New Semester!

Wow. I've really not been good at posting lately, have I?

Life finally feels back to normal in terms of school. My director's back (yay!), and I moved up two chairs. It's really, really nice. (Pops Concert on Feb. 5th if anyone's interested. E-mail me or leave a comment for details. It's going to be great.) I'm taking Counterpoint & Analysis and Music History. I have the most amazing Music History professor ever, but unfortunately, he's retiring this year. Counterpoint's not terribly exciting yet, as we're being reminded about basic Common Practice part-writing rules. "Do you remember how to prepare and resolve sevenths?" "Do you remember how strong chord progressions operate, and how that differs between major and minor keys?" "Do you remember how to build and resolve chords from a figured bass?" and that sort of thing. I'll admit, it is nice to have a refresher. It'll be interesting when we're asked to write two- and three-part exercises. They seem easier than four-part writing, but they're actually harder, since you don't have the whole chord there. It seems (at least as far as I can gather from the two real class periods I've been to) that it's more about a basic tonality. This should be... interesting.

In History, we're studying the 20th century. As Dr. M put it, "It's the century that people love to hate." Schoenberg, Berg and Webern (to name a few) were brilliant, and all that, but bleh. Not my favorite thing to listen to. I probably won't be buying a Schoenberg album any time soon. Then he reminded us what was starting in America -- Jazz! I *love* Jazz. It's been really interesting to see how music has affected history, and how history has affected music. Unfortunately, I value a lot of today's pop music even less.

Flute choir and orchestra are also a lot of fun. If anyone's looking for something fun and atypical to do on Valentine's Day, I happen to be having an orchestra concert that night. We've improved significantly since last semester. We're playing a lot of cool stuff, and I have some fun solos. We have a flute choir concert in February, I think, but the exciting concert with that will be our very own concert at the Assembly Hall on Temple Square in March. I'm looking forward to that.

Life's pretty good right now. I'm going swing dancing tonight, I got to sleep in (sleep, glorious sleep...) and have just been sitting here for the last hour and a half, just sitting, reading, writing, and not going anywhere. On Monday, I'll get to play MarioKart 64, which I'm really excited about. I got to spend some time with The Franchise and his family just after Christmas, and I'm looking forward to his return.

Maybe I should like, go eat something.