This week has been pretty crazy as we've wrapped up the semester. The last day of classes is Tuesday, which we're very excited about! Brittany has a concert that night, and then all that's left is finals. For me, it shouldn't be too hard. Technically finals go through until a week from Wednesday (the 21st), but I'll be done by Friday. I'm very excited for juries since I practiced with my accompanist yesterday and it sounded awesome. I was worried about it because I had procrastinated finding my accompanist until recently.
Speaking of all this, as many of yall know I recently changed my major from music ed to bioinformatics. However, after a lot more thought, and a lot of encouraging experiences through the last half of the semester, I've decided to try a double major. I still need to talk to the advisement center about feasibility, but I hope to be majoring in music performance and computer science. I thought through why I had decided to do music education, and I realized that it was because getting a bachelor's solely in music performance was very risky. In case I couldn't do well in performance I wanted to be able to do something without having to go back to school. I really do love performing, and so I've decided to go with horn performance. With this double major, I've basically signed on another year of schooling, but since any major as of now would take three years to complete, I think it would be worth it to not have to tear that part of my life out. I think that I would deeply regret essentially stopping my progress as a musician. The computer science degree is where I'm still a little undecided. I am still choosing whether I want to still do bioinformatics or just a computer science degree. I am hoping to do some kind of internship the summer before my last year, but if I did bioinformatics I'm not sure I would be able to do that without killing myself with classes. We'll see after I talk to advisement centers this week.
Tuesday, I had the final concert with the Symphony Orchestra. It was a fantastic concert - very exciting. It was a little long, though. My conductor really likes to team up with guest artists, which I don't mind. However, this concert we played a piano duet by Mendelssohn with some pianists from the U. This piece, by itself, was over 40 minutes long. That, along with a couple of movements from Slavic Dances by Dvorak made up the first half of the show. After intermission we played possibly the best piece ever - Fanfare for the Common Man by Copeland. If you haven't heard it HERE'S a link to the New York Phil's recording of it. Obviously we didn't sound this good, but it was SO fun to play it. Hopefully I'll get the recordings of it soon. (The names of the next pieces are links to youtube recordings.) We also played Samuel Barber's First Essay - a beautiful piece with lots of emotion. Debussy's L'après-midi d'un faune (Prelude to the afternoon of a faun). Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody transcribed for orchestra. And a piece called Pops Hoedown, which was just a funny encore piece. I can't believe I actually got a recording for that, even though it's not all of it! lol. If you don't like Obama, just don't look at the video. The music is what's important. As you can tell from the links, there were lots of horn solos, most of which I rocked out loud if I do say so myself :).
Wednesday Brittany's friend that she met in Brazil, Vanessa, got married. We were invited to her reception in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building. It was a fun event, and Brittany enjoyed working on her Portuguese again. We were glad we could support Vanessa in a wonderful choice she made.
This semester Brittany has been working on two different psychological studies with groups from her classes. Thursday, one of her groups had their work presented at a conference held at BYU. The study they did was called LDS Doctrine and Perfectionism. They set out to see how the doctrine of the Church affected the level of perfectionism in them. It was pretty cool seeing all the stuff she did with it. She keeps saying that it's not a big deal, but I am so proud of all the hard work she has put in to this semester (even when some of her group members slacked off a lot), and I'm proud of how she's progressing in her major and the field in general.
The final compositions this semester were/are being performed Friday and tomorrow. My group performed Friday morning, and Brittany's will perform Monday. For this composition we could choose from several techniques of writing. First is minimalism (think of that tape in the jorb video at the beginning of the blog. That could be considered minimalism. A real piece of minimalism is called Einstein on the Beach. An excerpt can be found HERE. It can get really old really fast! lol The next is extended techniques. This can range from using mutes on brass, to putting things under the piano strings to create what's called "prepared piano." John Cage wrote a piece called Bacchanale for it. I promise that's a piano he's playing on. The other technique (which both Brittany and I used) is quotation. It's basically just using melodies and other things from other pieces and changing them around. I used the songs Bolero by Ravel and How Does She Know from Disney's Enchanted. It turned out quite nicely. Brittany has been working on a piece like this for a couple of years now. She just calls it "Her Medley." It's two minutes of songs ranging from Broken Road by Rascal Flatts to the theme from Zelda to theme from Superman. It sounds really good, and I think it will be a big hit with the class.
Anyway, I'm sure I've bored you long enough. We are very ready for the semester to be over, which is only in a couple days! We love you all and hope you're doing well.
Christian and Brittany
P.S. The recipe this week is one of my favorites from my childhood. It's my mom's homemade stroganoff. Delicious!
1 lb ground beef
1 diced onion
1 clove minced garlic
1 cu sour cream
2 Tbs Worcestershire Sauce
2 Tbs Ketchup
1 can Cream of Mushroom
1 3-oz can of mushrooms, drained
Brown the meat, onion and garlic together. Add the rest of the ingredients and heat it (don't boil it). Serve over rice or noodles (Noodles are my favorite). MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM STROGANOFF!
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