2 posts tagged “graduation anticipation”

The only course keeping me from graduation is piano--I'm making up for the three semesters of piano lessons that were spent on guitar instead.  A summer of piano, and then BAM!  I have a music degree.  Exciting, yes?

Except I has a battle, and it is not a battle I'm winning.  (And I'm not talking about my battle with the urge to use lolspeak all the time.)  It's called Chopin's Ballade No. 3 in A-flat, and it's mostly destroying me.  I'm about 6-pages into the total 13-pages, and out of those six pages I can play 1/2 of one decently. 

Sight-reading is my serious weakness, which makes the process of working through a piece as massive as a ballade even slower and more laborious than it is already.  Because of this the good news is that most of those 6 pages are already memorized; the bad news is, I pretty much can't play anything till it is memorized.  This is why my piano lessons are typically characterized by really weak starts in the semester followed by surprising bursts of progress towards the middle of the term.

Here's a video I love of the Chopin Ballade No. 3--if nothing else, because the man's adorable and knows how to choose a coat (seriously, nothing is sexier on a man than tails).  But you know, also because he's amazing.  Home boy should be a conductor--look at those facial expressions!  He's into it!

If you enjoy that video, you'll find all four of Chopin's ballades as performed by this cat are posted (and were played back to back?  omgwtfbbq mental endurance).  No. 4 is quite possibly one of the most impressive compositions for piano of all time, in my not-so-expert opinion (but I'm pretty sure most people would agree).

Alright, I've watched some Chopin, I've chowed down on the local gas station's chicken sandwich ("Clux Delux--More Clux for Your Bucks!"), I've blogged... all that's left to do is--gulp--practice.

I woke up early this morning to try and get some work done before my first class.  You can see how that's turned out.  ~sips coffee in spite of a mysteriously upset stomach~

11 days until Spring Break, and I'm pretty certain that all of my professors have combined their powers to make the next week-and-a-half as difficult to bear as possible.  I will defeat them!!!

Ok, the only real impossibility of the next two weeks is the "first draft" of a 10-12-page research paper that's due Friday.  Now I've always worked under the assumption that "first drafts" are so called because they are incomplete, and I haven't been too concerned about this.  Unfortunately, I've recently learned that it MUST be finished (...why call it a draft, then, I wonder?); furthermore, anytime we miss a draft deadline, our paper grade drops a full letter grade.   Maybe I should've started reading any of these nine books I have before Saturday, yes?

Aside from that, life is just a mess of midterms, piano practice (that isn't happening), and composition (that isn't happening much, either).  I feel like after this semester is over, the rest of my undergraduate days will be smooth-sailing;  I will have completed all my required music classes save private lessons, I will mostly likely NOT be an English double-major anymore (so that's about 10,000 less papers per semester), and I'll just have a few basic general education requirements to complete.  August 8th, 2008, my friends (that's right--my prospective graduation date is 8|8|08).  I shall hopefully be a free woman.  (Until starting grad school some 3-5 weeks later.)

And now, perhaps I'll consider getting some work done.