September 28, 2004 at 5:10 PM

I'm feeling in a bit of a blogging mood today!

School...yay, we are done with the Iliad! As interesting as it was to study the Iliad and Greek mythology as well as other kinds of mythology, I was starting to get a little drained of reading and memorising it all. We had a quiz on the Iliad yesterday in school. It was a fairly high marking quiz and the results from it go towards my grade percentage. I'm pretty sure I got all but one or two questions right. Yay! It's fun having to write and respond to things in my AP class and give ideas and reasons why we react the way we do or what significance that thing/item has to us. Now that we are done with the Iliad we are working on a Plato essay, Allegory of the Cave. I have to study a bit for another AP word quiz first today, but I'll finish and annotate the essay sometime later today. It's an interesting concept and it was fun to discuss it in class yesterday. I also need to cram in math today sometime...hmm....

Today I've only practiced a bit on viola so far. I'm performing part of the Arppegione Sonata at the end of October and I still haven't seriously worked through it all so that I can smoothly jump from alto to treble clef. It's a great sonata! I'm having a blast playing it. It lends itself to so much tugging and pulling around of tempos by means of rubato. I'm feeling really great about my progress on the C major Largo on violin (well all my pieces for that matter!) and I'm going to ask tomorrow if I would be overstepping my bounds to play that along with the Schubert at the recital. I'd really like to start performing it as often as I can to be really comfortable with it come the exam. The Barber concerto. Wow! What a fun piece, but so many different things you can do with it according to how you want it to sound. I've listened to Jasper Wood, Gil Shaham, Robert McDuffie, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Hilary Hahn, James Ehnes and a couple of other people play it and I can't belive just how different each recording is! Sonnenberg takes the first movement with a relatively slow tempo and uses lots of rubato where as Jasper Wood seems to give this feeling of urgency, always pushing forward, having you anticipate what's coming and at the same time taking some liberty with the time in spots. Hahn and McDuffie have the fastest last movements, but I find the musicality in Sonnenberg's and Wood's recordings to be much more appealing, even at their "slow" tempo. It's such an individual piece and I'm having a lot of fun learning it and infusing my own ideas and trying out different things to see how I like the tone colors and string qualities.

Now that I've hopefully made someones day a little less boring, I must return to practicing, or school, or something more constructive then a computer screen damaging my brain cells.

This entry has been archived and is no longer accepting comments.

September 28, 2004 at 5:10 PM

Subscribe

Laurie's Books