Listen

I'm at my family's home in BC for the holidays, and today I was looking through the journal I kept through 2010. 

My journals are random collections of miscellaneous tidbits. Sometimes there are actual entries, sometimes there's fictional prose, sometimes there's poetry, sometimes there's random pretty pictures that I liked. And sometimes there's to-do lists. I read through one tonight, and something on it struck me in a new way:

"Listen to scores and determine your questions about them." 

I definitely did not have the ability to hear orchestral scores, on the page, in my mind when I wrote that in my journal; what I would have meant is "listen to a recording of a piece while looking at the score, and determine questions."

But, really, as a music scholar, I actually do need to listen to the score, and what the score itself implies (assuming the score in question is as authentic as possible) as opposed to what the recording does. That's where it gets interesting and where the real questions come in! What, as far as we know, was the original compositional intent? Why do different conductors and performers have different opinions and interpretations? Where and how do the two differ, if they do? What could all these different ideas collectively say about the piece?   

This probably seems quite basic, but it's fascinating to me! 

Yes!

Exams are done, and I'm about to curl up on my couch with hot chocolate, the Christmas fudge I baked this morning, and some good historical fiction. Tomorrow, I go home to BC for the break, which means parents, friends, a kitchen that doesn't reek of vomit thanks to my roommates' putrid dishes (I'm sorry guys, I love you all, but it's true!), my mum's cooking, my memory-foam mattress, access to a keyboard without a fifteen minute walk in the cold, Christmas lights, and many, many other wonderful things. Suffice it to say I am happy.

Also, marks are back, and my Ivy League ambitions are looking much more plausible than I thought! Happy, happy dance!

Oh, the things I dig up when editing!

While doing final editing of my last English essay ever (YAY!), which my professor kindly let me write using Chicago style (I can competently cite in MLA, but I strongly dislike it), I discovered this:

 Q. Oh, English-language gurus, is it ever proper to put a question mark and an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence in formal writing? This author is giving me a fit with some of her overkill emphases, and now there is this sentence that has both marks at the end. My everlasting gratitude for letting me know what I should tell this person.

A. In formal writing, we allow both marks only in the event that the author was being physically assaulted while writing. Otherwise, no.

The original quotation as well as further amusement can be found here. 

Seven Days

In a week, when exams are over, I promise myself that I will:

1) Take two days to write fiction instead of academic prose.
2) Bake something divine.
3) Spend at least four consecutive days not thinking about school. This shall include (though is by no means limited to): current program, thesis idea, thesis research, GRE, future prospective grad schools, and future academic career. Theory review and voice/piano pedagogy are also off-limits (all three will likely be thought about on all other days, with the exception of Christmas).
4) Subsequently, make a plan of action about how to rock the ever-loved socks off of next semester.
5) Read historical fiction while having a bubble bath and drinking winter cider.
6) Play the piano and sing as much as I bloody well want!
7) Look into getting some art and photographs for my bedroom so I will not continue to live surrounded by white upon white upon white.
8) Spend time with family and friends.
9) Read the stack of books that are tantalizingly stacked beside my bed.
10) Sleep.

Erstwhile, I am off to the library to study.

Happy Advent

There's something about Advent. It's been my favourite liturgical season for as long as I've been Catholic. Though my faith in Catholicism is waning, the start of this season does make me pause and reflect.

Advent takes place, in the Western hemisphere, at the point of the year when it's dark outside a great percentage of the time. It also coincides with what is, for students, that perpetually busy point of the year, when papers are due, exams are imminent, and life! is! insane! 

It's a reminder to slow down, to take moments to be quiet and realize what a tremendous gift we've been given, simply in being. 

Sometimes life is shrouded in darkness. Wars are fought - amongst nations, amongst communities, amongst families, in our own hearts. Violence, in its many forms, occurs everywhere. Hearts break. Traumatic events occur. It's easy to look at the world, and simply see pain and brokenness and conflict and human stupidity on a mass scale. 

As I prepare for Christmas, and think of Advent, I can't help but feel that little rush of hope I get every year on this first Sunday. That light can come, and bring peace to those wars that we fight amongst others and within ourselves, to those traumas we're trying to heal from, to the hurt we're trying to remedy.

Darkness is not everlasting. 

Happy Advent, everyone. May this be a time of beauty and peace and light in all of your lives! 

Thesis!

It may, perhaps, be somewhat nerdy that on Saturday night, after finally coming up with an exciting enough honours thesis topic (over a year in advance from when my proposal is due), I jumped up from the stack of books and articles about Haydn that I was buried under, and danced around the room (to a keyboard sonata by Haydn, no less).

But I don't care.

I have a workable thesis topic!!!!!!!!!!!!

A Plea

I interrupt my regularly scheduled music-school-related programming to detour, for a moment, to Politics.

Harper is currently pushing a crime bill which will penalize growing pot more harshly than pedophilia.

As someone who has done volunteer work at a sexual assault centre, I've had fair exposure to what childhood rape can do to its survivors. How it can tear lives apart. How it can destroy families. How it can destroy children, and the adults they become (I've also seen tremendous strength, resiliency, and courage from survivors, but they've all worked through a period of intense pain).

Can pot that is grown ruin lives? Undoubtedly. Has pot addiction torn apart families? Of course. But, ultimately, before drug use reaches an addictive level, it is an individual's choice to do drugs. It's also worth noting that not everyone who smokes pot is a drug addict; drugs do not cause life-altering consequences to all users. Someone who grows pot is not forcing pot upon the people who will eventually use it.  

Children do not make a choice to be raped or assaulted. And children who are assaulted suffer consequences and trauma from that decision they didn't make.

Who deserves a harsher punishment: someone who makes a decision that enables someone else to make a decision that may potentially destroy his/her life, or someone who makes a decision that could potentially destroy a child's life?

I plead with all of you: sign a petition, write to your MP, do something -- anything.

Punishing someone who grows marijuana more harshly than someone who rapes a child is not only crazy, it's inhumane.

Kudos to Quebec and Ontario for saying no.
I'd simply remind the rest of the country, once again, that children who are raped don't have that option.