Back to some music!

Well it has been some time.....

I have finally brought myself back to writing here. The only thing stopping me has been laziness, so lets hope that I can shake this off for a while.

My last practice teaching placement was a great experience. This ended much better than my last one. On the last day of my second last placement a visiting teacher had told me that I sounded mean sometimes. Now I must add that I had prodded them to tell me how I did... This was not what I was expecting to hear. She said that i was short and snippy with some of the students, even those who were very well behaved. I get easily flustered and that is where that comes from. It also comes from knowing so many people who are like that and emulating them. This brings me to a startling realization that now there are probably some cadets out there who are officers or seniors that are emulating that type of action... So now I not only have to fix my own way of doing things, I might just have to correct the ways I have taught other people.

That was, however, the only negative comment I got on that placement so I imagine that I am not all that bad. I did let it drag me down for a while till Amy smacked some sense into me.

My last placement, as I said was very good. I really enjoyed the school I was at and the students I taught. In my last class I did a PowerPoint presentation on the music of the early Mass. It went really well along with my musical examples. I was in a public school, and some of you may be wondering why I was teaching parts of the mass. Well here I go:
The Christian Church was really the first major institution to codify and standardize the notation of music. Also, much of the music before the 20th century was inspired by religion. They all seemed to accept this answer and I think we had a good class.

Now that is all over… as are my holidays. We start school again on the 8th of January.

This Christmas I asked for and received some really neat recordings and DVDs, so lets talk about them.

First I decided to start of the season by buying myself some presents. This year UNITEL decided to release some interesting footage. I found Herbert von Karajan in Rehearsal and Performance on Amazon.ca. In this DVD there is footage of him rehearsing and performing Schumann Symphony No 4 and Beethoven Symphony No 5.

This DVD is very interesting because this is the only footage/recording of him rehearsing an entire work. It is quite the rehearsal. Lots of talking. It is interesting to see a conductor talking so much in rehearsal, as today the stress is on less talking, more gesturing. After all, talk is cheap. Rather when you are paying musicians and conductors money to rehearse, time isn't cheap and talk is money. Regardless, this is valuable as a learning tool to see how it IS or was done. The performances are great. Actually it is this footage of clips that are posted at
http://www.karajan.org/en/biography/ms/video.asp


If you have a chance you should check them out.

Anyways, this is probably long enough of a post. I guess I will discuss the presents that other people got me next time. Now that means I have to post again soon.

I hope everyone is having a great holiday season!