Hi everyone! What a quick term and year it has been. We’re miraculously already at the end of both, and it’s hard for me to believe that a lot of my friends will be leaving campus and starting their summer in a little over a week from now. This is our final week of classes, and then finals will be Monday through Wednesday of next week. Both of my finals are on Monday morning, so my summer pretty much starts on Monday afternoon! Until then, it’s a race to the finish line, as I try to finish all of my projects and assignments for my classes…and study for finals. Yesterday, I had my “clarinet final,” which was a juried performance of two pieces I’ve been working on recently: Carl Maria von Weber’s Clarinet Concerto No. 2 and Miklos Rozsa’s Sonatina for Solo Clarinet. These juried performances, or “juries” as we call them, are required for freshman and sophomore music majors, and although it sounds a little daunting, it’s actually not so scary. It’s basically just a chance for our professors to review our performance skills and make sure we’re progressing at the rate we should be. I performed for four of the woodwind faculty members, and they gave me really supportive and helpful feedback on what I did well and what I needed to improve on. My clarinet professor made sure that all of us performing juries yesterday were prepared well in advance, and we actually had several group meetings and performances leading up to the performance day to help make sure we were prepared and comfortable. I like to think of any audition or performance as just a fun opportunity to play my instrument and get the audience excited about the pieces I’m playing, and I think that helps a lot with anxiety and pre-performance nerves.
Now that my jury performance is over, it’s time for me to start preparing for my junior recital, which will be pretty early in the next school year during the fall! Performance majors (like me) have to do two recitals (one junior year and one senior year) following their freshman and sophomore juries. The junior recital is only a half/30-minute recital, and the senior recital is a full hour, but they’re actually a lot of fun to put together and prepare! I’m in the process of planning which repertoire/pieces I’m going to play for my recital in the fall, and I’m getting so excited just thinking about all of the different possibilities! I should probably make my final decisions soon, though, so I can have a definite plan of action for practicing over the summer. I think one of the fun things about putting together a recital (at least for me) is that it’s basically a chance to showcase my musical personality (as incredibly weird as that probably sounds…). A lot of the pieces I’ve played over the past two years have really influenced my growth as a musician, and many of them are pieces I really connect with on an emotional level and now consider to be important parts of who I am, and so the recital gives an opportunity to put on a performance that I’m really excited about. I suppose it’s very similar to a visual artist putting together an exhibition or gallery of their works…there’s something very meaningful and satisfying about sharing your creativity and soul with an audience in that way.
As I’ve been writing this, I’ve realized that this has been a very musically exciting couple of weeks! In my music history survey class right now, we’re covering 20th century music, specifically serial music and minimalist music. Serial and minimalist music are very hard to explain well in just a few sentences, but these styles of music sound…very different…from most of the music that came before it. Some of the major composers of this era include John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, and Philip Glass, and I spent much of last week listening to the music of some of these composers for my music history assignments! (Here’s one of them) Even just a few months ago, I absolutely couldn’t stand minimalist or serial music; it seemed to lack any semblance of tone, structure, melody, or anything pleasant or tolerable. But as I’ve been forced to study these styles in the past few weeks, I’ve realized that these styles of music are absolutely brilliant and beautiful! The inventiveness, the clever borrowing of romantic, classical and baroque musical ideas, the daringness to evade traditional structure and tonality…all of it amazes me in this music. This might represent a major way that the liberal arts education at Lawrence has really begun to transform and expand my way of thinking, and I think many of my classmates have been enlightened or transformed in similar ways. It’s scary and uncomfortable to challenge ourselves and break past our comfort zones, but it’s also so amazing and satisfying to discover or understand an idea or style of music or work of art that we never in our wildest dreams thought we could even appreciate, much less admire. After all, what’s life if not an adventure?