All posts by hannahviolin

I am a violinist. I also enjoy running, working out, reading, and hanging with my friends and cat.
Random thoughts

The Groundhog was right

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It’s been cold and snowy here, so I guess the groundhog was right! Fingers crossed for a snow day…sometime…

I have to say, I received some positive comments from my post the other day, and I welcome your thoughts. So often we musicians are expected to be thankful no matter what for our work and it’s considered bad form to be negative. And it may also seem that all other musicians you know are genuinely happy to play at any time, and it can feel quite lonely if you are questioning things!

Another thought I was rolling around in my head was a question one of my former classmates posted online: how do you definite success in your career? It may feel like if you aren’t making a living primarily playing music that you have failed your training, but I can tell you that isn’t true! Of course, you could also just say that I’m a failure so why can I give you advice Winking smile

Other random thoughts: my brother said he noticed I mentioned that two of my sisters had gotten their first vaccine shots. Now, this is a weird way to word things as I only have two sisters. So I guess I should clarify that both of my sisters (that I know of) got their first vaccine shots. This is because they live in different states than me. Here in Missouri, we are expected to teach children in the schools without having any vaccinations or testing.

I have been enjoying every aspect of my new teaching position this year except one…getting up really early. My entire life has changed. Since I’m getting up between 5:30 and 6 am I like to go to bed by 10 pm. I don’t know how I can reconcile that with playing any concerts ever again, because I hate being too tired. I guess time will tell!

I should really be taking more cat pictures, but I guess I just feel like they keep doing the same things. Sit in the basket. Sit on the cat tree. Sit on the file cabinet. Sit on the bed. Run around the house at top speed as soon as I go to bed. I’ll try to do better this week!

It’s Festival application time, so if you are a long time reader of my blog, you know that means lots of paperwork and stress for me. I have a group of students that participate in the National Federation of Music Clubs Spring Festival each year. It’s a great incentive to practice for them, but it ends up being a lot of work on my end once a year, in order to get the paperwork going. There is a book and lots of guidelines, and it’s very involved. I think I’ve got a few students this year that should be up for a trophy though, so I hope they do well! The Festival is online this year (again) so that means they are just making videos of themselves, and no live pianists are required. (Or dead pianists.)

I’m also working on observing more Improvisation Classes and learning how to teach Improvisation and Creative Ability Development further. I’m fascinated by how this will play out longer term for the students in my studio, but the ones doing the improvisation have been having fun, and I have been amazed at their creativity and musical ideas. This month is pentatonic scales leading up to some blues improv, and it’s been so much fun to work on.

It’s a busy time, but the school year is like that. I go back and forth between feeling like I’m totally overwhelmed and too busy, and feeling like it’s all absolutely fine and I have plenty of time. I blame the pandemic for the mood swings and worries…I never quite know how I’m going to feel on any given day. For instance, this morning I got up and felt like this job was the worst idea ever, but after my shower I felt just fine and I enjoyed teaching my class, and even felt like I did a pretty good job of getting them to have good technique and maybe they even enjoyed it. The good thing about teaching is that you can have your own goals for your students, and while teaching in a school program means I have to follow their goals, I can still have my own goals. And right now, my goal is to get and keep them playing, and give them a positive musical experience, because that’s all we need for being in a pandemic!

Sorry for all the randomness and odd details, but that’s what’s on my mind on this Monday morning. How are you?

Quarantine, Random thoughts

Saturday Morning

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When you have to wake up around 5:30 am several days a week, waking up after 7 am feels like an absolute delight. I didn’t need to get up today at any particular time, so I didn’t get up to make coffee until nearly 8 am. WEEKENDS.

I ordered seeds last night for the garden. I am planning on green beans, lima beans, and Swiss chard (Louie loves chard.) I think that’ll be it as I planted too many different things last year and only a few worked. I learned from some mistakes though, and look forward to fresh green beans as well as making some dilly beans, which are a pickled green bean with loads of garlic and dill and after they are done pickling, you can eat them right out of the jar and they are delicious.

Last weekend I made a quiche. I had broccoli and mushrooms on hand so I used those, along with a frozen pie crust I’d bought before the holidays but never used.

It was delicious!

