Heather's weekend started Friday when I let her stay home from school. She wasn't very sick, but she's been coughing and stuffy all week. In the afternoons after school, I could see that she was feeling pretty run down, so I figured a day off would do her good.
We made a "tie dye" cake. She also frosted and decorated it, but I forgot to take pictures before we ate some of it after dinner.
We also cleared off a bit of the pond for skating.
Then today, Saturday, Wayne and Cole wanted to skate too.
We've been happy to get outside for a change after what seemed like endless sub zero and single digit days.
We made some treats for birds.
Wayne joined a music composing club at school. He worked on his piece for a while. He has an online mentor who gave this feedback:
" You're off to a fine start. You have an interesting combination of instruments and some very driving music. This piece has the potential to be highly successful.
Let me deal mostly with the instrumentation. You have bassoon in your score but no music for it. Do you plan on actually using the bassoon? It would make a fine complement and pairing with the flute and give you two woodwinds to go with the strings. If you do, think of it as a bass instrument.
All the parts are fairly low. The flute isn't in its best range to sound against the strings. For some of the time you might want to put it up an octave. It will look really high, but it will be easy for flute to play and it will stand out more. You can do the same thing for violin some of the time. The viola part is also quite low and its final note is out of range by almost an octave. You could instead give the entire part to cello and it would work very well right where it is. It's up to you, but if you stick with viola, you'll need to move the last note and possibly other parts up an octave. The bass, on the other hand, is very high. It will sound better if it's dropped an octave (except for the final note, which will need to stay where it is). Since it sounds an octave lower than written, it will be nice and deep but not that hard to read." Wayne has since made some or all of those changes.
Let me deal mostly with the instrumentation. You have bassoon in your score but no music for it. Do you plan on actually using the bassoon? It would make a fine complement and pairing with the flute and give you two woodwinds to go with the strings. If you do, think of it as a bass instrument.
All the parts are fairly low. The flute isn't in its best range to sound against the strings. For some of the time you might want to put it up an octave. It will look really high, but it will be easy for flute to play and it will stand out more. You can do the same thing for violin some of the time. The viola part is also quite low and its final note is out of range by almost an octave. You could instead give the entire part to cello and it would work very well right where it is. It's up to you, but if you stick with viola, you'll need to move the last note and possibly other parts up an octave. The bass, on the other hand, is very high. It will sound better if it's dropped an octave (except for the final note, which will need to stay where it is). Since it sounds an octave lower than written, it will be nice and deep but not that hard to read." Wayne has since made some or all of those changes.
If you would like to hear Wayne's piece, click on either the red arrow or the grey arrow in the box below. The grey one works for me, the red one doesn't, for some reason. Wayne has named it "Resonance." Note flight is the name of the music writing program. He will be working on it and adding to it in the weeks to come.
Cole ate homemade ice cream and watched Nova.
That's about as exciting as it gets around here these days!
