Played this morning for a bit, after more than a week off. I was thinking about playing while away, listening to some other operators on my iPod while sitting in airports (Judith LeClair, Five Sacred Trees; Dag Jensen and the Quadriga Bassoon Ensemble, Pictures at an Exhibition; Tamás Benkócs, various Vivaldi concertos), and thinking about 26, and trying to memorize it. But I wasn't playing, and playing is a physical skill. The muscles lose their tone, the fingers forget, and so on. It took awhile to find a reed that was working for me, and mostly I just played scales. But everything seemed to still work. All in all, not as bad as I was expecting, based on the last time I missed a few days.
My goals for 2010 are more or less the same as they were when I took up playing again: learn how to make reeds, so that I don't feel trapped; intonation; and tone. I'm hoping that a year will allow me to at least make a fair bit of progress in these areas, enough so I can start thinking about what I want to do with music, while being able to stand listening to myself play.
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