Carlevaro - Compositions

Dale Needles Hi Dale, hope you're doing well. I do miss it quite a lot. In fact, I'd mentioned this to Martin in one of the livestreams a few weeks back. So, please go ahead. I'll try my best to participate.

Dale Needles I agree with you Dale and also miss the Challenges.  Would a composer like Manuel Ponce fit into the Latin American criteria for your challenge?  I was looking at a nice little piece by him recently.

Thanks for your initiative on this. It's much appreciated!

Dale Needles Definitely, Dale. That would be great. 

Barney Thanks, and Ponce for sure! BTW, Carlevaro in his youth performed for Ponce and was a big admirer of him.

Dale Needles Great!  Very interesting about the Carlevaro/Ponce connection.

Lars Kjøller-Hansen Hope you will join our Music of Latin America Challenge here on the Carlevaro Discussion Forum beginning on October 1st and extending through October 31st. 

Lars Kjøller-Hansen Thanks for your post. Have a great trip to Spain to one of my favorite regions. The cave art in that area is spectacular as is the vino. My two favorite cities are Bilbao and Ribadesalla.  Hope you can follow the Challenge during your travels and maybe pop in with a piece at the end of October.

Dale Needles Great, Dale. Thanks for doing this. Hopefully this will lead to a more official acknowledgement by TB. I would like to use this to revive my Tres Apuntes I & II pieces by Brouwer. Hopefully, at some point I will have revived (and retained) enough pieces to actually add some new ones!

Lars Kjøller-Hansen Hey Lars, I think Latin America refers to any country in the Americas that is a Romance language speaking country. so, basically any country in the Americas that is not the USA or Canada. (I guess the Quebec province in Canada could technically make claim to being Latin American since it is principally French speaking.)

Have a great time in Spain! My family and I visited Spain and Portugal for the first time a couple of years ago (well, first for me, my wife and daughter were there earlier). We definitely want to go back.

As to the challenges, I agree with your assessment - the challenges have become less attended as time went by. However, I am hoping TB would provided a dedicated forum for the challenges that could be member directed as Dale is doing (and Eric did in the past). I think it wouldn't require any official monitoring but would be easy to locate.

I also agree that 1 month is never long enough to learn a piece - certainly for me. 

Blaise Laflamme I am in agreement and will work with you on setting this up. 

Dale Needles Blaise LaflammeLars Kjøller-Hansen I'm glad this is being brought up, since I've kind of missed doing them regularly. I like the idea of having some long-running threads, but I hope it's in addition to, instead of in place of, the periodic month-long challenges. I think the closed-ended ones encourage a little more participation when there's a start and end date, and they're moderated a little with the weekly posts. Or maybe it's just that I'm lazy and need a deadline. But, I expect others need more motivation too, since the practice diary that was supposed to be for sharing progress on a piece you're working on has had two posts in the last 8 months, and I expect there would be a lot more activity in the Carlevaro thread if there were a month-long Microestudio or other relevant challenge, rather than leaving it up to people to post a new topic here. Just a thought. 

Also, Lars, like Jack pointed out with his Brouwer, I've never thought the challenges were only for entirely new pieces. Maybe I've got the wrong idea, but I've always thought they could also be for presenting a favorite from your repertoire, dusting off a piece you like, showing some reworked fingerings, learning or creating an etude, learning a single phrase, etc. Enjoy Spain. I've only ever been to Cadiz, but loved it. One of my favorite cities ever. 

Steve Price Blaise Laflamme Lars Kjøller-Hansen Steve, you make some excellent points. I will work with Blaise to come up with something that can serve both yours and Lars' suggestions.  We will announce it by the October 1st and know that it is work in progress and will evolve as we get members' feedback.