March 20, 2004 at 4:26 PM

It's been weeks, well no months,(close to a year) since I updated this blog. So let's hope, with good intentions in mind that I will actually maybe update this a little more regularly now.

It's been an amazing year musically, and some great opportunities have opened up for me. To look at my instrument, and pick it up, and play each day (even technique!) is a great joy. It's amazing the effect it has upon me when I play. I always feel refreshed after a good practice session, and find it easier to again concentrate on other things.

Since my last blog entry I have played with various orchestras as a mentor student, which has been and continues to be a great learning experience for me. I've attended my first summer music camp, where I got to do chamber music like I'd never done it before, and most recently got to solo in Dvorak's F minor Romance for violin and orchestra. What an amazing experience. I'm not a person who really gets nervous anymore, I've performed so much, but I was a little nervous right before I had to play, once the orchestra started, it was so strange, this overwhelming sense of calm and peace just came over me, and it was almost as if time had frozen while I was playing. It was over in an instant, yet it seemed to go on forever. I look back on it now, thinking, can that really be? Did I really actually play it three times? Was I really that lucky? Those concerts for me were also a big deal for me, because I got to conduct a work I wrote for woodwinds and strings, performed by the orchestra. It seems so surreal now.

Now I'm getting ready for a music festival where I will be performing Vitali's Ciaccona, Eckhardt-Gramatte's 3rd Caprice for solo violin, and the opening movement to a Suite that I wrote for unaccompanied violin. I'm quite excited about it. Especially to get feedback on my composition, and see if people like it or not. I think, and have been told, that you can hear a bit of my Bach and Ysaye influence in the work. (I would hope so, it was hearing an Ysaye sonata performed, and then listening, and practicing Bach that same day that got me to attempt to write this piece)

Composition has been an amazing release for me this past year. I can't nessecarily play my violin everywhere I am, at any moment, even if it's along, but I can have pencil and paper and write something down. It's been great fun to try out new, different possible techniques you use in a piece, and to use many of the ones already known to make the piece it's own, and hopefully, make it a more effective piece that communicates the message that you want it to.

Well here is an extremely breif update on me!

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March 20, 2004 at 4:26 PM

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