The Bach Season

My favorite book is "the Mozart Season," by Virginia Euwer Wolff, in which Allegra Shapiro participates in a concerto competition with Mozart's 4th Violin Concerto. This year, I want to learn all of the Bach Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin. It will be the Bach Season.

I am inspired by Julie Powell's blog, "the Julie/Julia Project," in which she chronicles her journey through "Mastering the Art of French Cooking."

I will play one movement per week, along with one scale and one Kreutzer exercise. I won't by any means master each movement in a week, but I will appreciate it, and I will be playing the violin the whole time. I can always go back for seconds, right?

There are 42 Kreutzer exercises, 6 Sonatas, and a total of 31 (if I counted right) movements. I'm not going to count the scales. So in less than 52 weeks, I will have played them all.

One problem is that I have already tried this by starting at the beginning. In fact, I spent a whole summer on the first movement of the first sonata. Even so, I think I'll start from the beginning again, because I'll need to get back into playing, and that will be easier with pieces I already know.

It would be neat to upload recordings of my playing onto the blog, but it's not an easy thing to do. Julie Powell had nothing but text on her blog, so maybe I will stick with a simple format, as well.

Here goes.