All posts by hannahviolin

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

Farewell Tour

I read a tweet that called Trump’s rally in Tulsa the beginning of his Farewell Tour. Oh let it be so.

I was thinking about my last post, and I did want to add: I am fine with all the plans changing…I recognize the privilege that Louie and I have, to be able to work quite successfully from home (if you ignore the fact that I am also a performer, and miss that). But yet, I can be understanding and still be sad for what might have been, and what might be or might not be. I can wish the pandemic wasn’t going on while being grateful that no one in my close circle has gotten sick.

It’s hard to know what to do. And that’s okay, I’m okay with the worries. I don’t need to be one of those white people who has all the answers who is on facebook lecturing others (while perhaps, not wanting to live in a diverse neighborhood “because of the schools”)—in fact I definitely don’t want to be that person. I also don’t want to be jumping down other people’s throats for being late to the party, yet I’m also not going to rallies or protests because I am still trying to stay away from large groups of people. So I’m thinking, I’m assigning my students pieces written by Black composers (but it’s been ragtime and jazz stuff, which I worry isn’t enough), I’m reading a variety of books (but are they the right ones?), and I’m donating a bit of money here and there (but is it enough and since I mention it here is that patting myself on the back?), and I’m continuing to nag my Senators and other elected officials as I have been for a few years now. But I’m writing this silly blog, and who does that help besides me?

I had a short teaching week this past week and my students were all pretty delightful. I think being out of school has been great for them mentally…most of them seemed to really hate online learning. I don’t know what the fall will bring though, and I think that anybody who claims to is lying. Remember February, when all of this would have been incomprehensible? And then March happened, and then on March 11 everything changed (at least that was the date everything started getting canceled for us in St Louis). So to think that in JUNE we know what August will look like is absolutely ridiculous to me. I understand trying to prepare and plan of course, and there’s nothing I love more than preparing and planning.

Anyway, just a lot of random thoughts, as you might expect if you are a long time reader of the blog! Let me leave you during this crazy time with some cat pictures. Throughout all the worries and troubles, isn’t it great to have pets?

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The cat trees are in a sort of “extra” or “Junk” room. My house has a kind of weird setup (I’m sure I’ve mentioned the kitchen is in the basement, for instance) and this room is a room I walk through all the time en route somewhere else but it’s really not good for much because it’s sort of small, and well, has a lot of junk in it. I’ve thought about different ideas for it, but honestly, cat trees, bookshelves, file cabinets and such are pretty good ones. I would still love to have slightly less junk but some of the stuff I wished I’d gotten rid of has come in handy over the past few months, whether actually or mentally.

Anyway, I’d better go. Time to go outside for awhile and enjoy that whole fresh air thing…later tonight we are doing a socially distanced gathering with another couple. It’s always funny: we tend to eat quite late, usually between 8 and 9 pm but hardly anybody else does, so “normal” dinner times always really seem to cut into the day! Even in the pandemic times Louie and I are trying to pack too much into the day. (We also just see dinner often as the last thing of the day, dinner, maybe a little TV or a walk, and then bedtime. I think other people have dinner, more activities, snack, etc.)

Random thoughts

No Cat Pictures

I feel like our nation has taken a turn, and we are all talking about things we haven’t been talking about, and it seems somehow different. To that note, today is Juneteenth and I really have to admit before a year or two ago I absolutely had never even heard of this holiday, and now people are wanting it to be a federal holiday, and it’s all great. Let’s continue this trend! Let’s continue to learn, to do better, and let’s get the madman out of OUR White House while we are at it.

I was finishing up an Edx course I’ve been taking and thought, I haven’t popped into the blog in awhile. So I thought I’d pop in and say hello. Things have been busy here but fun. I had my sister and her family visiting over the weekend through Tuesday, which was both normal and surreal…we hadn’t hung out with other people in months, and it felt wrong to do so, but yet we decided to go ahead with it. We’d all be doing pretty good at social distancing before the visit and are continuing to do so. I have been to a few more places than in the past, and even had a little gig for playing church music. I will say, it’s harder to play the violin in a mask, and I did take it off for the video, but only because there were only two of us in a giant sanctuary and we were more than six feet apart. Oddly I found it harder to hear in a mask, which makes no sense at all. But I wear the damn mask when I’m out and about, because all the science shows that we should. I wish more would do so, but I guess the American way is to be selfish and inconsiderate.

