Music Update

I got to play the Prelude from Bach Unaccompanied Cello Suite #2 at a talent show two weeks ago. I really think I need to be warmed up when I try to play Bach. It went okay. I felt it was a very mediocre performance. I have definitely played it better.

What I realized is that it was only the second time I have played solo in front of a large crowd of people (I think there were probably 200).

There’s this part in the piece where there is a grand pause… it is the only place in the piece where there is a rest, and it is for two whole beats. After I played the first beat, which was a chord, I was able to listen to the crowd and there was hardly a sound. It was so quiet that I actually heard one person say (under their breath) “wow!” I nailed that section and it felt really good!

I recently requested (through interlibrary loan) this bibliography of  compositions for the cello after 1960. I am fascinated.  There was (apparently) an explosion of pieces written in the 1900’s. I was looking for some good melodic solos to play. I’m working on the Appalachian Suite by Marc O’Conner for solo cello. It is a great piece, but slightly over my head. I can *almost* get all the notes. It still needs a lot of work though.

Cello and cataloging

I took a cataloging class last semester. One of our assignments was to make up a fake book title, using our names as the author and catalog it according to both Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classifications. Because I play the cello, I made up a book title that had to do with playing the cello and classified it accordingly. Then I got curious, and wanted to see how many books my library had on the subject. Our library had three books about playing the cello, but what I discovered was that they had ALL been assigned the wrong call number. I left them alone at the time because I figured there were only three of them, and no one would really know that the books were classified incorrectly except for the people in tech services and possibly the librarians.

I was telling this cataloging story at lunch and our cataloger happened to be there. Well, she couldn’t leave it alone, so she went upstairs, found the books, realized that they WERE classified incorrectly, and changed all the call numbers.

The two things that amuse me about this incident is that catalogers do not like it when they know there are mistakes in a record and that the numbers the books had previously been assigned were only one decimal off from where they should have been classified. So they went right back in the same spot. But now they are probably happier, because they are now classified correctly.

All this to say that hey, I can effect change in my library!