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I also made Rhubarb muffins last weekend. I felt like doing some baking I guess! This weekend I have no baking plans, but the preserved lemons are ready so we may make my favorite chickpea and preserved lemon dish (Double it and serve with rice). We found last summer it is excellent with chutney on the side, and since I have some canned chutney that we should be eating as well, that will work. I haven’t been doing any canning lately because we have enough still.

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I have a long online class tomorrow and today we are expected to get some bad weather, so I don’t know if we will make it out of the house much this weekend. I guess we will see! I am not looking forward to the cold weather this week: we are looking at weather in the teens and lower, which we have been fortunate enough to avoid so far. Leaving the house at 6:30 am in that weather will not be fun!

I’m looking forward to next weekend: we are celebrating Valentine’s Day on Friday night with a dinner from Stone Soup Cottage. They deliver to the house, and by the time I went to order (a few weeks ago!) Saturday and Sunday were already sold out. Friday is our takeout night anyway as it’s a nice way to end the week, so we’ll celebrate that night. Stone Soup drops the food off at your house between 4 and 7 pm, then they leave directions on how to reheat everything, so it isn’t cold and soggy. We’ve done it at Louie’s mom’s house once when it was nicer outside (ate outside together) and once at our home for Louie’s birthday. I’ll let you know how it goes! Spoiler alert: it does contain steak.

I saw that the National Park Service has an app that you can download that tells you about all the various parks. I downloaded it and now I’m wanting to go visit more places. We are hoping to do a little traveling this summer, visiting some family members and maybe some sightseeing along the way, if we are vaccinated by then (and them, though pretty much everybody in my family and Louie’s dad have their first shots), and now I’m looking up random NPS sites along the way. I realized we haven’t even been to all of the NPS sites in St Louis, so that’s on the list (the Ulysses S Grant Home) once we have a decent day for it. Also COVID concerns, so maybe that’ll be something for a bit later…I know people go inside for things, but it’s a question of limiting our risk. But I especially want us to go west, as there are many parks west (Utah, Nevada, California) that we need to visit. I suspect the next few years will be particularly busy, as people get to travel again, and maybe it’ll always be busy.

Anyway! It also looks like maybe today it won’t snow until later in the day, if at all, so maybe we’ll bundle up and do something after I teach my improvisation class this morning.

Quarantine, Random thoughts, Teaching

Career musings

It’s tough being a freelancer. Or maybe I should say, it was tough? I have had several phases of my career, and this latest one is certainly less stressful in many ways.

I started out as a full-time orchestra player, right out of grad school. I also taught and added in extra gigs and tried to make as much money as possible to start paying off student loans and start saving. I was young and had energy, drive, and a great love of music. My job tried to take that away from me, and ultimately I made a very personal choice to leave. I haven’t regretted that choice, though I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if I had stayed.

I then spent a few years being a more full-time freelancer and teaching in the Cleveland area. I played all the gigs I could, was a member of up to 5 different regional orchestras, and spent a lot of time driving to and from with small groups of friends. It felt very temporary, but it was a lot of fun and I had a large amount of satisfying and fulfilling musical experiences. I worked nearly every day and worked long hours, and it had its ups and downs.

I moved to St Louis then, and hoped to continue in  much the same way, but there weren’t the same opportunities…there weren’t 5 or more regional orchestras in driving distance, and in fact only one really, and that wasn’t even really within driving distance, so I tried to up my teaching and did what I could. I played a bunch of gigs, here and there, everywhere, trying to get my name out there, and ended up being really busy as well, but not having that many satisfying or fulfilling musical experiences. Truthfully my great love is orchestral playing, but my second great love is doing things my way, and the two are hard to reconcile.

I talked with a student yesterday who had her first full orchestra playing experience before her lesson, and she described it as overwhelming. It is! I recall my first time playing in an orchestra (with winds and percussion and all) and it is overwhelming, the sound is unlike anything you can ever experience, but it is amazing. As I’ve gotten older, I have come to terms with the fact that that just isn’t something I will do very much in my life, if at all, and that just might be okay. It’s a hard thing to come to terms with, honestly, but getting upset over a $150 gig that takes up two nights a week isn’t the same as playing a Shostakovich Symphony with a group.

