Whenever we tour, Jon always is designated to the bathroom for practice in the hotel rooms and I get the room. This is because the floors make my cello slip and usually the toilet seat is too close to the tub for my bow to not hit it. When we were on tour last week to Boston and NY, we stayed in a Hampton Inn that had a bathroom I could tell would work fine for me to practice in; so, I decided to be considerate and went in the bathroom to practice. How lucky I was!!! The acoustics were fantastic. I was surrounded by my cello's sound and it was a round full bodied sound. Not a weird pingy sound w/ lots of reverb like some bathrooms (Yes, even though the bathroom is usually Jon's territory- I am not a bathroom practicing virgin. I recorded many a demo tapes in bathrooms when I was in school and I have an ear for the finer points of bathroom acoustics.)
This Hampton Inn not only had those special comfy beds but also a great acoustic bathroom for me to practice in. :-)

I was practicing Bach that night and playing both the Bouree movement from the solo cello suite IV. and also the Prelude from Suite V. I love both of these movements from the solo cello suites in particular. The Prelude to Suite V. tunes the A string down to G to create a dark tone you cannot get with regular tuning. That prelude is very dramatic and dark like a Vampire movie. The Bouree movement to the IV Suite is made up of two sections. The first is a lighter one with sixteenths and a skipping along sort of feel. The second section is very special. Bach was such a master! It is like a reminiscence of something so nostalgic you can barely stand it but not a slow slurpy ballad type thing. It is still in the Bouree feel and plods along through the memory. The chords are wonderful in the second section and really remind me of the Prelude to the modern work for solo cello by Benjamin Britten. With Bach it is complex but yet beautifully simple. Everything has it's place. Everything has purpose and is going somewhere. It is obvious through his music that Bach was very spiritually in tune to the of creation on earth and he knew how to express that through his music- meaning the flower is perfect in it's symmetry, the sea shell's intricacy, etc. Bach's music reminds me of these wonderful aspects of our world like a perfect flower. Yet his music also reminds me of the Bumble Bee who's body shape and proportions are not supposed to be able to fly (according to our human calculations) but somehow the Bumble Bee does fly anyway.