h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Time: 21.50 hrs CET - Nearly forgot to write my journal today.
Weather - wet and miserable. Cold. forecast is for frost tonight.

Music school this morning. Learned a lot of new stuff, and a lot of things that had been confusing us were suddenly made clear. I really must look up all the jargon in English. It seem odd that I know words for things in German and not in my native tongue. I also learned that I am pants at conducting.

But the new teacher is far better in my opinion. Last year we didn't conduct at all until about three weeks before the end of the year and then we were told that we were going to be examined in it. This new teacher has the first years conducting straight away and certainly does not intimidate them. You can tell how overbearing our old teacher was because everyone who had him - particularly the girls - is still absolutely scared stiff of standing in front of the choir and of getting things wrong.

So with a couple of lessons under this new teacher's wing, I might get the hang of it.

[Amy P]

Everyone is useless at conducting when they start, or at least feel as if they are. I attended a few week-long conducting courses a while back, and the best one was where the teacher ignored our idiosyncrasies completely and after a day or two they began to fall away.

The best advice was some I got from a friend: the most important thing is to have a clear idea of how you want to hear the piece, and the next most important is to be able to hear how what they are doing differs from that.

Of all the things we do, conducting is the one where your technique has closest to zero importance.

It's fascinating listening to you lot sometimes.

Thanks for the encouragement Recumbentman. It is certainly the aspect that I am most keen to get good at. Organ-playing is a necessary evil, to my mind, but singing, then conducting, I do hope to get somewhere with.*

This week, I was delighted that I was able to sing the base notes, the thirds and the fifths out of chords played on the piano with a certain confidence and with a better success rate than the rest of the class.

We are now grappling with the rules of harmonics.

*I feel really naughty now, finishing no less than *two* consecutive sentences with prepositions. tee hee.

Final prepositions are not worth worrying about. Anyone who complains should be told to shut up. Go ahead! There's three, and this is a fourth, to go on with.