Death

has come for my social life. So gonna die. Rehearsals every night till Friday, except Wed, when I have a movie screening for History. 2 papers and a fugue to write - at least the History paper has coalesced into a semblance of structure in my head.
Recital is over, went well - JK has really gotten me to put my whole head into my music, if not quite my heart as it has been on occasional particularly frustrating lessons. In other words, I play with a lot more focus now, because she's really drummed it into me to think of every aspect of the sound, and not losing it. Some of my best moments playing this year have been from just wanting REALLY BADLY to get a nice sound in the Bruch, which applied less to my Mozart and Bach this time around. Still, managed to get through both of them without more than minor hesitations and tiny slips of intonation in the latter. Mozart has been pronounced good enough that I ought to play it again in one of the more general studio recitals... if I can find the time.

BSO concert is shaping up to be good - the music is coming much more easily, despite me having even less practice than ever before, although this stuff isn't quite as hard as the Hindemith and Shostakovich were in places. Brahms Symphony #4 is getting good, and the soloists are just awesome.

To bed! And up at 7 (if possible) to get some more work done. Just did a chorale-style harmonization of Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. Had an assignment to treat a popular/well known piece in a similar way to the chorales we've been harmonizing this whole year. Since we've been doing all religious music which has no real context in our lives, I decided to do something that's sort of a symbol for the secularization of Christmas - Santa, Xmas presents and the lot. Bach worked on Lutheran chorales translated from Latin to German. I translated the English to German for the title, but to be a little more subtle, I used the second phrase: Er hätte eine sehr glänzende Nase. (Stick it in Babelfish for a humorous attempt at translation)