New SwimMuse website coming soon!

Take a look at swimmuse.com the week after Thanksgiving. We'll? No, I will---have a whole new site going. It will take awhile to get all of the art up and will take constant tweaking to get it just right. Let me know what you think. I'm most interested in how to approach customizing/licensing. Husband Alan says licensing sounds too legal and heavy. The idea is to make it easy. Like adding text to items at Zazzle...I can do that right online! For a private file to be licensed, sent via internet---like for a team event---will cost a bit but not a whole ton. What would work for you? I can't do it for nothing but I want to make my art affordable for people to use.

Total Immersion Swimming Freestyle Demo by Shinji Takeuchi

Speedy Cello

I had a cello teacher aggavation moment two weeks ago. They happen sometimes and I usually figure out what to do about it sometime later. I need a little time to process. It wasn't a biggie. This young man of 15 is finally starting to play out on the cello and he's also starting to share his opinions. Great. No, really! This particular moment, which probably won't make sense to you unless you are a string player, he claimed that he wanted to play a half note open A so he'd have time to shift to fourth position E. For once my filter was off and I looked at him, surprised, declaring that that was perhaps the easiest shift on the cello and he certainly didn't need two beats to get there. Wow! So in a few days I uncomfortably realized that I wasn't teaching my kids speedy cello. I am such an analyzer, so much a build it from the bottom up, take it slow, understand it--that I've been going too far that direction and never balancing the other way. Swimming gets me thinking of this because all of the CUBU kids, or most of them, are racing. Now not all, but that's a lot of what they are after. Going fast. Going smart is secondary to them, most likely, but the coaches try to get the smart and fast working together.
So I realized I needed to have speed cello week and that's what I did. Fast C Major, two or three octaves, adding one note at a time---fast. In a slur. Having the left hand as more of a gesture than individual fingers. And it's not that we don't work on this in music they are working on. But C Major is kind of the fundamental, you can work on anything here, scale for the cello. It covers the whole instrument and it's the scale we cellists know the best. You can't help it.
So I was surprised at how well this went. I was scared of this as a younger player because I didn't want to make a mess of it. So I'd slow down. But that's not the point here. Of course we don't want a mess as a goal but it's more to latch on to a feel. I think I understood it in the bow first. How to fit lots of little motions into a bigger gesture. Because if you try to micromanage each tiny move you will freeze into a block of ice and your arms and fingers will sieze up, freeze, crack into a million pieces, you fall off the fingerboard and it is a mess.
So--swimming comes back to help me with what I already knew but forgot. Again. How cool is that?

Swimming and music disciplines--a lot alike.

I think part of what has kept me swimming since I got into it "seriously" nine years ago is that the discipline of it is so familiar to me. As a cellist I understand the importance of technique. And doing laps is like doing scales with their eternal variations. I'm sure someone will explain to me how swimming is like a Bach Suite but so far I can't say I've quite reached that correlation. I did recently state that if you can handle performing a B Minor Mass or Missa Solemnis then you certainly have the mental fortitude to do a long distance swim. Of course this is me giving myself a pep talk about swimming the Chesapeake Bay in June. I am not feeling prepared. So--practice, right?