It's that time of term again... when the blues start to get to me. Essay's due soon, and I'm still convinced that I stupidly chose a question that I'll probably not be able to answer. The books I borrowed seem to be out of point too... I'm sooooo dead can. ARGH.

Got back my paper composition too. Lots of comments about my 'weird' use of accidentals. I must concede that some of them were careless mistakes on my part, e.g. writing an augmented 5th interval instead of a minor 6th (G-D# instead of G-Eb). Fine, but some of the rest were not that hard to read what. C-C#-D and C-Db-D... like what's the HUGE difference lor. And actually, for that augmented 5th interval thing, I think it's alright for me to leave it as such cos it was what I intended to write, an augmented 5th interval. So why in the world would I think of turning it into a minor 6th until I got the score back and realised/remembered that oops, they prefer 'normal' intervals. Whatever. Lesson learnt. I think I have to like keep this in my memory forever, so that I won't do foolish things like that again if I ever take composition in my next two years. Which is very very possible cos it means I'll have less essay-based modules to do!

Now it's usually the instrumental lessons I look forward to, and there are so little of them... 10hrs per year for each instrument, pathetic! Sighs. But at least I'm enjoying them. The pace for piano is also picking up a bit, now we manage to go through more pieces each lesson. Loving harpsichord loads... it's so... I dunno? I guess Poot was right in saying that it's the vibes our teacher gives off that makes harpsichord lessons so enjoyable. She's so enthusiastic about everything, new pieces, old pieces, etc, even discussing fixing spoilt strings/parts of the harpsichord, which she does in addition to tuning at least two of the harpsichords each time she comes! Quite sad that this will probably be the only time in my life I'll get to play the harpsichord. I must make full use of this chance! =)

Text is boring as usual. But once I realised why I couldn't figure out the tone rows in the first movement of Webern (I didn't know there could be overlaps, stupid me...), I found it quite interesting. It's like solving a puzzle, like crossword puzzles (not the fill-in-the-blank type, the circle-the-words-you-spot type, what's it called again?) or sudoku. I also really admire Webern for actually coming up with such highly compact movements that made sense once we figured out the structure in class. Gosh, he's mad, in the words of one classmate... or maybe he's a genius, or maybe a mix of both. TMP is going along fine too. It's the usual cycle of 1) do exercise for homework, 2) teacher plays through exercise during class and comments, 3) look at the composer's actual harmonisation of the exercise, name chords etc, 4) give out new exercise, 5) listen to some music and guess the composer (this one's more for context, but our teacher's just trying to give us more exposure).

Ok, enough rambling and slacking, I guess I'm going to make a start on my text and studio compo homeworks (I finished TMP, yay!). Hopefully, if I finish those two by today, it leaves me ample time to finish my essay without having to practically not sleep the day before it's due... like the previous two times.