Month: January 2006

Posted on

Making Music Together

There is nothing in the world quite like performing with a great orchestra. Not just a pretty good one, but a great one. I’ve just come from my second GAMAC orchestra rehearsal for the week. I’m starting to feel like a real musician again and not just someone who hacks away with middle schoolers all day.

To combine your talents with those of many others, to collectively think, and and feel, this is what is required to recreate a musical composition. Tonight, we recreated Borodin’s Polovetsian Dances. Wow. They played this one at the last artist series of the year in my first year at BJU. I thought it was cool then, it’s ten times more amazing not only to play it, but now to see and hear it through much more mature eyes and ears.

This has been a difficult two days so far because of the time restraints, and likely the next three will prove even more difficult. Already, I can tell you that being able to express the artistry that has been bottled up inside for some time is well worth most every inconvenience I suffer as a result. I can’t wait to go back for more.

Posted on

A truly insignificant title

I?ve never been one to keep a journal. I’ve tried it several times and failed (though it has been many years since the last attempt). Just as with my quest to find a name for this blog, with each post, I seem to struggle to find a topic. The one that came easily was the one that came in a moment of caffeine induced clarity at 6:30 in the morning (these moments are rare, you see). The next day I was ready to report back on my experiment (which did not go well) and my new blog service was in the midst of a 24+ hour systems upgrade. After that, things just sort of went downhill.

Next week I’m performing with the GAMAC orchestra. We’ll have rehearsals all week and then a performance on Friday. I’m also doing a separate concert on Saturday as well. I know its going to be a hectic schedule, but I really can’t wait. After you leave school as a music major, your opportunities to perform in a top notch group is limited, at best. I know full well how difficult the week will be in general. I know how incredibly difficult it will be for my wife since she will be taking care of the kids all day and all night with very little help from me. Even knowing all of this, I am greatly anticipating those rehearsals and performances. I am especially looking forward to my second shot at Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet. The whole concert is a Russian extravaganza, so almost everything has pretty cool horn parts (though not all are terribly challenging). I’ll definitely have to do something as a thank you to my wife. The cool thing is that even though it is going to be difficult and she is not looking forward to the experience, she realizes how important it is to me and doesn’t begrudge me the opportunity. That’s a wonderful thing there.

Now once I got going, this wasn’t too bad. Perhaps from now on I’ll write my title once I’m done writing instead of before. Just start writing and then look back and see what its about. Sounds like something they taught us in one of my research classes, hmm. Maybe grad school really is paying off . . .

Posted on

Morning Coffee

Morning coffee is the elixir of life. Just twenty minutes ago, I was a complete zombie, staggering around in relative darkness. Now, after a mere quarter of my mug of coffee gone, I am sitting down writing coherent (I hope) thoughts. I really wish that I had the discipline to go to bed early and get up early. For me, the hard part is going to bed early. I?m going to experiment with it tonight and see what happens. If I go to bed by 10:30, am I capable of getting up at 5:30? I guess I?ll just have to wait and find out. Its amazing how quiet it is in the morning. Not just in my house, but in the neighborhood as well. When I had to leave the house at 6:30 on a Saturday to go take a test for NBPTS a few weeks ago, the silence in the neighborhood was almost shocking. Yet somehow, it was really, really nice. Maybe I?m a morning person who just stays up too late. As a kid, I always got up really early and prided myself in that fact. GI Joe coming on in the morning is a great motivator for a young boy. If I can end up getting more work done in the morning, spend more time with my family in the evening, and actually get 7 hours of sleep in on top of it all, this would be an even more powerful motivator. Let?s see what happens.

Posted on

Getting Started

Why must getting started always be so difficult? I enjoy writing, but I cannot stand attempting to determine a topic. Let?s take this new blog for example. An old friend encouraged me to get going on my blogging effort. I decided to take the plunge and then instantly hit a roadblock. What do I call this thing? There was the quest for something clever, for something that sounded intelligent, for something . . . I don?t know what. At any rate, this morning I said ?this is dumb,? so I just wrote down what came to mind. And now you have it, A Musician?s Musings. I hope that it will be enjoyable, and perhaps somewhat frequent.