Dalcroze and Arizona

It has been awhile since I've written. The past two weeks were filled with an intensive Dalcroze workshop and then this weekend was a trip to Phoenix, Arizona for a friend's wedding.

my Dalcroze partner for Level 2 Certification, Miyuki Watanabe;
This was only my 2nd Dalcroze test, but the feeling before taking one is not unlike the one I have before doing a belt test.  There are many parts and subparts of the test [Eurhythmics: performing a song composed to a given rhythm, walking that rhythm while conducting, canons in 6/8 and 3/4 (stepping what the piano played in the previous measure, while listening to the current one!), follows, complementary rhythm in hands and feet and switching, etc; Solfege: sing various keys in fixed Do; and Improvisation:  playing the piano!  doing it for people to move to, doing it as an improvisation, and playing for a given image], and there is an element of the unknown.  Sometimes people are judged to be ready and sometimes not.  It is not a guaranteed thing that by taking a summer workshop you will be able to advance to the next level.  My biggest challenge was, and still is, playing the piano, because I am not a pianist.  I found myself trying to internally balance the feeling of wanting to succeed with the pleasure of learning for the sake of it.  It is a difficult thing to let go of, in myself and I think in the culture in which we live.  Being entitled to success based on the work one has done or because people have always said you are smart, is a tough thing to let go of.  So it was good to have another opportunity to face those feelings.  In the end I passed, but just barely in the piano skills area.  I will be continuing this training specifically, thanks to the encouragement and support of the mentors in the program, who, lucky for me, live in New York!
This was the other cool thing about the program–meeting the people who came from different parts of the world to be there.  One of whom is pictured here, a woman from Japan who spoke and understood about as much English as I do Japanese.  It was a good chance to speak Japanese, and to embrace someone doing something difficult in another language.  Luckily for her, she is a piano and solfege teacher in Japan, and has a wonderful sense of harmony, so once the instructions were understood she was set to go.  It was great to meet another Japanese friend who has now returned to that repository of untouchable friends living somewhere, thousands of miles away in this world.  Or so I believe.  Good to have had the experience with her.

Wedding!
We spent the weekend in Phoenix, AZ for the wedding of Christina Havens and Michael Byerly, two friends from Japan.  And they were married by another good friend from that time.  They held the wedding in the Musical Instrument Museum which was a really cool collection of instruments from everywhere in the world, and with a gathering of only about 50 people, it was a special and intimate experience.

I also learned a lot about another part of the country.  It was really mind blowing to see the dessert, so different from any landscape I had grown up in and certainly different from New York City.  And I learned that they get monsoons this time of year and that they are sometimes preceded by dust storms, one of which is pictured her in the distance.  

There were so many cacti and they were beautifully dramatic during sunset, silhouetted against the mountain ridges and rich sky.  I failed to have a camera at any of those points, sunsets or otherwise, but couldn't leave Arizona without at least one picture.  They are very large and very old, and grow just about anywhere, even intersections.