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Sunday, March 8, 2015

A quickie!

Just a short post today, heading into the studio to work on a piece or two that's been languishing in Garageband on my laptop.

Thought I'd share what's inspiring me this week.

Last weekend I started exploring Ted talks, music-related ones to be specific. A few of my favorites:

Mark Applebaum keeps asking, is this music?

Michael Tilson Thomas goes through the development of notating and recording music

Maya Beiser, cellist, plays some freaking amazing multi-tracked pieces using her cello and her voice

And! We at Quince & Co are hosting a knit along on Ravelry for our 4th annual Scarves, etc collection, and though it doesn't officially start until tomorrow, I found myself with some free time yesterday...so now my Wending cowl is well on its way:


This lovely shade of Owl is Amethyst. 

Have a happy Sunday. xoxo


Sunday, March 1, 2015

Some belly dance love

Last night I went to the dance studio where I am learning belly dance to see the second night of their 4th anniversary showcase--it was so wonderful and inspiring. Though I didn't get to see Friday's performance, I spent some quality time on youtube this morning to check out belly dance fused with Celtic dance, Rwandan dance, and Martial Arts...and more of the styles I did see, theatrical belly dance, Egyptian folk dance, all kinds of fusion styles, and Chinese ribbon dance--all are fascinating. I had to really try hard to keep myself from grooving along with the dancers. We did get to dance though! My teacher, Rosa, got us in the audience up during the intermission to teach us an Armenian line dance. Super fun, she dragged us all around the (very crowded) room.

I get so inspired by the music that dancers choose for their pieces. I have yet to learn how to choreograph a specific dance to a piece of music for a performance, but it does seem to me that it's kind of like writing lyrics for a song. Most of my own music is written music first, lyrics after. Instead of adding words, melody, and harmony to the instrumental bed to expand the mood and feeling of the piece, you're adding a visual interpretation with movement, costume, facial expressions. And...the dancer uses movement to highlight certain rhythms--could be right with the percussion or something that complements or offsets it. As a person obsessed with rhythm, that's my favorite aspect of belly dance.

As I mentioned last week, this past September I collaborated with my friend Aepril (whose blog I visit almost daily) on a performance for the annual Occult Salem festival in Salem, MA. She is an extremely multi-skilled individual: she is a singer-songwriter, belly dancer, poet, astrologer, photographer, the list goes on. She wrote a few songs and poems that I played cello on, and for her I wrote a dance piece on my cello (using this fun piece of equipment), which was something completely new and fun for me. The experience of the dance and the music evolving together was really interesting, and something I think about every time I go to a belly dancing show. Maybe there's more of that in my future ;) I definitely cozied up to that Boomerang pedal, and now have hours and hours of crazy noises and loops I love with weird harmonies and fun rhythms...*sigh*.

One of the amazing parts of coming up with this performance was the fact that we live in different states, and all of our rehearsals except for the one day of show, were done via Skype. Yes, I said Skype. Also something completely new to me, even as a piece of technology, let alone as a way of rehearsing a piece of music with someone. To put this in perspective...I still have a flip phone, folks.

In knitting news, I totally cheated on my blog on Friday...once in a great while I get to write on my company's blog and share cool new knitwear designs I find on Ravelry that we didn't publish, but that use our yarn.

I haven't been knitting much lately, but I do want to get back to the idea of making this sweater (the pullover version--read the story about the sweater in this post), especially since now Quince has made the perfect color for me to make it in--take a look at Audouin (second to last color on the bottom row). Perfect, right?

Oh and...last week's show at Local Sprouts was such a great night, so much love, so many friends, so much awesome music. Really grateful for that night. Our South China set sounded so good with the extra special musicians joining us that recording those versions of those songs seems like a really good idea right now. Give us some time, we might just do it!