Amateur Bard

Hello again, beloved blog. It’s been a hot minute! I’d like to blame it solely on being busy but I am also just out of practice at real blog updates.

Although, to be fair, I have been busy. I’ve been doing my Typical Freelance Bullshit, except that I’ve been working as a temp employee. On the plus side, I don’t have to mess with taxes, yay! On the down side, I’ve been playing nicely and observing standard work hours rather than a mad marathon to knock out a project. It’s better in terms of not tiring myself out, but it is annoying to have a whole chunk of every day taken up by work instead of sacrificing a couple of days per week. Meh.

Pivoting: I also had a fun and exciting experience of taking my viola to a new-to-me luthier! Oh, uh. Yes. I also have a viola. Don’t worry about it. After many years of languishing, I decided to give it some attention and the first order of business was a string change. Except that I’d never noticed how light of a gauge my existing A was, because when I started putting a Tonica A on, the string got pinched into the nut groove and the winding was mangled. Fucking lovely. So I found a very nice gentleman who’s about 45 minutes from my house. (I was almost afraid I’d have to drive into the Big City to get work done. It’s doable but such a pain in the ass.) The viola, much improved, is back in my hands, although it’s still slightly cursed around the A string*. Maybe I need to do some sort of ritual to appease it. My blood, perhaps?

(*To be super, duper fair to the luthier who did this work, he did a fantastic job. I decided to go cheap and try out a set of Tonicas… turns out that the windings on them may be particularly fragile as I’ve found several other people who’ve had issues with Tonicas in particular but not other brands on a particular instrument. Weird!)

Back in May, I went to visit my sister and taught her some violin basics. She was a very good sport, putting up with my infodumping enthusiasm for a whole weekend. I was so impressed with the sound she was getting with the bow right off the bat! I did a compressed version of my ‘typical’ lesson plan, doing about five weeks of material in a weekend, just as a “this is what it’s all about” style of experience. She kept up very well, especially for someone who can’t read music yet 🙂 I’m putting away some mad money from this temp job to put towards an instrument for her.

Beyond that: I’ve been slowly plugging away at the basics, with the occasional mad dash through old repertoire (Telemann, Haydn, Bach) just to amuse myself. I keep losing myself in the depths of old method books on IMSLP; some very amusing grandiose statements about violin playing and some useful fun new exercises to work on. My current favorite is Richard Hofmann’s Opus 25, Die ersten Etüden für Violine. I happened to really like his etudes out of another complied book and went looking to see what else he composed. I was also introduced to the Rieding Concerto in B minor for violin; my teacher was a big fan of Baroque and Classical, less so anything ‘modern’ like a Romantic composer 😉 So it’s new to me and just about the kind of thing I can get under my fingers without much struggle. I’m using it to work on things like ‘dynamics’ and ‘phrasing.’