What are you guys doing on Valentine's Day?

After a 3 day hiatus that have left many readers disappointed about the lack of updates and pictures, I've decided that there's got to be a day where I do my blogpost, and that day was today.

So it's one day before Chinese New Year! Nothing much, but I'm looking forward to my CNY celebrations - that's because I go across the Causeway and we play mah-jong, daidi, eat peanuts and delicacies, tons of ba-gua, and of course, write a couple of short stories! (At least that's what I've been doing every time I go across)The last time I went there I wrote 3 chapters of a story I was planning to read for myself (about 2000 words - handwritten!). This time, I'm going to try writing a short skit. But a concept must be done up first.

The past few days have been spent doing the same old things - attending Saturday classes with Dr. Edwards, where we studied Liszt's Liebestraum 3 in terms of harmony, compositional techniques, and music theory. So we came about thinking out aloud how Liszt managed to bring us from Ab major to B major so comfortably. He mentioned that composers usually add just one more sharp or flat in order to prevent the event that we modulate too suddenly and all of us die in shock.

So we were all thinking - from A FLAT, how did we go to B major? (which is a 'sharp' key). And then I realised...that the flats of Db major (Bb, Eb, Ab, Db, Gb) correspond to the sharps of B major (F#, C#, G#, D#, A#)! And that proved altogether that Dr Edward's 'theory' was right - that composers usually add just one more sharp or flat. In this case, Liszt added one more flat (Gb) from Ab major to form Db major, and Db major's flats corresponded exactly to all of B major's sharps.

Now if you don't know what I have been talking, it's ok, because I'm quite sure musicians reading my blog would understand what I'm talking about. It's quite simple and elegant actually.

Sunday was Math Tuition day, and I did circular measure to prepare for the quiz on Monday. This time, I'm pretty confident that I would score very good marks for the quiz. Yumyum.

Remember last week when I said that I was going to perform for the concert next week? (12 Feb) Here's just a reminder that I'm still performing, and all of you can go. It's free by the way. This is the URL to the list of performers and items that day - http://scmapp.nus.edu.sg/events/details.asp?e_id=519

Meanwhile, yesterday was the studio class, and I played Faure in it. It was good, and of course we learnt lots and lots of things that simply can't be typed in here - the things we learn are found far and few outside of the Conservatory. However, we had a perfect analogy from Dr. Hecht that I could suggest to other musicians to think about.

That as musicians we control the vibrations we make, and like Harry Potter, while he controls 'magic', we control sound. So that means all of us have this craft, and that we are to refine this craft and produce wonderful music to give to the audience. As a pianist, we make use of the pedals and produce organic music, vibrations that can evolve and devolve, can rejuvenate and can sadden. We collect and send out different qualities of sounds in different forms - waves of sounds across the hall, rings of sound, thousands of different colours and shapes.

So hard to describe here...

What are you guys doing on Valentine's Day?