10th JuLy... Day Of DoOmage and WeiRdNesS

I must admit ,the day started off pretty well. I slept extremely EARLY at 11 30pm .. and had a solid 10 hours of sleep until 9 30am this morning... before waking up to go school for my Performance Seminar exam. Yup , i knew i needed this rest and sleep because i have not been able to sleep well last few nights due to the stress and stubbornness of staying up late.

Thank goodness for the rest i had .. because i knew today Musicianship Skills will require a lot of stress and unnecessary pressure.. So at least the 10 hours of sleep helped my ears a little. But the rest ... is history .. hahaha let me explain in detail.

Started off with Performance seminar ... i went to school yesterday to practice and found out that our dearest examiner was Lim U-Jin ... Mr EF judge ... and i thought ,

"What's with EF and 2plus3 and myself ??? Neverending story !! Great .. it's going to be so weird when he sees me play It Don't Mean A Thing which has meant a lot of things to me!"

And so without bothering about that matter , i went in calmly... walked confidently... said HI to him .. and though he looked nice and all friendly and smiley .. i didn't felt a sense of warmness and comfort playing in the hall with him alone. It wasn't like last 2 sems with the Ang Mo guy .. and Hock Seng and Jac .. though Hock Seng is one of a kind , but somehow the way he smiled brings more warmness ! So anyway i proceeded to start my first piece .. that turned out to be the BEST after all .

Symphonic Journey

This piece really turned out shocking .. not only for others but also for myself personally. I really don't know why , or HOW ... but amongst all the JAzz pieces ... this contemporary Classical piece turned out to be best. Least slips (not that no mistakes) , least forgotten notes , most expressive, and i just felt that i could connect with this composition a LOT. Junichi ... you are darn amazing!

Next piece is ahhh .. CLASSIC ....

When a Man Loves A Woman

I personally don't think i actually felt how a man loves a woman at all from my playing .. because the most worried part of all in this piece turned out to be OK while .. the other remaining parts of the piece screwed up. Plenty of slips were heard.... and my running notes were somehow not listening to my fingers ... so it went completely messy .. terrible. After the ad lib part i wanted this piece to end so badly ... and look forward to my next one

Londonderry Air

One piece that never troubled me until last week ... it was just my style of music. Upbeat... noisy.. fusion ... less expressive. BUT i screwed up the ending! Can you imagine.. i just missed out on the timing of the last few chords and it went totally screwed up. I couldn't find a place to continue and end up crapping some wrong chords which resulted in me missing my ending as well. It was the most embarassing ending i ever had in my whole life playing the el.

Moving on to Joanne ... Bossa nova .. relaxing piece... nothing much except with some few mistakes but i dont think it was detectable ..FINE

Second last one ..

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

My teacher's favourite song... and it wasn't too bad. Except the few notes i forgotten during the jazz guitar ad lib part. And a chord which was wrongly pressed but i forgotten what chord was it suppose to be .. so i continued pressing it though it sounded horrible to my ears. Otherwise , FINE... oh and forgotten the final Ab Major transposed section. But it was OK .

Finally!

It Don't Mean A Thing

I guess not only myself but Mr Lim U-Jin himself was anticipating this piece.. i had fun playing this ... really just stood there to enjoy myself and not wanting to think of the our rival who defeated us with this piece. I had some slips .. but it was overall manageable. I guess it was pretty messy as well in the middle ... but guess what , mr Lim was disappointed at

"yeah , the arrangement was good that's one thing but i was really looking forward to how you are going to move your pedals during the ad lib parts but it turned out that you were just holding the pedal instead. I mean you did do some quite good pedal work for the rest of the piece but just that the solo part i wanted to see how you would do it too"

After everything was over... i breathed a sigh of relief and walked over to him. Sat down and instead of him asking me questions he said ,

"Can you talk me through your different styles of pieces you have chosen?"

So i talked and elaborated like an old grandma... as usual.. and then even admitted to not playing Classical pieces ..and finally finding out that

HEY most of my pieces are JAZZ ! DOH!

He was done with me.

Went out , had lunch ... battled with my terrible gastric.. due to my exam stress... and nervousness.. but i must Thank God .. i didn't feel nervous at all ... not even feeling scared or paniced when i forgotten those notes. i just remember telling myself throughout whenever i made a mistake ,

"OK .. it's a mistake.. get it over ur head and look forward to the next one. Nevermind.. he'll forgive you for that."

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By 1 30pm .. C.H came .. and by then we already knew that C.H and E-Jan was going to be our Musicianship skills examiner. .. and so we all were really glad and relieved!

He came and chatted with us a little... still wanting to lie to us.. on him not examining us.. from last night ok! LAME! Oh not mentioning also how Siang lied to him on how badly i did for the performance exam because i did not have enough sleep and broked down a few times and how he would fail this time. He gave a ,

You fail!? HMP! See la...

For me he said

"Why? Cannot sleep? Nervous ah? Well last time i also like that..but it's not your first time taking performance exam ma!"

End of laughters ... i zipped my mouth because i didn't even had the chance to say anything. He said it all. We continued chatting and we were so sick that we actually insulted him over the lunch table .. on how he used to treat us so nice and really helped us in the exam room during Aural time.. and acted it all out .The girls even asked him to help us again now.

Then it was finally our time to go for our deadly Impro exam... While 7 of us were quarantined in studio 5 and the reading room was in Studio 6... we made so much noise that even the market butcher might not beat us. I was the first to read the ques and really panicked when i couldn't harmonized the 3rd line. I passed by my classmates and gave a "deadly" signal to them before walking into the hall .. and guess what .. i just love it .. they

SCREAMED in the studio!

HAHAHHAH so fun!

By then i walked in and started sight playing the impro A question ... found out the 3rd line was wrongly harmonized .. so i tried my 1st variation with another set of chords .. and still found out it was wrong. Without even mentioning how terrible my varation was. 2nd variation i tried another set of chords which ended up like my own composition so in the end ... i smiled to myself and went

OK ... NOT RIGHT AT ALL

Finally .. everything else was FINE ... except this impro A and a little lost of touch for motif .. but regained it back halfway through. By the time i started playing sight reading question on the el i freaked out.

Couldn't like get even 60% correct ! And it sounded FLAT . C.H gave me a comment after i finished , he said

"Why you play so fast??? You played so fast in everything!"

I lamely answered ...

"I know! I saw the moderato but still .. ahahha"

But i guess his overall comment shot us in the head well. He was right.

All of us did not have musicality.

Sad.

Oh but in another hand ... i want to really thank God for everything today. Though both my exams were on the same day and it was realy stressful and tedious , i went to Kajang to teach just now .. and the staff said this to me ,

"Lily ah.. sorry ah Kevin was suppose to come and observe your class today but he said he's ill. So he will come next week"

I went ,

"OK .... Thank you LORD!"

Isn't God great? He knows when to make people fall ill. Hahahhaha