Spicey Sauce

Two decades ago in Cleveland when Jared and I were first friends, he would occasionally cook a meal for me at his apartment, and at another time I would reciprocate at mine.  I noticed that he put crushed red pepper flakes into dishes, especially spaghetti sauce.  Not being much of a cook, and usually more of a scavenger when it came to feeding myself, I figured this was how Jared did things and followed suit.  It escalated.  Over time, each of us got bolder with the red pepper flakes until we were both steaming at the ears, almost unable to choke the meal down. We would both be sitting in front of our heaping plates of spaghetti, blasting through several glasses of water, running noses, trying to carry on conversation, pretending we were not in pain!

 I am not sure how we deduced that this was a dead-end path and the truth came out. It seems that it all started when Jared learned that I liked salsa with fresh jalapeño, and he inferred from this, and the fact that I grew up in Texas, that I would enjoy a little kick to my meal.  This is an example of Jared's thoughtfulness in doing quiet little things to benefit others, although misguided in this case.  And it is an example of my life-long tendency to copy others because whatever way I do things is probably not standard or generally acceptable. 

...Also around this time, I picked up a book at the neighborhood library about making bread using natural yeasts in the air.  It wasn't exactly sourdough technique, but the concept was similar.   If I recall correctly, I made one semi-successful loaf, and enjoyed the whole concept, because it seemed suitably ancient and fit in with The Way Things Were.  

...I had started to learn how to cook a pot of dry beans from scratch from Jared.  I would never have otherwise thought of it if I had not been exposed to his culinary habits.  I did not yet (and maybe still don't) have a good sense of which herbs and spices would best flavor a particular pot of legumes.   As a result, there was a giant, experimental pot of black beans, seasoned liberally with dill.  It... did not taste good.

Being ever thrifty and not wanting to waste (also a part of The Way Things Were, as well as extreme empathy, extending even to inanimate objects), I thought I might rescue this pot of beans by incorporating them into another batch of this complex-rise-with-natural-yeasts-in-the-cupboard bread.  The end result was...awful.  Dubbed Skunk Bread, even when role playing as a person in ancient times, I couldn't not choke the stuff down.  It was so bad, I voluntarily chucked it in the dumpster behind our rear fire escape.

Sometime after this, our dear friend Amy and I were at Jared's apartment for a meal, along with Amy's younger sister, who was visiting from out of state.  When the sister was gone to the bathroom, Jared pulled the cornbread out of the oven, and having little counter space but possessing of some empty cupboards, he set it in the cupboard to cool.  When the sister returned, he carried on a charade for some time about cooking in the cabinet rather than the oven, and voila, when the food was ready, he pulled the cornbread out of the cabinet.  It did not taste skunky.

Chamber Music

 

cham·ber mu·sic

/ˈCHāmbər ˌmyo͞ozik/

noun

noun: chamber music

1. instrumental music played by a small ensemble, with one player to a part, the most important form being the string quartet which developed in the 18th century.

The older I get, the more I love playing it.  And playing it with others whose skills are well matched to my own.  Too far in one direction and it is intimidating.  Too far in another and it is frustrating.  The range of relatively close skills can result in joy, friendship, and inspiration. It is tricky to find this range of close skills, because most of the musicians who are good matches already have busy professional lives and don't sign on for extra gigs which don't pay well.

I wish there were a way to make a good chunk of my living off of performing this incredible, vast, and intimate repertoire, but alas, that has not worked out to this point.  Fortunately I do love the challenges and relationships of working with my students at all levels, which does happen to pay the bills for now.

...Orchestra playing is fun, too, but chamber music can be done in smaller, quieter spaces, with friends, and more importantly, it is a vehicle for one's own exploration and creativity. In an orchestra, you have to sacrifice all personal artistry to the group.  That has its limits where my own joy is concerned.

The week we taught in Oregon, I got to perform a short violin duet - a transcription of a Kreisler piece I made - and a movement of a Beethoven string trio.

