Last meeting

Like I mentioned last time, tonight's seminar was the last in the series. With it came not only feelings of relief that it was finally all over but also of sadness because it meant that I will no longer be receiving my weekly dose of music--although I can of course always practice my piano on weekends, but that's entirely a different thing. Our seminar speaker, who himself admitted that he had always looked forward to these meetings, however assured us that this might not be the last as he was planning on giving another music seminar series but this time on Gregorian chant. Now that is certainly something to look forward to!

Sweet music

Tonight's seminar workshop on the elements of music was the last in the series. The lectures having ended last week, the participants spent the session applying what they were taught in the past eight weeks to learn a new choral piece. The seminar speaker went off to teach the men the tenor and bass parts while I was given the responsibility to teach the ladies the soprano and alto parts. When we all sang together (with me providing accompaniment with my keyboard) after about three quarters of an hour of practice , I felt once again the thrill and a proud sense of accomplishment that comes when one finally tackles a piece of music and hears the result of all the hard work put into it.

Meeting at a meeting

I ran into our church choir group's cantor--who happens to also be teaching but at another department--at this morning's meeting and we decided to sit together. When we had a good laugh over yesterday's choir mix-up he quite rightly said, "At least there's only person to blame for the whole thing and it's T!" Then when an elderly colleague requested to change a student's grade that he had erroneously copied from his record book to the grade sheet, the poor fellow had a hard time reading his own letter which was being shown using an overhead projector. But because we could read the letter quite well from where we sat--and we were seated farther away--our cantor whispered to me, "Now we know why he made a mistake!"