I have a lot of thoughts about orchestral musicians, and what work is worth, and the music world, and they are often jumbled, every changing, and not without a little bit of bitterness but also with love and hope. I won’t share most of them here, but I will just say this: I’m tired of the stress, and I’m tired of the hustle. I have been busier teaching than I’ve ever been in my life, but it’s so much happier. I miss seeing colleagues, but I don’t miss feeling so replaceable and being belittled.

I have a group I’ve played with for years that I have debated quitting for awhile, because of how it makes me feel. Sometimes I really enjoy it, and other times I feel taken advantage of. I’ve been yelled at, I’ve had a score thrown at me by the conductor, and to add insult to injury, my position wasn’t even considered worth mentioning to a new contractor. Nothing about the group ever made me feel good as a person (or hadn’t in a long time), but I hung on because I occasionally enjoyed playing the music…that’s how my performing career has felt over the past few years, maybe since I moved here.

That’s not to say that every experience has been that way, but enough for me to say, enough. I read other musicians who say how much they miss playing together. Maybe I’ve made other musicians feel bad as well, but I don’t miss being made to feel bad. I don’t miss pouring my playing into a job only to be passed over in the future to somebody new or somebody who grew up here, or somebody who was more “connected.” Maybe people read this blog and say, well, she doesn’t want to be hired anyway, she has a bad attitude, but there have been years that I have said yes to every single job I could, showed up early and prepared, practiced for hours and hours, and that didn’t matter either. And then once I stopped working, during the pandemic, I didn’t miss it. I filled up my schedule with students and there I am.

I have thought about this because there are gigs coming back. Now, some of those are an easy no, because, well, there’s a pandemic. But how to balance it? There are people I do want to play with, and there will be jobs I do want to take, but there will also be ones I don’t want to take. I know if I say no jobs will dry up, but they also dry up when I say yes, so I’m not living in fear anymore.

I’m being honest here, because this is a tough profession, and you should all know it. I don’t want the accolades and the pressure anymore. I’m tired of it. I don’t miss the audiences. Maybe that will change, maybe I’ll want something different in a few years, I don’t know. Maybe once the pandemic is over I won’t be afraid of crowds anymore, but maybe I’m just tired. I know I play well enough to play anything I want, and I’m okay with that. I’ll always be asked first if I play in the St Louis Symphony, and unless the answer is yes people won’t ever think I’m any good, so who cares what they think anyway?

So, those are my current career musings. I added it up and I’m currently teaching about 40 hours a week, counting a little bit of driving around, but not counting grading or admin work. No wonder I feel so busy! We’ll see what I decide to do next fall (I think I need to drop something) but for now, I’ll just work and work, which is something I’ve always been good at, and I will hope that I make a positive impact on some of my students. I’m not going to pretend that music is some sacred thing, that being a music teacher or musician makes me a better person, because I think that’s rationalizing something that we are worried we are wasting our time doing. (A good friend once said, “Musicians always think they are doing the Lord’s Work” and that made me think!) I think music is worthwhile and it is fun to play the violin. I think learning to play an instrument is good thing for kids to do and helps them in their lives overall and that’s a good enough reason.

But that would be going off on another tangent, so I’ll just say…lots more students to teach today, and then a nice weekend of relaxing and trying to do something fun in the cold and during the pandemic before another long week of teaching.

What about you? Do you feel like the pandemic has made you second guess your life choices or change your trajectory or work-life balance?

Deep Thoughts, Quarantine, Random thoughts

Rainy Day

We’ve had some snow here, finally, though no snow day. And today I think all the snow is going to get washed away with rain…the weather says currently we are having a frozen mix but it just looks like rain to me so I think my app is a little off.

The weekend ahead is like all of the weekends, nothing really going on after my Saturday morning CAD (Improvisation) Class. I’ve been enjoying teaching two classes a week to a small amount of students, though I need a few more to really make it fun for everybody. Time will tell though, I’m sure.

This week was difficult as far as being exhausted and headache-y. The fall semester started up for both of my colleges so I had a full schedule, lots of computer time, plus getting up around 5:30 am to get to my before school classes in person three days a week. I am going to three different elementary schools in my district each week to teach one small class (ranges from 2 to 4 students). The district is good in that we are only teaching kids who are already in the same classroom, and we leave before the rest of the kids show up for the day. But it’s still a lot of being around people, compared to not being around people at all. I also started teaching a small ensemble class in person, only 4 of us total in a very large room.

