We're still here!

We know it must feel like we've dropped off the face of the planet, but we're still here and still loving our music. The day after our last concert, life hit us fast and we really haven't had a moment to breathe since then. Over the next few weeks we will be posting about the direction our lives have taken after our last concert series.

Stay tuned, more on the way!

- The Cellist

What your best work looks like.

I've enjoyed perusing through John Holt's "What Do I Do Monday?". Very little is as interesting to me as reading about educational philosophies and practices. John Holt is considered one of the greats in this field. On page 244, he makes the following observation about his writing thatI think it is applicable to all the arts.

This happens to me, as I think it must to every writer. When I read over, now and then, some of what seems to me my best work, I often think, as if seeing it for the first time, "But this is good!" I sometimes think, "Did I really write that?" It is almost more as if it was written through me than by me, if that makes any sense. The effect of this is to make me very dissatisfied, as I write, with anything that seems much less good. From what I feel is my best writing in the past I get a standard that I want all my work in the present to reach.

Today's Program

For those of you planning to join us this afternoon, here's a sneak-peek at today's program. We'll see you there!

Quartet Op. 74....................Franz Joseph Haydn
Allegro
Largo assai
Menuetto
Finale

Quartet No. 2........................Alexander Borodin
Allegro Moderato
Scherzo
Nocturne

-Intermission-

String Quartet.................................David Martin
Movement 1
Movement 2
Movement 3

Quartet Op. 18 No. 4..........Ludwig van Beethoven
Allegro ma non troppo
Scherzo
Menuetto – Trio
Allegro – Prestissimo

What does "Final concert" actually mean?

Time to correct the rampant misunderstanding of the phrase "final concert". This does not mean that we are all quitting our instruments never to return to them or that the quartet will never play again. Quite the contrary, we are all planning to continue our musical pursuits --just less formally.

Putting these types of concerts together is a ton of work. With David starting his second semester, Eric and Justin working their tales off and me headed in every which direction, this seemed like the best time to have one last major performance together.

So this simply means that we will no longer be preforming formal concerts, like the one tomorrow, again. We will still be actively playing as a group for different events like weddings and church.

Thank you all so much for your care and concern. We look forward to seeing many of you tomorrow.

-The Cellist

Highstrung Concert THIS SUNDAY!

We've waited a long time for this day. We're very excited about this next Sunday. Allow us to take this moment and extended a personal invitation to all of you. We would love to have each and every one of you come enjoy the music.

Here are the details:
Location: Rockwood SDA Church (1910 SE 182nd Ave., Portland OR 97233)
Time: 3:00pm

For those you who have been faithfully following this blog, we'd like to offer you the "inside scoope" on what we're planning. You already know we're playing Haydn, Beethoven and Borodin. Well, we may not be able to play all of the Borodin (the notes are easy, the music is hard and it's just not yet up to our standard). We'll see. We've scheduled a coaching for Saturday morning. But more importantly, we're planning a surprise visit from a fellow musician. You won't want to miss that.

Hope to see you there!

But enough about us...

While most of you are here to see what we’re up to, but it’s been fun for us to see all of you. Below is a map of where our visitors are coming from:



Congratulations to all you Washingtonians! You all come in first place with the most visits. The next four are Oregon, New Jersey, California and Missouri. Honorable mentions go out to Colorado, Texas, Indiana, Louisiana and Georgia. Thank you all so much for stopping by. Also, special greeting to our recent visitor from Serbia. Welcome to the site!

Philosophy of Practice

[Editors note: It has been mentioned that some students are quite encouraged by our ramblings herein. So along with the fun and pictures, this post and it’s follow-up posts are designed to show the “work-your-tail-off” side of music. It’s not always about concerts , cookies, friends or even talent. It’s about hard work. This is the first of three posts regarding effective practice. Hopefully, you will find some helpful truths for your own practice. –David]

Trapped between the subtle nuances of effective pedagogy, most teachers struggle to distinguish between persistence and redundancy. In English, that means, “Every teacher feels like they say the same things over and over again; but he or she is not sure if it helps or hurts.” Perhaps this maxim will aid: The fundamentals are oft forgotten in the clouds of “advanced” technique. Meaning, students everywhere, myself included, forget the basics. Therefore, the basics must be repeated often. This is not good news to my students who stand on the business end of my Basics Campaign. Truth be told, I don’t hear complaints from my students (they have all been raised much better than that). However, I am a student myself. I know what it’s like to hear a teacher say the same thing over and over again. But I do not teach for that passing moment of annoyance. I teach for the moment when the student suddenly grasps the concept. Good teachers know what that looks like. Good students know what that feels like. Both should be seeking it.

