I just realized it's been a LONG time since I last posted. So here I am.
I finally, finally settled on some rep, worked things out with a pianist, and set a recital date: June 6th, a mere week away. And I still haven't really learned the Brahms sonata yet, nor had a single rehearsal. This should be exciting. Not that I'm worried, mind you, as the rep isn't terribly hard and I'm just doing this for fun anyways. Then agian, a part of me really wants to impress people, since I haven't really performed here in Madison for four years now; not only that, I feel I've made a lot of progress this year, and for my own sake, I'd really like it to show. But that's all just vanity.
I manged to get accepted to live at International House this fall. It's true I'll be moving back into a small room, similar to the ones at Eastman, and probably eating dorm food at least once a day. But it's affordable, and the facilities there look great, and it'll be so exciting to be living around people from all over the world. Now I'll have two communities to make friends in, which is good, because I need all the chances I can to not alienate people. And yeah it's a dorm, but everyone's over 21, so (hopefully) I won't have to deal with any of that stupid "dorm drama".
In two weeks I head to Tanglewood. Well, I guess it's more like 2 and a half weeks. It'll be strange, because I'm not coming home afterwards. Once I'm gone, I'm gone. It's almost like leaving for college in many respects, kind of like a prelude to my new studies. All of that said, I can't wait to leave, not out of any sense of annoyance or discontent with my current situation, but out of a need for Newness, an "adventure", if you will. I'm sure living in New York will definitely be an adventure, at least at first. I feel like a bumpkin moving to The Big City. It's not that I haven't visited plenty of big cities before, but never really at length, and I've certainly never lived in or even near to one. After a few visits to NYC it seems life there is VERY different from any place I've lived before, and I suppose thank goodness for that. Time to move on. In more ways than one.

Looks like a busy week ahead. I'll be playing with the symphony all week, which means my evenings are shot to hell. Plus we're doing Carmina Burana, a piece with some great moments, but goddamn is it LONG. I was going to pick up the music ahead of time and give it a quick once-over, but I forgot. Ah well. Tomorrow night's rehearsal will be exciting.
My quartet is performing all of Beethoven 59 no. 2 on Wednesday. I'll be glad to get it over with, honestly. I like my group well enough, but I've got this recital to plan and work on, and frankly I just don't really feel like playing in a quartet right now. Tomorrow's our last coaching. Our coach is kind of a strange guy. He's an excellent quartet cellist, but he seems to have some pretty whacked ideas about tempo. On our first coaching he was telling us to play as close as we could to Beethoven's metronome markings, which we were sort of doing, and now he wants us to go slower, especially in the last movement. I don't get him. But I suppose I learned something this semester. Plus, the coachings were free for me, since I never officially registered, since I joined the group right on the drop/add deadline.
I finally got my shit together and wrote my personal statement up for International House. Now to fill out the rest of the paperwork, and maybe I'll get to live there next year. That'd be damn awesome.
Today I played 85 minutes in a 90 minute soccer game. I play in this coed league, and the rules are you have to have at least 5 women on the field at all times, but only 4 showed up today, and 8 men, so we had one guy sub, but we had to play with only 10 on the field. Then at the beginning of the first half one guy hurt himself, so we had to play the rest of the game with no subs. My legs held up surprisingly well, I wouldn't have thought myself capable of running a whole game. Of course, by the last 10 minutes I was too tired to kick the ball very hard, but at least I kept going. Almost inspires me to try jogging, although right now I'm sore as can be.
Next week is the big event: Sara's Recital/big reunion. I'm glad so many people could make it up there, it'll be a blast. Now if only we could get a certain "I'm too good for all of them" Ms. Fitch out there, and maybe fly a few more in from overseas, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some others (ah yes, Florida girl) . . . ah well. Some other day.

Today I played an interesting piece. Basically, it was a short piece composed for solo trombone, called wash. For some reason, the piece didn't work out for the person it was written for. So he took some 3 and a half bars of the piece, recorded them, and then set it on an endless loop, which, over the course of 9 minutes, is distorted and deconstructed until nothing is left but a wall of sound, which eventually, after the 9 minutes are up, goes back to a vastly altered version of the original bars of music.
That was basically the core of the piece. On top of that we had the trombonist himself, who decided it would be cool to play into a microphone hooked into a distortion box, which added a sizable delay effect, and had another effect which added a lot of reverb. He would then play bits of the piece, and improvise the rest, overtop this recorded loop. For some reason, he and his teacher thought it would be cool to add drum set and cello to this mix, so that's where I came in. They also thought it would be nice if I had some distortion, so I finally got to use my amp and distortion box in a performance setting. I must say, it worked beautifully. I love the effects I can put on myself with that box, and I think I came up with a really good one for the piece.
But anyways, it was a really cool project. Basically, we broke the recording into what we thought were appropriate sections, and used stopwatches so we knew exactly where we were in the music, so when the spot came where we were supposed to cut out, we'd know it ahead of time. In the end, it was quite rewarding, since I kind of felt I helped to compose a piece that, at least to me, was original and exciting. Plus I got to improvise live. It wasn't hard, since I had the score in front of me, so I could use bits and pieces of that whenever I wanted. We're doing the piece again on friday. I'm definitely looking forward to taking another stab at it.
Kind of ironic. I never did much modern music at Eastman at all, and here I am at UW Madison, and have done two new music performances in the space of a week.

This weekend was my first experience sitting on an audition committee. Well, I suppose committee is the wrong word. It was really just me and another cellist, an acquaintance of mine who also studies with Vardi. We were asked to judge for the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra auditions for Concert orchestra, or the 3rd level orchestra (of 4). Of course, it was easier to judge for than most auditions, as there were anywhere from 8-12 seats open, so we figured the top 10 of the 20 were likely to get in. The hard part was that I had only a rough idea of the playing level of people who were going to be auditioning, so the early going was much more difficult, trying to gauge what would be appropriate standards to use. I think in the end we compiled as accurate a ranking sheet as we could, or at least I hope so.
It was certainly very eye-opening, being on the "other side". The auditions were not screened, but still, missed notes and incorrect rhythms really stood out prominently. And actually, had this been a "real" audition with one seat available, picking two or three finalists would have been a piece of cake. It was just a rather poignant reminder about how important it is to really master the basics for an orchestra audition, because when you get down to it, that's really what comes naturally for committees to listen for. I mean of course that's what we've been told from the first day of orchestral rep classes, but still, judging auditions really showed me firsthand.