speachless :)

i've been practising for the past three quarters of an hour, maybe even an hour by now. i just finished playing an old Chopin Nocturne that i learned 19 or 20 years ago, the Nocturne in E minor. it made me weep tonight.

first, that i can remember a piece 19 years after having played it in the Kiwanis festival (i placed, either first or second, with my performance). and second, at the beauty of the piece, and the maturity of emotion i am finally bringing to it, even if i'm not playing it perfectly. although i really like Chopin, there are several of his works of which i'm not very fond, and that list keeps growing. but this Nocturne, i'm in awe. this will always be on my list of favs when it comes to performance.

i learned it as a student of Mme Contant's, in North Bay. she was my teacher from my very first lesson, when i was 4 years old. i played the Nocturne for her one last time before heading off to the Kiwanis festival. for the first time in my recollection, she sat back and just listened, no interruptions with her conductor's baton, no utterances of things to improve or correct. she just listened. and when it was all over, she wept too. she wept for the recent loss of her husband. i'll never forget this piece.

ian gillan

i've got this amazing song in my head, i believe it's sung by ian gillan, with Deep Purple. it's called Child in Time. what an amazing song. the version i have is just over 10 minutes long. i think tom copied it for me in the middle of the original Jesus Christ Superstar soundtrack - why JCS? well, because ian gillan sings the part of Jesus on the soundtrack :)

Child in Time really rocks. there isn't much to the lyrics, just a few lines, but the instrumentation, and the drive of the music, it's sooooo cool. and when gillan sings, ooooh, he's so awesome, what a solid voice he's got. it's definitely a song from the 70s, prog rock at its best.

definitely a great choice for the voice of Jesus, recorded in 1970. oh, to hear him singing lines like "why should you want to know? why are you obsessed with fighting?" and "bleed me, beat me, kill me, take me now, before i change my mind"...

phew...

havin' a good music day

hey, this music stuff sure is fun. i've put in a full week of 8-hour days (and then some) for my regular job which, may i remind you, has nothing to do with music whatsoever. i've had some very intense emotional hours too, peppered throughout, and spent at least three hours last night teaching whistle and dancing some fun irish set dances.

and with all of that, i still managed to practice the piano every day this week (except last night) and watch at least one episode of either CSI or Carnivale every night too. i even watched Nosferatu and Minority Report somewhere in the midst of it all...

tonight was even better. i spent about two hours at the coffee shop writing a very brief imitative duo and working on what might be the next exercise to be introduced in tomorrow's counterpoint class, due to be handed in next week. so i'm jumping ahead a bit, for the fun of it. it's great!

and i've just spent an hour working on my new Debussy piano piece and the 2nd and 3rd movements of my Beethoven piano sonata. woohoo, i'm loving it! and get a load of this postcard of Beethoven that i found - it's awesome. maybe some day i'll pose like that too :)

so now, i deserve a bit of relaxation, right? of course, right. time for an episode of CSI. i'm exhausted, but happily so.

still no news from McGill... for now :)

i'm still waiting for a decision from McGill, in case you're wondering. i was in touch with the admissions office today to make sure they have everything from me that they need to proceed. and they do. so there's nothing left for me to do but to wait.

they said i should know end of March, beginning of April...

gearing up for the imitative duo

yay, California trip's over, i can focus on my passion now, fully and completely.

so the homework for tomorrow's class is to write a canon in 1st species counterpoint, between 14 and 20 whole notes, with a cadence (etc etc etc... more instructions were given but they're meaningless here).

before heading to Cali on Monday, i managed to get out one canon in mixed values (quite different and perhaps more complex than 1st species), and had about 93% of a second canon completed in mixed values. tonight, remembering that the homework was for 1st species counterpoint and not mixed values, i wrote a few more canons for that very purpose (as i sipped on a Caramel Corretto at the local Suction Cup).

at some point, i noticed that the next phase, after writing canons, is to write an imitative duo. by the end of that next chapter, i'll be writing a duo based on themes of my own invention. (whooaoh... i just re-read that paragraph in chapter 12, i'm excited) and it occured to me that this imitative duo could have lyrics.

i wondered what lyrics i would use. then i thought of asking someone to collaborate on it with me, they providing me with the lyrics - i was thinking of someone like Raphael, given that he's probably done this before, even if it is a few years ago, and he's an enthusiastic musician too, and it could be an excuse for us to become friends.

then i realized that i have a poem of Tom's in my possession (geez, i hope he doesn't mind that i'm posting about this - Tom, if you ever read this and are apalled, please let me know and i'll revise my posting!). this is a poem he wrote for his class a few months ago, and it was inspired by the misery that i've so often expressed to him regarding my current job, and how anxious i am to get out of it and finally into my real field of interest. (only a few short months more...)

i've just re-read it. it's a long poem, in terms of writing a simple imitative duo. but it might just work if i decide to expand the idea of the duo into several parts. wow, was i ever excited when the thought came to me. i haven't told Tom yet. that can wait. i want to see if i'm inspired to write some music to it first!

how cool would that be, to write music to someone else's works. and imagine if that someone else, or those someone elses, like what i write, and then it gets used in a play, or a movie or something like that...?! yeah, bring it on, bring it on. i'm sooooo going in the right direction.

Molinari Quartet

i attended the Molinari Quartet's performance at Pollack Hall last night. the concert was one in a series for the MusiMarch 2006 programme.

this year, MusiMarch is called Des impressions - music from Scandinavia and Canada. last night's concert featured works by Penderecki, Ratniece, Thoresen, Sokolovic, and R. Murray Schafer. this is all 20th century music which, often, can sound quite bizarre. to watch it being played is even more unreal.

the Penderecki and Ratniece struck me as very tentative pieces, full of very quiet glissandos on the strings. it seems the composers were very hesitant in their expressions - perhaps that's what they intended. Ratniece's piece, Alvéoles, was inspired by various textures and colours of honey. I could certainly picture the honey dripping throughout.

Thoresen's piece, Pyr Aionion, was more interesting to me. he seems to use a hybrid between a major and minor second between two specific degrees in the minor scale (that is not to say that this piece is in a particular key either, but it was certainly more tonal than the first two). it definitely sounded nordic, and i liked the feel of it. it was more solid-sounding to me.

Sokolovic's Blanc Dominant, based on Molinari paintings, was again very atonal. i was pleased to be able to recognize a recurring theme in some of the variations.

R. Murray Schafer's Winter Birds was more interesting to me, given that it is inspired by cold winter days in northern Ontario. you can hear the solitude of existence in that environment, which must surely be akin to winters in the scandinavian countries. no wonder the scandinavians were included with the canadians in this year's programme. in this piece, you can hear a variety of birds skillfully mimicked by the strings.

the quartet is quite skilled. to play this music, you need to be able to play your instrument in the classical way, but you must also learn how to do the weird things the composers call for.

i saw the cellist use the bow on the tail piece (the wooden bit at the bottom of the instrument that pulls the strings tight), and all four at some parts were clicking the sides of their instruments with their fingernails. in some cases, they were hitting the wooden part of their bow against the body of their violin.

they whistled, and they spoke. they used the edge of their bows to get a metallic sound on the string. they pizzicatoed, out of sync with each other. and all of this is written in the score. i wonder what the score looks like... how do you notate a diminished-major second (which is not quite a minor second)? how do you notate a tail piece note? how do you know what pitch you're going to get?

still, with all the skill and expression, i have difficulty enjoying this level of atonality. they're good at what they do. i just don't have a way of fully appreciating what they do just yet. but it's definitely good exposure into the possibilities of movie-music writing. and i'm all for that.