In honor of this, I have written a top ten list of the basics to aid all you musicians who are not in my studio and to make all of the students in my studio sigh and grumble. These ten truths, if taken to heart, will dramatically improve your practice and encourage you in your pursuit of fine music.

But before we get to that list of practical advice, I’d like to give four philosophies of practice. These ideas are more abstract, but if you incorporate them into your thinking about practice, your practice will be much more successful. And if you incorporate them into your thinking about life, well, you might find living to be more successful as well. These four philosophies are:

a. Getting started is the hardest part about practice

b. “Get it right.”

c. Accomplishment breeds accomplishment, failure breeds failure.

d. Your instrument wants to play well.

Getting started is the hardest part about practice

This one-liner has been a mantra in our home as long as I can remember. It’s been a truth passed down from teacher to beginner for quite some time. Getting your instrument out of the case and your music on the stand is the greatest challenge to anyone’s will power. If you can push yourself past that point, The rest will be intuitive (providing you have established proper practice habits). By way of practical advice: don’t wait until you “feel like practicing”. If you’re waiting for it, that moment never comes.

Understand what it means to “Get it right.”

In a subjective craft like music, it is essential to know what it means to “get it right”. (Some would argue that using objective language for subjective activities is not only philosophically inconsistent but also confusing. This question is outside the scope of this post, so for the sake of argument, we will assume that “getting it right” is a worthy goal). The problem with “getting it right” is that every students wants to, but few students know what it is. Most students will assume that “getting it right” means playing something until your teacher says it’s good. Or, in private practice settings, “getting it right” means fulfilling a practice assignment (the logic is something like: my teacher told me to play this section twenty-five times, I played it 25 times, therefore I “got it right”). That’s a best case scenario. More commonly, a student will approach his or her instrument with a vague assumptive notion of what their music should sound like or feel like and they try to replicate that experience in their playing. It almost never works.

There is a better way: educated, intentional, thoughtful, goals.

Goals: You must have a goal every time you pick up your instrument. You have to aim for something, anything. Many times, when my students have finished a piece, I will ask, “What do you think?” They look at me blankly (probably because I’m “suppose” to tell them what I think, not the other way around), but invariably, they don’t have any thoughts on their performance –except to point out the wrong notes or rhythms. Meaning, the only thing the students know about their playing is what they get wrong. How terribly discouraging. To avoid this discouragement, set a goal before you start every time. It’s not enough to have a goal for your practice. You must have a goal for your playing for every stroke of your bow.

Thoughtful: But goals by themselves are empty. You must have a certain type of goal, namely thoughtful goals. Thinking in cause and effect terms will do more for your practice than any other tool (mental or otherwise). When you do A then B happens. When B happens, C happens et cetera ad infinitum. For instance, when you start with your bow on the string you get a much better response than when you start from above the string –every time. The students who see the connection struggle much less with starting notes (especially fast-paced passages). To set a thoughtful goal means to look at your music and think analytically –finding patterns, similarities and differences. Armed with that knowledge, your practice will be more proactive and far more interesting.

Intentional: Every student practices. Not every student practices on purpose. Most students find a “good practice” to be a wonderful surprise that happens occasionally. They don’t know what causes it, they don’t know what, if anything, they had to do with it. But out of the clear blue sky came a productive practice. This is Reactionary Practice, not Intentional Practice. Intentional practice is to plan your practice in such a way that guarantees progress. Gone are the days of staring at your music books wondering where to begin. Intentional Practice is walking into the practice room with a list of needs to be accomplished and a clear game plan to accomplish it. It’s practicing on purpose.

