Friday, June 09, 2006

Son's Cello Travails, Continued

Son's cello playing travails continue. His 4-alarm wailing and gnashing of teeth has subsided, especially as we went to a music store and let him pick out a book with tunes that he wants to play. Seems like much of what's in the lesson book is exercises and such, and not so much fun tunes that he knows.

And it turns out that Son was also getting tired of constantly being pushed to do "hard stuff". In this case, his teacher wants him to play slower, which is "boring, and harder" according to Son. He says he can "play better if he goes faster". Okay, fine. For the summer, I'm telling him he gets to get away with 3-4 days per week of playing, and he gets to pick the music.

So far, he's going along with it, and only complaining a bit. And the rule is: no computers or PS2 before cello.

One last note (pun intended): the book we got was for euphonium or upsie-dasium, or some other odd instrument, and came with most tunes written for bass clef, in keys of either Bb or Eb, and then all tunes duplicated, written for treble cleff in key of C. I've been taking them, putting them into a Lilypond file, and letting Lilypond transpose them to bass cleff, key of D (or perhaps C), which is a really easy task once you get used to it. Yay, Open Source!

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