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October 19, 2004 at 8:37 PM

Don't you just love those suprise quizzes and essay tests? I can honestly say that I don't. As much as I love to write and write on topics that make a person think and try to exspress my views on something, I'm not so fond when you get a suprise test on an essay read the previous day and being expected to come up with something somewhat coherant that shows your argument, the authors and gives other examples and quotations that will help in favour of either argument.

English aside. I'm having a great deal of fun with the Souvenir d'Amerique right now! I've been trying to figure out a fun concert piece to play for awhile and thought it would be a fun piece to learn for the school talent competition. The competition isn't until the spring, but with everything else happening right now, it will be an acheivable goal to have it learned by. I can almost hear the laughter or groans or maybe cheers (!!) of the highschool crowd when that un-expected main theme comes in towards the end of the first page....

Practicing has been going very well. I've been pushing myself technically a lot in the past while, working on nasty keys, and really challenging my speed and precision, trying to take it to the next level. It's kind of fun challenging myself, doing different rhythms and bow strokes on scales, picking nasty keys and using the metronome, it's a fun personal challenge, though I'm sure if you asked me after two or three weeks of doing this I'd have a different answer.

I got to go and play viola in a string quartet last night! That was fun, it wasn't really hardcore, amazing playing or anything, but it was a lot of fun to just sight-read through a bunch of stuff. We looked at parts of 3 Beethoven quartets, a Schubert Quartet, two Haydn, a Mozart and then a fun arrangement of the third Brandenburg concerto for string quartet. We played until about 10 pm I guess, so a good three hours, then it was the second violinists birthday so there was cake and coffee to be had! Chocolate cake...yummy...that's a good end to a quartet session! :D

This has been short and sweet but I need to get back to studying.