The good news is that my parents and two of my sisters have gotten their first vaccination shots. I’m happy for them, but I’m a little jealous that other states are already inoculating teachers and Missouri says it’ll be a few more months. It’s odd, reading news stories about how children need to be back in school and we need to get teachers vaccinated so they can return to the classroom…they are back here in Missouri, with varying degrees of being allowed to work from home and varying degrees of how many students are back. My district is good in that they require mask wearing (no issues with the kids and that) and that they seem to be doing a good job contact tracing all illnesses. But still, it’s a risk, and the only thing I could have done to avoid the risk was to quit my job.

It’s also odd seeing people so upset about places reopening indoor dining here and there…I can’t imagine eating indoors at a restaurant. I just can’t. I haven’t eaten a meal with anybody except Louie since it got cold (we had a few outdoor get-togethers with friends earlier) and I haven’t eaten a meal indoors with anybody since my sister Leslie and her family left after visiting in early September. We knew their visit was a bit risky but they had been limiting their exposure at that point and so had we. Once Louie went back into the classroom in the fall I felt our risk as a couple was higher and now that we are both in person 4 to 5 times a week I continue to believe that any level of socializing outside of our house, barring some sort of very spaced/distanced outdoor activity would be incredibly irresponsible. It is both our responsibility not to bring COVID home from work but also not to take it there.

How do you all deal with the isolation? I spend entirely too much time online, yet I feel like that is one of my limited connections to people. I feel pretty isolated from any friends I had before, and I had already been feeling like most of those friendships were surfacey and limited anyway. Other friendships seemed to be based more on doing things which will likely return when doing things returns…I’d love to have a few more friends I could talk to, but I don’t feel like scheduling more zoom meetings, and sometimes texting feels exhausting. My work schedule this school year has been pretty exhausting, and though having the weekends free helps recover, I find myself just wanting to spend the weekend lying around reading and don’t have the energy for anything more, including social interaction of any form. Likely this is a bit of depression, but I’m hoping it’s all due to circumstances and will change with the change of weather, if nothing else.

I’ve been enjoying reading a ton of mystery novels lately. I like to find a long series and read the whole thing, so I get to experience one character finding dead body after dead body and helping the (often bumbling) detective solve the case. I particularly enjoy novels set in another country, usually England (currently reading a second series on the Isle of Mann, which is now on my list of places to visit someday.) I find reading is a nice break from hearing violin over the internet and it’s a quiet activity to do lying down.

I often wake up in the middle of the night stressed out about my work schedule and the future. The days are long, but absolutely possible, but I think it’s just getting up so early that gets me, and I (especially in the middle of the night) worry. I just worry, about the future of my career, the future of our country, and of our planet.

But I guess we will all continue pushing through, and keeping on. I think I’m just tired and need a change of scenery but that’s unlikely until after the school year finishes, so I’ll manage. I always remind myself many people have lived through worse, and while that’s true, it is pretty stressful living through a pandemic, dealing with the stress and worries of the coup and civil unrest (I find I cry a lot more often after January 6, it was some sort of breaking point for me), and trying to make it all work and hold it together all the time to be strong for the students. It’s a lot! I know other people have different or similar concerns, but we are all going through a lot right now.

Hope

Inauguration

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I don’t want to jinx anything, but I think it’s going to happen.

I can’t wait until we have a president who isn’t constantly lying to us, and who is willing to admit that COVID is a real problem that we have to deal with.

The past few weeks have been pretty tough, every since the riots especially. I’ve just been working, getting up early to go teach violin to small classes at a school (in person).

I’ll sleep better tonight than in a long time, knowing that the people in charge will be doing their best for the American people again. They will fail at things. They will do things wrong and we will disagree, but I will know that at heart, they are doing their best. This isn’t actually too much to ask in our government, as we have had it for most of my life.

It’s a shame how little some people are willing to settle for. It’s a shame that some people think that lies, hate, and violence are the way forward. It’s a shame that some people choose white supremacy while, at the same time, insisting that racism isn’t a huge problem in this country.

It’s a tragedy that over 400,000 Americans have died of a disease due to one man’s ego taking over. The president couldn’t stand failure so he just pretended it didn’t exist. He chose to stoke division and hate rather than lead. Instead of our country taking the lead in the pandemic and possibly saving 100s of thousands of lives, we relinquished all leadership and left the pandemic management as a free-for-all. Those of us lucky enough to have lived so far have lost nearly a year of our lives trying to stay healthy. Some have chosen to live their lives however they feel, not caring who gets sick around them, and this has divided our country further.

