April 6, 2005 at 12:34 AM

It was such a nice day today! It was really warm and sunny and pretty...but of course it will start raining again in two days. Oh well....
So last Saturday I did this Warminster Competition in Bucks County. I played Zigeunerweisen, and at first I wasn't too happy with the beginning (later on when I thought about it, I was pretty happy with it because it was really musical) but the Allegro was really good. It was a rainy day and I was a bit grumpy then about how I had played, so we really wanted to get out of there. So we rushed out the door before I got a chance to be obsessive about making sure I packed everything. For the rest of the day I was feeling too depressed to practice, also about various other stuff, but when I opened my music bag later, I discovered that not only my metronome but my copy of Zigeunweisen, with all the bowings and fingerings and notes and everything wasn't there. I looked everywhere but couldn't find it, and was really upset because I felt I really needed the music too. Luckily we had a clean copy for the competition so I was just about to put all the fingerings in that one when the competition people called saying they found it. The metronome was found too, but the music teacher who uses that room says it belongs to him, so we can't have it back. Hmph. But thank goodness we got the sheet music back!
Also, today we went to Wilmington to a violin shop owned by David Bromberg. We took the Alf violin there to see if we could get the sound post adjusted by Whitney Osterud , who we met for the first time. He has SUCH a good ear, and he would say things like, "Play a scale up the Ging....the sound is a little dryer with a hint of sweetness...OK try it again...now it's flatter but we lost the clarity." My mom said it sounded like he was describing wine! By the time he had tinkered with it a bit, it was a tremendous difference in the sound from when we had started! After that, my mother asked David Bromberg if he had any violins that were small full sizes, because I have a small hand, and he came up with six! We couldn't believe it! None of the other places we went had six violins my size that were actually playable. Well, we eliminated them one by one, but got down to three and couldn't eliminate any more. There was one from London, an Italian one, and one made by Whitney Osterud himself. The London one was brighter, the Italian sweeter, and the Osterud both. When my teacher comes back from England next week, I'll play them for him.
The violin shop was such a neat little place; we saw the workshop in the back which was amazing, all these tools and stuff and a marble surface that we were told had been measured as flat to a half a millionth of an inch. There were all sorts of cool instruments like one weird one with a really detailed carving of Paganini on the back, and a double case with marble flowers all over it.
Of course, the reason for all this good luck is because the odometer on our van turn from the 139,999 to the 140,000 and out of the unlucky number!

--alice

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April 6, 2005 at 12:34 AM

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