This past week was spent working on three major projects:
First, I needed to quickly learn the Mozart trio “Cosa Sento” from Le Nozze di Figaro. I will be playing the Count in New Mexico State University’s opera scenes program in April. That will be a lot of fun, but it was a challenge working on Mozartian recitative again (the sung lines in the manner of speaking, usually over a basso continuo or solo harpsichord accompaniment).
Second, I was working on a 3-6 page paper trying to define Romanticism in music. This was a challenge because I really wanted to boil it down to its innermost driving impulse, but I decided that for such a short paper, I might be getting in over my head. The other challenge with that was learning to cite in Turabian style, which was fun once I got used to it. It did, however, take some time to learn. Plus I had to learn how to use slightly more advanced features like footnotes in my word processor.
Third, I spent a couple days last week working on my computer, which I managed to crash (yet again). It turns out that operating systems that are not on the first partition of a hard drive do not like to be moved around. Luckily, I am an obsessive back-upper, but it still took a lot of my time to fix. And to compound the problem, after I had rebuilt my computer’s software, I kicked the computer (a laptop) right in its hard drive while it was performing some operation. It seemed fine at first, but pretty soon, warning windows began popping up and programs began crashing. That took another long lonely night to fix.
At the end of the week, there was a master class that I participated in. I will write another post about that, but it was very fun and very informative. It was a big week, and this week looks similar to it.
