6/2/09

Yesterday was a pretty good day. Nice and chilled out. Taught Michael in the morning. He was so enthusiastic about the cello sectional the other day, it was so good to see. He obviously though it was fantastic! So we went over a few tricky bits in the Mass and looked at shifting which will be important for his Grade 3, and forever I guess! I’ve been having a look at the Hungarian Stomp piano part, which doesn’t seem to hard. It’s mostly Um-Cha’s. Though I am useless at the piano so it will take a bit of work until its properly confident but it would be great if we actually played it together at some point! Beata had been giving a lesson to Soloman (Sam’s Grade 5 pupil) and she said she was going to a craft market up the road somewhere so Carys and I decided to join her. It was lovely - and there are so many things I want to buy, but definitely a limit as to how much my suitcase can take! Will buy stuff closer to my departure date I think. So that was pretty good fun. And the rest of the day was spent chilling in the sun and reading and internet stuff. Was a really good day actually, really chilled and fun. So I’m feeling very positive!
Today was Charlotte’s lesson - same as usual really. Am going to wait until she has the notes of the Elephant properly under her fingers before introducing anything new/complicated for now. Maybe next week I’ll introduce staccato/legato studies. That could work. Had a very long meeting after about all sort of stuff including instrument and CD storage, as there is not enough space for everything, us teaching at Primary Schools, which seems to be a changing idea every week. Looks like it’s going ahead in at least one school though. And it seems we’re going to be doing assemblies in other schools as well to expose younger children to classical music here which is always a good thing I think. Anniversary concert also talked about lots. And the repair man coming from England in a couple of weeks to train a couple of the more senior violinists to replace bridges, pegs and do other simple things like that, as well as fixing all the broken instruments. Also about giving theory lessons and other stuff. Carried on for ages, but quite productive I think. I played some duets with Phillip after. It’s good, I’m kind of teaching him the essentials of playing with other people - rhythm, pulse, tuning. I get the feeling lots of the students here haven’t had that much experience playing with others so its good to be doing this. I think I can see some improvements, we’ll keep going coz it’s quite good fun too! Sam and I got a boda together back to my house which was pretty fun! We had lunch at home and then just generally chilled out until he had to go back to school to teach a guitar lesson at 6. I think I may be taking over some of his cello students at KMS because lots of people have signed up for guitar lessons, plus he’s teaching at ISU so he’s going to be pretty busy when I’m really not that busy at the moment. So that could be good. Maybe we'll do some more baking this weekend!
Bye for now! X