Halloween Fun

Saturday October 24 we had our Violin Group Lessons for this month.  The theme of course was Halloween, and several violinists showed off great costumes!  The best game of the day was Violin Jeopardy. Miss Ruth reads a piece title or a description of a piece.  Everyone stands poised with their violin bow on the E string ready to play a fast tremolo (that is their bell!) when they want to answer correctly.  After a correct answer the student then plays the piece with the group and wins candy corn and pennies for points. The Jeopardy categories were Book 1 pieces for 3 points, Halloween Songs for 4 points and Christmas Carols for 3 points.  We often have many more categories to choose from when we play Jeopardy but on this day we were focused on Halloween musical tricks and Christmas Carols since the holidays are just around the corner.  Here is a picture of Miss Ruth in her award winning Galadriel costume for her family party.

 However this past Saturday she was simply a nice witch with a black hat.

Turning Suzuki pieces into Halloween Songs was fun.  We played Twinkle Twinkle Little Witch by making our first fingers low on the A and the E strings.  We played Go Tell the Goblin by playing B flat on the A string and F natural on the E string in Go Tell Aunt Rhody.  It made a spooky impression!  It's fun to play tremolo bowing on Song of the Wind and turn it into Song of the Spooks. We turned May Song into October Song by playing low 1's and low 2's throughout the piece.  Everybody knew exactly which piece to play when Miss Ruth said, "A piece about Dancing Scary Old Ladies...."  Witches' Dance by Paganini of course!  Here are a few of the great people who came to Halloween group in their costumes: 

                    L to R: Jane, Grant, Sophie, Abby and Maeve

                  Masquerade, Queen Maleficent and Professor Trelawny

                  The short and the long of it, we all play a mean fiddle!!

The Book 3-5 Group swelled to 12 people counting Miss Ruth.  In this group we practiced our Telemann Concerto for 4 Violins that is one of our featured numbers at the Christmas Concerts.  Please enjoy listening to the audio files of this fun piece! 

Telemann 1st mvt. Telemann 2nd mvt.