Modest Musical Irons in the Fire
I'm taking beginner's guitar lessons! Mom & Dad got me an acoustic guitar for Christmas, a nice one; I'm trying to put it to good use. A couple of the other editors in my department recommended a guy named Myron who teaches at the local arts-district music school, so I've signed up for biweekly Thursday lessons with him. I'm happy with the choice so far; he obviously knows his stuff, and he's very attentive to the technique/posture/hand-position issues I wanted to make sure I learn the right way off the bat. Also a soft-spoken guy, which I like. I need to figure out what kind of acoustic guitar music I like, though. I don't listen to much of it, and the stuff I like tends to have weird chord changes in it.
I joined a concert band all of a sudden! There's one that rehearses in Stratford, right in town off the Metro North, so effectively that's not so far away. I emailed a guy from their website on Sunday and Wednesday I was sitting in on their rehearsal, and now I'm playing in their concert next weekend, largely since they've lost some clarinets recently. I'm still not sure how this'll turn out -- they're a good size and they've got probably more talent than your average community band, but they sounded really underrehearsed last week and the conductor doesn't have any kind of flair for this. (Plus, much of their repertoire is out of the bins of the high school they rehearse in. Can we have a moratorium on pieces where the tempo markings have exclamation points after them?) The important thing here, though, is that part of me really has needed to play through a Holst suite for a couple years now, and doing so is quietly but genuinely satisfying.
I'm trying to get a classical radio show! I'm slogging through the drawn-out training lectures & studio labs at the university radio station, with an eye to starting a radio show at some future date. (I'm not sure if they broadcast over the summer. Maybe it'd be the fall.) There's no reason this shouldn't work out; there's a surprising amount of empty space in their schedule, particularly in the drowsy pre-workday hours I'd actually be best positioned to take on. In anticipation of this I'm trying to get used to my radio personality again, which is just like my regular personality except that it sounds funny. Also, I try to evaluate everything I listen to in terms of potential airplay, which is a bit frustrating since much of what I listen to comes in half-hour spans of fairly unfriendly dissonant soundscaping. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.
We'll see where all this goes! In the meantime I feel like I've had a ridiculously long February, though it's been less hard on the soul than your usual February, wintry mix or no. I feel like in the last several months I've managed to build myself a legitimately comfortable foundation of day-to-day routine here, and now it's time to see what kind of interesting stuff I can stack on top of it.
I joined a concert band all of a sudden! There's one that rehearses in Stratford, right in town off the Metro North, so effectively that's not so far away. I emailed a guy from their website on Sunday and Wednesday I was sitting in on their rehearsal, and now I'm playing in their concert next weekend, largely since they've lost some clarinets recently. I'm still not sure how this'll turn out -- they're a good size and they've got probably more talent than your average community band, but they sounded really underrehearsed last week and the conductor doesn't have any kind of flair for this. (Plus, much of their repertoire is out of the bins of the high school they rehearse in. Can we have a moratorium on pieces where the tempo markings have exclamation points after them?) The important thing here, though, is that part of me really has needed to play through a Holst suite for a couple years now, and doing so is quietly but genuinely satisfying.
I'm trying to get a classical radio show! I'm slogging through the drawn-out training lectures & studio labs at the university radio station, with an eye to starting a radio show at some future date. (I'm not sure if they broadcast over the summer. Maybe it'd be the fall.) There's no reason this shouldn't work out; there's a surprising amount of empty space in their schedule, particularly in the drowsy pre-workday hours I'd actually be best positioned to take on. In anticipation of this I'm trying to get used to my radio personality again, which is just like my regular personality except that it sounds funny. Also, I try to evaluate everything I listen to in terms of potential airplay, which is a bit frustrating since much of what I listen to comes in half-hour spans of fairly unfriendly dissonant soundscaping. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.
We'll see where all this goes! In the meantime I feel like I've had a ridiculously long February, though it's been less hard on the soul than your usual February, wintry mix or no. I feel like in the last several months I've managed to build myself a legitimately comfortable foundation of day-to-day routine here, and now it's time to see what kind of interesting stuff I can stack on top of it.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home