This past week we did our annual house concerts with piano and clarinet in Snohomish and in our studio.  We did a violin-piano transcription I made of a short work by Brazilian composer Ernesto Nazareth, the Mozart "Kegelstatt" Trio, and an incredible quartet by Viennese Romantic composer Walter Rabl.  I can't wait to play more of his music!

Additionally, since January,  I have been playing with a cellist and pianist around twice a month for the services at a church in the neighborhood, and we get free pick of what to share for prelude, postlude, and communion - and if the choir is ever on break, the offertory, too.  Free pick, that is, of things which are sight-readable in the hour before the service for all involved and fit in the allotted time frames.

All of the chamber music-ing is wonderful and very important to me, and enriches my teaching in large measure....

...Once upon a time, three friends and I, dubbed Alaska Quartet, were offered  job in a small, religious college town in Indiana.  We were offered to teach lessons in the community music school and provide chamber music for special occasions.  It might have been a good start for a career, but it did not pan out.  The pay was low, and the details nebulous; it was offered us on good faith by a lovely, enthusiastic, and safe person.  As it was, the cellist went alone and the group dissolved.

...Also once upon a time, a dear friend of mine at school and I argued good-naturedly about which of us would have the privilege of playing the important supporting second violin in our hypothetical future professional string quartet.  I am not sure why it did not occur to us to trade off first and second.... I am more sure about why it never occurred to us to work and push to create a career path together.  How to obtain or create a job was never addressed by our schooling, other than how to win competitions and orchestra auditions.  It mostly seemed like extreme talent (which we were pursuing but were not quite at the top of the pack) and lots of luck were the way forward.  That was all true, but the idea that there were other controllable factors never crossed my own mind, anyway.  And irrevocably committing to a course of action which might close certain doors seemed too frightening.  Still does.

Anyway, here we are.  I love performing in this context and wish there were ways to do a lot more.  Jared feels the same, I am quite sure.

Ticking

One of the most dreaded tasks of the year, I took on yesterday, voluntarily.  Said task consists of working out the school year lesson calendar and initiating the Fall lesson scheduling.  Actually, I like the writing up forms and tetris aspect.  The part that makes me writhe is being committed to a long-term schedule.  It aches and rankles, knowing that I am locked into a time box for nine months.

Beyond that, it is also a grim anticipation of the turning of the seasons.  The days will get shorter and shorter... and be full of rain... 

It seems each year that life is lived in anticipation of summer.  Summer, when the days are endlessly long and light... the world is in bloom... outdoor adventures await... music feels easier... the schedule is different each week, and little chinks of time open up to follow inspiration...

I have been savoring my evening ritual of visits to our roof to look at the sky.  The solar system has been shifting angle rapidly as Tellus tilts away from the Solstice.  I have been looking at Venus every night, but now she is setting before the Sun, so I have lost sight of her but for my astronomy app.  The other planets are all setting too early just now, as well... When the rains return, the roof will be wet and the clouds will cover the rest of the Universe from my two little eyes, trapped in the envelope of vapors.

After I spent an hour working on the calander for the next year, feeling boxed in by anticipation of clocks, rain, and dark,  I went up and sat on the roof for most of an hour and drank in the low, grey, lumpy rain clouds and cool breezes of an unexpected July weather system simulating Autumn, as well as the company of Laurel, Lazarus, NASA, and even out-of-state Anne -- not in person, but on the phone.

Enough clouds and breeze cleared out my head so I had the nerve to climb back down the ladder and teach four more lessons. 

Understanding

 It is easy to judge what we do not understand.

I have a phrase taped up in my house which says, "Don't get mad, get curious."  I need that reminder.  For most of my life until fairly recently, I was unable to notice when I felt angry.  Since I began to understand that anger is merely a signal, it means that I have an opportunity to collect data, as well as permission to listen to and ask questions of that anger.   

When I start to get angry, it is almost always true that there is something I don't understand in the situation I am facing.  If I stuff the anger, ignore it, or let it fly, that puts Anger in the driver's seat; then I cannot problem solve.  

