Class recap

I had class today from 6:30 to 7:15. I'd say that the lesson went decently well. It was certainly a refreshing breath after the last two that ended up being more about reeds. Not that I minded the reed lessons. I'm actually looking forward to having time for them again come May. Something about reed making appeals to me in a basic sense. It's like I have an inner carpenter in me. I think that as long as I always have something half way decent to play on, I'll be ok. The reason I got frustrated before was that I had no working reed at all for nearly a week and was too new at reed making to get one working. I feel like I went backwards during that time.

Tonight I got to play several exercises from my Gekeler book. I feel that they came out ok. He had me play them a little slower than I had been practicing them so I didn't have trouble with the reading and was pretty close with the articulations. My intonation was fine as long as I remembered to support the air well. I wasn't super happy with the tone, though I think it was probably the best it has been at a lesson. My teacher says it sounds good for the amount of time I've been playing. So overall I'm happy with tonight's performance. :)

I think that I am going to focus more on my breathing for the next two weeks (there's no class next week due to the religious holiday). That and he did notice tension in my shoulders. I have to watch it or I bunch them up a little especially when I go up to the middle register. We both noticed that the tone was much better when I didn't have this tension.

Next time we meet we're going to go over some of the high notes. I wasn't able to produce the D# or E that I had done at home yesterday so I have to practice those more and also go up to F. I did get an F once during the week. Gosh those fingerings are nuts!

Oh I need to work on chromatic scales too. Doh!

So it turned out that he really did mean the Ferling studies. He says that he likes all the technical skills you gain from those exercises, even if you do them much slower than they are meant to be played. I'll be working on number 2. I read through it in class very, very slowly (probably at like 40 - no where near the suggested 104). But I guess I *could* see how it will be beneficial even if I do it at my turtle pace. There is a lot of variation in the articulation, it moves throughout all the registers in both steps and skips, there are accidentals thrown in there, etc. Lots of things to work on. I'm still going to try to find a tamer book, but I will give this a good old try.

Lastly, I downloaded the music to the Schumann Romances today at work. I'll pick one to work on too for fun.

With my second Chem test coming up on Wednesday, though, I probably won't do much other than long tones and scales every day until that's done. I need to get some studying in during the next few days.