musicking.

I just passed my 1-year mark on the violin! No signs of stopping, and I'm pleased with where I'm at, considering. I don't practice as much as I might, for a couple reasons:

1. The violin feels, and may be, loud, and playing quietly is this whole side project.
2. The violin sound is (for the poor devils like myself who didn't start at age 5) heavily dependent on good posture and full attention.
3. The mandolin is familiar, easy to play quietly, and tolerates being played while slouched on the couch.

I have limited emotional bandwidth, and the mandolin really wants to help you make music, while the violin is the opposite of that.

I've been working on the same two violin pieces for many months, on the theory that as I've still been learning a lot of skills that strike me as basic, like "playing in tune" and "playing from one string to the next without producing a mysterious dissonant harmonic a couple octaves higher," I might as well learn those things on music I'm already familiar with. "Learning lots of songs" is a necessary step, though, and I'm about there.

I did return this week to a song listed in The Nordic Fiddler as "Swan Polska," which even six months ago was just a bit too hard. I applied a tool I picked up from my teacher a month or two ago:

"...and this note is held just a bit longer."
"This is where we discover I have no innate sense of rhythm."
"...?"
"I just fake it everywhere, that's why I'm not playing notes for the same duration every time."
"Oh! ...do you know about subdivision?"
"Nope, never heard of it."
"Ah ha! It will solve your rhythm problem. In fact it's the only thing that will solve your rhythm problem."

 I'm not sure why nobody ever told me this, but subdivision is just identifying the note duration that you're going to count: quarter note or eighth note or whatever. This came up for this song:

My trouble was (is) tracking the beat during all those offbeat ties and that half note, so one helpful way to count this is to count or tap eighth notes, and behold, immediate improvement. I took this back to the troublesome song, which is actually called "Polska efter Pelle Fors"...

...yes, much like Irish folk songs, which are often named things like "Garrett Barry's Jig" in the pattern of "[person]'s [dance type]," Swedish folk songs are often named "[dance type] after/in the style of [musician]." And, no, they're not unique.

...which I'm too lazy to scan the music for, but take my word that I'm counting the sixteenth notes and now I can practice it. Very slowly.