We plan to visit my sister again in a few weeks. They are in New York state now for a few months (and should be said, they canceled a flight they were planning to take for a few reasons, one of which was that masks were not required in the St Louis airport and therefore they felt less safe there) and it will be easy enough to drive to visit. We are still planning to take a trip out West. On the one hand, the virus. On the other hand, if others can do what they like, why can’t we, if we take precautions such as distancing and mask wearing around people, and mostly spend our time outside? We’ll be driving, and it’s still over a month away and some numbers are climbing while others are dropping…so who knows. Life feels more normal now…it feels normal to do nothing, to see no friends up close, to sign in when you go to a church to facilitate contact tracing (that made me feel safer, because I’ll know), and to be relieved at the grocery store when nearly everyone you see is wearing a mask and to know that THAT is why our numbers in the city are pretty good even while the rest of the state is growing.

I’m just blerghing now though, and you probably want cat pictures. I don’t have them right now! I have been busy catching up on teaching, reading, and just frankly, not taking enough cat pictures. They are adorable, but they keep hanging out in the same places and doing the same things, sorry!

I also don’t have food pictures. I think pet and food pictures are very controversial: people either love or hate to see them. I think, if you hate them, unfollow me or keep scrolling but other people really seem to enjoy complaining. I’ll try to do better this next week!

I’m going to read more about Juneteenth now. I am trying to take advantage of my more relaxed summer schedule to learn different things. In the alternate universe, we were supposed to be at a conference in Vail and then probably doing some sightseeing. Then we were going to be in New York visiting Leslie, which we are still doing, no matter what, and then we were going to be in France for two weeks, one for Louie’s conference and one for sightseeing. I still have the library books I checked out for that trip (are we allowed to return them now, I should look into this!). But instead, we are hoping to do a driving trip and camp, and hike, and do all many of outdoor activities (sitting around the fire, walking, watching wildlife, etc) and I hope it can happen. We may also be headed into another shutdown, so who knows! If so, maybe we’ll stay in New York longer Smile if we get there.

Hope, Teaching

Wednesday

This is the first week in a long time that has gone by fairly slowly. As I texted to my sister last night, it’s because I finally have something to look forward to…she and her kids are visiting!

They are en route to their summer job location and are stopping by. Is it a little risky? I suppose so. But they’ve been being careful (I’m talking about the virus right now, in case you forgot there’s a pandemic) and I’ve been careful, and we are all low risk and will be careful after our visit as well. So I’m super excited to see them! What will we do? Well, nothing really. Run through the sprinkler in the backyard? Cook at home and wash a lot of dishes? Take a socially distanced walk through the neighborhood? These are all thrilling possibilities.

So that means a bit of cleaning since one of them is a crawler. Thinking of a toddler poking around your stuff really makes you see how dangerous your house is. Bottles of bleach, just sitting around. Boxes of cat poo. Stacks of books! Maybe I should just build a small toddler cage and make life easier.

I’m just kidding…to an extent. After all, I have two cats. All my valuables have either been broken by now or are on the one shelf Muriel can’t get to.

This is just a sort of mundane post. All of the anti-racism stuff will be a long haul. It’s still great everybody is talking about it. I hope this energy continues and translates into real systemic change. I’m not naive enough to think that most of the companies and institutions that posted statements last week will actually do much, but I’m just naive enough to think that change will happen, starting with all of us talking about racism. Last Tuesday I saw the thing on Instagram about putting a black box and was really touched by how many of my friends did it. Did it mean anything? I don’t know. But it told me that unlike a few years ago during the Michael Brown protests, this time people were paying attention and looking beyond what the president was saying. This time people believed that George Floyd shouldn’t have been killed by the police, and this time people are saying, enough, and what can we do to help. So the support will come from all of us, and that’s where it has to come from. I have hope, again, and that hope was lost for awhile. I am looking at everything my eyes wide open though, and definitely that includes my own behavior as a white person.

On a lighter note…CATS.

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I celebrated my birthday on Sunday. My mom sent a few old birthday pictures of me.

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It was a pretty low key birthday…not the best ever, but certainly not the worst. I had made myself a Texas Sheet Cake a few days earlier, which is just a rich chocolate cake I often had when I was younger (I think we started making it for my birthday when I was in high school). Louie and I got takeout from Peacemaker Lobster and Crab then—it’s sort of become a birthday tradition to get takeout from there and I have a lobster boil. We keep saying we’ll go another time not on my birthday to try some of the other less extravagent things on the menu but we never do! But yes, a lobster died so I could celebrate my birthday and it was delicious (also the biscuits are to die for).

