind stirs the surface. As the wind is not constant, and also tends to get stronger in the afternoon, the sparkles adjust accordingly.

The two violins and the viola/cello play interlocking melodies as in gamelan music, but using the dreamlike C Lydian mode from the first movement - the Valley - making a frame for the entire work.

In listening to the phasing technique of Steve Reich’s music, the interlocking melodies play in canon, and then play in a simple phase where one group plays the first bar of the melody twice while the other plays the melody as originally written, making the canon sound different at each iteration, finally coming together at the end.

I will start with fragments of the melodies framed in bursts of silence, and flashes of color with harmonics and pizzicato for a variety of texture. The tendency of a string quartet is to sound the same from beginning to end, whether fast or slow, energetic or contemplative. I explore other textures."

Teaching Minimalism

The teachers at school requested that I teach the 4th, 5th, and 6th graders "about the composers" this year. Instead of dry lectures, I have tried to engage the students in some way. Inspired by an Orff workshop where we learned a simplified version of a phasing canon, I thought it would be fun to explore the minimalist music. The students worked in groups of 3 to create two minimal patterns in C pentatonic. I took the opportunity to try out my new iPod nano video to tape their creations, then use iMovie to put some of them together. I will teach this lesson to three other classes. The first 10 seconds or so show the practice session.