A Productive Day

I practiced a total of 3 and a half hours today, haha!! To make up for my not practicing on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Bad, bad me. My fingers hurt after pounding on my pieces for so long... I'm not piano major material. I wonder how the piano majors do it... they practice anywhere from 3 to 6 hours a day, everyday including weekends. Ang galing naman nila. THAT'S DEDICATION.

The difficulty about Voice is that you can't practice singing for lengthy periods of time... the vocal chords are extremely delicate and if one forces them, one might do potentially permanent damage. :( One hour of nonstop singing is extremely exhausting already.

I ran through my major pieces (a Filipino song cycle by Noni Espina <8 songs> plus six songs: 1 oratoria aria, 1 opera aria, 1 French melodie, 1 German lied, 1 English art song and 1 Tagalog kundiman) with Ate Michelle today. Whoa! Talk about a major blunder fest. In fairness, it was a first time pasada. I now realize just how much work I need to put in my major pieces this sem... gaaaaak. My songs are "killers," hehe, my teacher's words and not my own. They're all so darn HIGH!! It's frustrating. :( Especially the Tagalog, "Kay Tamis ng Buhay," the aria of Maria Clara from Noli Me Tangere. It has a sustained high C. And the Filipino song cycle is EXTREMELY difficult... then again, it IS an Espina piece. (sigh)

Our side won the Nurture vs. Nature debate in MuEd today!! YIPEE! Congrats to my groupmates Aretha, Kim, and Maricor... we're oh-so-galing! The whole thing was recorded on camera, we're going to watch ourselves next Tuesday and grade our groupmates accordingly.

I'm not cut out to be a public speaker, I must admit. :( It's weird, but the words don't flow from my mouth the way they do with some of my orgmates. I find it hard to string words together. I note that this is a common problem with my collegemates. They say that it's because we think in terms of music and sound, and not in words. Weee-eeell... to a certain degree, I agree with that. Oftentimes I find myself analyzing the musical aspects of the voice of the person I'm conversing with (e.g. timbre). And a few times, I've met people whose speaking voices I find so unpleasant. I have a hard time listening to these people when I'm talking to them, hehe. I know it's a bad thing, and I try not to mind. But don't you think it's hard to listen to someone whose voice is so shrill and screechy?

Tomorrow I have to interview Miss Joan Page for our Theater class. She was the 1940's/50's version of Thalia in the Philippines, hehe, a really famous actress in her day. How exciting!

The voltage regulator is fluctuating. Must post now or this entry might be lost.