Bloggin' on the Noggin
Whelp, after being dubbed a 'hobo-blogger' by Andrew (a little prematurely I might add, it hadn't even been a week) I was inspired to spruce up the old blog a little. Hooray for pictures! Hopefully reading my blog will be a little less brain numbing now that you've got something to look at while you're reading. I've got plenty to blog about, so I'll spread it out over the next few days so you won't have to read a novel today and I won't get hobo-bloggered again tomorrow. Today will pick up where I left off with finals week. Where was I anyway...
I'd finished up last time by telling you that I had been invited to play my guitar on KPBX, Spokane's Public Radio station, on Thursday. KPBX is in this ancient building with poor insulation in the performance studio I played in along with radios tuned into the station all over the place. This was very disorienting at first. You could hear the person who was currently playing through the walls of the performance studio at the same time as you heard them coming out of about 10 different radios. Weird. The performance studio was a 12 foot square room with a grand piano in it and some acoustic padding on the walls. Various microphones were set up for the different performers. All of the performers that week were participants in Musicfest, the competition I played in a few days before. I slipped into the room between performances and sat in the room while a 12 year old kid whose hobbies were skateboarding and playing video games played the crap out of some piece by Rachmaninoff or someone. Hmm, that's humbling. He got done, the announcer, who was sitting in the same room on a rickety old wicker stool, announced my pieces, and off I went. I did a pretty decent job. There were no train wrecks and any performance you walk away from is a good one, I guess (sorry for the mixed metaphors). I got a tape of my radio debut and was able to hear a real recording of myself for the first time. There are things I'd like to fix, but it was ok. So there's that experience.
Later that day I finished up my final project for Music Theory. Actually, I restarted my final project since my first try was pretty much a flop. I composed a short piece utilizing twelve tone serialism. For those of you who aren't familiar with atonal music, the basic idea is to write music that has no key or tonal center. In layman's terms, to make music that sounds bad. (It's actually more in depth than that, and some atonal music is really cool, but for our purposes this definition will do.) I ended up with something I thought was ok. Friday morning we presented our final projects at the professor's house. The entire class bought shirts that say "Theory Rocks!" on them, so we all wore them to commemorate the occasion. Our theory party was really cool. We got to hear everyone's projects (they weren't all atonal) and got to hear our professor who is a professional jazz pianist sing "Sneaky Snake" while accompanying himself on the tenor banjo. All in all it was quite a kick and was a great way to end my semester.
That wraps up finals week. I saw 'Troy' later in the day on Friday. My thoughts? Eh. It was fun...for a Greek tragedy. And the ending wasn't really a surprise, horse, heel, you know.
That's it for now. More blogging coming soon!
Whelp, after being dubbed a 'hobo-blogger' by Andrew (a little prematurely I might add, it hadn't even been a week) I was inspired to spruce up the old blog a little. Hooray for pictures! Hopefully reading my blog will be a little less brain numbing now that you've got something to look at while you're reading. I've got plenty to blog about, so I'll spread it out over the next few days so you won't have to read a novel today and I won't get hobo-bloggered again tomorrow. Today will pick up where I left off with finals week. Where was I anyway...
I'd finished up last time by telling you that I had been invited to play my guitar on KPBX, Spokane's Public Radio station, on Thursday. KPBX is in this ancient building with poor insulation in the performance studio I played in along with radios tuned into the station all over the place. This was very disorienting at first. You could hear the person who was currently playing through the walls of the performance studio at the same time as you heard them coming out of about 10 different radios. Weird. The performance studio was a 12 foot square room with a grand piano in it and some acoustic padding on the walls. Various microphones were set up for the different performers. All of the performers that week were participants in Musicfest, the competition I played in a few days before. I slipped into the room between performances and sat in the room while a 12 year old kid whose hobbies were skateboarding and playing video games played the crap out of some piece by Rachmaninoff or someone. Hmm, that's humbling. He got done, the announcer, who was sitting in the same room on a rickety old wicker stool, announced my pieces, and off I went. I did a pretty decent job. There were no train wrecks and any performance you walk away from is a good one, I guess (sorry for the mixed metaphors). I got a tape of my radio debut and was able to hear a real recording of myself for the first time. There are things I'd like to fix, but it was ok. So there's that experience.
Later that day I finished up my final project for Music Theory. Actually, I restarted my final project since my first try was pretty much a flop. I composed a short piece utilizing twelve tone serialism. For those of you who aren't familiar with atonal music, the basic idea is to write music that has no key or tonal center. In layman's terms, to make music that sounds bad. (It's actually more in depth than that, and some atonal music is really cool, but for our purposes this definition will do.) I ended up with something I thought was ok. Friday morning we presented our final projects at the professor's house. The entire class bought shirts that say "Theory Rocks!" on them, so we all wore them to commemorate the occasion. Our theory party was really cool. We got to hear everyone's projects (they weren't all atonal) and got to hear our professor who is a professional jazz pianist sing "Sneaky Snake" while accompanying himself on the tenor banjo. All in all it was quite a kick and was a great way to end my semester.
That wraps up finals week. I saw 'Troy' later in the day on Friday. My thoughts? Eh. It was fun...for a Greek tragedy. And the ending wasn't really a surprise, horse, heel, you know.
That's it for now. More blogging coming soon!
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