Naahhhht an awesome day.

Practiced one hour today, plus an hour-long flute lesson and an hour of flute choir. So total three hours of playing. I know, not enough.

My headjoint and I are beyond our honeymoon phase. We're fighting. Or at least it's fighting me. It's in this awful stage where I (temporarily, I hope) can't play the way I have the past six years or so. The hole, instead of making everything brilliant, is making everything sound screwed up. Perhaps that's thinking about it the wrong way. It makes everything sound very raw. And I have to cut it. Like a geode. My ideal sound is the shiny part in the middle.

Exercises--working on No. 3 from Maquarre's Daily Exercises for the Flute. One good thing about Maquarre is that if you're going to memorize it, you absolutely have to tap into theory. If you don't understand I-vi-VI-ii-V/iii-iii-III-I, it's absolutely impossible and makes more sense. The last two bars, with the weird chromatic thirds, still doesn't really make sense. But I'll have to deal.

The Rodrigo Concerto Pastorale is hopeless right now, partly because of that but mostly because it's just impossible. When I took it to Gary Schocker, he immediately expressed distaste for the piece (he had performed it a few years ago with some orchestra), not because it's so difficult, but because he found it difficult for very little reward. He said that it didn't even sound beautiful if played perfectly. To me that seemed like a cop-out attitude at the time, but now I'm not so sure. I'd love to have it under my belt, but as far as the concerto competition goes, I'm now getting a little more interested in the Liebermann--that's a more standard piece, anyway.

Excited for the CFC competition and my recital. Feeling good about those, anyway.

I know everyone struggles with this (people who say they don't are full of shit), but sometimes I'll be practicing, and an hour or ninety minutes has gone by and I'll feel like I've done everything I can do. Clearly that's not the case, but sometimes it really does feel that way. And I have to go and chew on something or do downward dog for a few minutes, and then it will usually go away. But sometimes it doesn't. Today was one of the days when it didn't. Perhaps just exhaustion? I went back to my room, did reading for computer science and then fell asleep without realizing I'd fallen asleep. So maybe that was it. Or maybe it's because I didn't go running today.

Tomorrow's another day. That's got to be, what, at least the third cliche in this entry?