eponymous_rose

First off:

Since Oscar Peterson's death just before Christmas, I've been working up the nerve to get myself back into jazz piano - I've got my RCM finished, thirteen years of classical piano training under my belt, and enough jazz listening growing up to have at least some level of instinct for the genre.

So this is my latest project: Oscar Peterson's Hymn to Freedom.



(Not me playing, hee!)

You may recognize it from a House episode - he played a bit it at some point. It's extremely straightforward up to about 1:50, at which point things get a little nuts. It's awesome.

Anyway, yes. This is gonna be a long, long-term project, but it'll be fun. Whee!

Second thing:

It's time for a meme! A Voicepost Interview Meme! Simple enough - ask me something (anything), and I'll answer it in an upcoming voice post. Got something you've always wanted to hear me say/do? That's good, too!

(I reserve the right to come up with clever ways to get out of doing stuff I don't wanna do. Apart from that, anything goes!)

Edit: Now, why do you suppose people would be setting off fireworks tonight? That's interesting. Almost as interesting as the car parked sideways across our back alley. Hm.

Also Edit: Oh. Said car is stuck. And it's the same one that got stuck there last night. People, there are cleared-out parking stalls not too far off! Go for them!

Not a lot.  I've been hardly working working hard (I've actually eaten supper at work two days in a row), but there's nobody in the office.  Um.  That's weird.  I think one guy is on holidays.  One girl, I know, always works from home.  Oh, and the other guy finished his thesis and is just waiting on some professors' comments!  It's still odd, though, to come into work and not see anyone all day.  I sort of feel like they must all be out having some sort of wild weather party, and I missed the invitation.  Heehee.

I got some stuff accomplished in terms of writing!  I dunno why I stopped for so long, there. 

This epic!fic I'm writing is gonna be a change for me - I really do like what you can do with one-shots, in terms of tight narrative and wonky symbolic tenses and backwards timelines.  Planning something this long feels weird, and even a little bit aimless, but I'm slowly wrapping my brain around it.  But it's fun, and I can bring in recurring motifs and whatnot.  Yay!

I've come up with a really twisted idea for my ficathon entry.  Woohoo!

I picked up a few music books from the library, pieces by composers I don't typically play - Liszt and Clementi.  I love Clementi's sonatas because they feel so relaxed and cheerful after all the Beethoven o' doom I've been playing lately; also, I can actually sight-read them with zero difficulty, which makes me happy.  Liszt?  I'm still a little hesitant.  I love the way he plays with different tempos (Au lac de Wallenstadt), but... *shrugs*  Dunno.  I've only played a couple of pieces, so maybe he'll grow on me.

I need to pull out my Debussy now I've got a real piano to work with.  Wonder if I can still play "Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum" up to speed?  Hee.

Tomorrow's gonna be a long day - I'll be sneaking away from work for a couple of hours to practice piano and violin, then sneaking back and working like mad, and then I'll be leaving early to go for celebratory scholarship dinner with the roommates, and then I'll be running straight from there to my violin lesson.  At which point, I suspect, I'll have fallen asleep.  How awkward.

(Harry Potter's out soon!  I must use my Shakespeare-shouting-"Expelliarmus!" mood as an homage. :D)

ETA: I'm now going to listen to "The Last".  And give myself freakin' nightmares.  Whee! :D

Welcome to the longest day of the year! :D  And here I slept through the first half of it...

Stuff's going well.  Extremely well, in fact, but there's not much to report.  Did some more accompanying work and realized just how out of practice I am - I pulled up a brand new Beethoven Sonata (well, new to me - I didn't just make a huge musicological discovery and produce a previously unknown work.  That would've been sort of sweet, though.) to help me work on actually moving my fingers.  The too-much-energy thing still hasn't quite worn off, considering the way I was chattering away yesterday (an hour-long phone call to my Mom is fairly unusual) - I blame the fact that fencing was cancelled on Tuesday.  Still expect it to wear off just before fencing tonight.

Am currently working on uploading a bunch of public-domain Sherlock Holmes radio plays (mostly from the 40s) - that'll be fun to share, especially since I haven't listened to them for so dang long.  I seem to have misplaced a bunch of my Stanley/Shirley ones, though, which bugs me because I know I've listened to all the episodes.  Hm.  I think my computer could use a bit of a cleanup at some point.  Should probably also defrag the disk...

Oh, and a shoutout to megoobie on her birthday!  Hope it's full of Holmesy goodness!  *parties like it's 1899*

I know I just did the 'six things' meme, but that was long and rambly and sort of pointless.  So let's do a quick and to-the-point Eight Things You Never Really Wanted To Know About Me (oh, come on, it'll be fun)!



So there you have it!

I went to the library today to study music history.  Afterwards, I decided to try and find a practice room, despite the fact that it's a holiday and almost all the university buildings are closed.  Predictably, the door was locked.  A man came up to me and asked me if I was trying to get to my office (?).  I went with the old smile-and-nod trick, and he opened the door for me.  I snuck up to the fourth floor and discovered that someone had forgotten to lock the door to the practice room hallway.  To celebrate, I (very sneakily) played Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata on one of the clunky old out-of-tune pianos.  Good times!

Woohoo - concert went extremely well.  I got a huge laugh at my oh-that-grumpy-ol'-Brahms introductory speech, played passably well on a lovely piano, and didn't fall over anything until after the performance!  All in all, a success.  I love performing, I really do, which is weird considering my aversion to large crowds in general.  Good audience, though - very friendly and receptive.

Now, I have a package of sesame snaps, a little batch of grapes, and a new episode of Who to watch.  Good day all around.  Lovin' me some summer.