Friday, March 14, 2008

A gold star day in the voice studio

...is what I had the other week at my lesson. Over the past two or three lessons, I've experienced some breakthroughs and a "singer growth spurt". In the previous lesson, we breezed through the vocal exercises and made good progress on the piece that I was working on. Then my teacher brought up the subject of repertoire, and we discussed possibilities for songs and arias I should tackle. I believe he was giving me a nudge to start working on more difficult pieces. I feel like I've graduated to the next level. It is exciting and rewarding! I never thought I'd have the interest or ability to sing pieces from the operatic repertoire, but here I am, taking the first baby steps in that direction.

I've updated my repertoire list accordingly.

Other recent musical endeavors:

Saw tenor John Bellemer perform at Stanford as part of the Shenson Recital Series. The following day, I sat in on the masterclass he gave for Stanford voice students.

Recently learned how to use LilyPond, an open-source software package for music notation. I used it to prepare some sheet music for my choir. It lays out musical scores beautifully, but it is not all that user-friendly, and using it is practically like writing computer code. However, it is free. I checked out the commercial alternatives, Finale and Sibelius, and they are definitely not giving them away!

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