Blog
Jazz choir and a half
Posted by Steven on Tue 2005-04-05 07:49:09 UTC #One and a half months since my last entry... must be time to update again. Time to go back in time to... let's see... February 26. That's the day the jazz choir went down to the Mt. SAC vocal jazz workshop. It had people like Jennifer Barnes and Michelle Weir to critique us. They liked us a lot... said we were at the level of a college choir instead of a high school. Yay. Anyway, those are some of the people that will judge at the competitions coming up (which I'll talk about later).
On March 2 we had a gig at the Bacara for TIAA-CREF. I sang the solo in Somewhere (from West Side Story), their theme song. Oh, and there's a rumor that Bill Gates was there... interesting... Bill Gates hearing me solo. Also on that day was my midterm for compsci. I got a 99% on it... it would've been a 100%, but the teacher apparently doesn't like it when people get 100s so he went back over my test looking for errors and found one. Oh, by the way, the midterm was crammed between jazz choir's mic check and performance. So it was head over to the Bacara, sound check, rush to CC, take midterm, rush home to get changed, then back to the Bacara just in time for the end of our warmup before we perform. Fun.
Three days after that the jazz choir (see a theme in this post?) put on our annual benefit concert I brought all the sound equipment that we needed over from DP to GV. It was raining that day, of course. After bringing it there Andrew Alker and I started to set it up... my dad came to help too. And we got some choir people to go set up mics. Then Andrew decided that I should do lights for the shows. So he showed me how to use the board... lots of sliders, wee. Anyway, I got to wear the wireless headset thingie for the show, and for the most part did my job without any problems. And I got to sit in an air-conditioned room while everybody else had to be in the rather warm house. Doing lights is kind of fun... too bad I kind of had to perform in the show, so at the end I went backstage and Andrew took over lights, as my dad was handling the sound. The choir's performance was pretty good. Too bad our audience was on the small side... oh well.
Let's see... what else is on my list of stuff that I should write about... the gig at the UCSB faculty club on March 12? Nah. Weird dream I had? Sure. I had a dream where we were singing a song in choir... but when I woke up I realized that I had never hear the song we were singing before. So apparently I compose in my sleep. Too bad I don't remember any of it after I wake up.
We had an interesting rehearsal on March 17. Jory and I were the only basses there for most of the time. We were singing the end of Minuano, the part where the basses go up at the high end of their range... and we were very loud. It was rather entertaining... when we sang the high D and F we couldn't hear anybody else singing at all. So we had to be a bit quieter, which isn't exactly easy on those notes when we're supposed to hold them for as long as we were.
I think it was March 22 that Jennifer Barnes came into jazz choir. The choir seemed to like her a lot... she got us to put more intensity into Dizzy's Itch, showed us what a good solo consists of, etc. We sang very well when she was there... hopefully we can keep singing very well like that day.
Okay, that's enough choir stuff. For now. It sounds like all I do and all I think about is choir. Which probably isn't too far from the truth for a good portion of my time... but maybe I should talk about my other classes. Like... calc. Calc is... calc. Okay, not much to talk about there. Physics? We're doing circuits right now. Econ? We don't do anything for the most part. English? Meh. I had a paper due last Thursday. I turned it in today, Monday. It was not a fun paper... analyzing a chapter from The Island of Dr. Moreau and saying how and why it is crucial to the novel. Sounds easy enough, right? Except English homework drains my will to do anything... unfortunately this includes actually doing the English homework. My mind likes to go blank instead. So... yah. Anyway.
So, this is spring break. It doesn't feel much like a break, except for the lack of classes and more sleep... I still have to do English homework (and other classes' homework for that matter) and I still will have jazz choir practice this week. We're going to Monterey on Friday, so we're getting ready for that. Our set is Dizzy's Itch, Spain, Full Moon, and Minuano. Should be interesting to listen to the other choirs perform there... all our favorite rivals.
I still need to rewrite my blog's code. It's still the original mess using the original layout engine. Hopefully I'll be able to convert it to a non-mess and use the new layout engine. And redesign the URI system so it makes more sense. And use XMLHTTPRequests to serve up comments. Well, that's enough writing for today. You may now comment.
