Greeting

Welcome to my blog! To find details about what I do, click HERE. This space is for me to write about whatever and for you to get to know me. Feel free to comment, browse, and share with others.

Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Dear friends,
I wish you a most blessed New Year abounding in new opportunities.  Many updates for yours truly:

1) Beginning in mid-November I began composing what will be a 4-part chorus, hopefully with some type of accompaniment (before I was thinking piano, now I'm thinking small ensemble).  I've named it Joy in Sorrow and the text is taken from an old Irish blessing. I'm about halfway there in terms of voice parts.

2) I've updated both my sites and will be adding new audio and video in the coming week.  My students and I are having a great time learning new things together.  I have one student (7 years old) sight-reading a series of 5-6 notes, starting on any key knowing that the first note is either do, fa, ti, or whatever scale degree.  Another student (6 years old) and I, for a portion of each lesson, are playing Go Fish or some other similar game with note flashcards to more quickly identify the note and increase the vocabulary for describing its placement.  Many more things going on than that, but just to give you a slight idea.

3) Remember that collaborative project I had mentioned?  Well, I've evaluated the samples and will be drafting an email to send to the CEO of the company (Peterson Directed Handwriting) and production will be forthcoming.

4) I have rejoined ASU's Choral Union for this semester (yay!) and we are singing Brahms Requiem - truly an exquisite composition.

5) I'm reading a very neat book: Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.  It won the Pulitzer Prize and the author has actually won a Nobel in the area of economics.  But the book is a historical account demonstrating the connections between mathematics, art, and music (Godel a mathematician, Escher a print artist, and of course Bach, the master of fugues). I'm not very far into it yet, but it is an exciting read - at least to me....:)  Its subtitle?  "A Metaphorical Fugue on Minds and Machines in the Spirit of Lewis Carroll"  Good luck with that one.