30 Day Music Challenge Part #1

I love, love a good 30 day challenge. I’ve, mostly unsuccessfully, tried to run a multitude of 30 challenges and experiments. In an effort not to overload myself with anymore challenges than what I already have going right now, I wanted to do this 30 Day Music Challenge, but in 2 days.

Why 2 days? Well, I found this list today, pictured below, but want to spend some time tomorrow building a playlist so that I can share that completed list with you all. So tomorrow you can expect a list and playlist of all of the songs from this challenge. So it’s less of a challenge and more of an opportunity to just share some music with you.

Let me know what you think of challenges like this. I’ve seen lots of them floating around and am pretty pumped to do this one, even if I do it all in 2 days.

-Ciyadh

P.S. Found this on here.

Musing #2

Starting to write again daily has been such a good thing that has reentered my life recently. For many, many years I have and still do have some aspirations of journalism as one of the many facets of my career as an artist and thinker. I’ve been thinking a lot about the other types of writing that I want to include here and on my micro blog too. I imagine that this blog in particular will continue on as it has for the last several weeks, a mixture of long form and short form things many of which are prose and are my own thoughts in opinions. Of course, I have also given lots of thought into the ideas of writing narrative fiction, poetry and things along those lines.

One of the things that I love most about music is that I get to do it with people. There’s this connection and community that I find in music that I have yet to connect with as deeply in other art forms. I do though think that it is possible to have that same feeling through writing. Baronfig, my absolute favorite notebook company launched a project called The Global Haiku Project. It’s such a cool idea I think and a great way for people to connect with each other through writing.

-Ciyadh

P.S. Listen to this! I’m absolutely loving this piece right now.

Happy Earth Day 2020!

As we’ve all expressed, this Earth Day hits a bit differently than it usually does. This time last year I was wrapping up the first iteration of Trash Music and actively looking for ways to continue engaging my community in fighting for climate justice. Today, we’re mostly inside as we are doing the best we can to keep ourselves and inconsequentially, the Earth, healthy. It’s a weird, but important thing to think about as we continue to honor and celebrate the Earth.

I think you know by now that I’m a musician and in everything that I do I look to myself and other musicians to continue to engage with topics outside of music by engaging with music. I started Trash Music because I wanted to use music as a means to creating and having conversations about music, sustainability, and climate / environmental justice. It was my way of wanting to connect and think deeply about these topics. This isn’t the only way though. There are numerous ways that you can engage whether you’re an artist or not with these topics. You can support financially or volunteer with an organization that you feel does good earth work. You can choose to research and learn more about alternative products that we can use for the environment. You can choose to listen to podcasts and read articles and statements from BIPOC climate activists who are doing some of the most important work when it comes to how capitalism and racism deeply impact people who look like me. There is not right or wrong way to do this and the best way is for you to do what feels good for you and where you are at this very moment.

It’s been 50 years since we started celebrating this day and our Earth. And sure, nothing is perfect and in some regards we’ve caused and reeked even more havoc on things, but on today and on more days, I’m looking for ways that we can continue to celebrate the successes and to earnestly build on those as a way forward.

-Ciyadh

P.S. Watch THIS!

I Did an Interview

Super excited to share that I was interviewed as part of I Care If You Listen’s Turning Up the Volume series where I talk more about my work in diversity and goals in classical music. It was super fun to chat with Jess about what I feel the guitar community can do in order to address issues of diversity and inclusion. With anything like this my hope is that I help to start and continue this particular conversation. It’s a difficult one, but a necessary one to be having as a need for diversity that we both see AND hear is important to progress in our society.

Check it out here.

More to come!

-Ciyadh

P.S. I've been going back to using RSS to stay updated with news. Feedly is my app of choice. Will likely do a post on this soon.

Currently Practicing #1

I thought that today I would share with you what I’m currently practicing. I love, love hearing about what people are practicing, how they’re doing it, and just generally about how people go about learning music. The processes behind how people go from reading a piece for the first time to performing it on stage for the 50th time is a very time-intensive and laborious process, but a very rewarding process at the end of the day. So here are the pieces that I’m currently practicing.

