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No, this isn't an article about crawling around the fingerboard of our instrument, yet I hope readers will find value in my recent ruminations about perspective and subtlety, and ways to apply these ideas to their life and in the practice room.
Listen ...
After 15 months of lockdowns and restrictions in California and many other parts of the country, upon reaching June 15th, the date when California’s year long mask mandate would be lifted, we had less than a 2% positivity rate throughout the state ...
This difficult conversation concerning the origins of many popular folk song melodies came up in my teaching studio recently. In searching for ideas on how to reconcile the fact that a number of popular American folk songs have racist origins (whether ...
We’re all wondering how life will adjust to the current global crisis surrounding the spread of the coronavirus. Seven cases were reported in my county over the last few days. Until then, people didn’t seem particularly concerned locally. The stores ...
The question posed on a forum was: “How can people find great music and new artists if they don’t go to bars or listen to Spotify?”
Wow, well, I couldn’t help but share what myself and a network of talented and heartfelt musicians around the ...
It happens to all of us. We get impatient with our musical progress and suddenly we start questioning whether we should bother playing music at all. We start wondering, are we really cut out for this? Are we ever going to get any better? Have we reached ...
We received a message today from a house concert host who's decided to end his concert series due to "music becoming too divisive." He said he just can't have artists bringing that kind of "negativity and conflict" into his home ...
Never heard of Parkour? I hadn’t either until a few weeks ago when a friend tried it. Wikipedia describes it, based on the original French name, l'art du déplacement (the art of movement), as a “physical discipline of training to overcome any obstacle ...
My partner and I have a friend who jokes about the fact that we never have anything but very specialized magazines lying around. Next to the piles of Strings Magazine and The Strad, my non-specialized reads are as specialized as Yoga Journal, VegeLife, ...
This is an interesting article that came my way recently. Rather than answering the question: “What value does beauty have in our society,” I feel the experiment asks us to ponder the importance of beauty in our own lives. If our lives have become ...
I went out to see Mike Beck and the Bohemian Saints play at Plaza Linda in Carmel Valley Village on Saturday and ended up sitting in with the band for the second set. The experience brought me back to the first gig I played with the Cardinale Brothers’ ...
Please email Laurel at laurel@laurelthomsen.com if you have a violin, viola, fiddle, music biz, or practice related question you’d like answered in the blog or on a podcast, have a story or insight to share, or if you’d like to inquire about violin, viola, or fiddle lessons with Laurel, in-person or via Skype, FaceTime, or Zoom.
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Laurel Thomsen Violin, Viola, Vocals Performance, Instruction, Recording Based in Santa Cruz, California
