First week (well, 3 and a bit days) of school is over and what do we have to show for it? A teacher who looks like Hannah Gordon, a ton of coursework and a lecture basically on how stupid we are. Encouraging, I'm sure.
But what is the point of sending us to school at 1:30, just to send us home 2 hours later? There is none! All we got was a planner and rough book - no, 'General Work Book'. What is with that? We don't do general work in it, we do rough work, crappy French exercises and scribble about how much we hate certain teachers. No general work in sight! But that took an hour to give out counting the continual lecture we received, so that basically left a whole hour. Ample time for form tutors to be given locker keys to give out. But no! The school has to do it the complicated way on the second day. Why? Because they're silly.
Lessons, nothing much happened. We went back and heard tales of drunken roudiness from some of our friends while we just caught up on stuff we'd seen and read, rumours about things (like Farscape, how can they do that?!) and working out who was lending what to whom.
There is also a helium balloon trapped on the ceiling in the school hall. We're trying to decide if it's a dodgy monkey or a strange teddybear. But it's on the ceiling and it's showing no signs of coming down.
I'm not going to talk about *that* first anniversary or Iraq bacause I have earlier, instead I'm going to talk about 4 minutes and 33 seconds. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you may as well leave now because I'm not going to explain it.
But is 4 minutes and 33 seconds a show of musical power or dramatic power? No one would have dared speak because they didn't know what was going to happen next, if something would move or play, if this was an introduction or what. I guess by about the third minute they'd have been getting a bit pissed off, but at the start it must have been captivating. And the fact that the conductor had that much power over the audience to keep them curious that long. Then we come onto the whole thing about how there would be no music if there had not first been silence. But that's for another day altogether.
Or was it a display of dramatics? It must have been amazing to watch, no one could look away in case something moved or it finished. Was it even classable as music since there was no noise? Where can we draw the line? But it could have been more of a display of drama than a musical performance. Did the crowd break into rapturous applause at the end, or did they all settle down and whisper amongst themselves about how obscure it was? But then that depends on the kind of people who went to see it.
Mind you, playing a classical instrument, I don't find some of this contemporary stuff very good. We once played a modern version of Peter from 'Peter and the Wolf', an it was bollocks! It sounded awful, I never was a dissonances person. But it was just the way it was ridiculously fast and clashy.
And then there is Berlioz.
