Composers

I played on the most amazing student recital yesterday. This senior composition student brought together a string quartet, a random quintet, an OPERA, and a few other solo works. She rehearsed them all, got over seventy people to attend the recital (that alone is literally stunning) and made every performer a gingersnap with our name written on it in frosting. We all have a thirty minute recording slot on Wednesday.

She should run for president- this woman is organized and gets people to agree to all sorts of things.

I've been really enjoying playing lately. There seem to be phases for that, like any job I suppose. While there's always a certain functional satisfaction to performing, I savor these times when even practicing is appealing to me.

J is probably laughing at my tra-la attitude after listening to me practice the trio I'm playing Friday. It's by a nutty Romanian composer and was composed in 1990. Kurtag is a big name in contemporary classical music (not necessarily the whitest hottest kind of fame) but he put things in the viola part that are impossible to play. This is not hyperbole; it is physically not doable and would have garnered any composition student a lower grade. I guess over the last few months of rehearsing and practicing I thought I would come up with something to approximate his requests, but no such miracle has occurred. Sometimes you get the feel of a piece and can fill in a bit of musical vocabulary for the composer if he's written clumsily, but this... well. Just look: