How Music May Help Ward Off Hearing Loss

While on my morning workout today, I heard this npr podcast about the effects of training your brain through music and if you spend a good portion of your life interacting with sound, then your nervous system makes many "sound-to-meaning connections."

I would love to work on making my students better listeners for various reasons, and this is just one more.

Teaching Improv

I try to teach a little bit of improv to my recorder and string students.  I have great aspirations, but never spend too much time on it.  This morning on my walk, I listened to this story on NPR about improv with Alzheimers patients, and it gave me an idea that is an easy first step to improv.  On recorders, our first notes are B, A, and G.  After we learn B, we can go around in a circle and have each person play B in whatever way they want to.  Long, short, in a little rhythm, loud, quiet, etc.  I can imagine that students will be initially shy, but if we make this an easy warm-up every time, as well as making it more complex (Bs and As, then all three notes), it will become easier for them to think of something in their mind and then translate it to an instrument.

I would also like to try this with my string class.  At first we could do it with plucking open strings and gradually add fingers and bowing, as we learn it in class.

Tenor Recorder

Today after recorder practice, I brought home a loaner tenor recorder to practice on....

Gigs Galore!

After a two-week summer vacation, where I did not play any instrument, I am back with a vengeance!  I have four gigs coming up in the next month and a half, so I'm practicing violin, viola, and soprano recorder.

First up is a wedding next weekend - playing viola in a trio.
Second is a church gig - playing viola in a quartet.
Third is a recorder gig.
Fourth is our Celtic Duet gig for Friday Nights Live! in Claremont (violin).

I'm feeling very much like a musician these days!