My Long Days

Every day this week has been grueling to various extents, but today was the very paragon of "hump day." I awoke at 5 am for no apparent reason. It's not an uncommon occurrence for me to start my day at some unholy hour, but I was a little bummed about that coming to pass today: the one day this week I will have been on campus for 13-14 hours.

So I warmed up at 8, as usual. Attended my classes, met with the facilities manager to take care of some logistic rehearsal issues, picked up music from a professor's mail box, registered for the last of my classes, scheduled voice lessons, practiced, wrote e-mails, rehearsed, and then ate lunch at 5. Yes, 5. I've spent the past two hours translating lyrics, transcribing phonetic symbols, doing theory analysis, and memorizing music.

It's great that I'm getting so much done as a part of my initiative to reduce my time spent idle. It's also tiring. I have a melody sitting in front of me, but I'm having a lot of trouble concentrating on harmonizing it. It will have to wait lest I risk stupid mistakes and parallel perfect intervals (musically unacceptable. Funny thing is that we hear them allll the time in pop progressions. My theory is that the songs that "sound better" are actually just well-constructed progressions that avoid the traditional faux pas of parallel fifths and octaves.) That was a really long parenthetical statement. Point is, I have all day Saturday to get homework done so I'll leave it for then.

In other news, I got my music history paper back, and I think I should meet with my professor to talk about it. It's the only research paper I've ever written based on a self-assigned topic, and my greatest struggle in composing an argument was that I didn't know what to ask. I think I did a pretty good job of musical analysis, and I definitely aced socio-political context for one of the works I examined, but even turning it in, I didn't feel that my overall analysis was cohesive enough. It's much easier to have a clearly designated topic on which to present one's findings. I still got an A- on what I turned in, but I think that academic writing is one of those things that I lack experience in, and I could definitely benefit from detailed feedback on what could have been better.

I also got my final back. Not that it really mattered. I could have skipped out on the final and still received a C in the class. But it was a nice little pat on the head to see that I'd received an A+ :) Call it a cherry on top!

So yes. Lots of ups today. No downs, but definitely some "gaahhhI'msotireds." I have a concert to attend at 8. One of the grad students is performing Kurtag's "Kafka Fragments," which is a hour-long piece that Professor Negyesy has talked about staging with me sometime next year. It should be really modern/funky/awesome. Hopefully I can sneak backstage afterwards to give Tiffany my congratulations and peace the hell out of this place by 10!

I am in dire need of sleep.