@cbcd: i can whisper to you! it's an xtrev feature developed while mutex was off on a bender. you can just imagine how pissed the explosives-happy mutex was when he received his first whisper.
i think i have one thing that you might want in exchange - are you a fan of solti recordings?
whew - after that whispery interlude we're set to have a beginning. garrett's first lesson is today + after school practice follows...i'll try and tape the first one and lift a sample to someplace that everyone can access - i'd like to keep it relatively locked down, access-wise - i'll run it by mutex to see what he thinx.
i did pick up a tipbook: violin + viola (an interacative book with tipcodes - so on-line video to visualize) - stay tuned.
Brittleblood has let me know he has received the music stand.
Let your son, the budding viola player, know that the music stand has some *special* viola karma.
When I was a girl growing up in Washington DC my next door neighbor was Boris Kroyt, the viola player in the Budapest String Quartet. That makes that music stand cool in a viola player two degrees of separation kind of way.
68 - do some research. Who repairs the stringed instruments for the school system? When I bought the serious viola for daughter (summer after her freshman year of high school), I bought it through the man who did those repairs. He did have some less expensive instruments for students, but I went for bust. He does buy some unfinished violas (and other instruments) from Germany, then does all the finishing himself. Beautiful work, and it results in instruments that cost less than if they had been bought from some of the big stringed retailers. The one i bought was being considered - and played - by a viola player in the Louisville Orchestra. I held my breath until she decided she wanted another one. He gave me a good deal for several reasons, and he even allowed me to pay for it in two installments -- one now, and the other payment just before he went on vacation. That was quite a few years ago. He didn't have a web site then, or apprentices, but he does now. He is one of the good ones! Daughter took her bow to him for rehairing about 4 years ago. She said he was just as approachable and easygoing as always.
quick update - garrett has been practicing daily. but early lessons are not using the bow...when he realized i was recording him because it was "the first time", he decided he wanted me to record the first time with a bow.
this is really neat...we're a pretty close "four family" and being able to watch him is a thousand percent parental pride. i've noted he's not a "loud player" - he is deliberate and steady.
ok. time for an update that i think is broad enough to connect with a number of you.
for those of you who heckled me and hollered out "you should learn too!" here is the following: this is really something we've wanted garrett to own entirely...and now a few months into it he offered to teach me. i know now what pizzicato means as well as the A and D strings (he has yet to learn the other two). he let me practice a few pizzicato chords and we both smiled when the sounds were just as he had indicated they would be.
i had mentioned earlier that he is not a "loud player"...while he still isn't, he has changed his sound. it definitely seems richer now...sure there are lots of scratching efforts when bowing, but he's definitely on course. i love to sit in the room with him when he practices...and being the evil dad that i am i usually manipulate the timer to 25 minutes when he thinks it's set for 15.
he really is comfortable with his instrument.
adding to this is his younger brother. holden is exceedingly unique and, by all measures, life comes to him on his terms. not to be outdone by his older brother, holden insists upon practicing as well. while he hasn't had to go thru the process of selecting an instrument as his brother did, he is more than happy to play for any audience his shoe-box and 3 rubber band instrument.
also, early on in garrett's bowing the scratching was wall to wall...but at one point it really sounded like he was "accomplished"...so i walked into the room and said - "wow, that sounded really good." and mia said the same from another room. to which garrett replied - "o, that was holden, he wanted to play."
The main thing here would be to learn to read music and count time.
Reading this thread late, but just want to say that after going through the typical school-based instruction and playing alto sax for 14 years during school, I really disagree with this. I think learning to read music (scores**) is a damaging learning technique that likely hampers (statistically speaking) development of a student's ear. I really wish most musical education was entirely ear-based for the first few years. One can learn to read music any time, but ear development is much harder, and way more important to becoming a musician.
**I point out "scores" here to emphasize that "written music" is not "music" at all, but just an information delivery medium.
@kargatron It has been some 18 years but I still break out in a cold sweat and can hear my horn teacher clacking her pen against the music stand when I see this book...
welcome to the thread kargatron...as you may or may not know, i have an alarming lack of street cred/music ability, etc. (which offers me the opportunity to regularly fritz frogkopf who has all that like he's paris hilton). so when you raise the concern/warning to the level you do i have to ask what are the real dangers here???
cbcd has more than generously provided a music stand...should i be looking at this in another light...after all, it was later revealed that she is a yankee fan.