1. Soldier’s Sonata by Thomas Flippin- Thomas is one of my living heroes for a whole host of reasons. I’ve been looking forward to having some time to learn this piece in particular and now is the time!
2. Sonika Chenzi by Anthony Green - A large part of my work as an artist centers around continuing to create art by those who are living and by those who I admire most. Anthony is an amazing artist and composer. I’m going to perform this piece later this year.
3. Postcards from Spain by Thea Musgrave - Among all of the other things that I am fascinated by, I’m often fascinated by learning music that I’ve never heard before and although I’ve searched far and wide for a recording of this piece and haven’t found one. So I’m playing this piece and learning something I’ve never heard. There are so many challenges that come along with learning a piece that you’ve never heard, but I think it’s a worthwhile pursuit and one I’ll continue to pursue.
4. Op. 9, Variations -Theme of Mercadante by Emilia Giuliani - I really enjoy listening this piece. One might say it’s cute. I would say it’s deceptively virtuosic and in the best way.
5. Guitar Concerto No. 1 in D Major, Op. 99 by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco - This is kind of like a yearly summer project for me. I tend to spend the summer months focusing on this concerto and then get busy during the fall, but it’s starting to feel really good this go around and I’m planning to put this into my schedule in the fall too.

So, these are the pieces that I’ll be focusing on learning for the next 6 weeks or so. In total this is about 60 minutes on music. Once I feel good about my progress on these pieces I’ll start working on a different set of pieces and keep these in the maintenance phase.

How do you practice? I would love to know!

-Ciyadh

P.S. Happy Listening!

I have Micro Blog?

You might be asking yourself what is a micro.blog and before last November, I didn’t know what that was either. Listening to one of the 90 podcasts I’m subscribed to, not joking there, I heard about this website where you write and share short blog posts. For context, there is a 250 character limit on each micro blog post. So enamored with this idea, I started a micro blog that was focused completely on stationary and adjacent ephemera which is likely no surprise to any of you.

Over the past few days I’ve been thinking about resurrecting that micro blog and have decided to give it another go over there. Don’t worry! This blog is not ending. I see the micro blog as a place for more short and stationary specific posts that are for people who are interested in that content completely and would like to follow my thoughts there. It doesn’t mean that some of the posts here won’t be about these things either. I envision the posts that end up here to be a bit more long-form in nature.

So here’s the link to my micro blog: tothepoint.micro.blog

More posts will be there in the coming days and weeks!

-Ciyadh

P.S. Read this fascinating article last night! Inside One of America’s Last Pencil Factories - The New York Times

Took the Day

I had BIG plans today. I was going to work on some new music by finalizing some left hand and right hand fingerings which is process I do in the beginning stages of learning a new piece of music. I wanted to work on my artist statement because I’m applying to a few fellowships and residencies and need to update that. I was supposed to work on one version of my resume that needed some attention. I wanted to organize my bookshelf and organize the rep that I’m currently working on into a binder.

None of that happened and that is okay.

What really happened is I woke up, watched some tv, watched a webinar, took a nap, watched more tv, ate dinner, watched some YouTube, and now I’m writing this and I’m okay with that. It felt good to just do nothing today, something that after this week I think my mind and body desperately needed. And I’m okay with it! Sure, it would’ve been nice to get ahead on some of those things, but none of them are pressing and I still have tomorrow so I’m going to do them tomorrow and keep it moving. To be honest, I would normally be in a panic because I didn’t do much today, but for whatever reason today it was okay and I’m just going to go with it and see where things go tomorrow.

P.S. I learned about this Instagram live show called The Show and Tell Show. Super cool!

This Video is Cool.

I love, love Stevie Wonder. I could and will go on in the future about his much and how much his music has impacted my life. While going through YouTube today I came across this Nu Deco video and was super excited to watch it. I saw Nu Deco in concert last year while visiting Miami and have been a fan of their work ever sense.

Happy Weekend!

-Ciyadh

P.S. I subscribe to A LOT of newsletters and just learned about this one today, Morning Brew Looking forward to seeing what I learn from it.

Write a Letter

A few weeks back in one of the post scripts I recommended that we all take a moment and write a letter and today I finally, after much delay, put 2 letters in the mail. One letter is going to a good friend of mine and the other is going to a complete stranger who I was matched with through a pen-pal writing program.

I love writing things down by hand and using stationary and all the benefits that come along with that. There’s something so intentional and purposeful about sitting down to write a letter to someone. It’s a process, but it’s art too, I think. There’s an element of creativity, of storytelling that goes into this practice that I’m looking forward to reconnecting with more.

Sure, email is great and goes along way, but emails for me these days a full of fleeting thoughts and often seemingly left unread. There’s an element of surprise that I find email can’t quite comprehend that you do get when a hand address letter shows up unexpectedly in your mail box.

