#practiceblr

[practicegoblin]

i love everything about musicians. i love seeing peoples' practice corners and their sheet music binders, the inside of their cases, glamour shots of their instruments, selfies with their instrument, scores all marked up and cried on, excited captions like "i finally nailed this passage!" or "my tone is getting better!" I love seeing us evolve and grow. i love seeing us support and encourage each other. i love seeing older musicians help out younger ones, giving them little hacks and tips. i love seeing younger musicians inspire and reignite a love for music in older ones. I love selfies with your section, with your conductor; pics of your set up on stage and your proud post-performance pictures of your programs and awesome performing attire. I love seeing us fall in love with our instruments and our music over and over and over again. i love our community. i love our passion. i love being a musician.

[enouemnt]

The Musicblr Symposium

What is it?

A network of musical studyblrs that come together to share resources and gain support!

Who can join?

Anyone studying music is welcome to join. You don’t have to be a music major to get in on the fun!

How do I join?

At the moment, follow @musicblrsymposium. Once the blog is more set up I will be opening applications for various positions.

[fallingstarstudies]

30 day practice challenge: Day one This is Precious, my flute!

[lazyytraveler]

#1 My holidays consist of 2 hour practice sessions and 30 minutes of “what-the-heck-did-I-just-play?” I’m nervous to start my second semester in grad school, but even more nervous to be taking up music again. Here are some of my accomplishments/things I did during my first Thursday session:

Etude in D minor (DONT, Op. 37): 2nd position intonation, quarter note =80

G major scale/arpeggio(s) memorized

Carl Flesch Scale System: G major #5 - Working on thirds and realizing the scale starts on G4, which means it goes as high as G7 

[practicegoblin]

Um hey????? Are any of you guys watching "Living the Classical Life" by Peter Hobbs on youtube?? It's an amazing series with nearly 50 episodes and he interviews music students as well as famous performers and talks to them about their careers and studies and it's just so beautiful??

[practicegoblin]

Sometimes I think of how romantic it would be to rise, effortlessly, at the crack of dawn (without an alarm) and smile, refreshed, as I hear a bluebird begin it’s morning song; then float elegantly into my practice room where I would find my music and instrument illumined by the first amber rays of the sun. then I would sit, position myself correctly, with such exquisite anticipation, and then launch into a nearly perfect (nearly bc I’m simply TOO expressive and TOO accurate) rendition of a fully memorized and polished piece….the hardest in my repertoire obviously. And just generally start the day with beauty and grandeur and perfection.

And then I remember I’m a haggard troll who sleeps until 1pm, past 8 alarms, needs at least 2 pots of coffee to even BEGIN venturing open a single crusty eyelid, and that my will to practice this time of year is practically unreviveable and there’s no chance in hell I could even play an etude at 40bpm with any measure of accuracy without warming up for an hour first.

[practicegoblin]

Musicology student aesthetic:

the whirring of the scanner as you scan page after page, the smell of dusty books, the warmth of freshly printed pages, cold coffee, small offices with no windows and a dim desk lamp, refreshing your email inbox every few seconds, scrolling through Microfische, crying over dead people and old documents, midnight in the Stacks, piles of books, hoarding instruments people haven't played for hundreds of years, reading music treatises in foreign languages to try to learn how to play those instruments, forming a period ensemble to play those instruments with other musicology students, trying to figure out if that's a note or a mistake or a booger on the facsimile, waking up in a cold sweat after a nightmare about finding out someone else did your thesis topic first and better,

[practicegoblin]

Just my happy place.

[practicegoblin]

Viol de gamba! (My phone auto corrected to “cool we can be” and I don’t think that’s a coincidental statement when the viol de gamba is involved)

[practicegoblin]

Oprah voice: YOU get an etude! YOU get an etude! YOU ALL GET ETUDES!

[practicegoblin]

Day 11/14

[practicegoblin]

We get 500 free prints each semester at my school and this semester I have endeavored to print EVERYTHING IMSLP HAS TO OFFER FOR GUITAR AND LUTE!!

[enouemnt]

Calling all Musicblrs & Practiceblrs!

After @allydsgn‘s wonderful Creative Field Studyblrs post, I realized there’s a lot more of you than I had previously noticed. I’d love to see/get to know more of you and so I was wondering if any of you would be interested in creating a network for musicblrs and practiceblrs. I totally have some ideas to set it up, but I don’t want to be the only one. 

Send me a message if you’re interested!

[practicegoblin]

I wish I could walk around all day wearing Classical Musician Aesthetic outfits with nothing but my instrument on my back in a nice shiny case, but in reality I'm a troll and I carry a 87 bags full of various textbooks and snacks, with stray pages of sheet music falling out of my many unzipped zippers, and I've been wearing this sweatshirt for as long as I've been living in this practice room which is 4 days.

[practicegoblin]

Day 10/14

[practicegoblin]

Honestly I’m so dang proud of myself from practicing 5 days in a row. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but getting back into the swing of things after switching to musicology has been so hard. I haven’t been practicing a lot each day, and I’ve honestly been working on mostly etudes to get my chops back up, but I’m proud. It only takes a little bit each day. I’m getting stronger, I’m remembering, I’m learning. It’s hard work, sloshing through things that used to be so easy! But I’m getting there.