When I first started my inquiry project, I’d already gotten sick. Several years ago, I never got sick because I didn’t have the time to get sick, but then covid happened, and now it seems I get a big kind of sick once a year. Hardly a week into the BEd program and I’d had the flu – all before going into elementary schools, a.k.a., big germ playground. Rounding the corner of my first month down, I thought I’d paid my dues. Now I’m not confident that I actually caught a cold, and that going to bed without drinking water after having a single pint had nothing to do with the matter, but either way, I was either hardly sleeping or catching up on sleep all this week and only saw through about 50% of my commitments. In the neglected 50% was my flute.
At the time of writing, I haven’t opened my case since that first time. I probably could have spent a little bit of time yesterday, but it was a long, long day and we were at the season finale of watching The Bear. I could have done it today too, but I got lost in the sauce with another project I’m working on for math pedagogy. I do have some respect for deadlines, though, so today I missed class but arranged the composition.
Behold: a sneak peek of what ended up being a nearly 40-bar piece, to my best approximation. I didn’t use 0.25 speed, which seems like progress, but I did stoop to 0.50 speed once and it felt kind of triggering. And before you think, wow, she really has a handle on her musical notation, may I introduce you to Noteflight?
Ironically, because I played the rhythm section for the majority of my band life, I have a pretty awful sense of tempo, so I can’t tell you how happy I was that Noteflight ate up all the “sheet music notation online” SEOs. It really was a great program to use, not just because it was smart enough to arrange stems, count up all the bars, and reorder beats, it also plays your piece back to you and provides a lot of shortcuts. I found that typing a + (shift=) made the selected note a sharp. I learned copy and paste worked for duplicating bars. I eventually experimented typing “g g f d e c” and out popped the corresponding notes on the program. Like, really great.
I can’t say that I was nearly as productive or giddy this week as I wanted to be, but I still have a little to show for it. As of today, I am supposed to have transcribed this piece (1/1) and started working on the finger placements for 3 scales (1/3). On paper, I’m behind, but I’m not actually feeling that lost..? Who knows why time is stretching out in front of me, and whether that feeling is likely to last, but I feel alright. A plateau is a plateau is a plateau.