I have referenced this before: the work of Dr. Ross Greene has been so unbelievably helpful to me.  I first learned of the Collaborative Proactive Solutions model, because I was trying to solve some dangerous situations with one of my kids.  In the end, it has been so helpful for ME in learning how to approach unsolved problems and disagreements with myself, with other adults,  and with work situations.  I think I need several more years of work with this model in order to be as regulated, kind, non-reactive, and helpful as I want to be.  There have been just a very few people I have met in life who embody the peace, self-control, and incredible ability to work through conflict that has made them feel really safe to be real with, and that safe person - that's who I want to be.

...It is easy to judge what we do not understand...and even to become unwilling to try to understand...assuming that our own thoughts about others and situations are the whole truth.  Curiosity is essential...

Minor Crises

 When I arrived home from my walk this morning, I was in a certain on-edge mood.  I have looped back around to my childhood deep interest associated with Anne Frank's diary, and I have been listening to some more recent audio books associated with her story.  This means I am listening to lots of major crises, terrifying happenings, and beaurocratic evil in German-occupied Netherlands during WW II.  I was informed by Jared that we were experiencing a minor crisis in the house.

The details are murky, as the only human witness arrived rather late to the scene, and the feline witnesses are not talking.  The upshot of it was, there was a nearly grown Western scrub Jay perched on a high shelf behind a bottle of honey and box of noodles, and NASA had been locked by said human witness into the front bedroom with two sleeping children.  Jared had found him atop the rolling dishwasher trying to get at the bird. 

I put Nutmeg behind a closed door, too, although she was not a real threat to the bird.  Then I researched how to get a bird out of one's house.  (At this point,  it was Jared's turn to go out for his run, so I was in charge.)  I closed all our cupboards and rubber banded them shut, quietly absconded with dishes and food items I and the kids might need, closed the two curtains to the kitchen, opened the window, and removed the screen.  Shortly after, kids started waking up, and I ran around keeping cats contained, procuring the children's breakfast, and trying to keep them away from the kitchen and the window.  I would also check on the bird, who would peek out from behind the box, then hide its face again.

Unfortunately,  as I knew it likely would, losing the autonomy of using the kitchen was triggering for my PDA kid.  Yesterday, they were asking to have breakfast brought to them and made for them, but suddenly today's off-limits kitchen made them loudly protest that they had been planning major independent cooking projects for breakfast and were planning on making several special types of tea, and now they would starve, and I had to get the bird out immediately.   I knew, however, that the same PDA kid is very protective and justice-oriented when it comes to the downtrodden, discriminated against, and voiceless, so once they saw the bird with their own eyes, they would go into protector and veterinarian mode and the loss of autonomy would be embraced for a good cause.  This occurred as predicted after some stressful minutes of trying to incur the least amount of damage to all parties. 

Meanwhile, I had also been on the phone with a local wildlife rescue to discuss how best to deal with the situation, and it was not clear if the bird had sustained any injuries or was perfectly fine but confused and stressed.  I had the information on how to catch and transport the bird to their facility, and how to help it escape, depending on the situation,  which was not clear up at ceiling level in the dark interior of the cubby.  I did put a plate up there with some seed and water in case it needed some sustenance before attempting its escape.

It was now 10 minutes until I had my first morning lesson, and I was looking ahead to a four-hour block of teaching in the afternoon with musicians sawing away just outside the open window, and anticipating that I really had to solve this problem completely between noon and two.  And then another child awoke and informed me that they had wet the bed.  So I used those ten minutes to get them in the bath, set out a towel and clean clothes for them along with some food, strip the bed, starting the first of two loads of wash which would need to be complete before we had students in that room at 5:00, sprayed down the mattress and put a fan on it, and ran out to teach...

Anyway, the denouement is as follows...  At noon I set up gear to capture the bird and transport it 40 minutes to the wildlife rehab place, with my vet helper in place.  After a couple of scrambly moments in which it became clear that the bird was in good shape, it flew out the open window and disappeared from our property entirely, and I cleaned up bird poo from the kitchen, reinstalled the screen, put away the equipment and my purse and shoes I'd readied for the drive, and put the kitchen back into commission again.  I still had time to eat, hang out the first load of bed wash, start my practice for next week's concerts, and visit with the kids a bit, plus vacuum and  reorganize furniture for group class before my 2:15 lesson.  It all happened, but I felt rather frantic.

