Quo Vadis?

In keeping with the 1970s vibe, I left an extra button of my shirt open.

As Wallace said to Grommit, “Well - I think we got away with that, eh pooch?”

While there are always things that you wish went differently, I think the performance yesterday was, well, pretty good. It did leave me hungry for more, however: as much as I reached a summit in pulling off this piece after a month of practicing for an average of about an hour a day, the ideas I discovered, from the YouTube performers and The Advancing Guitarist will need more time to get really settled into my playing. There’s a lot left to explore, and if anything, this experience gave me a better view of the next summit.

To that end, I registered for the Creative Cello Workshop, a five-week online course taught by Eugene Friesen. I took a series of online lessons with Maestro Friesen some years ago, and we were a good fit. The workshop (I’m expecting) will address improvisation, particularly in jazz/commercial contexts… I may finally do something with Beck’s Song Reader.

The question though, is where to go from Wuorinen? I have some contenders, and some of them are pulling pretty strongly. Wuorinen’s Cello Variations III is one of them: after all, it was written for Sherry at the same point in his life that I just reached.

The thing that really made this project work, however, was the hard deadline. While I may get lucky and land another gig, it’s more likely that I’ll have to find a creative way to create and enforce another goal. I have a YouTube channel that I don’t use very much; maybe keep going with a piece each month?

The other elephant in the room, which I’m profoundly aware of, is “for what purpose”? I’m doing this because I enjoy it, but it doesn’t pay the bills in any significant way, or really benefit anyone except me. Unapologetically modernist solo cello music from the 1970s has a “rather narrow audience,” shall we say. Sometimes the selfishness of taking the time and energy to pursue this sort of cello playing (particularly at my age) is a little difficult to justify.

I will probably have to give it up sooner or later, but for now, anyway, I’m getting away with it (eh, pooch?).