Saturday, August 23, 2008

Everybody's solos

The truth is, I blog for my own selfish reasons, not to provide ideas, inspiration, counter-examples or entertainment for others. And so I will shamelessly post these videos of my children playing string solos as a sort of virtual scrapbook / home movie that I can look back on in future years. I've now been blogging for over 10 years. I wish I'd had digital video capability back at the beginning. Here's one solo from each of my kids on their stringed instruments.

Fiona is now almost ready to start Suzuki book 4 but at the SVI she performed a piece she learned quite a while ago, "Two Grenadiers" by Schumann from Book 2. It was a chance to enjoy playing different articulations, rhythms and musical feelings, and to exercise her vibrato and intonation skills.



Sophie's performance is from late last winter, the first movement of the Vivaldi a minor. It's a "golden oldie" for her (really the best kind of performance piece for young students, I think), but I especially like this performance because she managed to project confidence and energy when she played, a capacity which has waxed and waned over the past year.


Noah's Allemande is all about heart and musical sensitivity. Technically this piece is not a big challenge, but in terms of musical subtlety and sensitivity it will take as much as a student can give. Noah has so much in the way of natural musicality and I think that really shines in this solo performance of the Allemande from the Bach Solo Suite in G Major.


This is Erin's performance of the Bloch Nigun. She had polished this up last winter but unfortunately was not able to perform it accompanied until late this summer. It was nice to finally get the chance. It's not quite as polished in this performance as it was a few months ago, as she'd been working mostly on a couple of new concertos all summer long, but it was nice to have the piano.

5 comments:

  1. My DD and I are delighted that you are posting these videos! We greatly enjoy them.

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  2. You need not make any apologies for posting these wonderful videos. You must be so extremely proud of them. Each of your children played beautifully, and so advanced for their years. You are to be commended for leading them this far.

    I feel frustration with myself because I am holding mine back -- I have no music background, and I cannot provide adequate feedback to my 8 year old, yet, to keep him on course. Thankfully we have an excellent teacher, but we only see her once a week. I wish I could be a better support to him through the rest of the week.

    I am curious - how do you embed YouTube videos on your blog? I have my kids on YouTube, too, and I would like to add shameless video plugs to my blogspot blog.

    Again, thanks for sharing your childrens' beautiful music. They are all very talented in their own way.

    Blessings,
    Violin Mom in FLA
    http://violinkids.blogspot.com

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  3. Embedding is easy. When you pull up one of your own videos in YouTube there's sidebar on the left below your username / avatar with a line that says "Embed:" and has a line of text in it that starts "[object... ". You select that code and copy it, and then when you're creating a post in Blogger, you choose the "Edit Html" tab and paste the code in.

    There's also a procedure to link your blog account directly to YouTube and publish to your blog directly from a video, but that's a little more involved and cookie-dependent. It's under My Account > Account > Blog Posting Settings .

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  4. Thank you. I got it! Blessings, VM in FLA

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  5. Think you posted these while we were away on holiday; I read the post but didn't have good enough internet to watch the videos until I was home.

    Definitely an inspiration to watch these, thanks for sharing them.

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