Projects Afoot

When we were teaching at the Oregon Suzuki Institute,  an old friend asked about my year.  I told him things that seemed to answer the question.   Then he said, "I have learned to ask, Are you happy?"  I knew the answer to that, because I have thought about it recently, too.  I responded, "I am happy when I have creative projects to work on."  I should have added, 'self-generated' or 'personally invested', because it has to be something I care about.  And I have so many things, big and little, which fit the bill.  Collecting photographs from my life, researching a topic of current interest, reading, writing, painting, knitting, putting together a concert, making a transcription, sewing, rearranging the furniture...

We got back from Oregon and taught Thursday and Friday.  Saturday ended up being a beach with a neighborhood friend day.  Sunday I played chamber music and hymns at the neighborhood Presbyterian church.  

And...

...

There are many special things afoot.

This week is our annual studio summer workshop.  We had already done something like this with Anita at her house when we lived in Kent.  When we rolled over to the annual tuition plan for our business a few years ago, we decided upon offering a one-week intensive for group class rather than offering random group classes here and there in the summer.  

This July we have two Dalcroze classes and four ensembles going, taking up space in both studios (the smaller one for stowing cases), the patio, and the kitchen/utility/mudroom/dining room/annex.  We have a nice group of violins, viola, and cellos from early book 1 through the end of book 2.  With this younger group, I am rehearsing with them several items from our shared Suzuki repertoire, plus a fun Stanley Fletcher tune, Fiddle Blues.  The viola duet with my most junior violist and my most senior violist meets in the 10-minute break between classes.  They are putting together a duet which I hastily chose and transcribed from a cute little modern book of viola and piano pieces; it's titled Computer Games and has some sound effects in it.  I have a quartet playing a Haydn Menuetto and Trio (with a violinist playing a transcription I made of the viola part), and I have a string trio playing the March from Beethoven's Serenade.  I have the trio and quartet rehearsing simultaneously in adjacent spaces, with me popping back and forth every few minutes to coach them on next steps and giving them group autonomy as well.  I wasn't sure how this would work out, but the first day seemed pretty fun and smooth.   At the end of the hour, I opened the door separating them and they performed for each other.  At the end of the week, everyone will go to the park across and we will put on a pop-up concert under the trees.

Prep work for the week, in addition to finding, selecting, transcribing, sending around, and teaching the music and planning dates and times, was mostly heavy labor and fun to work out in my mind.  The back patio, which has been the creative domain of cats and small children for the last 11 months, was cleared of the extensive debris covering it.  Sand toys and random plastic objects went to the sand box zone, the wooden crafting table and cat bed went to the shade-hung zone between the annex and the small studio, and the glass dining table and six chairs moved to the back yard between the swings and garden, had their cushions installed and the huge amount of sand and other detritus (semi-melted balloons!?) removed.  We have been eating our dinner there now.  The patio also was cleared of small bits of trash and many larger organic objects, weeded (it's old and cracked), and swept.  By the time the sweeping has been pushed to the south quarter, the deposited sand was easily a quarter or half inch thick.  We bought a new rectangular shade sail and mounted it, which involved tools, ladders, and special knots.  The annex was cleaned up, and for the first time in several months we saw the middle of the dining table.  The living room rug was taken up and stowed, and the dining table took its place in the living room.  That meant living room debris was collected, the TV tables put away, and vacuuming and mopping done.  The newly tidied and emptied annex was fitted with the curtain rod and curtain from the back bedroom closet as well as the window shade from the annex to visually divide it off from the rest of the house.  I do enjoy all the curtains hanging about...  Then of course, chairs and music stands and benches and shoe racks and pencils were distributed in useful groupings around the property.  I am once again background brainstorming about if there are any new ways to distribute furniture and purpose in our small, overburdened living space.  It's a fun mental exercise.

