September 8, 2004 at 3:52 PM

Mainting my blog.

Today is September 8th. I've had my first day in a public highschool. It was interesting to say the least. There was one guy I saw who I'm sure thinks he's a wizard. He had very ornate and colorful makeup on, that appeared to have taken hours, and his outfit was rather peculiar. A sparkly black, netted type dress along with a heavy black coat. I knew there would be strange people at school, but this topped the strangeness charts for my first day! I've discovered that when you attend a highschool that covers a nice chunk of land and has three floors on some of the buildings and far too many students for the size of the buildings, if you have any hope of making it to class on time you just have to plow. No excuse me's, or waiting for the people in front of you to move...just plough your way through the throngs of people. To make things more confusing, based on where my locker is situated I will have literally no use for a locker because there hardly is enough time to get from the basement of one building to the 3rd floor of the ajoining building and have time to walk across a bit parking lot, up a flight of stairs and down a really long hallway to my locker then back in between to get textbooks. hmm.... Oh well..it's a good place for my box of granola bars at the moment!

Playing. Well today (I leave in 15 minutes) I start rehearsals for this weekends concerts. Beethoven 5 is pretty much securely down and I'm not terribly worried about it. The Rautavaara is certaintly an interesting piece and I'm very much looking forward to hearing how it sounds with the full orchestra and hearing how the dissonances of the cluster chords sound when spread through-out an entire orchestra. It will be nice to be back to some orchestral playing/performing and getting to see some friends and mentors that I haven't seen for awhile.

For solo playing, I've been pretty absorbed in the orchestra music the past few days, since I was away for a couple of days and my violin and I had a two day hiatus from each other. I have, however, managed to cram in a bit of time for my solo stuff. I've worked a bunch on my vibrato, which I'm thankfully starting to notice improvement on and feeling more relaxed and un-forced then I've ever felt before when doing it. So this is a good thing! I'm also starting to get more consistent with my tenths, which have been a hard thing for me. I've picked a couple of study/etude/caprices that have tenths in them to help with them. At first I kept over stretching and getting and eleventh, but not I'm starting to gauge my stretch and hear the interval in my head before playing, and it's helping a great deal!

I should go and get packed up for the day! It's going to be a long one. :)

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September 8, 2004 at 3:52 PM

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