Two Projects

First, the studio has undergone a bit of a renovation in the past couple months. For about a year and a half I used two white IKEA shelving units to house all my music books and teaching materials. These worked ok but didn't look the greatest and took up a lot of space. So we decided to move them upstairs and use them as toy storage and voila! my hubby got a new construction project.  

He took down the very ugly wall that hid behind the shelves and decided to make a built-in bookcase there instead. He constructed the shelves in a workshop before hauling them into the studio, at which time things looked like this...

 ...and most students' reactions when they came in was "Whoa!!". But his hard work paid off because I now have a lovely space to house anything music related, and it looks wonderful. Thanks Tim!

Second, I have challenged myself to do some memorizing.  I am currently learning Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 21 in C Major, Op. 53 (also known as the Waldstein). I find I work really well if I set goals for myself, so I gave myself a deadline of March 20 to finish off the first movement. At the time it worked out to doing one page every two days. So far I am staying on schedule (yay!)...and since I started memorizing at the end first, I figured I got all the really tough stuff out of the way. But here's a page I tackled the other day and found particularly difficult to get into my brain, no matter how many repetitions I did:

But the good thing is I only have another four pages to go, plus it's really fun to play! Here's a video of this movement for you to watch since my version is not up to par yet. Enjoy!

~ Jennifer

)