ahh, music
I love my mom's CD shelf ~~* It's got a pretty robust collection of orchestral and chamber music that I think is well representative of Western music history. So about half or 2/3rds of the time when I want to listen to a famous piece, she just has it on her shelf, and that's really great because I can just pop it in the stereo and listen to it in the nice quality and stuff. And then I have a somewhat decent selection myself from the CDs that came with my music history book. They tried to cover all the great pieces that we ought to know, so there's some great stuff in there too. The other half of the shelf is Mom and Dad's CDs of old pop and rock, like the Beach Boys and the Eagles and Carly Simon and Neil Diamond (haha), plus a couple of movie and Broadway soundtracks that we like. I guess we could use some more but I was so happy two weeks ago when I found the Fleetwood Mac CD. I just had a really really strong urge to listen to it and just being able to get out the CD was very satisfying. I'm still listening to it a lot, because I mostly get stuck on one album for 2 or 3 weeks.
It took me kind of a long time to get myself to do it, but I finally took Rachel's advice and started reading Nodame Cantabile. It's been really fun to read a manga about young people at a music college, and I find that most of it is really accurate. It's kind of inspiring, and I guess is kind of standing in for hanging around with a bunch of music students, which I don't always get to do these days at home.
I'm happy that I'm making some breakthroughs in my playing. It's taken a long time but I feel like I have more confidence in my playing and myself and can perform with some presence now. Maybe it was from being section leader in the orchestra this year and doing the musicals I played. There doesn't seem to really be any question anymore of "Can you do this?" People just look to me now to make it awesome because they know I'll do it, and that's pretty cool. I used to be so timid about playing solo but I feel like I can deal with that now, and maybe even enjoy it. The two difficult (for me) pieces we picked are starting to take shape and sound like something. I'm especially glad that I was able to take a lesson with Sam's friend Randy and talk about the timpani piece. I definitely learned a lot that day and Sam was blown away the next time I played it for him after that lesson. :3 It's pretty fun to hear that. Hopefully after practicing a lot this weekend on the marimba I will blow him away on Monday too. yaay.
It took me kind of a long time to get myself to do it, but I finally took Rachel's advice and started reading Nodame Cantabile. It's been really fun to read a manga about young people at a music college, and I find that most of it is really accurate. It's kind of inspiring, and I guess is kind of standing in for hanging around with a bunch of music students, which I don't always get to do these days at home.
I'm happy that I'm making some breakthroughs in my playing. It's taken a long time but I feel like I have more confidence in my playing and myself and can perform with some presence now. Maybe it was from being section leader in the orchestra this year and doing the musicals I played. There doesn't seem to really be any question anymore of "Can you do this?" People just look to me now to make it awesome because they know I'll do it, and that's pretty cool. I used to be so timid about playing solo but I feel like I can deal with that now, and maybe even enjoy it. The two difficult (for me) pieces we picked are starting to take shape and sound like something. I'm especially glad that I was able to take a lesson with Sam's friend Randy and talk about the timpani piece. I definitely learned a lot that day and Sam was blown away the next time I played it for him after that lesson. :3 It's pretty fun to hear that. Hopefully after practicing a lot this weekend on the marimba I will blow him away on Monday too. yaay.