Month: February 2015

  • Musings on Mistakes – part one

    As I mentioned in the return of “Sunday Spotlight”, I want to do more writing this year.  I’m going to start with a 3 part series talking about mistakes and learning. In this post I’m going to look at societal attitudes towards mistakes, as well as our own relationship with them.  In part 2 I’ll…

  • Sunday Spotlight for Feb. 22, 2015

    For this week’s spotlight we start with some great “two minute technique” videos by the one and only Deborah Henson-Conant: http://www.hipharp.com/blog/9618 Then a nice collection of traditional pieces freely available – tune plus chords. http://www.cpmusic.com/tradmus.html (I’ve been using The Star of County Down with several students – a nice piece). And finally, this rather unique…

  • New Harp Tuesday episode is up! A look at Ribambelle #8

  • Sunday Spotlight for Feb. 15th, 2015

    In today’s spotlight we start with a wild instrument apparently designed by Leonardo Da Vinci which is part piano, part string instrument (click the “cc” button for English subtitles): I may have posted this before, but this talk by Evelyn Glennie is always worth a watch: I’ll be playing the harp part for Stravinsky’s Firebird…

  • Sunday Spotlight for Feb. 8th

    For this week’s Sunday Spotlight we start with a video of cellist and composer Zoë Keating.  She does some super cool stuff with looping – recording herself as she plays and then playing back a section as she moves on to play something new – in a sense creating a whole orchestra on her own……

  • Sunday Spotlight for Feb. 1st, 2015

    In today’s Sunday Spotlight we have: “I never practise scales” says violinist James Ehnes.  (I’m certainly always a proponent of creating exercises from the music on which you are working…) Valentina Lisitsa is an fantastic pianist (who credits YouTube for a lot of her success).  Any or all of the videos on her channel are…