For some months, my friend, who is a linguist and language acquisition/reading specialist and I have been pondering how to help Anne with her reading journey, and this past Sunday, with all parties in agreement, we moved forward on that.  I took Anne over to my friend's house (an 8 minute drive from us in the neighborhood) for an hour, staying just long enough to make sure she was comfortable there.  My friend handled the whole thing brilliantly.  She showed Anne every room in the house, introduced her to every person, and let her meet all the animals (two dogs and two snakes.)  She chatted with Anne about Anne's interests and found points of connections as they moved through the tour, talking with her little by little about how people learn to read and how she could help Anne with that skill.  Basically, it was like a job interview, where Anne was being invited to join a firm, and the firm put all their cards on the table so Anne could evaluate her willingness to join them.  It was a resounding yes, as it is a no-pressure environment with lots of opportunities for curiousity, novelty, and play, and Anne went for her first learning session yesterday.

Next week, our pianist friend from Cleveland will be in town, and we (meaning Jared and I) and our clarinetist friend in Snohomish are putting together a program which we will share Friday at her house, and Sunday at our studio.  We are doing a transcription I finally made for violin and piano of a Brazilian piano work I heard on the radio once when we lived in Huntsville and fell in love with and planned that very moment to transcribe.  The other three musicians are playing a Mozart clarinet trio, once upon a time premiered at a house concert with Wolfgang himself on the viola. We will finish the program with a late Viennese Romantic work in four movements for the four of us.  This concert was planned rather recently,  so I have done less about advertising, but I think it should work out nicely in the end.

Friday, Anne heads off on her first solo flight for many adventures with various family members in Texas, and I am trying to work out details of what the airline needs from me, as she will be picked up in Austin by one set of relatives and delivered back to the airline with Houston by a different set.

And in between all of this, I am practicing for our concert and teaching lessons.

Mazama

Since  a very young age, I have possessed a special interest in what I think I might call The Way Things Were.  How that looks has manifested in different ways.   When I was six and seven, it meant intense curiosity about life for white settlers in North America in the 1800s, and especially Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Most recently it has manifested in extatic interest surrounding plate tectonics and volcanism, especially in the Cascades in Washington state.  I have a piece of artwork in my small studio, supplied by my parents, depicting the Cascades in Washington,  including elevations of prominent peaks, and denoting the five active/potentially active stratovolcanoes, listed north to south: Mt. Baker, Glacier Peak, Mt. Ranier (Tacoma/Tahoma to our Indiginous people), Mt. Adams, and Mt. St. Helens.  I have also done some cursory research about extinct volcanos in Washington and a tiny bit about volcanism in Oregon, but I was too overwhelmed to add much data to my mental files.  For how much the subject interests me, I have very little data to share.

I really like to put things in mental boxes, to sort, and categorize.  Only...when I dive into a topic, I find it is more complex than I ever thought.  That can push me off it or make me hang onto the boxes too tightly for a time out of disappointment.  But when I lean into the reality, the complexity breaks down my assumptions and prejudices and sends me joyfully reeling deeper into data collection.  Along these lines,  volcanism is way more widespread, varied, complex,  chance-associated, important to life on this planet, and descriptively organic than I thought possible from my first grade science unit on the topic, and our recent visit to Mt. Mazama opened up even more of this nature to me.  I am disappointedly and happily reeling. 

Once when Jared and I flew from Portland to the L.A. area for a workshop, it was clear and sunny, and I excitedly picked out various Cascade stratovolcanos from the air.  Mt. Mazama was unbelievably impressive with a caldera five to six miles in diameter, and I knew I would want to see this behemoth which produced the largest volcanic explosion in the U.S. in the last 500,000 years, in person - on the ground.

Anne mentioned some time back that she wanted to go camping at Crater Lake (the more common name for Mt. Mazama), and when she makes a request like that which aligns with parental desires, it is worth trying to make it work.   As it is a pretty long haul from our house, we determined it would be best to do it from Jared's parents' house, as they are more or less the half-way point.  We were conveniently stowed away with them during the Newburg week.  And so very grateful that they and the kids have a wonderful relationship and that they were willing to engage with our kids for all the hours we were away each day!