Here’s the podcast I listened to today that kind of inspired me to write this post. Episode 139: It’s All Well and Good Until You get Arrested for Mail Fraud (with Courtney Cochran) | The Erasable Podcast

So, if you’d like a letter from me or wish to write me a letter, send me a message through the contact form. Buy some stamps if you can. As a child I had a robust stamp collection and I might, hint-hint, be getting back into that because stamps are cool.

-Ciyadh

P.S. Don’t forget about your local library! Most library systems can get you set up with a card and account online so that you can still access their services.

In Pursuit of Polyglotism

I want to be a polyglot! A polyglot is someone who has working knowledge of several different languages. I’ve always wanted to pursue learning more than my first language, which is English. In high school I took Spanish and wanted to do a Spanish minor during my bachelors degree, but music school is HARD and I had a credit limit on some of my scholarships so guitar it was, which was totally fine. While I do much prefer classroom learning environments and private tutoring and such, I’ve been diving deeper into Spanish more on my own and am starting to get more into other language.

After thinking about it for awhile now, I have at least 5 languages that I hope to gain working knowledge of over the next few years. I’ll write some posts later about the resources that I’m using to do this, but I wanted to share what languages I’m interested in learning and where my knowledge is of them now.

1. Spanish-As I mentioned, I have some knowledge of Spanish already from some classes I took in high school and then through self-study.
2. French-I know some French words from doing a few lessons on Duolingo, but don’t know anything.
3. Hebrew-I have a Hebrew language learning book that I’ve had for way too long so and have held onto it because I know that I’ll get to it eventually.
4. Japanese-I don’t know any Japanese so super excited to get to learning some.
5. Latin-My friends took Latin in high school and I was always jealous that I couldn’t take both Spanish and Latin. My novel interest in linguistics peaks my interest in learning some Latin.

For now, I’m focusing primarily on Spanish and will likely start working on the Japanese tree in Duolingo and some other things too.

So, these are my polyglot pursuits!

-Ciyadh

P.S. Language Learning Book National Best Seller | Fluent Foreveris a great book about learning how to learn.

Women of Guitar Video Project

I have lots of ideas for projects! Some of them are great and come to fruition, others stay on post-it notes and travel from place to place with me until I loose them or just wait until it’s the right time. I waited for many years on committing myself to this type of project because it can be very intimidating to commit oneself to learning 52 new pieces in a year and preparing them to a performance level all within 7 days. For whatever reason though, this year I decided to take the plunge and it has been well worth it so far! I’ve learned 16 new pieces that I didn’t know before the start of the year and so much more about the women behind these pieces. I chose to have this focus on the project because I wanted to take time to honor the voices of women composers in an intentional and purposeful way and this is just a small part of how this project fits into the larger narrative of my work. I’ve listed the YouTube playlist below and a link to the call for scores.

-Ciyadh

P.S. I'm currently obsessed with this new planner / journal that I absolutely do not need.

I Teach Music Lessons Online!

I wanted to make a post about me teaching online music lessons and how you can contact me should you want to take some with me. This is sort of a q&a post where I answer some of the most frequently asked questions that come up when someone is searching to start online lessons.

What kind of lessons do I teach? I teach music lessons for various instruments. I teach lessons for guitar, of course, electric bass, ukulele, mandolin, voice, and music theory. I have received some sort of training on all of these instruments and subjects and love sharing with students.

Do you teach beginners? What about if I’m an intermediate or advance student? Yes, to all of these questions. I do teach beginners as well as students who might already know how to play their instrument.

What are lessons like? I think that each week every lesson is different with every student. This depends on a lot of factors really. My hope is that lessons are an enjoyable and mutually beneficial experience for both you, the student, and myself, the teacher.

Do you use method books? Generally, I do like to follow and / or reference some type of method book or text. I see method books as more of guides that we can use to provide some structure to the learning process. I provide my students with lots of resources in addition to whatever method we both decide is best to use.

What’s cool about lesson? Why should I take them? The internet is a great resource for learning music. I will not say that it is not because it does a great disservice to all of the tools that help us all online. The reason that I think lessons with a teacher can be helpful is because it provides some level of feedback and some level of accountability. Having a teacher or instructor means that you have someone who can carefully guide and craft your music learning journey in a way that is most helpful. Learning from a teacher allows you to ask questions and receive answers in real time. Plus, taking lessons is fun.

How long are lessons? I offer lessons in blocks of 30 minutes, 45 minutes, and 1 hour.

How much do lessons cost? If you’d like to know how much costs contact me through my contact form for more information.

