...is what I had the other week at my lesson. Over the past two or three lessons, I've experienced some breakthroughs and a "singer growth spurt". In the previous lesson, we breezed through the vocal exercises and made good progress on the piece that I was working on. Then my teacher brought up the subject of repertoire, and we discussed possibilities for songs and arias I should tackle. I believe he was giving me a nudge to start working on more difficult pieces. I feel like I've graduated to the next level. It is exciting and rewarding! I never thought I'd have the interest or ability to sing pieces from the operatic repertoire, but here I am, taking the first baby steps in that direction.
I've updated my repertoire list accordingly.
Other recent musical endeavors:
Saw tenor John Bellemer perform at Stanford as part of the Shenson Recital Series. The following day, I sat in on the masterclass he gave for Stanford voice students.
Recently learned how to use LilyPond, an open-source software package for music notation. I used it to prepare some sheet music for my choir. It lays out musical scores beautifully, but it is not all that user-friendly, and using it is practically like writing computer code. However, it is free. I checked out the commercial alternatives, Finale and Sibelius, and they are definitely not giving them away!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
If you're looking for a reasonably-priced notation program, check out GenieSoft Score Writer:
http://www.geniesoft.com/products/scorewriter/scorewriter.htm
I've been using it for a couple of years now and love it. It has all the features I've ever needed and the UI is way more intuitive than Finale.
Thanks for the tip, Boris! I don't know if you've tried LilyPond, but it is like LaTeX for music scores. Eeek!
Yeah, I tried LilyPond a year or two ago. I'm usually a big fan of Unix and command-line stuff, but this approach doesn't work very well for music. At least it didn't for me because I need to do things like copy/paste from one measure to another, move notes around, align measures, enter notes from a MIDI keyboard, transpose for wind instruments, etc.
Post a Comment