Sunday, June 12, 2011

NOI, Day 10

Today was my first day off since arriving at NOI. Of course, I was at the music building between 6:30 and 11:00 pm practicing, so I'm not sure it felt like much of a day off after all.

This morning I drove into DC to go to church at St. Paul's K Street. After a nice service with beautiful music sung by the choir there, I headed over to my friend Story's house, where she made me fried rice for lunch. After 10 days of granola bars, trail mix, apples, peanut butter and honey sandwiches, and eating out... well, home cooked food was amazing.

After spending some time with Story and her family (I took some cute pictures of her kids, but I'm having problems with the SD card slot on my computer right now), I headed back to school, where I spent the evening practicing Mahler, Beethoven, and a completely awful piece that is severely stressing me out right now. It's a new work, full of symbols so obscure (and some of them invented by the composer) that there is a key attached to the music explaining symbols that mean things like "play the highest note possible" - oh, fantastic. The piece changes time signatures nearly every measure, moving through meters like 5/8+1/16 at a tempo of 144 to the eighth note. Oh, and every member of the violin section has a different part, instead of the usual section parts with 8-10 violinists on a part. So I might be the only one playing those obscenely high C-sharps, and I'd better be prepared, just in case.

Remind me why I'm doing this whole musician thing?

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