I don’t envy the job President Biden will have ahead of him. I doubt he really wanted this job, but I think he’ll do it, and he’ll do his best. That’s a change from the previous occupant, who did his worst, intentionally.

I’m not happy yet, because the past ten months have taken my ability to feel true happiness away.

I did buy a bottle of sparkling wine to open tonight after work though. We will celebrate at home, just the two of us, as we have celebrated all the holidays in the past year.

Christmas, Random thoughts

Undecorating

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Undecorating for Christmas is far less exciting. I did most of it yesterday, and just have to take down the tree today at some point and put the boxes away.

My last post was perhaps a little negative. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t regret any time I spent playing music with other people, particularly my quartet over the past few years. I was just realizing (for the umpteenth time) that chamber music has never been my great love, and that I don’t miss playing in small ensembles.

I have missed playing in large ensembles for a long time, but the orchestral world being what it is, both difficult to procure a position and seemingly quite difficult to enjoy that position after you have it…I am fine with my current lot in life.

Today is my last official day of vacation , even though I’ve been ramping up my work each day, at least from the perspective of answering and sending emails, and I even practiced violin a bit yesterday. Over the break, I did other work stuff besides emails, such as submitting grades and setting up courses in Canvas, but I have to say that overall it was amazingly relaxing.

I watched some Great British Baking Show while doing cross-stitch. I read several good books, including Jodi Picoult’s The Book of Two Ways, Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, Katharine McGee’s American Royals and Majesty. Louie and I rewatched the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy, watched the latest season of Cobra Kai, and are working our way through Schitt’s Creek (two thoughts, why did we wait so long, and of course everybody’s favorite character is David!). I did a lot of cooking and baking, I did some organizing and decluttering though nothing major, and I did a good amount of workouts. We went on a few hikes and walks as well.

We woke up New Year’s morning to a bit of ice storm debris…I forgot to mention this before.

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The neighbor’s tree had lost some branches into our yard. Luckily it didn’t seem to cause any damage and Louie was able to saw the branches down easily enough.

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The other day we went to Cliff Cave park to walk around. There were more people there than we would have liked, and a few too many groups of people who didn’t see fit to step to the side (rather than walking 2 or 3 abreast) OR wear masks, but we had ours to put on when needed. I’m always more concerned with people who might be walking or running in front of us for any length of time than I am with people who are just walking by, but still, it’s a pandemic and it’s not hard to give space on a wide path.

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Very large trees! That’s the Mississippi River.

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A picture of Louie taking a picture.

So tomorrow I’m back to teaching. I am both looking forward to it and not looking forward to it. Louie tells me I can’t retire yet, so I guess I’ll log into zoom inside. I originally set up my schedule to start on Wednesday rather than Monday because I was supposed to do jury duty. I started worrying about it a week ago and got a postponement of a year, but they did end up canceling the week (due to COVID) anyway. I guess this time next year I’ll be complaining about jury duty, and I’ll have to miss some work for it (as usual) but I’m glad to have another year. I was originally scheduled to do it in June, then September which I postponed to January. It’s a mess, isn’t it.

One last collection of thoughts. Headaches. Back in early 2020 I finally saw a doctor about some bad headaches I’d been getting, which I started calling migraines. I don’t know sometime, whether it’s a normal headache or a migraine, or if people get headaches like I do, or if they are all migraines. In any case, I got some nice prescription medicine that I end up taking about 2 days a month on average for a headache. The medicine tends to work really well, though the side effects are that I feel fuzzy for an hour or more, and generally a bit more tired and thirsty. It’s a decent trade off though, and I’m glad to have the medicine. I can usually feel the headache disappearing into fuzziness in my body, and that’s a real relief. I’m dealing with one right now, which I suspect is also a bit stress related, between pandemic worries, political concerns, and the worries of going to in person teaching next week and getting back online as well…

How is your week at work going? I’m assuming most people are back to work this week after having had some time off, though I know most people don’t get to take two weeks off like I was able to this year. This year there is no spring break from college, it’s just a slog to the end, so wish us luck!