Snatching a breath…. (Suzanne)

Before coming to Melbourne, I spent a few months studying Chinese in Beijing because of the gap between the Hong Kong school calendar, which ends in June, and the Australian one, which starts in February.

My clarinet teacher in Beijing used to use a phrase called ‘tou qi’ （偷气） a lot when referring to breathing techniques. Roughly translated, it means to ‘steal air’, and it refers to what you do when you realise that some silly composer has forgotten that you, being a human being and not some impossibly large-lunged clarinet playing machine, actually need to breathe. What you would do in this case is to find a small gap somewhere in the phrasing, and quickly and discreetly snatch a breath of air in a way that doesn’t disturb the overall shape of the music.

I’ve been doing that a lot with my time recently.

Because in between the big things, like practise, and orchestra rehearsal, and that mountain of reading from law, and all the clubs and stuff, and assignments, and new friends, you tend to forget a lot of little things. I’m not talking about the obvious ones, like having a social life, or procrastinating, or calling your parents, or writing in this blog. Nope. The little thing that always gets overlooked is doing your laundry. In other words, I’m out of clean socks because I haven’t really made the time to do any laundry in a while. Which happens to suck. I knew I should have packed more.

But anyway, socks aside, it feels like university life is one of those big long chunky musical phrases where you have to figure out where the appropriate places to cut the length of a note or insert a little bit of airspace without disturbing the rhythm of the work. In fact, it’s one of those orchestral excerpts where there’s lots of little tiny rests, or staccato rhythm, where there’s a gap just long enough that it looks like you can take a breath, but just short enough where if you actually do take a breath you’ll come in late on the next beat. And after you’ve messed up the rhythm, and died from asphyxiation, and are just about used to the pace, there’s half a page of rests where you can take a nice long break (I have three day weekends because of no classes on Friday), except that you kind of forget you have another passage of the same kind of stuff on the next page and then end up not being prepared to come in at the right time in the next passage.

But hey, it’s still a damn cool piece of music.

Anyway, for those of you who had absolutely no idea what I was talking about up there, I’m just taking a little break from anything and everything productive right now. Call it a sanity break or something. It’s been kind of busy this week… I have my first ever law assignment due Monday (luckily, it’s a really easy one – all you have to do is read a case and then answer a few basic questions about the facts and judgement), orchestra’s started, the readings for law are getting gradually longer and more dense, the music side of things are starting to put on more pressure (although I admit that a lot of that is self-inflicted), and I kind of realised that I signed up for more clubs and activities than I could commit to at orientation week. I don’t want to give anything up, though — it’s all so much fun! I kind of like the faster pace and the pressure too, except that I know that if I don’t ease it off now, sometime right before swotvac when it gets really intense there might be the possibility of me exploding.

I really really need to make more practise time. I don’t have a clue what’s going on at orchestra — being the only first year clarinetist in the orchestra (possibly the only first year woodwind full stop, but I don’t really know the flautists and oboeists and bassoonists so I can’t say for sure), I didn’t realise that I was supposed to learn my part before the first rehearsal. Practise rooms are generally in short supply though, even if you have both the faculty rooms and separate ones in college — too many musicians, not enough space. Gotta go fight the pianists for rooms.

But first, I think I will go eat lunch. Food makes me happy.