Angryday

I'm surprised at how very busy I've been lately. I mean, I know it's the end-of-term crunch and whatnot, but I haven't worked this many hours in a day since my second year. And I find it very satisfying. :-)

But I also spent a great deal of today being rather angry. I ran into my Conducting prof right after I wrote that post yesterday, and he realized that he'd taped over the video I was supposed to watch with our Unit 3 assignments. This would suck, except he decided that I didn't have to do this one, just the next one, and he'd count the mark I got on it as the mark for both of them. Woo-hoo! However, this morning, when I got to school at 7am, I was less impressed with him. We had to do a rhearsal preparation assignment. No big deal. Four excerpts from the textbook, five weeks, two rehearsals a week, high school band. The problem was the excerpts. See, Brendan, for all that he's a really good teacher, is a choral conductor. The Rufford Park Poachers movement of Lincolnshire Posy is not something I'd give to a high school band on five weeks' notice. Nor is this Aegan Festival Overture piece, which liberally uses time signatures I grumble at, such at 11/8. The pedagogy for these excerpts overshadows any quick and dirty rehearsal process. Now, for a choir, these pieces would be rather easy to both sing and conduct. Choir is just more condusive to intuitive conducting and interpretation like that. Part of the assignment was that we had to give a brief overview of each of the excerpts and note any difficulties they present for the ensemble or conductor, and for two of them, I started my description by saying that this was not an appropriate piece for the hypothetical situation. I got kind of snarky, even, when I mentioned the bass line for the Lincolnshire bit, which is a divisi part where each player plays the same note the. whole. time. Not so much as a breath mark. I finished my overview paragraph by saying that the basses would have to be left out of a great deal of the rehearsal process so that they don't die of oxygen depravation, and I suggested giving them a crossword or "one of those hip new Sudoku puzzles."

Yeah, it was early and I was annoyed.

Then came my Scene Study class at 9. Most of it went all right. We had more or less a free class to go rehearse our final project, so my partner and I went and yelled at eachother in the dungeon/pit at the bottom of the stairwell in FAB. We got a lot of work done, some good blocking especially, so we decided not to rehearse this afternoon. Glory! But we had to back to SouthLab to pick up our theatre review assignments at the end of the two hours, and I was surprised to find that my assignment had been docked marks for being late. See, I printed off a copy of it the Monday it was due and then left it on my desk at home. Oops. I had e-mailed it to myself just in case, though, but when I told my prof, she said that it was fine and to bring it on the Wednesday. We didn't have anything structured for the first hour of that class, so I could've gone and printed her off a copy. She didn't even collect them until the end of class. I argued her into conceding and upping my mark, but I was still annoyed. Plus, I just plain got a bad mark on the assignment. She told us to look at the reviews in See Magazine and the Journal to get an idea of what she wanted, but she said my review seemed too much like I was advertising the play. I didn't even say much very good about it, so I was kind of miffed. But what really got me was that she said that I didn't mention the acting enough. Now, I commented on the one guy who did a spectacular job. I said he performed his character with "remarkable fluency." She didn't know what I meant by fluency and wanted me to use another word. I meant it in more or less every way you could reasonably construe. He had the Welsh accent down, he was smooth, etc... But, really, my prof is an actor. She wanted me to talk about the acting. The acting in this play was tertiary, though. Primary was theme, secondary was tech. Very little of the play involved the characters actually talking to eachother, so there was no playing off the other actors. And anything cool the actors could have done was teched. They actually pre-recorded lines of speech and altered them so that they sounded echo-y or emphatic or whatnot, so the actors didn't have to do it on stage. It was kind of cheap. But, no, I was supposed to talk about the acting. Bah.

*pause*

Ok, rant over.

I finished off the day by taking a nap on the old, dilapidated and wonderfully comfy couch in Peter's office. I'm going to meet up with him later. He's currently drinking with his fellow historians. Oh, and the listening for the good "screaming punk" endeavour has not yet been deliverd. It's apparently sitting in his car, so I'll hopefully get it when I meet up with him on Sunday. I'm wondering if he'd like borrow my Mahavishnu Orchestra CD or something. Or maybe my electroacoustic sampler CD. ^_^ I had a nice nap in a practice room yesterday while listening to Chopin Nocturnes... Yeah, I won't lend him that one... Maybe my CD of Holst's Planets... ^_^...