Archive for November, 2013
Sunday: Psalms 7 and 8
Monday: Psalms 9 through 16. 11 to 16 are all pretty short, so I just kept reading and reading. Found one verse that I really like: “I say to the Lord, “You are my Lord; I have no good apart from you.”” (Psalm 16: 3)
Tuesday: Psalms 17 and 18
Wednesday: Psalms 19 through 21
Thursday: Psalms 22 to 24. I like 22 and 23 a lot.
Friday: Psalms 25 and 26
Saturday: And on the seventh day, I’ll take a break from Psalms and just pray.
This time a week from now, I will be, with the exception of three final exams, finished with my first semester of college. But what a week it is going to be… Between now and next Friday at midnight, I need to write a full lab report for chemistry, put together and edit a video for a group project, write my last writing seminar paper about climate change ethics and make a final portfolio with some of my earlier work from my writing class.
Even if I didn’t have anything but work to do, it would be busy, but I do. This afternoon we have our last football game of the season, so I am not going to be able to give my TA very much (if anything) from my paper to look over, like I was hoping. And next weekend our orchestra and university choir are putting on our winter concert, which means I am going to have rehearsal Wednesday, Thursday and Friday night. Yikes.
So I’m praying for the ability to focus on my work and being productive with my time more than ever for this week. The end is in sight, but there’s quite a gauntlet to run from here to there. Anyway, I’m going to finish eating breakfast (dry cereal in a mug because the dining halls still aren’t open after Thanksgiving) and do some research (and hopefully some organizing) for my paper before marching band rehearsal. I hope to make some posts this week, but for obvious reasons, they may be few and far between.
This may be a little bit cliché, but it is Thanksgiving after all (it’s really early in the morning the Friday after, but I haven’t gone to bed yet). So I wanted to make a short list of some of the things I’m thankful for.
There are many other things that I could list, but I would be up a lot later than I am prepared to be if I chose to write them all down. I’ll stop there for now.
I discovered this band on Spotify today, and thought I’d share the first two tracks from their album Worth Dying For.
The credit music for the amazing film Beasts of the Southern Wild, which I had to write a short paper on for my climate change and writing seminar.
I’m not sure why, but I wanted to make a top 5 list of orchestral players who wrote good music for horn. It’s taken me since Wednesday to make the post, but here’s what I came up with:
5. Tchaikovsky – Though I really like Tchaikovsky, he’s really only on this list because I couldn’t think of anyone better. Most of his horn parts are decent, but not all that exciting relatively. Some of the better ones:
4. Mozart – I kind of didn’t want to put him on the list, but his horn concertos are kind of important… Even though he was a bit (understatement) of a jerk to his friend and horn player Joseph Leutgeb, his four concertos and Concert Rondo are such a staple of the horn repertoire that I need to include him.
3. Wagner – Wagner didn’t write much other than operas, but horn parts in those operas are pretty cool. A couple of them, like the Siegfried call, are very common audition excerpts and some of the best known passages for the horn. Had a hard time picking which pieces I should chose here.
2. Mahler – Mahler may very well be my favorite composer of all time. His nine (and a half) symphonies have some of what I think are the most memorable horn parts in the standard repertoire. And unlike many of his predecessors, Mahler used horn and other brass instruments much like strings and woodwinds, giving them melodies and countermelodies regularly instead of just chords and maybe six measures of glory (ahem, Haydn…)
1. Strauss (Richard) – Strauss the youngest belongs to the same group as Mahler, with excellent horn parts in almost all of his music, which consisted mainly of symphonic tone poems. As my teacher said, he had such an excellent understanding of the horn (his father Franz was a hornist, after all) that, although difficult, the his writing is some of the best for the instrument. In addition to two amazing horn concertos, my favorite of the “genre,” the horn plays a major role in many of his other works.
Just to clarify, there are a couple of film composers I would add to this list (John Williams, Hans Zimmer), but I wanted to stick to traditional classical repertoire.
One Hour Till Midnight 