...As much as I love nature adventures, I am not much able to specifically plan them far enough in advance to reserve camping spots 6 months ahead... which left us with first-come-first-served spots on a holiday weekend.  But ever hopeful, we set off with enough water for two nights and gratefully secured a quiet spot just 13 miles from the park entrance, in the Umpqua National Forest. 

I carefully kept in mind that this particular adventure was for certain particular people,  and that we did not plan all the kid details well,  and that certain inconveniences cannot always be forseen. So I expected some disregulation and sadness amongst the younger three, knowing what some of the "unlucky" behaviors might present and enacted Plan C's as we went to help mitigate my own lack of preparation.  (Since I started learning about it, I am SO glad to have Dr. Ross Greene's Collaborative Proactive Solutions framework in my thought process - on so many levels. As I learn more I am able to be so much more understanding of what might be going on when people are having a hard time - myself included - and am better able to move toward helpful solutions.  Getting curious rather than angry, and problem-solving rather than retaliating, is such a relief, when I manage to do it!)

Some of the things which caused disregulation:

Long car ride

Not knowing which campground would be our end point

Mosquitoes and more mosquitoes and more mosquitoes 

Itchy mosquito bites

Hyper-empathy for mosquitoes, as well as for other insects, plants, fungus, sticks, rocks, and pieces of trash (It wasn't me, but I feel it in my bones!)

Fear of the dark

Heat

Not having preferred foods with us

Waiting an hour in the 100-degree .heat to drive through the entrance gate to the national park

Not having the ability to arrange a backpacking trip

Not knowing exactly when a parent would return from a hike

Getting stuck on a dead-end road on the wrong side of a parked train

So there were some difficult reactions to all this, and some solutions.  Three of the solutions worked really well.  The others were OK at best.

But on to the good stuff:

Let's talk about the largest volcanic eruption in the lower 48 in the last 500,000 years.  (I assume most people head over to see the beauty of the lake - the color is quite intense, and due to the size of the caldera, it is the deepest lake in the US.  I did take some pictures, but mostly I was interested in the volcanic data.) There were people living in the area under 8000 years ago when it happened, and it's in their oral tradition.  It was not the last eruption of Mt. Mazama, but certainly the largest.  Mazama has been erupting for close to 500,000 years itself, and the remains of an eroded cindercone in the caldera, dating back around 400,000 years is visible.   The plumbing for the stratovolcano is still potentially active, and there are several cindercones in the lake and on the flanks.  This particular eruption in 5000-something BCE was so large that the ash could have buried the entire state of Oregon 8 inches deep, and ash traveled around the globe.  The mountain is believed to have lost 5000 feet of height in the ensuing collapse, which would have taken hours at least and a few days at most.

And here is the exciting part.  I got a chance to hike alone along part of the rim.  As I looked out this way and that, I would say to myself, "That looks like a stratovolcano."  "That looks like a shield volcano."  "That is obviously a cindercone. "  "That mountain has an odd shape; I wonder what it is."  And, I had enough phone connectivity to search for these points of interest on Google maps, most especially using my preferred terrain and satellite modes.  As I positively identifid various features, I was able to hop over to Wikipedia and get a sense of their histories.   I came back from the two hour hike with the realization that every single hill and peak I could see in that part of the High Cascades is either an extinct volcano or a potentially active one.  This seems to be different from the stretch of the Cascades  in Washington.  Although that sector has been a volcanic ridge for untold millions of years, including when a chunk of it bordering on Renton which left major coal depoaits was its own large island plate that drifted from Southeast Asia and docked with the Okanogan plate to become part of North America, most of the mountain features there seem to be uplift with the occasional stratovolcano.  Anyway, this is all very exciting and mind-reeling, and I want to look again at the list of calderas for the Yellowstone Hotspot, as the North American plate has drifted over it for untold eons, and there is evidence of major eruptions in a line from its current location as a National Park, all the way back into Oregon, and though that is far more ancient than anything visible in the Mt. Mazama region, which only dates back to the Pleistocine on the whole.  Though it is said that the region is built on much older shield volcanos, also derived from the subduction of the Juan de Fuca plate.

