My desk.

While everyone's mugging for EOY, you stay put here and start blogging. Life can sometimes be a bitch, really. I shall start with the most emo sentence you can ever ever start a blogpost with.

Today is a bad day. When has a day never been today? Tomorrow? The day after the next? They will all become todays. More bad days ahead. :) Which doesn't prove anything about my mood currently. It is become, er, sort of non-chalant.

I'm currently depending on Jean Hsieh's notes to survive in physics, still mugging those same worksheets. I can't stand it though. Why can't I be practising piano, doing music now...I need to practise my Beethoven Op. 10 No. 3, but to be honest I know I can't make it in time for tomorrow. Ravel's Sonatine is a definite though. I know I can get that done, because I've been practising that. Wonder whether Dr. Hecht will mind.





Let's do a slight description of my desk, as I had done a few months ago if you readers can still remember: On my right, a calender. At my elbow, my mugging book.

Couple of pencils. A mechanical one I accidently borrowed/took/never returned/don't-call-it-steal from Paul/JonLim. Sorry. It's white in colour.

Above me on the protruded ledge a huge speaker that weights around 10kg at most, a stack of CDs in one box cover that says: Ultimate Piano Concertos, the essential masterpieces - 5CDs. For the record, I'm listening to Tchaikovsky's First Concerto now. On the most left on the ledge, a defunct scanner which I found was defunct after attempting to scan my air tickets and stubs to Jenny, an officer at the Conservatory.

Stuck on pieces of paper at the edge of the ledge that hangs down reads - "Jonathan - practise maths, physics, and chemistry" My pop.

Directly on my left, an entire stack of pure music. Ok maybe not, on top of the stack lies by 10-years-old pencil box that's all about Tweety Bird. Yes, Tweety Bird. Got it in kindergarten. Below it, the empty jewel case of the Tchaikovsky No. 1 and Rachmaninov No. 2. (Heavyweights)

Oh, shit. Ok below it is another library book I borrowed, which isn't related to music at all. But here's a section of it that does relate to music.






"What you are about to hear, comrade, is a Mozart sonata,' Luo announced, as coolly as before.

I was dumbfounded. Had he gone mad? All music by Mozart or indeed by any other Western composer had been banned years ago. In my sodden shoes my feet turned to ice. I shivered as the cold tightened its grip on me.

'What's a sonata?' the headman asked warily.

'I don't know,' I faltered. 'It's Western.'

'Is it a song?'

'More or less,' I replied evasively.

At that instant the glint of the vigilant Communist reappeared in the headman's eyes, and his voice turned hostile.

'What's the name of this song of yours?'

'Well,it's like a song, but actually it's a sonata.'

'I'm asking you what it's called!' he snapped, fixing me with his gaze.

Again I was alarmed by the three spots of blood in his left eye.

'Mozart...' I muttered.

'Mozart what?'

'Mozart is Thinking of Chairman Mao,' Luo broke in.

The audacity! But it worked: as if he had heard something miraculous, the headman's menacing look softened. He crinkled up his eyes in a wide, beatific smile.

'Mozart thinks of Mao all the time,' he said.

'Indeed, all the time,' agreed Luo.

As soon as I had tightened my bow there was a burst of applause, but I was still nervous. However, as I ran my swollen fingers over the strings, Mozart's phrases came flooding back to me like so many faithful friends. The peasants' faces, so grim a moment before, softened under the influence of Mozart's limpid music like parched earth under a shower, and then in the dancing light of the oil lamp, they blurred into one.

I played for some time. Luo lit a cigarette and smoked quietly, like a man.

This was our first taste of re-education. Luo was eight years old, I was seventeen.




Alrighty guys. There's the section - see, something about China and music. Below is a book sent to me as a gift by billionaire Eric Lim (seriously, you heard it, billionaire - he opened a South African factory with S.R Nathan last year)

It's called The Rest is Noise, and Uncle Eric if you're reading this, I'm not done reading the book yet. But it's really great. Which has really drawn me into the world of Mahler, Prokofiev, Strauss, Bartok, Copland. Yeah, it's all about 20th Century music, and it's really cleverly written. Super witty. Isn't really about the history though. Don't know how to describe it.

By the way, I think I typed the entire passage from the story in less than 3 minutes. Or maybe even 2. I'm fast. :)

Alright below the book is the manuscript paper I got from Germany - it's really super precious to me, simply because it is engineered differently. Manuscript paper that works like foolscalp? Forget finding it in Singapore. Come on, import it to Singapore please...we already have F1...

Underneath the manuscript pile is another manuscript book that I got in 2002, and in fact all my knowledge of music can be found inside these book - what I've written there can seriously be what I've been taught in Sec 4 MEP. Yeah, check it out, transposing instruments, chords and blah blah blah, thank you.

The later pages contain my sketches for the piano concerto I was mentioning about of creating, and it's still going pretty strong, except I realised yesterday in the library that one of my passages came DIRECTLY DIRECTLY from Tchaikovsky No. 1's Second Movement - the first motive.

Akkra, if you're reading this, you'll know what I mean. I played it for him once, and he said, "Hey! That part sounds like, Rachmaninov or Tchaikovsky, it's, rreeeally familiar?"

Yeap. That's the part.

What. Stop staring! I didn't mean for it to come out this way!

I'll take out the part soon enough.

The freaking scanner can't scan a sketch I had of my sonatina, because, yeap, it's dead.

Below it is Britten's Orchestral Anthology, published by Boosey and Hawkes. I got it from the Music Teachers' library last year in order to write a transcript for simply bass and piano in order for us to practise the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.

Never got around to doing it. Sorry Mr Sze.

After that is the Schumann score that I accompanied Jinghui with - his Violin Sonata in A minor. Really fun, except I screwed up the last movement. I should go stick my head in some mud.

Below that is the famous yellow book that contains my Shostakovich and last year's music assignments, including the C major sonata by Mozart, Faure, Liszt, Debussy.

Below that, my original Mozart score, now torn and tattered, with freaking tonnes of detail in it. Don't touch it.

Ok underneath it is my Griffes score, yellow-covered Schirmer one. And finally, at the bottom-most of the stack, is my trusty ringed-manuscript book, which has been reduced to a couple of pages because of all the pages I've torn out of it in my entire life. Let's put it to 6 years of tearing.



In front of me on the green-painted wall sticks the EOY schedule, and the contact list of 3L'07. Oh, you asking me for the difference? The difference is that Ben Liu isn't on the 4L' 08 list. Ben, you reading this? Please do CLE poster.

On the left of the freaking stack, is a container that contains another container. Yeah, trust me on that. Nothing much in it, except a metronome, and a Sistic packet that contains 6 Sistic tickets - including this Saturday's one, and at the end of the year, an ENTIRE FEATURE OF YELLOW RIVER WITH THE ORIGINAL COMPOSER PERFORMING.

Yes, you heard that babes, the objective word being ORIGINAL COMPOSER PERFORMING. Hardly believable.


On the left of the container, a new printer me dad just bought. And on the left, the entire speaker that weighs 10kg, as mentioned. And the book about Ibiza that Dr Hecht sent me. Reading it really gives me a huge sense of nostalgia.

Wait. Nostalgia? Isn't Singapore my home? Oops.

Check it out.



My entire desk. And if you refer back to paragraph 1, I'm sorry about the 'slight description' part. Really my mistake.

Cya.