Friday, September 21, 2007

concert was a fantastic way to end the week; nothing beats listening to a live performance, with all its little subtle nuances and the awe-inducing silence the esplanade concert hall can contain.

there were some new things that i heard that i didnt pick up when listening to recordings, and the endings of the first and fifth movement were nothing short of spectacular; something to be felt. after studying the work in such depth and then going to listen to a live performance truly helps one to appreciate the performance better. and, yes, all the little inaccuracies made are forgiven, even the compromise of the 2nd harp not being strummed by a wooden stick in the 1st movement haha.

life is like music, fleeting such that each note, each phrase comes and goes and may never return, but yet in the mind can exist an entire structure of notes, phrases and themes which can appear almost all in the same moment, kind of the timelessness described in siddhartha lol.

and so apparently our mini holiday is extended by one more day; teachers are given one more marking day next thursday because of the wednesday declared holiday, which means an extra day for us :P plus honours day on friday = an effectively 1 wk hol.

okay its over.

maths paper today was thankfully okay, quite enjoyed some of the questions, like the beijing mascots and the car colour and accident severity questions.

things to do now:
1) bartok concert tonight, highly ironic
2) buy guitar strings and change them
3) sleep like dead people.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

i am here to announce that i am completely and utterly traumatised by the music written paper.

my time management was all over the place; i started with and took 40min for qn 4 the guitar extract. i took half an hour for dies irae (ironically i was just listening to it on tuesday; i listened to it because it sounded nice, not because i wanted to practice), chionged bartok in half an hour, and had 25 mins each for the last 2 unidentified extracts. it will be a miracle if i pass my last extract, it was like a jazz extract with only a trio playing and hardly any form, and i wrote like the equivalent of 1 side of paper. i wasnt really thinking much during the paper, it was more like.. listen listen listen.. write write write!!

i do hope the 3rd extract really was a neoclassical composition (which i wrote it was) but in this world you can never be sure of anything.

we do need a revolution. there has to be a better way to use that half hour we have for each extract.


and all i want to hear now is silence.

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

after bartok studying

there is just too much to study for world music. everything is acculturated and everything is influenced by something. you cant just sum up an entire country's music tradition in 6 pages of notes. thats the beauty of music.

which doesnt make it simple at all for us music students.

i shall be dreaming of bartok tonight. hope i dream of the chorale and not the elegia.

Tuesday, September 18, 2007

andddd with physics paper 3, math I and econs II down, its 1 and 3/5 left to go (subjects i mean). the prelims almost seem to be lasting forever, but it'll be over soon.

and after that theres this lapse of the weekend + 1 day with no papers + 2 markings days, which i only found out about today. i dunno but temporary freedom wont really feel like freedom at all.. but better than nothing.

i need to change my guitar strings. been using it since june.. not bad for a pack of $18 strings.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

we're ahead of our time

we're a privileged batch, us first-time AC IB students. it seems that some other top schools such as the school of the arts is heading in the direction of IB also, and by the time the first batch of students from the school of the arts graduates about 5 batches of year 6s would have obtained their next most important academic qualification following the PSLE. And perhaps Dr Ong would not be too far off in terms of achieving his dream of acs being the top IB world school haha.

it's surprising that the school of the arts is offering IB, after all you can only choose one group 6 subject to specialise in, and requires students to be very all rounded. it also seems that the head of departments don't have any experience with the IB, but perhaps they'll get parallels of our mdm priya, mr dumortier, mr eric and the like to help out.

and the head of music is joyce koh, the lady who came to conduct the composition masterclass and look at justin's emo cheena compo, and who composes some 'postmodern' kinda stuff. i guess it would be interesting to be in that new programme, but i don't have any regrets going through the acsi music programme. yeah some areas could definitely be improved, but if not for my time in acs, i would have not: 1) learnt the hardcore mugger way of studying music, 2) learnt the ultra deep analysis of setworks concerto for orchestra and classical symph I & II, 3) learnt the classical guitar AND met my guitar teacher, 4) played in a guitar orchestra who even dared to play my arrangements, 5) and most importantly met the friends who contributed to my growth as a musician.

news articles aside, its 1 and two halves of subjects down. after today, i realised that english paper 2 (like music) is not something you can study in a day. well but at least its over and have a bit of time to rest and study for maths next wk.

