Sunday, May 6, 2012

I think I'm done with music for a while.

This is what I was thinking when my choir concert ended this afternoon. But don't worry, I'm not done with music. I'm just done with singing for a bit. You see I've done quite a bit of it lately.

Yesterday my school choir went to compete at a choir competition. We did a fantastic, amazing job on our songs, but when we got to the sight-reading portion we were thrown for a loop. My director said that the sight-reading we were assessed on was the most difficult she'd seen in 17 years.

Today was the spring concert for my out-of-school choir. We did pretty well but we had severe trouble with our 2nd to last song. Nevertheless we ended strong and the rest went pretty smoothly. I love choir, but it takes up so much time and energy that I'm glad it's over for the year.

I actually have a new composition that I hope to get up in the next week or so. I'll have to see how my schedule works out though.

My school's Tournament of One-Act Plays opens this week and I'm involved in 2. I'm feeling a bit unsure about them since we had so much trouble pulling them together and we haven't even rehearsed on the stage yet. You see, the directors for one of the plays didn't do their job so we replaced them. Our new director decided to rewrite the script and condensed the entire 20+ page play into just 3 pages. We began work on that only this last week. The amazing things about plays, though, is that somehow they always seem to come together in the end. I'm confident that we'll do just fine.

I have a new goal: Write something that sounds Chinese. I'm not really sure where to start, so I'm listening to a bunch of traditional Chinese music and experimenting with chords and all. I'll let you know how that all comes along.

Goodnight, my friends!


(Because you can't have a post without a picture)

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Composer Todd Barton on The Seagull

The first play we saw in Ashland was called The Seagull. It was written by Anton Chekhov, a very famous Russian playwright. This is what the composer Todd Barton has to say about his experience writing the music for the play.