One of my favorite moments is the getting a new piece on the violin. It’s a feeling of giddiness I can’t describe. I have such a long “bucket list” of pieces I want to play that each time I get the chance to play another one of my favorites, I can’t help but get excited.
Sure, some of it comes from the fact that I finally get to leave behind the piece I’ve been playing for the past eight months…practiced to the point where only the technically frustrating passages are left to conquer. But in my lesson this week, I played through the tenths passage that I never thought I’d be able to do. I was pretty sure these two lines would be the gap preventing me from being able to say “Oh, I’ve played the Havanaise. ” You can take one look at it below and see why.
I used to flail internally at this part, but now I can play it ahh!
It took a lot of struggle, struggling to hear the tenths intervals amidst everything else, struggling to get the shifts in tune, struggling to turn it into a sound that even mildly resembled what it was supposed to be. But I did it! This week! I played through this passage and my teacher said it was “perfect” (I was skeptical at that) and got really excited (me too!).
So, after that breakthrough, I’m getting a new piece. Not just any piece, but I asked for one of the “big” concertos, the kind the professionals play, fully expecting a gentle “no, let’s try something else first” and received an enthusiastic “yes!” instead. I don’t know what it’ll be until my lesson Sunday but I will most definitely be letting you know. I’m enjoying this delightful point where I have all the excitement of getting a new piece, without actually knowing what it will be or looking at the music yet.
My other good news this week was also music related. The heart of my ethnomusicology class is a research project, in which we’re expected to conduct our own fieldwork (observations and interviews) to analyze the musical community of our choice. My love of classical music immediately drew me a project on El Sistema, the Venezuelan-born music education movement that aims to use power of playing in an orchestra to shape the lives and values of kids from lower-socioecomic backgrounds. You can’t hear El Sistema kids play without feeling something; it’s profoundly moving to watch and I really want to believe that it’s making real positive change. But maybe the underlying values of El Sistema are focusing more on fitting disadvantaged kids into pre-approved capitalistic roles, or the El Sistema program is a clever marketing tool for raising money. My project plans to explore these nuances, but it rests almost entirely on getting access to an El Sistema program in a charter school. This week, I got the go-ahead to volunteer! So I will hopefully be spending my Friday afternoons surrounded by dozens of little string players. I’m so excited for the opportunity and to be pushed a little outside my comfort zone, and I hope I can give even a little bit of my love for music back to the kids.
Until next time, and ever lovely yours,
Eleanor
my favorite practice room