NESI Strings Camp

June 21st-26th was the New England Suzuki Institute's strings camp, held at St. Joseph's College on beautiful Lake Sebago. TBear and I went for the week. However, instead of staying in the dorms we chose to stay at the lovely Family and Friends Campground in Standish. We were combining 'business' with pleasure since TBear loves to camp, as did some other strings campers that week. Our site was next to a frog pond, which also happens to be full of fish, but we somehow managed to forget the fishing pole this year. I'm not sure TBear would have done much fishing anyway since it poured most of the time that we were there. The campground owners are very accomodating, and encourage the strings students to use their lovely lodge with its piano for practice. TBear chose to practice at our site instead because there were quite a few piano students staying there that week too, so we left the lodge and its piano to them. Because it poured all week, this is where he wound up doing most of his practicing. : )

We were exceedingly thankful for the big, new, beautiful tent that my brother mailed to us from Ohio just before we left. We were able to store all our cooking gear and food in the tent with us, as well as the chairs! We listened to the rain come down night after night. At the beginning of the week, we also listened to the wind whipping the trees around and flapping the tent sides causing us to wonder if we might wind up in Texas! That lasted about four days, then finally, on Thursday, the wind died down and we had a little sunshine and warmth. Friday turned out to be fairly sunny too, and I was able to mow our lawn on Saturday after we got home. But it's raining again today.

Not one to let a little rain stop him (no thunder or lightening), TBear went swimming in the campground pool. I watched, hood pulled up, and TBear's t-shirt protecting the book I was reading from the rain. He had a good time. That's a nice heated section of the pool he's sitting in. He tried hard to get me in with him, but I wasn't biting. It wasn't the getting in that bothered me so much as the getting out again. Brrr.

TBear thoroughly enjoyed this year's strings camp. Each day he not only had a semi-private master class (seen here with his teacher, Joanne from Ohio, I think) but he also was part of a chamber group for the first time this year, which he really loved.
In addition to all that playing each day, TBear chose two other classes to attend. The first additional class he chose was a fun kind of music theory class called Sight Singing. The second was a Musical History Tour, which was a fabulous preview to what we'll be studying next year in history. I took copious notes, which will hopefully still make sense to me as I dig them out again this year when we get there. The guy who led the class was a stitch to watch and listen to. He kept the kids enthralled, telling them the story line of various operas, which he also had them come up and act out as he told the story, before playing some of the musical scores from them. It really was a very cool way to learn about the history of musical eras and what events sort of heralded each one in, or delineated the time periods. (I think the opera being described here is "La Boheme.")

For example, we learned that the Baroque period was heralded in by the invention of opera in 1600 when Claudio Monteverdi wrote "L'Orfeo." It was the first dramatic, musical (or operatic) presentation of the story of the legendary musician Orpheus, who tries (unsuccessfully, I might add... I guess it's tragic opera :) to get his beloved Eurydice back from the Underworld by the power of his music. What is memorable about this particular opera, we learned, is that it was the first masterpiece of its kind, and is the most often told.

Another interesting observation we made in this class about the Baroque period was the connection between the fascination with, and advancements made, in science and its reflection on music composition. William Harvey discovered the human circulatory system, Johannes Kepler came up with the laws of planetary motion, Galileo (known as the father of modern science) improved the telescope and was the first to clearly state that the laws of nature are mathematical, and so on. Composers of this time, such as Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel, created more mathematically organized music. Besides cantatas, minuets, gavottes, and bourrees, Bach was a genius at writing fugues. (One of my favorites is his "Little Fugue" in G minor.) Bach was so influential in the Baroque period that it ends when he dies in 1750.

On the last night of strings camp, the fiddle class plays for a contradance. Preferring to play rather than dance, TBear got copies of the tunes, spent a short while brushing up on them, and then played with the fiddlers. It was a great time. Afterwards, when we returned to the campground, the owners invited all the families to make ice cream sundaes and swim for an hour to celebrate the end of our week. They really seem to enjoy having the young musicians stay at their campground, and they always make us feel so welcome every time we stay there. In spite of all the wind and chilly rain, it really was a fun week of music and camping.