V.com weekend vote: What musical opportunities are you looking forward to this fall?
The calendar has flipped to September and stores are suddenly bursting with harvest food and pumpkin-spice everything - fall is in the air!
The change of season can also be a time of new musical opportunities and activities. This change in musical life is different for everyone: the start of the school year, the start of the symphony season, getting back to indoor concerts, returning to regular teaching, returning to regular lessons, returning to community orchestra, etc.
For me, I am always happy to return to a "regular" teaching schedule with my private students. We make more progress, with lessons every week and not so many vacations!
What are you most looking forward to this autumn, when it comes to your musical life? Please participate in the vote and then tell us about what is happening in your musical life this fall.
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Replies
Too bad there's no "check all that apply" feature!
"Community orchestra" for sure, so that's what I selected -- I'm the CM and just yesterday I completed all the V1 bowings. That wasn't much work because we play a lot of arrangements that are fully edited including bowings. I do always check those, but usually I don't have to add much.
"Starting a new project" is true, too, because a cellist friend and I are going to work on the Hoffmeister duos. He's a semi-retired electrical engineering professor.
"Taking regular lessons" is partially true. It depends what you mean by "regular." Over the past few years my lessons have suffered from what one might call "occasional irregularity." :) Hopefully I can have one every three weeks or so. That's about all I can manage as I already have too much stuff to practice.
"Something else" is true for sure because I'm in a string quartet club. This morning we played through Haydn Op. 73 No. 3 "Emperor" and Mendelssohn Op. 44 No. 2. I played viola, which is pretty much the operational definition of "something else" LOL. Next weekend is Beethoven Op. 135. Our first violinist has dubbed the Vivace movement "unsafe at any speed."
And in the "something else" category I'll also put my jazz trio, in which I play the piano with a bassist and a drummer, and we get together every couple of weeks, and as a jazz pianist I play a couple of gigs a month, too.
@Richard I bet your fingerboard is longer. So there's that.
Something else - a few things, really. From late fall through winter - typically late November through late March in north-central AL, USA - I plan to concentrate more on technique review. Late afternoon/early evening sessions of 90 minutes are more than enough to keep me in shape.
Related to this: I plan to refine my digital audio recording technique. Some progress already, now that I have better equipment than when I started with my previous Android phone in 2018. I can’t count all the tracks I’ve put down so far. Winter means a little more time to - finally - sort through them and select the ones I’d like to add to my budding YouTube channel.
If I can fit a bit of weekend afternoon chamber playing into the schedule, I’ll take it.
Here, around the 34th parallel, it’s warm about 8 months of the year to practice and play in the garage. When the cold air of late November forces me back indoors, I may work on learning digital reverb - that’s something else to look forward to. Still, with or without it, I’m happy with the natural reverb in the garage.
@Paul...yes indeed, and a couple of bows!
I accidentally voted "something else" but intended to vote for "the start of a new project."
I'm in an amateur chamber music club where I have the chance to perform a movement or two of chamber music (guideline is ~10 minutes) twice a year. This fall I'm working on the first movement of the Rheinberger piano quartet, and I'm excited about having the chance to present an underrated piece with a group of excellent musicians.
I'm also excited about my community orchestra season, though also a little apprehensive because we have some monster pieces on it, all on 4-5 week rehearsal cycles. We're currently rehearsing Shostakovich 1, which is both tricky and very transparent. We're playing Rite of Spring in February, Respighi's Vetrate di Chiesa in April, and Mahler 1 in June, among other things. The latter will be my first time playing any Mahler.
I love Shostakovich 1, so mercurial and interesting. It is not played nearly enough! You will love all of that Andrew. Put it all on your playlist now and you'll be ready! :)
Next week the Banbury SO reconvenes with its customary off-the-wall programmes. Why not start a concert with Ethel Smyth and end it with my old buddy/mentor Ruth Gipps? In the New Year we have works by Cowen, Barton and Parry, all of them unfamiliar to me. After that Barber, Lieberman and Holt's Planets.
The following week I'll be breaking the ice in a string quartet with three players I've never met before and know practically nothing about except that they're keen.
After that I'll be joining an Oxford orchestra that professes to unite town and gown in non-standard repertoire. Their first programme is actually more conventional - Shostakovich 5 and movements from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. Am I overdoing it?
Besides resuming regular lessons, participating in a community string orchestra (the Heerenveen String Guild, no less), and hopes of restarting my string quartet, there will be the tonebase Violin Festival! It is to be held in Münster, Germany, from 20 October to 1 November. This link gives an impression.
nothing unfortunately
I didn't vote (yet), as the only exciting thing I have coming up is the start of community orchestra season, and I'm sitting out the first concert for various reasons. I am supposed to have a solo violin gig coming up in under two weeks, but I literally haven't heard from the event organizer since July, so I haven't bothered practicing for it yet... Still itching to do chamber music, but I haven't yet found the right group/opportunity.
“We're playing Rite of Spring in February, Respighi's Vetrate di Chiesa in April, and Mahler 1 in June, among other things. The latter will be my first time playing any Mahler.“
Oh, Andrew, you will love Mahler 1. Playing Mahler makes me grateful to be alive.
Mahler 1 is the bomb.
It's taken a while for me to get around to Mahler, so I'm very much looking forward to it. I've had three near-misses with Mahler symphonies. My current community orchestra played Mahler 1 two concerts before I joined (more than a decade ago, under its previous director). When I went back to school for a graduate degree recently, the university orchestra I played in had performed Mahler 9 in its last concert before I joined. And I would have played Mahler 2 in my current orchestra if not for our last three concerts of the 2019-20 season being canceled.
Since the discussion has veered into Mahler, I'll throw in that I've sat in with an orchestra other than my regular community orchestra, and we did, among other things, Mahler 1. And speaking of Rite of Spring, we once did an end-of-season one-off rehearsal when we sight-read it! Train wrecks have never been so much fun.
But getting back to the subject at hand, it's ironic that the vote question refers to "musical opportunities" in the plural, but we can only select one. I chose "community orchestra", since we finished August with a 4-day day camp where we concentrated on our next concert's material: Bizet's Patrie overture and Grieg's Symphonic Dances. But I have a few "something elses" as well - primarily when I swap my viola for a violin but flip the little switch on it to "fiddle" and join bluegrass jams. But I'd like to pick up a bit of chamber music too, if I can.
On 10/27 I will be performing the Bruch Concerto no. 1 in g with the Monmouth Symphony in New Jersey!
I also look forward to teaching many new, current and returning violin students.
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September 8, 2024 at 08:42 PM · I wish my jumble of violins, recorders, food and paper were as attractive!
Happy new season to all!