It has long been a goal of mine to write a book about learning to play an instrument well. In the 1990’s I started on the process by writing 23 newsletters on a variety of topics I thought were relevant and interesting.
Here are the titles of the topics I covered:
- Discipline
- Stage Fright
- Students and Teachers
- Talent
- Practicing Skills
- Ego
- Cello Posture, Form and Body-Mind
- Self-Evaluation and Paying Attention
- Discouragement
- Motivation
- Easy and Hard
- Tales and Lessons from the American Cello Congress (1996)
- What does it mean to be “Musical?”
- A Cello Student in the Family – Common Sense Approaches to Common Problems
- How We Do Things In Our House – How parents of my students handle practicing in their households.
- The Politics of Musical Potential
- Becoming a Professional Musician – Some considerations for the starry-eyed.
- Who’s Better?
- Musical Success
- What I’ve learned – Twenty Newsletters Later
- Quitting and Voices From the Musical Future
- Finding Mary’s House – the problem of location on a fretless instrument
- A Good Match – Values and Goals
Now that self-publishing is a thing, and not that hard or expensive, I do hope to collect these newsletters into printed and/or digital form. Please let me know if you might be interested in a copy if and when I get it done!
I do have a certain quantity of hard copies of each newsletter listed above which students of mine are welcome to borrow.
