Travels With My Cello
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May 05, 2013
St. Valentine's Day Massacre
Read more →I sat in the front seat of my car with Christopher, the furry hood of my parka pulled down low over my eyes. Silently, we passed a small flask of Jose Cuervo back and forth. My stomach was churning and even though it was snowing outside, I was sweating like a pig. I thought about crawling out behind the car in the snow and just have Chris back over me…then go forwards, just for good measure. We were back in Georgia, it was Valentine’s Day, and while most people contemplate love, chocolates, flowers and other Valentine-alia, I was about...
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May 02, 2013
The StringWorks Setup™ - expect the BEST from your violin, viola, or cello
Read more →While StringWorks has always practiced the highest level of quality in our instrument setups, to be sure each violin, viola, and cello performs to its absolute full potential, we've formalized the process a bit by naming it The StringWorks Setup™, as it deserves to be highlighted given its importance in how an instrument plays, assuring both ease of use and rewarding tone. On our new webpage dedicated to highlighting the precise points of each StringWorks Setup™ - http://www.stringworks.com/pages/the-stringworks-setup-assuring-every-instruments-plays-its-finest - we hope that violinists, violists, and cellists will take a close look at their own instruments, or those they plan to purchase, to assure that...
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Apr 18, 2013
Back in the USA! Cellospeak 2011
Read more →I was sitting in my dorm room at Bryn Mawr college, feeling not a little like a giant doofus. Chris and my kids had just laid scratch out of the parking lot, heading for the King-of-Prussia mall, and I was left in a 8x10 monkish cell at an elite women’s college with a bag of clothes and a cello. I knew absolutely nobody, and while I am not normally a shy person, I was feeling a little… wrong footed. I was at cello camp. For a whole week. With 100 people I had never met before. Who does that? Was...
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Mar 27, 2013
Lost in Translation
Read more →Lost in Translation After about two weeks of lessons, I took inventory: near as I could tell, Misha had about 20 or so usable words of English. By “usable,” I mean words that could reasonably be used in the context of a cello lesson. I mean, I knew he knew the word “cancer” but it’s hard to imagine how that particular word might apply in a music lesson. I had a few more words of usable Russian, but he tended to speak too quickly for me to understand his answer. Weirdly, we filled holes with German, another language I...
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Mar 10, 2013
The Russian Way
Read more →And so it went. Week after week, I made the trip down the hill to the conservatory for my cello lessons with Misha. He sat facing me, knee to knee, while I played open strings; we weren't moving on to actual notes until my bow and my strings formed a perfect 90 degree angle, and I released my crazy death grip on the frog. Sometimes he would hold my bowing hand and the tip and move the bow back and forth across the strings with me. For an hour. Misha gave me an old exercise book to take home, the bottom of...
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Feb 26, 2013
What Love Sounds Like....
Read more →This is a piece called "Nocturne" by Georgian composer, Vazha Azarashvili. Georgians know it of course, but I had never heard it until my friend Manana Chanturishvili played it for me. Her husband, Paata, plays violin in this recording. My teacher, Misha, plays the cello part on an exquisite 1865 Giuseppe Baldantoni cello. Enjoy!
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Feb 17, 2013
Misha
Read more →It was a beautiful, brisk October morning in Tbilisi, the kind of day that makes you think of apple cider, bonfires, and Halloween. I strapped my cello to my back, and made my way down five flights of stairs, and out onto Kotetishvili Street where I lived. My neighborhood was an interesting mix of new apartment buildings and 19th century houses, now crumbling to bits. Picking my way across the cobblestones, I began the slog down the hill to the Tbilisi State Conservatory. I was going to meet my Georgian cello teacher for the first time and we were...
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Feb 03, 2013
Everybody Knows Boris!
Read more →Marianne Ide So how exactly does one move a cello from Yemen to the Republic of Georgia…without a flight case? I spent quite a while pondering that question, because it appeared I had two fairly awful choices. One: somehow, get a flight case shipped to Yemen and take the cello home with me for a month. Two: ship it straight to Georgia in the box it came in. The first option quickly became impractical and horribly expensive. Option two scared the crap out of me, but since I couldn't think of another solution, Yemeni shipping would have to work. In retrospect, I...
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Jan 20, 2013
From Sana'a to Stalin: Moving to Georgia
Read more →There was no doubt about, Yemen was falling apart. In the days and weeks after Mohamed Bouazizi doused himself in gasoline and set himself ablaze in Tunis, Yemen would succumb to the rage that dominated the Arab world throughout 2010 and 2011. Leaving just seemed like a good idea. Christopher and I had applied for and received a transfer to another school, in the Republic of Georgia. We began the long, tedious and very painful process of packing our traveling circus of belongings and saying goodbye to all of our friends and students. Tanya tried to put a bright...
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Jan 13, 2013
Concerto for Al Qaeda
Read more →Marianne Ide It was always hard to know what to do with the Warden’s security messages that passed through our email in boxes every so often. The State Department took its job of warning Americans of potential danger quite seriously, and in Yemen, danger was part of the collective conscience, to varying degrees. The Yemen Post would report such exciting tidbits like “Al Qaeda Franchising into Southern Yemen” and “Yemen Proves Attractive Breeding Ground for Al Qaeda.” But what did that mean exactly? 9/11 proved that you can’t turn a rock over in the sands of Arabia and not find someone waving...