So now I’ve got three more days of teaching, and then I am taking two days off teaching to enjoy the visit with family, and it’s the first break I’ve had since getting back from Atlanta which was sort of in the before times. I’m more and more hopeful that we will indeed go on our vacation at the end of July, and things are just looking up generally.

I’m still teaching online, in case you were wondering. Especially with having family visit and such, it’s important to minimize contact. I know some of my students have been traveling and I can’t trust them to be safe, so the best thing is to continue avoiding each other. I think it’s a little easier for people now that they have started doing a few more things outside of the home, and now that school is over. A few of mine are not loving being online so much, but I do still think at this time it’s the best thing. We’ll see what happens for the future.

Teaching

Having time to think about a more diverse musical canon for teaching kids to play the violin

I read that somewhere recently: that it is a privilege to have time to think, to have time to process all of the Black Lives Matter stuff happening right now.

I had a whole lesson with an adult student dedicated to discussing how we can incorporate music by non-white male students into our teaching, and how to avoid problematic pieces. It’s not easy! But that doesn’t mean it isn’t important, and that, yes, I should have been thinking about this earlier, but hey, I’m doing it now, so it’ll have to do.

I teach private violin (and a few viola) lessons, so I do something that is optional and generally accessible to higher income families. There are places in the city for lower income people to go to have lessons, but I have not worried myself about doing that in my own studio. I have always told myself I didn’t have the time to worry about how to make my studio more inclusive to lower income people..and I don’t really. But maybe I should try to find some students who need lessons anyway, and either use my time to give them lessons, or solicit donations from other more affluent people in my studio to cover the lower income students. So there’s an easy thought. How to find those students? And right now isn’t the best time just because I’m only teaching online, and it’s not a good time for beginners to start.

My other thought as far as teaching is to include more diverse composers in my teaching. It’s SO easy to just follow along in a method book (I am sort of kind of a Suzuki teacher, so I tend to follow the Suzuki books which are only dead white male composers), and that means kids don’t play anything by Black people, by women, or by anyone living if I don’t branch out. I do tend to branch out a touch, but more to add in “fun pieces” like jazz or fiddle tunes, which thankfully are often written by Black people, or even living people, but that’s not enough—plus, music by Black people shouldn’t have to be FUN, it should also be used to be educational and part of the core repertoire, it should be considered good enough for that. Oh, and there is an etude book I sometimes use by a woman, and one intermediate level piece (Yes, Josephine Trott, I’m looking at you.).

Awhile back I ordered Music by Black Composers but haven’t done anything with it: it’s got a variety of pieces by a variety of composers that would be great for young students, but I was afraid to be seen as pandering (I.e. I didn’t want to give it to my Black students for fear that they would feel singled out, but I wasn’t sure how to use the book across my studio…so I did nothing.). In any case, I am going to try to start teaching one of the pieces, and then perhaps another, and go from there. I also ordered some of the other books recommended in this article on violinist.com that has stuck in my head recently. It’s about how to incorporate more diversity into the core repertoire of your teaching and is written by Claire Allen. I already have the Music by Women Composers Series and haven’t done as much with it yet either, but will. I think my conversations with my student yesterday have lit yet another fire under me to do more with all of this. I want my students to know that music can be written (and WAS written) by anyone and everyone, and that the reason that most music we play is by white men ISN’T because that music was superior (I mean, goodness, so much of it is awful and boring, so why can’t we play awful and boring music by non-white men too, why must it always be BETTER) but because of a culture of white supremacy and patriarchy. 

Okay, another step, how to increase diversity in my studio itself? I teach in the city, and I believe firmly that living in St Louis is important because I want to live in a diverse places, surrounded by different kinds of people (though the actual neighborhood I live in isn’t that diverse…but all sorts of people walk down the sidewalk in front of my house every single day), and I believe that is a step I have chosen to take and continue to take, to stay here and to be here. So my studio should reflect more kinds of people, and yet mostly I have the students of professors, teachers, doctors, and scientists. On the other hand, I think that those adults believe more strongly in music lessons and the importance of education, and also they have more money to spend on these things. I do have Black students, and non-white students, but not many of them.

