Despite what I’d heard from friends, sleeping with an APAP machine (like a CPAP machine) has not really brought on a welter of nocturnal weirdness: most nights when I sleep, I may dream but I don’t recall much, if anything. I’d say the frequency for my remembering dreams has risen from maybe once a year to maybe once every three months or so. Last night was a little different, though.
It’s 2024, and the blogosphere has been passé for over a decade*, so I don’t get a ton of comments here anymore. One type of comment I do still sometimes get is the drive-by-snipe.
Although I started getting physiotherapy for my back problem, I’ve still managed to be quite consistent with practicing over the past week, though I had to miss a couple of days—one due to my wife’s schedule, and another due to inability to book the practice room when I was available. I’ve continued with the Ferling studies and also working my way through the altissimo fingerings in the Larry Teal. I should be doing a couple of altissimo fingering charts for myself soon, one for alto and one for tenor. (I haven’t started working on that on my bari yet.) When …
Last week, practice was a bit of a mess. I had trouble booking the room on a couple of days—the practice space I use has been getting busy!—and I also caught a cold, which usually occasions time off practice for me. On the days I did practice, I spent time on tunes as usual, but also on some Ferling Studies (yes, really!). I still am not sold on the idea I need to get these perfect, but they have some handy fingering exercises and challenges in them, even if they’re not really my kind of thing to play. It’s wild …
I had a lot of nervous energy to burn during the Isle of Joy Kickstarter, and I let off steam by making music. At some point I realized that I was making an Isle of Joy soundtrack, so we decided to release it for free to all backers of the campaign. If you’re a backer, you should have received a code to download it free about a month ago. (Some people have been having issues with the codes, I’m not sure why. They email saying that their code is not working, but it’s still on the list of unredeemed codes. …
So, I’ve been getting lovely messages containing images like this for the last couple of days: People are starting to receive their copies of Isle of Joy. It’s lovely to see the book out there in the world, and I’ve been hearing positive things from those who’ve received it, too. I should be seeing my own copy before too long, but for now I’m content to vicariously enjoy these sightings. It’s exciting to see the book in people’s hands! Oh, and if you missed the campaign, you can still order yourself a copy. There’s a link from the Kickstarter page, …
So, last week’s practice was pretty solid, though I got sick over the weekend and didn’t make it to the practice room on Sunday. Again, I did a lot more alto practice than anything else, though the tenor and bari got some play too. Tunes-wise, I worked on a bunch:
This is the fourth in a series of posts about books I’ve read in 2024. May was rough for reading, due to a crazy work schedule, a crazy translation schedule, and a heavy practice schedule, so I didn’t really get much reading done that month—or, rather, I finished relatively little in May, though I had several books on the go. Therefore, I’m posting about May and June together in a single entry here.
So, I took a hiatus from practicing sax there for a while. In May I got quite sick for a few weeks, and practicing was out of the question. Then I got really busy between work and a big translation project my wife and I took on, plus working out the reservation system at the practice room I use was just a bit too complicated for me to wrap my brain around. The good news is that I’m back at it. However, now that I am, I’m going to change up how I write about it here. Specifically, I’m not …
…. and, we’re back. Years ago, I started a series of posts covering each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, one (or a few) at a time. I’m picking up that series now, since I have a little time again. (Who knew having a kid would make someone so busy?) The readings are probably still going to remain atypical, not so much for the reasons made clear in my first post in this series as because atypical is my general approach to the Cantos. II seem to have abandoned the fiction project that inspired this series, but I’d like to …