Just Another Wednesday

Yesterday was a really good day.  But it was the longest day I have had in awhile, or at least it felt long.

It started in the morning with my run.  Then immediately I tried to fix a broken light.  By "immediately", I mean I got home from my run, showered, and in my rob was climbing on the piano bench to take out the florescent light bulb.  John has been taking care of a lot of house-related things lately because I have been so busy.  For example, he's taken care of car repairs (whether in the shop or fixing the front headlight).  He also is spearheading the selling of our car.  So I thought I would try to take care of the three burned out lights. After resetting the breakers and causing some sparks, I got one of the lights to work again, but not the other two.  I met up with a friend for lunch (whose birthday is today).  We went to school and then our hour long choir rehearsal turned into an hour and a half.  At this point I was going to making some photocopies and PDF files for graduate school applications, but it turned out that we had a guest teacher for our conducting lessons and instead of our half an hour lesson, we would have a 2 hour master class (more on that later).  Immediately after that I met up with a student to go over some music I am conducting in her recital.  Then I ate supper before our 7:00 rehearsal last night with choir and percussion.  From 7:00-8:25 we rehearsed Carmina Burana.  Then from 8:45-10:05 Chamber Choir rehearsed their music.  My friend Mike gave me a ride home so I was home by about 10:25.  I got home and pretty much collapsed.  So, a good day but really full and lots of singing.

We had a guest teacher in conducting lessons yesterday.  His name is James Kim and he is the director of Choral Activities at Colorado State University.  My friend Austen received his masters under Dr. Kim.  Before my lesson I was really nervous.  First because I felt like I didn't have Britten's Festival Te Deum completely in my body.  I had the pattern and I knew what I wanted musically, but I still hadn't incorporated showing everything yet.  However, in my 30 minute lesson we made it through the entire piece and went back to work different sections.  It was my first (and last) lesson on the Festival Te Deum.  I received some great musical feedback from Kim.  I agreed with everything he said and some of my fancy gesture work was thrown out the window because it made it more difficult for the singers to make it chant-like.  I literally needed to make my gesture passive at times.  He didn't comment much on what musically I was doing.  Two of my conducting colleagues said it seemed like I was really solid and only Mike said I seemed a little uncomfortable, but it still seemed as if I knew what I was doing and what I wanted.  So next week we are working on Winter Festival stuff for Women's Choir.  Dr. Kim told JT that he was really impressed with us- said we were doing great things with great literature.  He also commented on how our teacher "must beat us up."  We laughed because... yes, that's kind of true at times.

I thought I wanted to do a Requiem next, but thinking about the rep out there, I might want to do one of the Brahms choral/orchestra pieces (Gesang der Parzen maybe?) or Honegger's Le Roi David.  I hope we have time.  I will also have to do recital rep. It would be nice to do Gesang der Parzen.