New Year’s Resolutions for 2020/the 2020’s

January 1, 2020, 8:58 AM · Happy New Year; and welcome to a new decade!

I know it’s just a number, but as I wake up on this sunny snowy morning outside my window, I can’t help but think of it being a fresh start for the decade - I’m going into it with two hopefully exciting pieces to start (and two to finish engraving!), and coming back to my love of the violin. So, I thought I’d list out some goals for not just this year, but hopefully things I can keep up for a long time - perhaps the whole decade! We’ll see how much of this I will remember and want to look back on in the future, but for now, similarly to what I did in 2013 here on this blog, here are some of my personal goals starting in 2020. (I guess this is also going along with a recent violinist.com post I saw about 10 Things Musicians Should Do Before They Die - although for me, I’m a bit more focused on this coming decade, not the next several.

1.) Compose at least once a day. I’m not sure if I will be able to squeeze in time for my violin every day, but I could at least find time to wake up in the morning and do something related to my current projects, whatever they may be. My violin teacher at Augie told me from a film composer friend one should be able to do their craft every day - for some that’s practicing, and for me, hopefully, that’s composing!

2. Get my pieces out into the world. Going along with the above, I can’t wait to share new pieces with you and perhaps get more entered in competitions and even published in the coming years. As I get further into my composing again and finally more excited about it, this will all be easy to do.

3. Listen to a (new) piece of music every day. If it isn’t a new piece all the time, that’s okay - I get very nostalgic at times and listening to pieces I’ve known for years now sometimes helps me through rough moments. This is one I hope to take pretty seriously. Today’s one was Bartók’s 21st of his 44 Violin Duos - the New Year’s Greeting. Even if they are short like that because I’m busy that day, I hope I’ll put some effort in listening to at least something every single day. This will only help me grow as a musician, music-lover, and composer and performer, as well - make me more well-rounded in music! I still have TwoSet Violin and all my VGM violin YouTubers I’ve been following as well - and new soundtracks from my favorite gaming YouTubers too! I’m excited to see where they’ll all go in 2020, just as I myself will!

4. Upload more violin covers? Not sure about this one due to the time it takes, but returning to my YouTube channel as a violinist could be fun, just as I started in 2012 to help me get excited about it. I could have my older channel be filled with violin covers or excerpts from my new violin books (I got Simon Fischer’s book of transcriptions that I believe was on the 2019 Violinist.com Holiday Guide!), and my second professional account for all my compositions for my website - which I’ll will try and make and launch this month! I’d love to get into video production like my favorite VGM YouTubers - but maybe this could wait to be truly great quality until after I graduate. We’ll see...

5. Generally, focus more on music, but be curious about the world. Having a focus is something that is important to me, and while I have mentioned games a lot of times throughout this blog, throughout the past few years I have sometimes focused more on them than my music. As I have been posting about in December (of last decade - that joke never gets old!), I have been getting a bigger passion for the violin and my music. Besides music, I hope I’ll read more books about the rest of the world, whether it be scientific or historical or any topics - just to become more knowledgeable about this wonderful world we live in.

So I dunno, there are five fairly generic things I am hoping to focus on throughout this decade and beyond. There are plenty of specific things I could tack on - I really want to see a performance of the BBC Proms live one summer, for example - but for the moment I am content with these more personal goals for myself to really get me back into being truly excited about the wonderful music lifestyle and what my greatest passion is. Sorry for all these personal posts lately - but they are all helpful for me to store on this site. Maybe that’ll be my 6th goal, post more about generic topics, like the Paganini TwoSet video from last month.

For now, I hope you have a fantastic New Year’s Day! I can’t wait to dig into my new pieces and starting to plan for what I will do this summer between my two years at graduate school, and... yeah! Happy New Year!

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New Year’s Resolutions for 2020/the 2020’s

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