Catching Up and Fiddle Camp

I have been remiss in posting. I have not been remiss in making music integral to my life. The end of the school year brought the usual concerts - the fruition of our work. Vista Orchestra and Recorders performed, the EIMP of CUSD performed, and my private studio students were in a recital. The Women's Choir at church sang in the big music service.

However, right now on the forefront of my mind is the amazing, transformative week I spent at Sierra Fiddle Camp. My mind is swimming with tunes. Scottish tunes, Swedish tunes, Old Time USA tunes, and a few from other places.  Tunes on my fiddle, tunes in my voice.

I learned how to learn tunes by ear on the fiddle. This is big for me. I know that it has created new synapses in my brain, and I think I may spend a good deal of time on our upcoming sabbatical in working on fiddling. I wondered how I would continue learning by ear. In camp it's set out for you. The teacher plays a tune in full, then breaks it down into chunks and we repeat small chunks and add them to others until we have a whole A or B section, then we end up knowing the whole tune.

(Interesting fact. Although I felt as though I knew the tunes really, really well, when I played them by myself at home, I needed to relisten to the recordings I made to clear up some fuzzy places. It's very helpful to be playing in a group (which is one reason I love teaching string classes).)

So, someone suggested that I make my own recordings of tunes to learn. I can play the small chunks for the looping. I will have to try that. I also have some recordings from Peter Cooper's book with work on ornamentation, so that will come with me on sabbatical.

Last Week of General Music

This is the last week of the school year for me. The money has run out, and even though there is still another month of school for the CUSD, music is ending. I am not at all sad since at this time of year, students are not coming to music with their full brains engaged. (This is an understatement.)

I have always tried to do different and fun things in the final weeks of music class, but my attempts to involve students in music-making fail. I have finally remembered this while I lesson plan, and this week we are watching movies! Well, you know, good movies. With the upper graders we watched The Sorcerer's Apprentice section of Fantasia and I had the kids write about various sections of the 10-minute video. The second-graders watched The Dance of the Hours and laughed and laughed.

The vast majority of the kids have not seen this movie, so it was fun to be able to introduce a part of it to them. We told one of the older classes that we couldn't show them the whole movie because some parts are "inappropriate" (I showed it to my own kids when they were young, so I don't find anything objectionable in it, but maybe some parents wouldn't want me to show them the sort-of nudity or the wine-making by Bacchus.). As soon as they heard there might be racy parts, they all wanted to know the name of the movie so they could go rent it.....

CUSD Concert

Last night our district string students, 4th-12th Grades, performed our final concert of the year, so now it's time to clean-up, regroup, rest, and think about next year.

I am constantly amazed at how well-behaved string students are.  They sat for a little over an hour, performing and then listening to the other groups play and adults make all kinds of announcements.  We had absolutely no issues (just some students who have no idea how to play their instruments and sit in the back row looking completely lost).

April is a Busy Month

Even though the end of the music school year is still more than a month away, this is the time of year when we realize that we need to get things done.

This weekend we took a field trip to Disney Hall with our String Orchestra for a children's concert.  You can read more about that on my daily blog here.

On Sunday afternoon I played with the Village Pipers, a recorder group at the Claremont Community School of Music.  We played for a Garden Tour and performed under a large live oak tree overlooking the valley from a garden up in Padua.

The Women's Choir at CUCC is gearing up to actually sing in worship on Mother's Day, so that has involved some extra practice time.