I've been bad. Starting my master's is my chance to take the boat by the oars and really get things moving, but I've caught myself procrastinating again. This composition - I haven't really touched it since the last time I blogged, and I should have been spending every spare moment on it. Now, I will have to spend pretty much the entirety of my weekend working on it. I shouldn't say that though, that gives me the excuse to waste a whole weekend on something that shouldn't take that long. I'll rephrase - I will have it done by tomorrow evening so that I can go out tomorrow and spend Sunday doing whatever I please. I also have to keep in mind that I have some reading and listening to do for my first Orchestration class and Composition lecture.

Another thing I noticed myself doing is walking on the left side of the sidewalk. I hate this; I have told people off in Winnipeg for walking on the left side of the sidewalk. Here, they may drive on the right side of the road, but I swear the pedestrians think they're in jolly old England, and it's starting to rub off on me. I will keep my eye on it and try to rectify this mistake.

Today we had a guest lecturer at school. Allen Forte is credited as being the man to have brought the Second Viennese School of music over to North America and revolutionized how we organize pitch content. Long story short, he is a hugely popular and respected music theorist and he came to our school. At lunch, we were treated to a lecture recital of the three Petrarch Sonnets by Liszt, played by his wife Madeleine Forte. In undergrad, I had played the vocal version of Sonnet 104, so having listened to quite a few recordings of the solo and vocal versions, I can easily say that hers was my favorite interpretation. How do I put this nicely... She is not a young woman, which made her incredible technique and pianism that much more impressive.
Later in the afternoon, I attended Allen Forte's presentation of a recent research paper on a short piece by Schoenberg. It was fascinating how he presented the many instances of referencing himself and his students through the use of the musical alphabet within a piece that was under a minute in length. There was so much more substance to his lecture, which I cannot even begin to try and explain here.

Ok, back to procrastination... I will do so by speaking more of procrastination - I've been avoiding dishes since yesterday afternoon. I certainly need to have those done before my roommate gets back from Toronto, but I'll set myself a goal - I should have them done before going out tomorrow. Maybe the dishes will help me to avoid working on my composition.

On a positive note, I finally got around to going to the percussion department today. I found some random percussionists in the hallway and they showed me some of the ins and outs of cymbals. In all of the textbooks I have and some online resources I consulted, nothing could answer the questions I had about them. They all told me about the fact that a cymbal can sound very different based on where you hit it, but they didn't really attempt to qualify that with descriptions. Basically all I wanted to know was if the harmonics increased as you move outwards on the cymbal or if it was the inverse; also what were the sonorous qualities of hitting the dome. Basically, those questions were answered simply enough by just hearing it played at different points of the cymbal. Harmonics are not the same in the cymbal as they are with other instruments. Rather than the number of audible overtones being different based on where you strike, it's the organization of the multiple sets of overtones. Hit at the outside rim, the overtones are quite spread out giving the sound a full body, whereas the inside renders a sound more compact at the high end of overtones. Hitting the dome gives a dead(ish) sound almost exclusively made up of the upper partials. Now I have the information about the cymbal that I needed in order to feel comfortable developing a piece based on the acoustic qualities of it as an instrument.

Now I will stop blogging and maybe even get some work done.