Thoughts on a Sunday night

Today was a wonderful day!  After staying up way too late last night (4:00am) playing Final Fantasy IX, I didn't expect today to be a very comfortable day, considering I only had about five hours of sleep.  Surprisingly though, I haven't enjoyed a weekend as much as this one in a while (aside from the film scoring session a couple weeks ago of course)!  After spending the greater part of the afternoon researching film composer gadgets and software (specifically Pro Tools and Cubase), then walking to Safeway and back with a backpack full of groceries, I went out for pizza at an amazing pizza place called La Perla with my friends Adam and Desi!  Desi, Adam, and I were all members of the Oregon Marching Band baritone/euphonium section ("Beuphs") together my Freshman and Sophomore year, and both Adam and I have not seen Desi in the past 3 years!  Last night I saw on facebook that Desi was a little lonely / depressed, and since Adam and I are good friends with her I thought I'd see if the three of us could meet up for a little catch-up reunion.  It was really great to see Desi again (and great to see Adam, but I see him all the time anyway), and hear about what her life has been like since she has had her wonderful child Max (who's about 3 now).  Tonight was a venture back to the old marching band days, with the same awkwardly masked sexual innuendos coming from Adam, Desi's play off of Adam's words, and my simple enjoyment and comfort of being in their company.  Desi mentioned that the three of us should have a movie night!  I really hope that happens, because I know it would be really fun!

After having dinner with Desi and Adam, I led a brass ensemble euphonium sectional for an hour, and that went pretty well.  We're playing an arrangement of the funeral march from Wagner's Götterdämmerung:


The difficulties in the music are mostly rhythmic - our section has some problems lining up notes perfectly, so I asked them to do a lot of work away from the horn, and to think about a quarter-note triplet pattern against the normal pulse of the piece (a pattern of 3 against 4), to help finding the exact timing of the notes.  It's sounding a lot better now, so I think the sectional was indeed worth it.  I also gave them copies of a sight-singing warmup sheet (for intonation) that I was given for my adv. aural skills class, which deals with major, minor, and chromatic scales, and asked them to practice singing them with solfege while consistently check themselves for pitch at a piano.  I have learned that the ear training that comes from sight-singing in solfege has really helped my intonation, so I want to see if it will help the other members of my section in the same way.

Then when I got back home I did my counterpoint homework, which was to write "a bunch" (I did three) of bridges / sequences for our fugues.  A bridge or sequence is just a couple measures of music that repeats in a pattern, being vertically moved around (in a consistent pattern) to bring you from one key to another.  In this case, I need to get from the key of the dominant (roman numeral v) back to the tonic (roman numeral i).  My favorite of the sequences I made use a chromatic leading-tone motive in every repetition.

As the day passes, I feel very good about the day, because it was relaxing, I learned a lot about the software and hardware that will give me so much more to work with as a film composer, and I got to catch up with an old friend in good company  :-)
Today's been a good day!