Oh boy, I feel old. Birthdays seem so pointless after 21 - I mean, what's the next milestone, senior citizen discount? No thanks. Anyway, things finally seem to be vaguely functional on the chamber music front - in fact, somehow I've even got TWO quartets in the formative stages. Fine with me! Finally getting to do 18#3, which is the last one in that set I need to learn (Mexican Hat Dance, woo-hoo!), and the Barber seems to be on tap as well - why not, everybody loves the Adagio and it's a great chance to work on matching sound and vibrato and of course, the all-important "we gotta play in tune even when everything is flat!"
In the teaching arena, I got the gang in Milton through their first recital, and they all did quite well - the Wellesley crew is up next week, and I trust they'll do equally well. I picked up (well, okay, in two cases switched over) some more viola students, so I now have a total of 14 viola kids (and 22 violins) - one new one moving into town, the 10 I started with, a high school senior that dropped in and the 7th and 11th graders who switched. The balance is shifting! Phew - don't think I could've stood much more on the "squeaky E-string" side of things, but the ones I have have pretty much figured it out now and are actually all playing some real tunes, yay! I'm also FINALLY doing some coaching - it started as a violin duet, but they grabbed a cello so if I play with 'em we can start them on the quartet road, 7th grade is a good time to do that. Cool.
Oh yes, and I think I will shortly have a new picture for the main page - the one on there now is from Fall 1999, so it's about time I had some new ones done, don't you think? I'll cull through the results of a quartet photo shoot we did a few weeks ago and see if there's anything decent. And for those of you who've known me forever, don't be shocked, but I took up cross-country skiing this winter, and it's FUN! What a great workout, too. Had some really spectacular falls - mostly going UPhill - but for the most part managed to stay upright. Now if the blizzards would just stay on the ground more than a day or so... They all seem to be followed by a warm spell and rain. Yuck. Anyway, I need to go figure out how many giant piles of music I need to prepare for the kids this week and which members of my quartet don't own Beethoven scores yet.
