Friday, March 15, 2013

Scribbles and Scrambles ~ Squeak-A-Long

cool sculpture in a violin repair shop...
Violin story...

Did I mention how hard this is for me? The complete and total remodeling of my brain...intense. For starters reading music...little black dots on series of a vertical and horizontal display of clotheslines. Easy enough, right? Those clotheslines have letters assigned to them. The lines are E(very) G(ood) B(oy) D(oes) F(ine) or Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge. The spaces are FACE.

Easy. UNTIL one has to take those little black dots and figure out which space or line it falls upon and WHICH corresponding string and finger placement is required to make the proper sound. I'll let you know when I actually pull this off. 

Then, the G string. The queen mother of low notes has a logical placement below the clothesline. And these. Whew, these totally mess with my mind. Though it makes total sense on paper, the way these notes are supposed to be played, it makes very little sense to my eyes, my fingers and my brain

Also, to complicate things, the notes on the pages are repetitious. Like A through G over and over again. And those notes all have special places on the strings of my violin. And bowing must be just so, if not, all manner of screeching ensues. 

 Oh, and, the little black dots can morph into connected dots, flagged dots and open centered dots....and dots with special tiny dots, too. Each of these means something. That something is a whole lot of CHALLENGE.

Note to all you children out there. If you ever think you might want to make pretty music someday, learn it now, while your brains are still elastic and limber.