Once in a while, you realise life isn't so bad after all

24th March 2008
Monday
Once in a while, you realise life isn't so bad after all.

Firstly, I apologise for the lack of updates. (Mostly due to my own laziness and addiction to WOW.) Addictions are evil things that eat away your time, this I have learnt.

Every now and then, I like to stop whatever I am doing and take a break, look back at my progress and evaluate. Usually all these leaves me in a pretty depressed state. I shan't elaborate on that. But recently, my evaluation caught me off guards and I saw a side of me which is much more positive than my dark personality.

For once, I saw massive improvement in my playing. It still needs a lot more work, but I am really pleased with where I am now after 3 months of hard work. Hard work really do yield results.

My audition to NAFA was on last thursday, 20th of March. The auditions went really well despite the many mistakes made during principal studies (PS) [I will be referring to PS quite often in my latter posts.] the previous day.

So audition day started off early in the morning at 8am. My audition time was at 9.45am so I had to come in early to warm up and get my chops working. I started off with reading Today newspaper. Irrelevant to the audition, but it helps get my mind working. Then at 8.20, warm ups begin with some stretching and arppegios. Tonguing exercises were next. By 8.40, lips and tongue were awake and fresh.

8.40 to 9am included reading through the score and last minute research on the piece, composer and arranger. 9am was theory lesson which I sat in with caterpillars in my tummy, waiting to become butterflies. 9.30 am arrived and I met Rebecca outside the classroom before going to the Gamelan room where auditions were held.

At about 9.45, I went into the room with Rebecca and things started to ease up from there. The butterflies that were happily fluttering away before entering the room flew away after I played a few notes to test the acoustics. Danza Movida was very successful and it sounded very much better than what I have ever played during rehearsals. Berceuse was the hardest bit of the auditions. Lucky for me, Mr Adams told me to stop before I got to the technical parts.

He gave some pretty encouraging comments such as "very musical performance", "beautiful tone" and some other stuff. All in all, the audition went well. Looks like my hard work is finally producing some results!