3 of my nails are almost long enough to play already and hurray i found la catedral score and can play some parts of it like never before. :))))

i'm an ib mugger.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

this study by someone doing a ph.d is quite interesting to read:
http://www4.gu.edu.au:8080/adt-root/uploads/approved/adt-QGU20040427.122927/public/04Chapter9.pdf

its a study on the influence of pre-tertiary music training on adoloscent music development. study involved a violinist and a guitarist, most shocking thing being the coda on the last page of the report. haha.

kk back to paddy. for a while lah. my brain going to blow soon already.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

having physics and econs on the same day is no joke.

what was the school thinking.

what was the ib thinking.. 2 hours of econs paper 2 in the morning, followed by a massive physics paper 1 & 2 in the afternoon. all on the deepavali holiday. lol.

anyways after coming home i just lay down on my bed for 2 hours. too exhausted. english paper 2 is on thurs, so got slightly more time to study for it.

bye.

Sunday, September 09, 2007

Jerome Ducharme:

was listening to this insane guitarist playing this insane piece, its called tres piezas espanolas and is written by rodrigo. trinity college thinks it belongs in the licentiate diploma but associated board thinks otherwise and puts it under FRSM.

it feels surreal to sit in front of the computer and blog now on the night of the eve of the start of prelims.

who would have thought we'd ever make it so far. at the beginning of Year 5 or during the first lessons at 3.15 for that matter the thought of the prelims of the IB exam was well, nonexistent.

decided to take a break and rest during the past 1 1/2 days. which means i'd have to do slightly more work tml for phys and econs, but thats okay. admittedly, this time i dont feel as crazy as the mid years, but of course theres that tinge of fear; after all, it IS the prelims.

today i managed to find the la catedral score that i misplaced (okay lah i forgot where i put it) after my ATCL, and now that my nails are growing back, i find that i can play reasonably faster than in the past. now just waiting for adequate length to grow back so that i wont miss the strings.

well then, all the best to those studying for exams. cya

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

siddharberry paddytha cluckfinn. ahahahahaha

now that i feel sane enough to blog again, after taking a break from my revision schedule which i planned but decided not to adhere to, here's whats been happening. the past three days went something like this:

8am: wake up
8:30 - 12:30 physics with a 1 or 1 1/2h break
12:30 - 4: sleep/tv/sleep
4 - 5: study
5 - 7:30: run/dinner/bathe/slack
7:30 - 9:30++: econs

thats quite insane for someone like me who normally doesnt study more than an hour and a half on a normal school day. studying at home is good and bad.. the only distractions i have are the com, tv, bed and guitar. but i suddenly feel really deprived of interacting with friends (even though that will be the hindrance to my revision haha).

and so my index finger nail has grown back, 3 more to go. achieving perfection in playing is really hard.. i was trying so so hard to play a grade 1/2-ish study without any mistakes from beginning to end, and it took me like 15 tries to get one of them right. and when i played it again to make sure i didnt make a fluke, i made a mistake again. sianz lah.

the creators of pokemon are geniuses with probability; there is probability everywhere, right from what type of pokemon you meet in the grass, to the probability a pokeball manages to catch a pokemon, to the highly pissing miniscule probability of meeting the two legendary dogs in the wild. but with a bit of patience and cheating using visualboy's save and reload scene i managed to capture raikou, entei, ho-oh and lugia today. muahahaha.

as you can see when studying high level intellectual material, its often therapeutic to do brain dead stuff during the 1 or 1/2h breaks. such as watching spongebob haha.

the case study of george soros was quite interesting, being able to make USD 1 billion out of the crash of the british currency about 17 years ago. took me a while to understand how he did it.. but it shows how people with not so good values can have incredible intelligence.

and can someone please put me out of my misery by telling me the solution to this math question. we have a guy, a forgetful guy. lets call him Retard. the probability that Retard leaves his umbrella in any shop he visits is 1/3. after visiting two shops in succession, he finds he has left his umbrella in one of them. can someone please tell me why the probablity that he left his umbrella in the 2nd shop is 2/5?!?!?