So those are some of the thoughts I have bouncing around my head, how to make my teaching more inclusive. I know many other teachers are doing the same, and yes, it’s terrible we haven’t done this before. Honestly, I’m embarrassed to be writing this, and to be saying to myself, well, it’s not like you weren’t teaching ANY Black composers, and it’s not like you were doing anything differently that the norm…that’s definitely not good enough. I’ve always wanted to do better than the average, to be better than the people around me. So I will do better, and late is always better than never. And I hope that those around me also continue to do better, and I hope that somebody with more research experience than me makes a book of core repertoire to teach from, not just Black composers, or woman composers, but a whole series of books using a truly diverse selection of songs that all students can use and look at and learn violin from (without having to purchase four books at a time and know that the Black composers, and the woman composers, are in a different book than the main book). I want the main book to be for all the composers, White, Black, from other countries, Male, Female, non-binary, etc…using pieces from them all to teach kids to play the violin. With wonderful age-appropriate history and writing about them all so that music and history are taught side by side.

Deep Thoughts

Black Lives Matter

Suddenly everybody is saying this, and it’s great and terrible. It’s terrible it has taken us so long to do so, and it’s terrible we have to. I have been afraid, and then I was reading something about if white people are afraid to speak because they are afraid to say the wrong thing, then imagine being a Black person, the fear they live with. But it’s great that we are talking now, and that more and more people are realizing that things aren’t equal.

So I’m sorry. I support the protests: I think they are wonderful, though I’m scared for the people. I think that the police need to stop murdering Black men and women. Police brutality is a terrible problem, and I see so much of it on twitter these days in the protests, and I realize it’s been going on this whole time, but now I am really seeing it clearly. I’m scared for our country (especially since the president is going full fascist calling in the military and nonviolent protestors are being gassed for photo ops), but I’m hopeful. I am thinking about my own life and how I treat people, and things that I’ve learned in the past and things that I know now, and thinking about how I can do better to fight against systemic racism and to be part of the solution.

So if I’m saying the wrong thing, so be it. Others have said things far more eloquently than me, and that’s great. I’ve been reading and trying to learn. I’ve been contacting my congressmen and I’ve been donating. This article gives some great places to donate, if you are able to do so, but there are many. Look around. Support Black-owned businesses (I read that you should capitalize Black which is why I’m doing so, I hope that’s correct) in your local town or city. Protest if you feel you can and do what you can.

I have to consider other things too…how do I perform more music by Black composers and how do I work with more Black people and how do I deal with the fact that I work in a predominantly white field with concerts primarily attended by white people and play for organizations that are run by people who make racist statements? How do I reconcile all of this for myself, and what do I do to change things from my position? This is all stuff I’m pondering, and I don’t want to just move on when things die down and then get bogged down with life again, as has happened over and over again.

Quarantine

Clarification/Random Thoughts

I’ve gotten a couple comments lately and figured I’d take a few minutes on this Monday morning to follow up.

As far as my students: I don’t know if they read this blog. Mostly, definitely no. Do I think of them as misfits, as in, don’t belong to society? Of course not. But I think of them as unique students, because when other teachers talk about their students, they act as if they tell their students what to do, the students do it, life moves on.(From things like, get a binder, get a music stand, to keep track of your practicing on this paper.) My students are more creative and move to the beat of their own drummer. So when they all did so well on the recital and actually played using big bows and full sounds and things that I’ve been trying to teach them, I was really moved! Do I wish they were more diligent, practicing regularly for hours a day? Sure! But maybe they are doing their best and I think they are great people no matter.

It’s possible that I’M the misfit teacher. I don’t like to nitpick my students about things that don’t matter and I like having a variety of things happening during the week.

Oh, and as far as Katie’s Pizza and Pasta. I LOVE their pasta when we go to the restaurant. We haven’t gotten curbside pickup there because it is about 20 minutes away and my experience is the farther you go, the worse the takeout is when you get home to eat it. But the frozen pasta was a bit greasy for our taste. That being said, on the second day (we ate half the dish, then oven reheated the second night) it was better! I think it dried it out just enough to be less oily, but not too dry. But that might simply be a personal preference. We’ve enjoyed the pizzas immensely, and only had one that was a little watery and probably we should have just baked it longer. I think it’s great that the restaurant has sort of reinvented itself during this time. Necessity is the mother of invention. And you can probably order from them if you like. May I recommend the morel mushroom pizza!

In any case, I’d better get going to teach. I have a few this morning, and a few later in the day. In between I am not playing a live concert today but am planning one next week and should back into practicing since I’ve taken a few days off after finishing a short video recording last Wednesday for a difference project.