To my mind, reading music acts as a crutch which allows your "ear" to do no work. I never developed a proper ear, even after 14 years of fun saxophone playing, and I gave it up precisely because I was making too little progress with my musical goals of learning to improvise and really make, vs "read", music. I never made the critical connection between what I could imagine in my head and what went through my fingers, because my brain never did that early hard work. I think the huge fraction of people that take some sort of music in school/lessons and never end up doing anything at all with it is partially due to that same phenomenon. It's not that early reading will make ear development impossible, just harder and less likely.
And yet reading is taught from minute one (in the west) - I remember my first sax lesson, this is how you finger 'D' and this is the whole note 'D' on paper. Bah. If/when my kids start music, I'll actively seek out a teacher willing to just use ear-training. Read music when you have to (when you want to play music that's too complex to work out, when you're in a large ensemble, when you have to learn to play a piece quickly rather than work it out), but not just because it's easier, especially when you're first learning to play.
I'm as musically untrained as brittleblood but from my outside point of view it does seem as if the goal of general musical training is to train performers and music teachers and not composers or improvisers. Which is probably part of the reason I was never attracted to musical learning.
I was exposed to music lessons as a kid but it never took -- piano lessons for probably 6-9 months came shortly after guitar lessons for maybe three months. I was never interested or diligent enough to practice consistently, but when I was older I really regretted not being able to play an instrument. Almost ten years ago, I took up the electric bass when a guitar-playing friend offered to teach me a few songs, and I've been playing with little skill but much enjoyment ever since. I took lessons for a couple of years, including sight reading and theory.
I agree with kargatron that ear training is more important than learning to sight read, because plenty of great musicians can't read standard notation, but a great reader with tin ears will never be a great musician. Both are ultimately important, but ear training should come first. I have lousy ears, though they're getting a little better with practice, but everything related to music is easier to learn and develop when you're a kid. If you start in your thirties or later, ear training and music theory are pretty hard.
I saw a NOVA episode on PBS about music a couple months ago that spoke with that guy. While the lightning likely messed with his brain causing him to like music, it didn't exactly make him a virtuoso. He simply practices for hours a day, and still isn't all that good.
I do recommend the NOVA episode though to anyone interested in music. They did brain scans on a doctor while he listened to music (both Bach and Beethoven). This particular doctor has always loved Bach, but only likes Beethoven, and the scans were amazing. His brain lit up like a Christmas tree during Bach, but not so much during Beethoven.
There's a great book along those lines called "This is Your Brain on Music" by Daniel Levitan. Much of the technical discussion about what happens in your brain when it's stimulated in different ways was lost on me, but still a very interesting read.
interesting, thank for posting. Who knows?
Not sure what you mean about ear training. Do you mean, someone plays an A note and you can say, that's an A? Yeah, I can't do that.
Not sure what you mean about ear training. Do you mean, someone plays an A note and you can say, that's an A? Yeah, I can't do that.
Something more intuitive than that. I'd describe it as the ability to play what one hears or thinks at the moment. It's particularly prized by those who play Jazz (for improvisations) or traditional (to learn a tune and transmit it later). I'd disagree that playing by ear and music reading are musically exclusive, although music education often favors the latter to the detriment of the former.
I know one fiddle instructor who prefers to have students who play by ear; she requires those who read to make very precise transcriptions. Personally, I think the latter gain a better grasp of the material.
No, that's perfect pitch. I mean more relative pitch, how you can hear music and realize the harmonic and melodic patterns occuring, knowing by sound how to work your way around your instrument, how to translate your ideas in your head to your instrument, etc. All those things fundamentally require a "musical ear", and reading music will help you with absolutely none of them.
I think it should be pretty easy to imagine how early reading interferes with ear development: imagine learning "Frere Jacques" or "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star". A very common approach is using written guides, with the piano keys labeled, the written music notes big with C, D, E, etc labeled too. Compare that with the work your brain would do figuring out how to mimic the song you know by experimentally hitting the keys and getting it gradually right. You rapidly learn the basic feel of intervals/relative pitches that the reading method just plain skips.
no doubt we do lots of things without formal or other such representative training...does it necessarily follow that the representative nature of "reading music" create an obstacle?
i look at elwoodicious' old school implant of the image and i can go right back to the first time he taught me how to do it. i think from there a buttload of jackassery blossomed.
My personal take on it is that both formal and informal training are important. How to play is only partly technique (fingers go here, breath like this, etc) but the part is being able to express yourself through the music, that's the ear part. I count myself as lucky for having learned in both spheres. Learning the french horn via Rubank taught me much about technique, theory, and made me a decent sight reader. In my spare time, I taught myself the bass, played in bands, and eventually had cobbled together a small recording set up. That experience taught me how to make music, how to take a feeling or thought and put it into sound and the real benefit to the formal training was that I knew how to transcribe that music into something I could share or easily recall once the moment past.
