Alpha

I'm creating this blog as a place to organize my thoughts, goals, plans, and actions with respect to my career as a future Music Educator and Choral Conductor. I am currently a second year student at the University of Maine in Orono majoring in Music Education with a focus in Voice.

I'm currently on winter break anticipating the start of spring semester. I'll be going back to campus on the 6th to start blocking rehearsals for "The Marriage of Figaro" by Mozart in which I play Don Curzio and am the chorus master.

I'm using the break to prepare my schedule for classes, lessons, work, and practice time for the next semester, as well as plot out my academic plan for the rest of my college years. I'm trying to raise the money to go with our University Singers on tour to Italy in May, as well as attend Level I Kodaly Certification training at the New England Conservatory in Boston. Mary Epstein, the head of the program, has already promised me a %50 tuition scholarship to begin study with them and bring the knowledge I gain back to UMaine. I plan on applying for the Dysart scholarship at UMaine which will potentially pay for $100 of the travel expenses for the trip to Boston.

I am also using the time before the start of classes to prepare for my lessons and classes. I am studying Orff's Carmina Burana and Bernstein's Chichester Psalms along with many smaller works by Whitacre and other composers in preparation for my conducting lessons with Jeff Hollowell. I am preparing an aria from Haydn's Creation, Massenet's "Ah Fuyez" from Manon, and select other pieces for my voice lessons with Professor Ludlow Hallman. I will also be polishing Schumann's Dichterliebe, a cycle of 16 German lieder, which I tackled last semester. I am planning on finding a private instructor for piano to supplement the piano class required by the school. I hope to find someone who will help me more specifically with playing choral and vocal scores, sight reading and score reading (and of course be reasonably priced). My good friend Becca will be helping me with Clarinet this semester, which I will work on in addition to the instruments covered in my Woodwinds class: Bassoon, Oboe and Sax. I am also preparing for Orchestration which I am taking concurrently with my last semester of the Theory sequence. As i have very little instrumental experience (playing in a marching band for two years) I feel the need to familiarize myself with C clefs and transposing instruments, as well as ranges for the basic instruments before I begin the class.

Woo, it seems like a lot more now that I've written it all out, haha, and it sounds quite dry and boring, I promise to try and not be so dull as I continue this on the off chance that anyone else ever reads it.

My last major project for this semester will be heading up the start of a peer-tutoring group connected to the UMaine music dept. I already have the support of the department head, the music ed faculty, and the core instructors (as well as the secretaries, the most important people in any school) and I have at least one other student willing to tutor at this time. Luckily I work at two jobs that are work-study and basically add up to babysitting a room so I will be able to use this time to tutor. I won't be requiring payment for the tutoring as college students can't afford, in addition I feel that I'm getting valuable career experience by getting the opportunity to teach music while I'm here studying how to teach music.


As for what I've accomplished today, I got my black folder and filled it with my conducting music and the music for the choral groups I sing with. I did some studying of a few Whitacre pieces that we are singing in Euphony (a highly select A Capella choral ensemble directed by Jeff Hollowell) and that I have worked on in conducting lessons. I also began work in the Garritan Interactive PRINCIPLES OF ORCHESTRATION by Rimsky-Korsakov which is an online version of the standard Orchestration text by the great Russian composer. I hope it will work well with my Orchestration class nad help me get up to speed with the instrumentalists in the class. Finally, I've spent my last few hours before bed watching SVU, listening to Palestrina, and reading 31 Days to Better Practicing courtesy of Chris Foley's Collaborative Piano blog. And now, feeling a little more accomplished than I did half an hour ago, I wil head off to bed as soon as this motet finishes.

Goodnight