Essays should write themselves. Seriously. (Suzanne)

^ Need I say more?

Anyway, I’ve gotten absolutely nothing from the list on my last post done except number 1, my Principles of Public Law research essay draft, which took me all week and still sucks. Clearly, I am not cut out for legal research, which has been this huge drain on all my time and ruined pretty much all my practise and travel plans for the holidays.

Actually, now that I think about it, I did in fact get number 5: buying a new mouthpiece for my clarinet, done yesterday. I love my new mouthpiece. It has this lovely, dark mellow tone, kind of like melted chocolate, and it responds beautifully to my every command. Unfortunately, I got so carried away with the prettiness of the sound that I forgot why I was actually buying a new mouthpiece – namely, to bring my pitch down to normal because I play horrendously sharp. So now I have a really lovely sounding new mouthpiece, which plays at almost the same pitch as my old mouthpiece (despite being marked on the box as one which plays flatter), which means that I have basically not spent my $175 particularly wisely.

On the plus side, it’s a lot more responsive than my last mouthpiece, so I can shift the pitch manually with my embouchure. Plus, it is actually slightly flatter, just not as much as I was hoping for. To be fair, though, it’s perfectly in tune in the lower register, it just kind of goes sharp again once you cross the break into the upper one, which is not such a big deal because it’s not too hard to try and push the pitch down yourself in that register. I am, however, disappointed. And also, it’s a little too responsive — I keep moving the pitch back and forth accidentally because I’m used to little changes in embouchure, tongue position, jaw pressure, etc. not making a difference to the overall pitch. So I’ll have to start learning to be more precise and controlled with all my lip and jaw muscles, or else everything I play will sound like Mariah Carey on crack.

Since it seems to be ‘talk about concerts you went to’ week on the first and second year blogs, I suppose I’ll fill you in on the details of the Cologne New Philharmonic concert at St Paul’s Cathedral I went to yesterday. They played all four of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, Elgar’s Serenade for Strings, and the Mozart Clarinet Concerto, which happens to be the piece I played in concert class two weeks ago and will be playing again on May 1st for the Music Faculty Mozart Concerto Competition.

So anyway, the clarinet player was German. For those of you that don’t know, German clarinets are completely different to clarinets in the rest of the world. The Boehm clarinet, which was invented by the French and is now what most countries use, has a much simpler fingering system, but much less consistent tuning and a different sound, to the Oehler clarinet, which is what the Germans, Austrians, and half of the Dutch play. So I was listening to this clarinetist do all sorts of absolutely painfully complicated looking things on this Oehler clarinet which had about twice as many keys as my Boehm, and I couldn’t help but be impressed. I suppose they’ve got the advantage of not having to worry about being in tune like us Boehm-system people, though — the reason the Oehler system has a much more complicated fingering system is that they’ve actually decided to cut the holes and put the keys in where they’re in tune, and not compromise by moving them somewhere slightly easier to reach. I’d like to learn that system, actually, but it’s only really used in Germany and Austria, and I have no intention of moving to either country in the near or distant future.

I’m assuming no one really cares about any of the above.

Anyway. I’m starting on my second law essay, for Legal Method and Reasoning, and I’ve decided to do the medical negligence case out of the three choices we were given. This means that I will probably have to stop talking to my medicine friends about schoolwork, for I have discovered that med students do not take kindly to the topic of medical negligence, or, in fact, law students in general. Note to self: keep gob shut. Hopefully this one will be easier, or at the very least, less time consuming, than the PPL one.