;tldr
Formal and informal are equally important in my experience.
I don't think my point has anything to do with formal/informal training, nor do I at all discourage learning to read written music. I just think (for reasons already stated) that it's a bad idea to be taught to read early on, in a crucial period where your ear development should be paramount, and the music you work on is obviously not as complex as it likely will be later on. Another facet I didn't mention is that I think music listening should be a much bigger component of early music education, though that might be implicit with a requirement that ear development be the focus.
Nah, I didn't read you as shooting down formal training rather I wanted to say that I got both at the same time and feel it worked out pretty good.
Totally, hear you on the music listening aspect. I didn't expand my sonic horizons until well after leaving behind my peers and giving up on being a musician. Now that I'm slowing warming up to playing my ear and technique is vastly different and for the better. My instructors and bandmates in the past had myopic and shit tastes in music. If I ever start a band again the first test will be making me a mix tape. :-P
first orchestra event this coming monday. had to go out and get him black shoes, black pants, socks - apparently they provide a polo shirt...i'm guessing there are a number of stories from those who were in band/orchestra with proper attire.
time to take a step back + thank cbcd again. really a great contribution! thank you again!
garrett really has a healthy attitude with his music. neat as neat can be.
this past summer we made the decision to enroll him in once-a-week privates. his instructor is tougher than a ten-cent steak and garrett tends to show-up but not warm-up to the drill. time passes and a new development! northwestern's program - which cannot be unionized - offers a free lesson a week led by a grad student. garrett's assigned grad student - rick - takes him through the steps every wednesday at 5 on nw's lakefront campus. (here i will exercise great restraint to avoid babbling on and on re: NW's campus + academic atmosphere).
rick is just about as ideal as a teaching match as you can find. for example, garrett forgot to bring his music to wed's session. without judging or dwelling over it, rick simply worked with what they had - which was the time. he sat garrett next to him on the piano bench and started working through reading music with the one piece he did have - then went through identifying finger positioning, reading quarter time, eights, sixteenths...clapping beats, etc.
and then...
he brought out...
the metronome.
this one goes up to 208 beats per minute. i do not know if this means anything, he just provided the info to give some scale to the metronome's powers.
with metronome leading the way, the two used left and right hands to knee-slap their way for another 45 minutes. whew...when it was all done we had been there for an hour and ten minutes - well over the designed 30.
so, taking a step back, we have fallen into a very good resource - and, as a parent with no music skills, i'm amazingly grateful and humbled. yippee!!!
Thanks for the update BB. So glad your son is taking music lessons with someone that sounds constructive verses constrictive. I've had a few of both music teachers.
@elwood: overdue, but I had to laugh at the Rubank book note. I swear most have not changed in decades (except the price).
Comments
i think i have one thing that you might want in exchange - are you a fan of solti recordings?
i did pick up a tipbook: violin + viola (an interacative book with tipcodes - so on-line video to visualize) - stay tuned.
c
Let your son, the budding viola player, know that the music stand has some *special* viola karma.
When I was a girl growing up in Washington DC my next door neighbor was Boris Kroyt, the viola player in the Budapest String Quartet. That makes that music stand cool in a viola player two degrees of separation kind of way.
Mark Edwards Violins (Yes, he sells violas and cellos, too.)
this is really neat...we're a pretty close "four family" and being able to watch him is a thousand percent parental pride. i've noted he's not a "loud player" - he is deliberate and steady.
for those of you who heckled me and hollered out "you should learn too!" here is the following: this is really something we've wanted garrett to own entirely...and now a few months into it he offered to teach me. i know now what pizzicato means as well as the A and D strings (he has yet to learn the other two). he let me practice a few pizzicato chords and we both smiled when the sounds were just as he had indicated they would be.
i had mentioned earlier that he is not a "loud player"...while he still isn't, he has changed his sound. it definitely seems richer now...sure there are lots of scratching efforts when bowing, but he's definitely on course. i love to sit in the room with him when he practices...and being the evil dad that i am i usually manipulate the timer to 25 minutes when he thinks it's set for 15.
he really is comfortable with his instrument.
adding to this is his younger brother. holden is exceedingly unique and, by all measures, life comes to him on his terms. not to be outdone by his older brother, holden insists upon practicing as well. while he hasn't had to go thru the process of selecting an instrument as his brother did, he is more than happy to play for any audience his shoe-box and 3 rubber band instrument.
also, early on in garrett's bowing the scratching was wall to wall...but at one point it really sounded like he was "accomplished"...so i walked into the room and said - "wow, that sounded really good." and mia said the same from another room. to which garrett replied - "o, that was holden, he wanted to play."
