Timothy's Blog

Timothy's blog on dulcimers, music, nature and life!
JAN
20

Play music in the moment!

When you’ve developed a performance piece, or even just something you’ve learned which you like to play on your own, it may be easy to simply draw on your memory of the way the composition goes, and bring it out and replicate it.

Or it may turn out to be a big challenge to reconstruct all the details in the way you intended originally, and you have to struggle to get it right.

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2542 Hits
MAY
26

Playing an instrument or playing music?

When I perform, people often ask me how long I’ve been playing the hammered dulcimer.  I think they mean this question to compliment my apparent years of study, probably many, you know, to learn from teachers how to develop the appropriate virtuosity on the instrument.

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3745 Hits
JAN
10

A glimpse of the sublime

A glimpse of the sublime

One nice feature of the Classic iPod is that it has so much capacity that you can store tens of thousands of tracks of music and play them back in ‘shuffle’ mode --- a vast potpourri of, at least in my iPod’s case, a massive variety of genres and moods.

Today my iPod cycled through into a somewhat obscure piece by the great master J.S. Bach --- Violin and Keyboard Sonata no. 5, BWV 1018, the third movement, the Adagio, played by the inimitable masters Jaime Laredo and Glenn Gould.

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4375 Hits
SEP
11

Trio StringWind's September 11 and 13, 2001

Trio StringWind's September 11 and 13, 2001

On September 11 of every year my thoughts go back to our Trio StringWind: Phil Skeens, Ardie Boggs, and myself.

In 2001 we were about to celebrate the release of our live album Three-Fold Joy: a Williamsburg Christmas by giving a free concert at the Hennage Auditorium in Colonial Williamsburg, and the date was September 13, 2001.  It was well advertised by the Foundation’s people, as usual.

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6629 Hits
AUG
29

Emphasizing harmonic 'inner voices'

Emphasizing harmonic 'inner voices'

Do you know what the letters ‘SATB’ mean?

That’s the shorthand for the common choir and hymnal arrangements in which there are four parts for the four ranges: soprano, alto, tenor, and bass.

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6046 Hits

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