Do you do video reviews? Yes, if now is not the right time to sign up for lessons, but you’d like for me to review a video of you playing and provide you some feedback, I can do that too. Contact me through my contact form to get started with this.

Okay! I think that this answers some of the most frequently asked questions about starting online music lessons.

I can’t wait to work with you!

-Ciyadh

P.S. This article is cool! The Feynman Technique: How to Learn Anything Quickly

What I Did this Weekend #1

Happy Easter! This weekend I didn’t do too much, but wanted to do a quick recap of what I did end up digging into.

1. Listened to some old podcasts. It’s not secret that I really enjoy listening to podcasts. I could go on and on about them and probably will, but this weekend I listened to episode number 28 of the R.S.V.P podcast and then number 96 of the Erasable podcast. Both of these episodes were pretty deep into their catalogs, but I happened not to have listened to them yet, so that’s why I started with those.
2. In my most recent post I shared a few of the projects that I’m currently working on. Working on that many projects is awesome and requires a level of organization and planning that is necessary to keep them going so while listening to those podcasts I did some good ole project planning with my favorite analog tools.
3. I talked to my friends! I’m super fortunate to have some really awesome friends many of whom I’ve known for a long time and so during this period of time I’ve been able to make sure to talk to them regularly.
4. Surprisingly or not surprisingly, I’m on a quest to pursue my polyglotism more seriously. With that in mind, I spent a few hours working through various Spanish language learning workbooks. I have a list of languages which I hope to learn and am focusing on Spanish because it’s most familiar to me and will begin working on others within the next few months.

Usually weekends are also a big time for me to practice, but I decided to take a few days away from the guitar and plan on hitting it pretty hard this week. Looking forward to it.

-Ciyadh

P.S. On Being with Krista Tippett is a really awesome show. Check out this conversation on the importance of brave spaces here.

Some Current Projects

I love working on various types of projects! I recently added a projects tab to my website where you can learn more about some of the projects that I’m going to write about below. These projects allow me to engage in creativity in a different way and I’m super excited about how they’ll progress.

1. Duo Charango - Duo Charango is the duo of which I am one half of. Made up of Jamie Monck and myself, we are a guitar duo primarily specializing in music by living composers from this part of the world.

2. Margins Guitar Collective- The Margins Guitar Collective is a collective dedicated to creating and supporting a more diverse an inclusive guitar community. I started this collective in 2018. We primarily focus on creative concert experiences and commissioning new works for guitar.

3. Women of Guitar Project- The Women of Guitar Project is a youtube video series that features a guitar piece by a women composer each week. My goal with this project is to honor these works and to provide space for a conversation about diversity in classical music.

4. The Research Diaries- Research is fun! I think that often people do great research, but don’t have the opportunity to share it widely. My research, both personally and professionally, primarily concerns Black guitar composers. This series of videos and posts is a way of sharing the research that I have found.

5. Trash Music-Issues of environmentalism justice and sustainability are really important to me. Trash Music is a research project and art series that engages the community about how we can be better stewards to the environment and how to better do that through music.

More on these projects to come! -Ciyadh P.S. I’m so inspired by dance and have taken to watching various dance performances. Alvin Ailey recently shared a video of Revelations which is here.

On Fridays, We Jazz

Since I began my job in January, I’ve made it a point to spend Fridays listening to jazz while I work. Admittedly, even as a classical musician, I spend a large part of my music listening time listening to jazz. I think very many musicians would agree with me in saying that listening wildly greatly informs the music we play most often. I largely consider myself a musician and classical guitarist who often plays guitar and sometimes, hopefully, that plays jazz. I have a deep appreciation for the art form and I hope that in a lot of ways that comes through in all of my other artistic pursuits.

If you’re new to jazz or just looking for something new to listen to, I’ve included a few of my favorite jazz albums.

Enjoy your weekend!

-Ciyadh

P.S. If you can, find a reason to continue supporting the USPS. It’s an integral part of our society and we need to keep it!

Podcast Review: Broken Record with guest Esperanza Spalding

For awhile now I’ve been subscribed to the Broken Records podcast using my trusty podcast aggregator app, but had yet to really take a listen. I tend to listen to lots of podcast that do not discuss music. Music is such a big part of my life and I love it. Sometimes it’s just nice though to learn about something else. I like listening to podcasts a lot. I love listening to other people talk and be engaged in conversations about really interesting topics.