Educated: You can’t teach yourself forever. Let me acknowledge my interest in this point: I’m a teacher. I make my living from teaching. But I would gladly teach free of charge, I just can’t afford it. So my students and my student’s parents pay me so that I don’t have to work someplace else. I’m a teacher, not for the money, but because I believe a student under my tutelage will flourish. He or she will be immeasurably better off than those students who try to teach themselves. A good teacher can save you hours of work. A good teacher can show you the way to where you want to be because they’ve been there before and they regularly guide students there.

So “getting it right” means having goals and achieving them –no matter how small. But it’s not just any goal, it’s educated, intentional, thoughtful, goals.

Accomplishment breeds accomplishment.

The difference between encouraged students and discouraged students is the difference between accomplishment and failure. Most of my students have transferred to my studio from another teacher. There are two kinds of transfer students: eager students and discouraged students. Eager students have experienced success in their playing. Discouraged students have experienced failure.

Nobody enjoys being bad at things. This is why people who are good at math love math and people who are good at writing love writing. Typically, you won’t find someone who hates math doing math just for kicks. Nor will you see someone who hates writing penning a poem for the fun of it. Therefore, if we want to stay motivated, we must continually experience success in one way or another.

This is not to say there is nothing to be gained from struggle. But we have to guard ourselves from unachievable goals –especially in the practice room. A student who thinks they can learn an entire piece in one practice session is on a course for failure. A student who plans to learn the recapitulation is a student on a course for successes. Both of these will be a challenging, but one tunnel has a light at the end. The more we see that light, the more we will practice. In this way, the goals are the same, but the portions are different. A failing goal is one big goal. A succeeding goal is five small goals. Both lead to the same result, but one produces accomplishment, the other produces discouragement. Five tiny accomplishments is far greater than one major failure. If you’re not experiencing at least one victory per practice, your goals are too lofty. Aim smaller.

Your instrument wants to play well.

When you look at the great musicians of today, it’s difficult to distinguish between the musician and the instrument — as if the two entities have melted together. The Instrument is as much a part of the musicians as the musician is part of the instrument. The two are a couple so in love with each other that you can hardly tell them apart.

When you look at the lousy musicians of today, the musician and instrument look like a blind-date with a one-way ticket to breakdown. There’s no connection. No comfort. No joy. Just awkward, clumsy, frustrated interaction between two halves that don’t seem to belong to each other.

The difference between the successful relationship and the failed relationship is the musician’s expectation of his or her instrument. If you assume that your instrument is the barrier between you and musical success, you will never play well. If you view practice as a battle between yourself and your instrument, your practice will be a warzone rather than a courtship.

Consider this: Our instruments were conceptualized, designed, crafted and sold in order to make great music. Our instruments want to play great music. Our job as musicians is discern what needs to happen to make our particular instrument do what it was created to do. To begin a relationship with your instrument, you must understand that you and your instrument are on the same team.

In order for that relationship to work, you both will need to make adjustments. If your down bows always crunch, you may need to adjust your bow weight or bow speed. If your instrument sit comfortably, the chin rest or shoulder rest may need to be adjusted or replaced. This process can be frustrating, but any relationship can survive if the members of that relationship will always remember that they are in it together. Your instrument is not your enemy; it’s your friend. And a very dear friend indeed.

Conclusion

So there you have it. Four philosophies of practice. There are more, but these will get you thinking and, hopefully, practicing with new vision. In the next post, we’ll look at ten practical approaches.

From Pateros with Love

We enjoyed a very leisurely trip to the Wenatchee, WA area where we met some wonderful new friends, ate a lot of really fantastic food, endured temperatures in the single digits (which welcomed a snow fall that broke a ten year record) and performed for a very appreciative and kind-hearted audience. Below are some pictures.

The view from our host home. I'd never been to eastern Washington. I would move there next week. It's amazingly beautiful and peaceful (click to view full).

This poor plant illustrates the way we all felt about being outside.

Playing (for business)

Eating (for pleasure)

Our new friends: Luke, Isaac the harmonica player, and Emily our hostess-ette who could make more food in an hour than the four of us could eat. Trust me, that’s an incredible talent. Not shown: Mr and Mrs. Wall and dear Ethan who apparently are very camera shy as we don't have a single picture of them.