**I point out "scores" here to emphasize that "written music" is not "music" at all, but just an information delivery medium.
cbcd has more than generously provided a music stand...should i be looking at this in another light...after all, it was later revealed that she is a yankee fan.
clearly elwoodicious is scarred. what to do?
And yet reading is taught from minute one (in the west) - I remember my first sax lesson, this is how you finger 'D' and this is the whole note 'D' on paper. Bah. If/when my kids start music, I'll actively seek out a teacher willing to just use ear-training. Read music when you have to (when you want to play music that's too complex to work out, when you're in a large ensemble, when you have to learn to play a piece quickly rather than work it out), but not just because it's easier, especially when you're first learning to play.
I agree with kargatron that ear training is more important than learning to sight read, because plenty of great musicians can't read standard notation, but a great reader with tin ears will never be a great musician. Both are ultimately important, but ear training should come first. I have lousy ears, though they're getting a little better with practice, but everything related to music is easier to learn and develop when you're a kid. If you start in your thirties or later, ear training and music theory are pretty hard.
unless lightning strikes.
I do recommend the NOVA episode though to anyone interested in music. They did brain scans on a doctor while he listened to music (both Bach and Beethoven). This particular doctor has always loved Bach, but only likes Beethoven, and the scans were amazing. His brain lit up like a Christmas tree during Bach, but not so much during Beethoven.
Craig
interesting, thank for posting. Who knows?
Not sure what you mean about ear training. Do you mean, someone plays an A note and you can say, that's an A? Yeah, I can't do that.
I know one fiddle instructor who prefers to have students who play by ear; she requires those who read to make very precise transcriptions. Personally, I think the latter gain a better grasp of the material.
I think it should be pretty easy to imagine how early reading interferes with ear development: imagine learning "Frere Jacques" or "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star". A very common approach is using written guides, with the piano keys labeled, the written music notes big with C, D, E, etc labeled too. Compare that with the work your brain would do figuring out how to mimic the song you know by experimentally hitting the keys and getting it gradually right. You rapidly learn the basic feel of intervals/relative pitches that the reading method just plain skips.
i look at elwoodicious' old school implant of the image and i can go right back to the first time he taught me how to do it. i think from there a buttload of jackassery blossomed.
is it all so bad?
again, i'm ignorant as sin.
;tldr
Formal and informal are equally important in my experience.
Totally, hear you on the music listening aspect. I didn't expand my sonic horizons until well after leaving behind my peers and giving up on being a musician. Now that I'm slowing warming up to playing my ear and technique is vastly different and for the better. My instructors and bandmates in the past had myopic and shit tastes in music. If I ever start a band again the first test will be making me a mix tape. :-P
time to take a step back + thank cbcd again. really a great contribution! thank you again!
garrett really has a healthy attitude with his music. neat as neat can be.
this past summer we made the decision to enroll him in once-a-week privates. his instructor is tougher than a ten-cent steak and garrett tends to show-up but not warm-up to the drill. time passes and a new development! northwestern's program - which cannot be unionized - offers a free lesson a week led by a grad student. garrett's assigned grad student - rick - takes him through the steps every wednesday at 5 on nw's lakefront campus. (here i will exercise great restraint to avoid babbling on and on re: NW's campus + academic atmosphere).
rick is just about as ideal as a teaching match as you can find. for example, garrett forgot to bring his music to wed's session. without judging or dwelling over it, rick simply worked with what they had - which was the time. he sat garrett next to him on the piano bench and started working through reading music with the one piece he did have - then went through identifying finger positioning, reading quarter time, eights, sixteenths...clapping beats, etc.
and then...
he brought out...
the metronome.
this one goes up to 208 beats per minute. i do not know if this means anything, he just provided the info to give some scale to the metronome's powers.
with metronome leading the way, the two used left and right hands to knee-slap their way for another 45 minutes. whew...when it was all done we had been there for an hour and ten minutes - well over the designed 30.
so, taking a step back, we have fallen into a very good resource - and, as a parent with no music skills, i'm amazingly grateful and humbled. yippee!!!
@elwood: overdue, but I had to laugh at the Rubank book note. I swear most have not changed in decades (except the price).