Autumn Cleaning & Chord Practice

October 22, 2007 at 4:45 AM

The rains have started in Oregon. This means many more hours of practice time on to look forward to on the weekends. In preparation, I did my "autumn cleaning" this weekend.

This primarily consists of gathering all my sheet music from all it's sundry locations (the music stand, viola case, desk drawers, file cabinet, table tops and book case) and filing it neatly on the bookcase in my music room. I was astonished that I have nearly 2 feet of music collected now over the past few years! It is now neatly arranged from Back to Vivaldi. I discovered that I have 4 versions of the Bach Suites, and only one is for the cello! The secretary's desk (musical "work-bench")got a thorough cleaning. Spare strings, peg drops, polishing cloths, chin wrest wrench, spare parts, metronomes, tuners, recording devices, mutes and so forth re-organized. The old viola and cello got cleaned and re-runed. The old viola now has a permanent scordatura tuning.

I spent quite a bit of time on the 5th Allemanda this weekend working mostly on 2 chords - B-flat/D/G in third position, and middle C (harmonic on C)/E/A-flat in 4th position. A bit tricky on their own, very difficult in context of what is played leading up to them. I played these few measures over and over again for hours to learn the transisiton to and the fingerings of these chords. There were a few adjustments to the fingerings of the piece in a measure or two, but no further adjustments to bowings. Over the next few days I'll start working on the dynamics.

All in all, a productive weekend.

From Pauline Lerner
Posted on October 22, 2007 at 6:18 PM

Organizing my sheet music is a never-ending problem. I have several bookcase shelves full of it. I gather related sheet music, punch holes in the papers, and put them in a clearly labeled notebook. Unfortunately, I've resorted to "Misc." as a label several times. I'm glad you managed to organize your sheet music better.

From Karen Allendoerfer
Posted on October 22, 2007 at 6:28 PM

Doesn't it feel great to have your music room organized? I've tried to alphabetize my sheet music, but I'm having trouble keeping the violin, viola, piano, and voice music straight. Not to mention my and my daughter's violin music.

I love the workbench idea, right now I just have this shelf of old shoulder- and chin-rests.

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Autumn Cleaning & Chord Practice

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