We really enjoyed our visit to Pateros. Special thanks to the Wall family for making it happen and giving warm beds, great food and delightful company. Your hospitality was both generous and gracious; Also thanks to Uncle Kevin and Aunt Jen for their greeting us at the Homestead; to Grandma and Grandpa for inviting us and to Josh McPhearson for a really great sermon last Sunday.

3 down!

Greetings!

Just a quick update: We've just finished a whirl-wind set of performances. We're staying at our grandparents house. They hosted a living room concert for a very cordial group of our friends and family. We also played a concert set at Bellewood. The residence there were welcoming and encouraging (It's always a joy to play for those who really love to listen). Tonight, we played our first full concert in Hobart (about an hour and a half of music). Everyone there seemed to enjoy the program a lot. Tomorrow, we leave for one more concert in Silverdale. Photos and video are coming soon. Stay tuned!

-David of the quartet

The Living Room Concert........

[NOTE: As a way to prepare for our concerts, we host preview concerts in our living room for our friends and family. That intimate setting is one of my favorite ways to perform chamber music. Below is Justin's account of our first livingroom concert. It should be mentioned that the views expressed below are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this violists nor the other members of quartet. -David]

There I sat on my bench poised to begin. I looked at Eric. His eyes locked into mine. He gave the motion to begin and we set off on Beethoven's Op. 18 No. 4 First movement. It sounded pretty bad too. I found myself near the end of the first page and then from the corner of my eye saw that our guests had arrived. Thankful this was only a warm-up and not the performance, we stopped, stood up, stretched, and said hello to our wonderful (and brave) friends, the David Cools family and a couple of the Winslow girls.

After talking for about 10-15 minutes we decided to begin the evenings festivities. We opened with two simple Christmas songs and then moved into a more exciting number from our Christmas pops album. We all thought it would be nice to talk in between songs just because it is more friendly, and because Eric always needs a break. So David slouched, turned in his chair in order to see the audience and started sharing something about how simple songs are hard and hard songs are easy or something like that while the rest of us got out the next piece of music. When David finished rambling we could get on to the David Martin String Quartet. The guys decided to do all three movements and so I was ready for a nice stretch of beauiful music. (I love this string quartet immensely). After Josh demolished the intro and Eric butchered a couple of parts in the middle, (including skipping an entire measure), we painfully came to the end of the first movement. For the second movement we were out to kill. The composer's work that is, not the audience. Eric and I began our unison part out of tune, then David joined, also out of tune. [Editors note: please see the above disclaimer] The third movement went well and ended with the approving applause of our audience. Yes, surprisingly they did like it.This says more about the composer than the musicians. Our audience felt honored to be the first to hear this wonderful piece of music and it was great fun for us to see that they liked it too.

Eric then led us down the path of Haydn's Op. 74 No. 3 (4th and 2nd movements). These movements went relatively smoothly. Each of us making small mistakes here and there but it seemed musical and over all passable. They all clapped and we laughed about how tiring Haydn's adagios movements can be. Which is true. Especially for the two who fell asleep.

When planning this concert we wanted to do the First Noel arrangement that we've never quite mastered. My part looks like those ridiculous parts labled “Violin 1” on the upper left corner of the music. And when it came down to the time we were supposed to play it, the others thought better of embarrassing ourselves more than we already had and skipped it.

With this we moved into the Beethoven movement 1. The one we never got all the way through the entire day of rehearals. (Or on any previous day, for that matter.) But we took the bull by the horns and plowed through. Actually, it wasn't all that bad considering the limited practice we have had with it. I enjoyed seeing the audience jump when we began this vivacious piece of and they seemed to be connected with us to all the way through. With this our little night together ended.

All in all these living concerts are the most fun in my opinion. Not only because I am with friends, but also because I think we all prefer the intimacy of the living room over a big performance space. We enjoy the warmth of the Christmas tree, and great friends comforabably seated on couches and chairs and even the floor and to get to share the music we have worked so hard to learn with those who are eager to share it with us. It is very comfortable and enjoyable. Not only that but Eric can have his breaks........

- The second violinist