Winter Concert Reflection, 12/15/16

Aniela Crayton

Dr. Wang

Thursday December 15th, 2016

B4 Symphony Orchestra

Winter Concert Reflection

Preparation for Concert:

• I think that I spent enough time practicing but I think that some of my practicing techniques could be improved upon.
• One thing was my intonation, I need to find a more affective way to improve upon it.  Many times I found myself playing the piece over and over to improve my intonation, where I feel a more affective way to improve my intonation would be to work on each note individually and s slowly.
• I worked a lot on my bow technique, but sometimes in class I found that my bowings did not correlate with everyone else's and I kept having to change them, so my bowing was not always consistent.
• A worked a lot on dynamics, because that was something that was talked about a lot last concert as something we needed to improve upon for next concert. I think that I did a good job at improving upon it and made a conserted effort to play the dynamics and play musically.

In Class Participation:

• I participated in class and attempted to improve upon my playing each class.  Especially during sectionals I tried to appreciate and fix the problem areas that the first and second chair suggested, especially intonation issues and fingering suggestions.

Concert and Group Results Discussion:

• To begin, I really enjoyed Romeo and Juliet.  I feel that this piece was really interesting because we played it with the choir, and that added another dimension to the piece.  Furthermore, I especially enjoyed the piece after number 4, I thought it was really pretty and in many ways a stark contrast from the rest of the piece.
• Dovark was my favorite piece, but I think it was the one that had the most problems.  Especially with intonations for me and I think some of the other first violins getting the sharps and the high positions resulted in poor intonation.
• Sleigh Ride was probably the most fun songs that we did.  In the middle it felt like the whole orchestra was moving together and I get consumed by it.  Furthermore I thought that the dynamics was good but the rythem and musicality of the piece was not always there.  For me, at least, knowing the song made it harder for me to get the rythems right, because sometimes the rythem I thought it was was wrong and hard to get out of my head.
• The last piece, Orphee, was the hardest in the beginning but as I learned it I began to really enjoy it.  For me some of the shifts were hard and so some of the intonation was off.  Also, dynamics weren't as strong for me in this piece.  Finally, as a whole of bowing was also slightly off in style.