End of June

My, that month went by quickly. It's already time to look back and see how I did with my practice goals this month. Drumroll, please...

And the answer is, very well, and very badly. I practiced 18 hours and 5 minutes over 19 days, which means I reached my total time and frequency goals handily. But I had a deuced time with the sit down behind the cello for 5 minutes before noon goal. I did OK for the first 6 days, missed a couple, tried again, and just gave up.

Turns out I am completely unable to sit down behind the cello without a goal. What I found myself doing was getting to the cello at 11:55 to start an hour's practice, not my intent at all. The biggest question I am left with is why I thought I wanted to do this in the morning.

Good reasons to practice in the morning.
1. If I practice in the morning, well, then it's done. Works for exercise, so I thought it would be a good idea with practice.

2. Morning is both an introspective and a focused time for me (but do NOT talk to me before 9am OR before coffee, whichever comes later). Seems like the energy requirements should coincide.

3. I used to practice for 30 minutes before work, with the benefit of starting the workday feeling relaxed and virtuous.

Possible reasons it didn't work.
1. I also got back on the morning exercise bandwagon this month. Ran every day (but 3) for 10 minutes with 10 more minutes of walking, PT, and stretching. Doesn't seem like much, but a huge breakthrough as I am still trying to recover from knee surgery.

2. I like to sleep late, now that I can. Thirty years of being up and at 'em before 6am was plenty long enough, and since retirement I have resumed my more natural night owl rhythms.

3. I love to spend my first barely-conscious hour drinking my coffee and catching up on the overnight blogging and Twitter activity. After feeding the cats, of course.

4. I don't have to, and no one can make me.

Sleep late + coffee/blog time + work out + breakfast and the morning's over.

I guess that's the bottom line. There are other ways I would rather spend the morning, and much as I like practicing, it just gets squeezed out. And you know what? It's not really important. I reached my time and frequency goals with no problem, and the practices I had were of good quality. So I guess I learned an important lesson this month. Just because a goal seems like a good idea doesn't mean it's right for me.

June practice goals

That last post has been up on top 'way too long. To move it down a notch, I thought I'd post my practice goals for this month, as per my CelloBloggers Practice Club commitment:

Lots of things changing in my cello life right now - new teacher, new piece, fewer things in active progress, (which simplifies my practices and therefore seems to make me less resistant), integration of physical focus and learning music (which makes practice more pleasurable). But, though I have some intermediate performance goals, my primary practice goal for June is practice consistency.

My resolution: at least 15 practice days AND 15 hours of practice in June, PLUS at least 5 minutes of sitting behind my cello in playing position and doing *something* every day before noon.

There is method to my madness. I know I will face incredible resistance if I try to "practice every day." This allows me to take off on lesson and performance days without guilt. Plus I can plan practice lengths day to day, with a shorter practice on one day compensated for by either a longer practice later or an extra day of practice during the month. And I'm sneaking up on the goal of more frequent practice days by that very innocuous sitting behing the cello every day thing. Tee hee. I'll let you know how it goes.

[My first 5-minute deadline was very successful. Today I sat down at 11:53am, with time running out, and proceded to practice for 80 minutes.]

No-cello practice

When I first became an over-the-top obsessively-committed beginning cello player, I bought a Prakticello so that wherever I went, for business or vacation, I could take my cello along to practice while I was away from home. There was no way I was going to backslide because I couldn't practice with no cello available. I became quite good at setting it up and breaking it down, and it provided endless fascination for TSA checkers. But I gradually came to resent the extra hassle of flying with it, and finally, when DH and I were living in separate cities for awhile, I left it set up at "his place," and used it for practice while I was there. That was (so far) it's last trip, as when I moved out to join him I broke it down, packed it in its box, and stashed it in a corner of the new house. I know it's there if I need it.

As a more experienced intermediate-level cello player who still travels fairly often, I have gained confidence that I won't lose all of my hard-won skills and revert back to the beginning if I don't play the cello for a few days. But practicing is part of my life, something I do, and am, and I practice every day, whether I have a cello available or not.

I don't mean to write an exhaustive treatise on no-cello practice, but thought I'd list the things I brought along on my current trip, by way of answering Ten Northern's question, "What do you mean by 'no-cello practice'?".

1. String quartet by Alexander Glasunov, op. 26. I'm not actually playing this, but a friend asked me for some fingering recommendations, if I had time. Marking a part with fingerings and bowings is a great thing to do when traveling. This quartet has lots of little chromatic puzzles to work out those fingerboard geography muscles.

