I love that show.
It inspired me to photoshop a picture of myself with various short pixie hair cuts, but I concluded that I don't think I could pull it off. :(
The final concert of IBIL was amazing! I had so much fun, particularly playing in the orchestra. I actually have felt that of all my playing so far, my playing has been best in orchestra. I feel that is true on modern oboe a lot too...I'm definitely a team player, and the extra push of inspiration and pressure I get from having to give the other musicians with whom I'm playing a really strong performance out of respect for their skill and practice time and dedication pushes me to places I wouldn't reach otherwise.
Fantastic after party at Cambridge Commons.
Since being home, I've played a couple hours each day of Baroque oboe. Yesterday, I again practiced while watching ANTM. I wouldn't normally EVER do such a thing where my attention is divided between practicing and something else, but I thought I'd give it a try for some specific skills and lo, it did have some positive effects. I think the biggest thing was that it gave self 1 something to do and talk about while self 2 took over the playing. I didn't work at all with music, just exercises. Primary exercise (basically a scalar long tone type exercise), scales in thirds, and then repetitive practice for some awkward issues, like B to C, Bb to A, Bb to C, F to E, etc. So the controlling, gossipy, negative part of my brain was focused on forming opinions on models and guessing who was going to be eliminated, while the part of my brain that can hear intonation very well and regulates my playing was paying attention to my intervals and finger motion. I definitely was not practicing without awareness. In fact, I'd say in many ways, there was a much more pure awareness. I never let an interval go out of tune without going back and fixing it, and overall, the pitch was fairly decent. And having the controlling part of my brain distracted, I could do some things much better - for instance, letting go of the reed in a way I've not been able to previously achieve, and getting a much cleaner finger control with very relaxed fingers. Of course, I can't rely on being distracted, and it's not a type of practicing I am going to do anymore, except on special occasions if I want to revisit the feeling of the good things that were happening. But I paid attention to how it felt when things were going very well, and when I was most both precise and relaxed, and now that I have identified the feeling, I will be able to regain it in my practicing (sans ANTM).
Interesting little experiment.
Started working on music today, spent a good portion of practice time on solfege (in French violin clef, hooray!). Also, tied two blanks and started scraping them, and shaped five pieces of cane. Probably about two of them are good, two of them decent, and one might possibly make a good reed. Too narrow at the throat, but still, I'll give it a shot for the practice scraping. These pieces of cane are three bucks each. Eww. Ridiculous.
I need to make a shopping trip to the hardware store before I can actually get a good jump into reedmaking.
Hmm, in other news, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell was a really fabulous book. I needed to read something fun. Not sure what I'm going to read next, but I did make a goodreads account! I listed as many books as I could remember since high school and the best ones from before that, but I left a lot out that I had from childhood on living social a while back. Woot.
If you don't get it, the title of this post, "winding and unwinding," refers to winding thread around reads and unwinding from a long week of hard work. Get it? Hardy har. I hate naming these things.
