After such a self-deprecating first blog post, I’ve got just a few days left to finish up my project (within the time I’ve allotted myself), and while I’m sure I would be a little more relaxed right now if I had managed my time better from the start, I’m feeling better with each completed task.
But anyway, I really don’t want to spend another post just talking about whether or not I’m caught up; I would like to talk about another issue I’ve encountered in the process of this ELI, however. From the get-go I knew that I wanted to include a cello performance in my final presentation, because what’s a music ELI without music? My initial goal was to polish the piece Hungarian Rhapsody by David Popper and to perform it in its entirety during my presentation. The Rhapsody is a very cool piece and it’s a lot of fun both to listen to and to play, but… it’s hard. With a lot of diligence and no small thanks to my cello teacher, I can play all of it by now, but I don’t think I can say that I would have a very good chance of keeping it totally smooth if I tried to perform it beginning to end at this point. (And with all of you to impress!)
But I don’t want to let my final presentation go by with scarcely a slipping interval reaching your auditory cortices just because of a few pesky harmonic double stops.
I want to be able to demonstrate what I’ve learned and how much fun I’ve had learning it this year, even if it’s not perfect. I also want to use the best example possible of the concepts I’ll be discussing elsewhere in my presentation, including music in physics, neuroscience, and culture as well as basic music theory. I want people to be engaged and to make connections between what I talk about and what I play, and I want to show off a little bit.
I resolved at first to talk briefly about certain concepts and then to demonstrate each one with a short section from the piece that tied into what I was explaining, but then I realized that this really wouldn’t show my audience anything about what it’s like to have all of this work come together as a musician. My new plan is to find a good chunk of the piece that I feel confident playing and that gives good examples of a lot of different things that I’ve studied this semester, and to play that chunk with an explanation of what you’ll be hearing first. I think it’ll be a great way to pull everything together, and Ms. Wissner might be my piano accompanist, so I’m excited to see how it all works out.
The problem now is finding a cute outfit that can accommodate my cello.
~Clare
No comments:
Post a Comment