Today=fantastic
I've been having a lot of really good days lately...I hope that the trend continues.
Today in my American poetry class we got back our first paper...the only comment on mine was "Brilliant!"...so I think that we're off to a good start there (I got a check plus, whatever that means as far as points, haha). I love that class, it's just SO what I enjoy doing...reading poetry and looking for meaning and connections...it's just orgasms all over. Identifying the speaker in Whitman's poems turned out to be an interesting exercise, but some of the poems are fairly pornographic. I was too shocked to make any immature comments, so I suppose that it provided its own defense mechanism. 19th Century British novel is SOOOO boring. But the books are good, so it balances out. It's just so weird that the material is so great, the teacher is so great, but it just doesn't work. French was fun, we were actually doing linguistics exercises today, so it was good.
...which is generally the best time of my week, but today was especially great because (on top of playing really well today, thus giving me some more confidence in the first row)I was offered a formal invitation to join the top chamber group at the school ...it's a bit of a time commitment (5 or 6 hours a week)...I would be last chair (4th, to professional Russian musicians, but maybe 3rd if I play as well as I have been lately), with the big payoff being a free trip to New York in April to play in Carnegie Hall (opening a renovated recital hall, I believe, as well as spending a few days enjoying the city)...yeah...kinda tough to turn down. The history of this orchestra (ARCO Chamber Orchestra to be exact) is that the School of Music really wanted this violinist in Moscow to come be a professor, but he had established an orchestra there and didn't want to leave them, so the University paid for the entire orchestra to move to the US with him...a professional Russian orchestra made up with Moscow Conservatory grads...they're sorta good. I would be the youngest lower string player ever to join and the youngest official member to date, so that'd be cool...and Sinisa (my summer teacher) asked me to join as a personal favor, and I don't want to turn him down, because I basically love him (my summer lessons obviously paid off a lot), so yeah. I told them that I would try it out in my schedule for a few weeks to see if I could fit it in, as I am quite busy already, so we'll see. My fear is that I'll love it too much to let it go, but I dunno. I guess the gist is that this semester I am trying out doing the whole English/Music thing...and it's going way too well thus far. I mean, it's almost too perfect. I'll have to meditate on it more because drawing any more conclusions though
Ugh...anywhom, back to reading some Donne. Yay! I hope you're all doing fabulously!
Ben
Today in my American poetry class we got back our first paper...the only comment on mine was "Brilliant!"...so I think that we're off to a good start there (I got a check plus, whatever that means as far as points, haha). I love that class, it's just SO what I enjoy doing...reading poetry and looking for meaning and connections...it's just orgasms all over. Identifying the speaker in Whitman's poems turned out to be an interesting exercise, but some of the poems are fairly pornographic. I was too shocked to make any immature comments, so I suppose that it provided its own defense mechanism. 19th Century British novel is SOOOO boring. But the books are good, so it balances out. It's just so weird that the material is so great, the teacher is so great, but it just doesn't work. French was fun, we were actually doing linguistics exercises today, so it was good.
...which is generally the best time of my week, but today was especially great because (on top of playing really well today, thus giving me some more confidence in the first row)I was offered a formal invitation to join the top chamber group at the school ...it's a bit of a time commitment (5 or 6 hours a week)...I would be last chair (4th, to professional Russian musicians, but maybe 3rd if I play as well as I have been lately), with the big payoff being a free trip to New York in April to play in Carnegie Hall (opening a renovated recital hall, I believe, as well as spending a few days enjoying the city)...yeah...kinda tough to turn down. The history of this orchestra (ARCO Chamber Orchestra to be exact) is that the School of Music really wanted this violinist in Moscow to come be a professor, but he had established an orchestra there and didn't want to leave them, so the University paid for the entire orchestra to move to the US with him...a professional Russian orchestra made up with Moscow Conservatory grads...they're sorta good. I would be the youngest lower string player ever to join and the youngest official member to date, so that'd be cool...and Sinisa (my summer teacher) asked me to join as a personal favor, and I don't want to turn him down, because I basically love him (my summer lessons obviously paid off a lot), so yeah. I told them that I would try it out in my schedule for a few weeks to see if I could fit it in, as I am quite busy already, so we'll see. My fear is that I'll love it too much to let it go, but I dunno. I guess the gist is that this semester I am trying out doing the whole English/Music thing...and it's going way too well thus far. I mean, it's almost too perfect. I'll have to meditate on it more because drawing any more conclusions though
Ugh...anywhom, back to reading some Donne. Yay! I hope you're all doing fabulously!
Ben