November 20, 2004 at 4:56 AM

There is a link to the luthier who's violin I got to try that you can read about in my previous blog entry.

I had a violin lesson yesterday! I really enjoy my lessons and yesterday's was no exception. On Sunday I will be performing Gary Kulesha's Caprice No. 1 for solo violin and I only started serious work on it two weeks ago and had to take close to a week of that off due to being away on a symphony tour and then being in Vancouver. So the first thing we tackled at my lesson was the Kulesha. First of all, it's a positively great work! The more I play it the more I really start to be able to dig in and just enjoy every note. There are some neat things that I've noticed in the composition of how the composer plays chords in one bar the arpeggiates them in an effective manner in the next bar. It has two short sections to it, the first being a more stated maestoso and the second an almost dance like Allegro. So much fun! I am so excited about performing it on Sunday and I hope the audience enjoys it. After working on that at my lesson we tackled my Bach. I played it by memory for her and managed to do alright on it. I was a little bit disapointed with some little things that I found out I was in fact capable of screwing up, but generally speaking it went very well and we discussed a couple little things to just enhance the piece overall. Then it was Barber!!! We got up to the recapitulation in the first movement, which was fine with me because I hadn't really worked on the recap. enough to make it worthwhile to waste lesson time on it. It went well. I'm really pleased with how it's coming along and some of the technical hurdles I'm starting to finally master with the even tone and vibrato. Still a very long wase to go yet, but I've at least chiseled something out of that monumental work!

Practicing the last few days now that I'm back into the grind is going really well. I missed it while I was away but the time off makes me enjoy it and feel refreshed and renewed to an extent. This weekend is nice because I've gotten all my homework done so I can just enjoy getting ready for the performances for tomorrow and Sunday.

Nothing else too terribly exciting and new. We had a couple of quizzes in German, one oral and one written. The oral one went really well for me! I don't know about the written one yet but I was a little confused about it, so hopefully it went alright. In English we had AP essays to write on Machiavelli's "The Circle of Governments" which was quite challenging. I enjoyed writing it once I determined what I wanted to say after seeing the proposed tasks and questions that we had to answer. I finished writing it with only a couple of minutes to spare in the time limit. We'll see how I did....

I'm off!!

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November 20, 2004 at 4:56 AM

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