catsittingstill

So the Ohio Valley Filk Festival is this weekend.  For those who joined us recently, filk is mostly songs by and for science fiction fans, about science fiction subjects or other things that interest us like science and cats.

A friend of mine got nominated for a Pegasus award, and asked me to play along in the Pegasus concert, where all the nominated songs are performed, before the final voting by the OVFF attendees (and anyone else who cares to; there is also an online form for filk fans.)  He is much more comfortable with dissonance than I am and takes pleasure in, (and is sometimes inspired by) weird chords and key changes, but he provided me with the chords well ahead of time, so I could work out melodies on the mandolin that fit with the chords.

Then he changed the ending, and got me the new chords, uh, Tuesday night I think?  But I think I have something worked out for that and I've been practicing it up and will hopefully be ready to perform it onstage by Friday, though I will need my music.

And another friend asked me to perform a song with her in the filk circles, so I worked out a mandolin harmony for that also, and have been practicing it faithfully and it's ready to go, provided she hasn't changed the way she performs the song since she made the mp3 I practiced to.

I have a copy of Finale (sheet music program) and I so I ended up entering the music for last year's Chamberfilk rather at the last minute (Chamberfilk is OVFF event where we take all comers with orchestral instruments that don't often make an appearance in filk and practice together a couple of times and do a performance on Sunday.)  So this year I asked several months in advance if I should do that, and the answer was yes, and it turns out if you're the one making the sheet music you get a lot of say over what the program will be.  I proposed Wild Rose (by me), Banks of Sicily (folk song) Morning Has Broken (the words are under copyright but the tune is a much older folk song) and Ship of Stone by Don Simpson.  When I asked who all was interested Chamberfilk, Robin Baylor, one of our Interfilk guests, piped up (among several others), and it turns out she is very accustomed to arranging things.  So she wrote harmonies for three of the songs and sent them to me and I entered those and I wrote a harmony for Wild Rose, and I sent out those sheet musics to everyone who had spoken up, um, a couple of weeks ago I think.  I  have been practicing both melodies and harmonies for all of those fairly assiduously, especially after the Bean Supper when I no longer had to practice 45 minutes worth of old time tunes.

I waited until last week to run them past my violin teacher; if I'd been thinking ahead more thoroughly I would have done a lot of this earlier to run it past him several months in advance, because many of the things he suggested are just not things I can learn to do reliably in a week.  But I am using more pinky notes, and I'm very proud of myself, because my pinky notes aren't everything I wish but they are so much better than they were last year!  I flip back and forth between thinking my playing is terrible and admiring how much better I have gotten since the last time I tried to do this.

In other news, Summer's lute has had a bridge shave to fix the action and has had the little dots replaced on the fingerboard, and I squeaked some time in today to make a trip to the music store to outfit it with a tuner and a strap.  A lute desperately needs a strap; it is so round it is basically impossible to pin it to your body with your picking/strumming arm the way you can with a guitar.  So now it has one.

And I went to the KSO Q-series (alternating quartets and quintets) that my violin teacher plays in, and heard lots of fun chamber music; it was great.

So my teacher wants me to do another Sitt Etude and it has been long enough since the last one that I was willing to give it a go.  This one is #5 which is a big improvement over #1.  Sitt only wanders off into two wrong keys instead of three this time, so progress on that front, and also all the bowings are the same length which I personally deeply appreciate when I’m trying to get all those pitches right.  This should probably have been Etude 1 frankly, but here we are and I’m enjoying it while I can.

The point of this Etude is apparently leaving fingers down.  Eventually the point will apparently be slurring all different ways, but right now we are not slurring at all because the point is left hand efficiency and framing which means leaving fingers down, both because you 1 don’t need that finger elsewhere and 2 don’t need any notes on that string that are lower than that finger for a while.  

This lets you find the correct pitch once and re-use it, which is efficient, and also move your hand less which is efficient, and also have that finger as sort of an anchor point while you find other notes with other fingers, which improves pitch accuracy which is job 1 on the violin so very much a win-win-win situation.

The down side is you kind of need to know what comes next for the next couple of measures to know what fingers you can leave down so it’s for pieces of music you have time to learn very well.  Or maybe for people who just read music that well that they can be reading two measures ahead while playing the correct measure and if you can do this, my hat is off to you. 

Also he wants bridge notes for some of the anchor notes, which those readers who have been following along at home will know is when you use the pad of one finger to hold down two strings and get both in tune, which I’m better at than I used to be but this is still pretty challenging.  (Note that Sitt does use plenty of pinky notes here, including ones which he DOES NOT MARK drat him you’re just supposed to know to use the pinky note when you hatch from your egg I guess.  Sitt is improving but has a ways to go yet.). If you can manage this bridge note as anchor note, however, you get 2 found notes for the price of 1, which is also efficient.

Even on the first play-through I could tell I’d improved hugely from when I started lessons, which makes me feel both very happy and accomplished and much more generous toward Sitt.  I pretty much learned the entire thing the first week, even if it took me till Sunday to notice I was playing a wrong note in the first figure, and I’m rather proud of that.  Now I’m going back over it a few measures at a time to write out (on a photo of the music) which fingers I can leave down, and there’s a rather astonishing number of places that is possible.

The other thing I am working on is hemiolas which are hopeless.  I mean I’ll keep trying but.  Surely we didn’t need to wait until the A scale to concentrate on this.  Also why is my Etude always in a different key from my scale?

But it’s more fun, and much more interesting, when you can actually do it, more or less.

Also in other news I finally got around to scrubbing the mailbox and vacuuming the fans and it was all because I was sitting around going “it’s Labor Day, it’s going to rain all day so I don’t want to go hiking or anything; I don’t want to go shopping because I don’t want to be the reason people have to work on Labor Day; what can I do” and I looked at my bullet journal and thought; those things are easy and not intimidating.

I also discovered that those shelves that are held up by pins sticking out of holes in the sides of cabinets to be all adjustable and stuff—it turns out those pins come in standard sizes and you can order more, which means my CD cabinet will be getting its last 2 shelves in as soon as I order the pins tomorrow and they arrive in a few days.  More room to store CDs will be very helpful.