2. Brahms sonata no. 1 in e. I am preparing the first movement to play for T4- at my lesson in 2.5 weeks.In addition to marking fingerings, I'll totally mark this part up for memorizing, with bowings on almost every change and fingerings at the beginning of phrases in addition to on the shifts, where I usually mark them. That's so I can start anywhere on the right bow and finger when I am practicing tiny bits at a time, later. I will also survey the movement for structure and work out which parts are alike, and how the alike parts are different. Then I'll start memorizing it by singing it.

3. Duport #7. I have already re-written this etude as chords, changing it from it's written-out arpeggios into something I can see the structure of more clearly. With this, I'll mentally practice chord changes as coordinated movements. I find this quite fatiguing, so I'll only do a few measures at a time.

4. A chair. OK, I didn't bring that with me, but plan to use one here in the room. I'll tip it back toward me as I sit in another chair and practice one of my new motor skills. My directive is to develop more flexibility in my thumb mcp (left hand), particularly in thumb position. So I will pretend I have a fingerboard, and with thumb and one finger at a time observe what I need to do to vibrate with a flexible hand while keeping equal weight between thumb and finger. This is also something you can do with arm cello, but since I have a wooden chair handy I thought I'd use that instead.

I also have two books with me: Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment, by George Leonard and Set Your Voice Free: How To Get The Singing Or Speaking Voice You Want, by Roger Love.

Here's a quote from this morning's reading from Leonard's book to inspire you:

...the essence of boredom is to be found in the obsessive search for novelty. Satisfaction lies in mindful repetition, the discovery of endless richness in subtle variations on familiar themes.

Fandom

Yes, my computer is still dead, but I have delusions that I am going to try to revive it today. In the meantime, I am microblogging on Twitter, something I have been watching for a couple of years, but declined to jump in to. Finally had to, to respond to one of Stark Raving Emily's comments.

Anyway, I'm one of the quarter million people following Zoe Keating's mundane and ever-so-fascinating life log. Yesterday Wired posted a video interview, which I am now linking to here, mostly so I can easily reference it later when I can find it no other way, and partly so the few people who read my blog but don't tweet can see it, too.



This is what she says her current equipment consists of, as best I can make it out, being a dead-Windows user and not Mac (yet):
MacBook Pro
* Ableton Live
* Super Looper
* Applescripts to tie things together and allow everything to be controlled with her feet ("duct tape")
Foot controller mapped to the functions in the program(s)

I loved her analogy, likening the way she builds her music to the way a programmer builds information technology. Start small. Try things out. Build on the foundation. Perfect each bit. Scale as needed.

Thanks, Zoe, you make the impossible seem achievable. I have got to try this.

Bah

My short-lived blog renaissance has run into a roadblock in the form of a dead computer. It appears we had a power surge in the night, according to the tale told by the oven clock. It's really dead - no response at all from depressing the power button. Hopefully that means that the power supply bore the brunt of the damage, as it seems to me I'd get power up if I had "only" fried the motherboard. I happen to have a spare power supply sitting around, waiting to be transplanted into the computer that died a year and a half ago. That one can probably wait a little longer.

In the meantime, I am typing this last post on DH's tiny laptop. The font is so small that I can barely see it even with maximal squinting. It may be awhile until I try this again.

The hive

The kittens are thriving. You can see a couple of them more clearly here, with Mama in milk bar-up position. That was the first afternoon, when they were just a few hours old.

The second pic is a mere 72 hours later. It appears the volume of kittens is about equal to the volume of Mama, who quickly regained her svelte pre-pregnancy figure.



We are so grateful that this is an experienced Mama (though it will be her last experience) and that all her milk stations appear to be functional, with a goodly supply of product. When we visit the nursery there is generally a pile of sleepy babies with big round bellies, and a rumbling purr emanating from Mama. D- likens it to the buzzing of a bee hive, with a surrounding swarm of kittens, so has decided on a bee theme for names. Mama will henceforth be known as Queenie Black, and we'll be choosing names that start with B as soon as we can reliably tell them apart and determine genders.

I wonder where they were before?

Life wastes nothing. Over and over again every molecule that has ever been is gathered up by the hand of life to be reshaped into yet another form. The molecules in you and me and indeed in everyone are secondhand, borrowed for the occasion and returned when outgrown.

My Grandfather's Blessings: Stories of Strength, Refuge, and Belonging (Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, 2000) p 259