Back to classes this week. Friday was my midterm in Musical History. I hadn't had an essay test since grade school. I jammed on the definition for "musica ficta". Isn't it something that you make up when you can't remember how to play a piece?
Today was "write an essay" day: The 1st one was for the concert I attended Thursday night which was the Russian Patriarchate Choir of Moscow singing mostly 16-18th Century polyphonic pieces. Nice and easy, finished that in an hour and submitted it to my online course.
Decided to the write a 400 word essay for a contest on why I deserve to win a round the world trip. Also fairly easy -- I blog, I travel, ergo I exist.
Then plunged into my big essay about the Aulos, double pipes of ancient Greece, which required conforming to MLA. Another memory blast from 30 years ago -- high school English class theme papers. This took up most of my afternoon.
Fought with my word processor because I was trying to manually do superscripts and references and it kept adding extra things I didn't want in the pages. Finally figured out what the word processor was trying to do. If I had been able to do it manually I could have been finished in a minute. Fighting with the program took much longer and forced me to expand my vocabulary for exasperation.
One should be able to turn off those automatic features. Anyway, the feature's great if one has twenty references and doesn't want to renumber them every time there's a change. It makes sense now that I understand it. I had attacked the problem the old fashioned way and there's all that new fangled stuff now in word processors.
Just received an email about playing in the Suzuki class Xmas concerts next month. Rehearsals to follow...
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