On March 2 we had a gig at the Bacara for TIAA-CREF. I sang the solo in Somewhere (from West Side Story), their theme song. Oh, and there's a rumor that Bill Gates was there... interesting... Bill Gates hearing me solo. Also on that day was my midterm for compsci. I got a 99% on it... it would've been a 100%, but the teacher apparently doesn't like it when people get 100s so he went back over my test looking for errors and found one. Oh, by the way, the midterm was crammed between jazz choir's mic check and performance. So it was head over to the Bacara, sound check, rush to CC, take midterm, rush home to get changed, then back to the Bacara just in time for the end of our warmup before we perform. Fun.
Three days after that the jazz choir (see a theme in this post?) put on our annual benefit concert I brought all the sound equipment that we needed over from DP to GV. It was raining that day, of course. After bringing it there Andrew Alker and I started to set it up... my dad came to help too. And we got some choir people to go set up mics. Then Andrew decided that I should do lights for the shows. So he showed me how to use the board... lots of sliders, wee. Anyway, I got to wear the wireless headset thingie for the show, and for the most part did my job without any problems. And I got to sit in an air-conditioned room while everybody else had to be in the rather warm house. Doing lights is kind of fun... too bad I kind of had to perform in the show, so at the end I went backstage and Andrew took over lights, as my dad was handling the sound. The choir's performance was pretty good. Too bad our audience was on the small side... oh well.
Let's see... what else is on my list of stuff that I should write about... the gig at the UCSB faculty club on March 12? Nah. Weird dream I had? Sure. I had a dream where we were singing a song in choir... but when I woke up I realized that I had never hear the song we were singing before. So apparently I compose in my sleep. Too bad I don't remember any of it after I wake up.
We had an interesting rehearsal on March 17. Jory and I were the only basses there for most of the time. We were singing the end of Minuano, the part where the basses go up at the high end of their range... and we were very loud. It was rather entertaining... when we sang the high D and F we couldn't hear anybody else singing at all. So we had to be a bit quieter, which isn't exactly easy on those notes when we're supposed to hold them for as long as we were.
I think it was March 22 that Jennifer Barnes came into jazz choir. The choir seemed to like her a lot... she got us to put more intensity into Dizzy's Itch, showed us what a good solo consists of, etc. We sang very well when she was there... hopefully we can keep singing very well like that day.
Okay, that's enough choir stuff. For now. It sounds like all I do and all I think about is choir. Which probably isn't too far from the truth for a good portion of my time... but maybe I should talk about my other classes. Like... calc. Calc is... calc. Okay, not much to talk about there. Physics? We're doing circuits right now. Econ? We don't do anything for the most part. English? Meh. I had a paper due last Thursday. I turned it in today, Monday. It was not a fun paper... analyzing a chapter from The Island of Dr. Moreau and saying how and why it is crucial to the novel. Sounds easy enough, right? Except English homework drains my will to do anything... unfortunately this includes actually doing the English homework. My mind likes to go blank instead. So... yah. Anyway.
So, this is spring break. It doesn't feel much like a break, except for the lack of classes and more sleep... I still have to do English homework (and other classes' homework for that matter) and I still will have jazz choir practice this week. We're going to Monterey on Friday, so we're getting ready for that. Our set is Dizzy's Itch, Spain, Full Moon, and Minuano. Should be interesting to listen to the other choirs perform there... all our favorite rivals.
I still need to rewrite my blog's code. It's still the original mess using the original layout engine. Hopefully I'll be able to convert it to a non-mess and use the new layout engine. And redesign the URI system so it makes more sense. And use XMLHTTPRequests to serve up comments. Well, that's enough writing for today. You may now comment.
English
Posted by JCB on Tue 2005-04-05 16:13:28 UTCEnglish is usually not too difficult for me, but tell me to write a paper on polisci and my eyes can only focus on infinity and my brain only experiences white noise. I know what you're feeling.