Esperanza Spalding has long been one of my favorite musicians. I think it’s her mix of imagination and just pure creativity that I find really love. A few years ago I was able to attend a concert of her’s and it really inspired me to think about how I continue to infuse creativity into my performance and concerning that as the art itself. One of my favorite parts of this interview is about how she mentions how she created her own custom costume / suit to wear everyday because she didn’t want to have think about what she was going to wear. She also dove into how she doesn’t consider herself a jazz bassist even though she won a Grammy award for being just that. It’s fascinating really.

Next in my queue for the Broken Records is an episode with Brittany Howard.

Let me know what you think!

-Ciyadh

P.S. Started playing around with this new app, Agenda. I’m using it particularly to keep track of some language learning projects that I’ll write about…eventually.

Melodies

As a musician, there is nothing more beautiful than a good melody. A good line that you can sing over and over again the touches you and digs deeper into your soul with each run of it. It’s so rare though to find a melody that is simultaneously both sad and happy and always moving. For me that piece with this type of melody is Valseana from the Aquarelle by Sergio Assad. There’s just something about this melody and it moves me every time! It’s so cool that in music so many people can play the same melody in a myriad of ways and it miraculously still turns out beautifully. The recording below is one of my favorites of this particular piece.

Enjoy!

-Ciyadh

P.S. Art At A Time Like This recently curated on online exhibition featuring artists who are creating work during this time. It’s super awesome.

On Pencils

I promised myself that I wouldn’t turn this blog into a stationary blog, but alas. Stationary is cool so I’m going to share more of that with you. I’ll start this off with why I use pencils.

There are lots of reasons that I use pencils. Pencils are neat, shiny, affordable, erasable, and easy to spin between your fingers, if you can. As a musician and from an early age, I was trained to use a pencil while practicing. We use pencils instead of pens or anything more permanent incase there are changes that we need to make during the music learning process. Learning music or anything for that matter is an iterative process, one that requires constant experimentation and change. You just can’t do that with a pen! And before you start, no, erasable pens aren’t going to cut it either.

There’s something about the way that the graphite hits the page or the way that it runs across the paper that makes it so satisfying. There’s also this familiarity that comes with pencils. That’s how we learn how to write, how we learn to read. The satisfaction that comes with this is just unmatched.

With all of that in mind, I do have some current all-around favorite pencil. My current favorite pencil is the Mitsu-bishi Master Writing 9852 HB. They’re so comfortable to write with on any paper and show up so well. A rarity these days, the beautiful pink erasers on these pencils actually work! I’ve been purchasing them individually, but am in search of a dozen.

Well, I hope that you’ve enjoyed a deeper dive into my affection for pencils. More of these to come!

-Ciyadh

P.S. I have lots of little corners of the internet where I buy pencils and CW Pencils in NY is by far one of the best pencil shops out there. Visited there in the summer of 2019 and it was so cool.

Musing #1

Musing #1

While some of the blogs will be individual posts, I want some of these posts to be part of series that I revisit and add to regularly. I think I would be so great at sharing some stream of consciousness thoughts, but since I don’t want to subject, you, the kind readers of these words to that, I’ll share more of reflective things that I’ve been thinking about.

Today, I wanted to talk about kindness. I think that we could all use a bit of kindness whether it’s to ourselves or extending that to others. We all know that things are happening in the world that are far beyond our control and while kindness can’t fix that, I think it can give all of us a much needed and brief respite. I won’t tell you how to be kind because that looks different for every single situation so I’ll just suggest that you practice it and hope that you feel kindness sometime soon.

-Ciyadh

P.S. Lots of learning is happening for me these days and I’m doing it through this awesome site called Coursera. It’s a platform full of courses that you can take on various topics. Learn about it here.

What People Do

I think I’ve mentioned this before but I love reading blogs. I love listening to people, learning about what they do and all of the thoughts that they have. It’s one of my favorite pastimes. It’s taught me so much about who we are as people and how we can and are all so connected. My interests in EDC and gear makes the blog on the Bellroy website incredibly interesting for me.

In their Carry Portraits series, Bellroy all interviews people about how they use things to be productive. This particular on featuring writer Joel Hanna is one of my favorites. You can find the link here.

Keeping it short today as I think this article speaks for itself.

-Ciyadh

P.S. I’m currently listening to Bob Reynolds’s new album and will likely do a review of it soon. Check it out!

Runway by Bob Reynolds, released 02 April 2020 1. Wash Over Me 2. Second Wind 3. The Last Dance 4. Downfall 5. Runway 6. Until The Next Time 7. The Peace You Find 8. Moving Pictures 9. Always An Upside 10. To Each Their Own 11.