Anne yelled at me several times to stop hyperventilating over volcanos. And as annoyed when I laughed.

Other good things:

At night, we could see stars, the full moon, and satellites.

Also, the number of bats flying around after dark in the woods was truly spectacular,  and it was a joy to see them flapping by our noses rapidly, precisely, and nearly silently.

I learned that the occasional light tan, cement-looking rock along the Umpqua River Highway, which at points obliterated the view of the darker, redder, more obviously volcanic rock on the cliff sides was from the massive pyroclastic flows associated with Mazama's most spectacular eruption.  

There was a lot of snow near the rim at Crater Lake, which provided many hours of fun and cooler temperatures for the younger set on a hot day, while the adults took turns hiking.

Our campsite was above 4500 feet, and I met some wildflowers I had never seen before.

On the way back to Jared's parents' my cemetary-loving 4-year-old requested a stop at a tiny hillside cemetary in the tiny town of Wilbur on the side of Highway 99.  There was a pioneer cemetary enclosed within it, and I found a headstone dating to 1859.  This hillside spot on a gravel track is where we got stuck waiting for a parked train.  I found this very exciting, but some other of our party felt otherwise.  It was hot,  but there was shade from mature trees and a strong breeze.

Newburg

I just finished up teaching at a five-day workshop in small town in Oregon, which I learned last night is the second-oldest Suzuki Institute in the US.  I do like teaching at workshops, particularly the one-on-one masterclass component, as that is an easier and more minutely-studied social situation for me than running large group classes.  I like the five-day format best, as it feels like long enough to accomplish something important and have it settle.  In a materclass, I am NOt helping the students prepare for events, or churning on to the next piece or scale or etude... so I feel a lot of mental clarity, which I am sometimes missing in the normal trajectory of life, about deconstructing, reconstructing, and big-picture priorities. 

I got lucky, too, because I was assigned only masterclasses, and a large percentage of them were with fairly well put together advanced teenagers with a lot of intrinsic motivation.  I care about students of all ages and levels, but the afore-mentioned are a group I find particularly enjoyable.   So my nerd violin heart got to work on:

Phrase shapes, dynamics,  micro dynamics,  articulations, voicing, style, and harmony in solo Bach

How to use recordings to research artistic ideas

Body alignment

Choosing priorities and focus in practice

How to prepare for a sub gig in an orchestra

Bowhand balance at the frog

Developing stamina to perform a complete Concerto

Intonation via ring tones, singing, drone work,  and checking with open strings and double stops

Consonants, dissonance, and beats

Singing and gesturing to find drama and phrasing

Measuring rhythm via step and play

Using stepping patterns to feel 3-pulse patterns vs hemiola

Shifting with guide fingers and Yost

Building up the sautille stroke from wrist-based string crossings using the metronome

The role of the thumb in vibrato and building up control and the range of artist speeds using the metronome over time

Surrendering the bow to the string and using the hairs to pull the string sideways for tone

Poof bows

Which finger travels with the arm and which one travels independently while shifting in double stops

How to practice with intention so that each note, each shift, each bow, each string crossing, each rhythm is understood and acknowledged 

How to divide up limited practice time so that there is time for the nitty-gritty and the story-telling 

I did work with one masterclass of little beginners around Lazarus's and Laurel's age, most of whom had not been to something like this before.  With the very youngest class, I spoke a lot to the caregivers, and I worked on lots of things through ACTION:

Learning from watching our peers

Practicing, not until you get it right, but until you can't get it wrong - long-term practice habits

Using a checklist to prepare our bodies and bows to play

Bowhand balance, flexibility,  and strength

Left hand flexibility, strength, and speed, and the role of the thumb

Violin balance

Steering the bow

Using the right elbow hinge

How to practice the tricky parts

Musical form

In addition to all that, I met two generous  violin colleagues I did not yet know, practiced undisturbed for many hours,  and got to rehearse and perform two really fun, short chamber works with capable colleagues.

Yesterday while waiting for the final concert, I walked around the town, eagerly viewing a wide variety of houses of the Victorian era.

It was hard to transition into institute week, and now it is hard to transition out of it.