Distant Worlds

In a non-picture post today, I attended the Distant Worlds concert last night, which is music from the Final Fantasy series. Overall I quite enjoyed it. Only real disappointment was that there was no chorus present which meant some things that would have been nice to hear weren't performed. Ah well! Still enjoyable.

Here's the playlist (more-or-less in order):

• FF7 Intro
• Victory Theme
• FF8 Battle Theme
• Medley from 1-3 (including the prelude and fanfare)
• Suteki da ne (FF10 - sung in english by Susan Calloway)
• Dear Friends (FF5)
• Vamo Alla Flamenco (FF9)
• Rosa's Theme (FF4)
• Chocobo Theme (FF14 version) leading into Swing de Chocobo

(intermission)

• Man with the Machine Gun (FF8)
• To Zanarkand (FF10)
• Kiss Me Goodbye (FF12 - Susan Calloway again)
• Aerith's Theme (FF7)
• You're not Alone (FF9)
• Battle on the Big Bridge (FF5)
• Blinded by Light (FF13)
• Eyes on Me (FF8 - Susan Calloway again)
  
• Ronfaure (FF11 - I was hoping for Distant Worlds, being the song that gives the concert series its name, but I guess the concert version has a choral backup which would have made it difficult to do without a chorus)
• Terra's Theme (FF6)

You may be asking yourself - where's "One Winged Angel"? They wouldn't do a Final Fantasy concert without One Winged Angel, would they? Well, no. It was the encore (of course), though without a chorus, it was done karaoke style (not kidding!) which was kind of fun - even showed the lyrics on the video screen.

Anyway, that's all for the moment.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Centennial Something or Other

It appears that this is my 100th post. Considering that I've had this blog for almost two and a half years already, that tells you something about my posting frequency.

Anyway, I'm going to celebrate my 100th post by doing a follow-up to my previous post in the form of a video. Behold! (Or don't, eyes may bleed, I can't be held responsible.)



Hmmm. The default video frame selected by YouTube says it all, I think, and is quite amusingly appropriate.

This is actually why it took me so bloody long to get around to making that post about my FR porting experiment. I had originally wanted to do a narrated video describing things, but never found the time or motivation. Instead, I decided to slap something together, call it a day and inflict it upon my readership, such as it is.

The only thing I'll note is that most of the music in the video (which was added through the magic of video editing) was composed by my brother with one small piece by myself. In order, they are:

Victory Fanfare
Here's the Boss
Walking Around in a Fog
Canackian Theme
New Folk Song
Dungeon 2
Merv's Theme
The Reel of the Drunken Sailor
New Folk Song (again)
Elvis Theme
Merv's Theme (again)
Flute Song (I composed this for a music theory class)
Appliance Theme
Dungeon 1
The Reel of the Drunk Sailor (again)
Substation Theme

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Star Trekking

Last night I went to a concert by the K-W symphony orchestra with a couple of friends, my brother (though he's not a Trek fan) and my sister-in-law. This wasn't what you might call a regular concert as the orchestra was playing the music of Star Trek. This included themes from several (though not all) of the movies and most of the television series. As I first started watching Star Trek with The Next Generation (it was still airing new episodes at the time), that theme was, for me, probably the most iconic.

The concert was hosted by John De Lancie (Q) and Robert Picardo (The Doctor on Voyager). The concert, as a whole, was quite entertaining and I was particularly amused when the hosts referred to the Governor General as "The Queen's Grand Negis." Some of the concert goers were in costume (though not a lot) - most were in Star Fleet uniforms though there were a couple of Klingons in the audience. There were also several orchestra members in costume, which I thought was rather nice for them to be allowed to do that.

Anyway, it was an entertaining evening and also quite nostalgic at times.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Doing Time

We got our third piece for the orchestra this week. It's from Barber - Second Essay or something like that, not a memorable title, really. However, as I was playing through it, I found myself often uttering things like "this is so strange", especially regarding the time signatures. The piece changes time signature fairly often - not really an uncommon occurance, but this seems to do so more frequently than most of the stuff we've played - and while most of the time signatures that are used aren't really all that strange, there's some less than common stuff in there like 12/8 or 5/2. But the one that prompted a "that's so bizarre" was a single bar of 7/4 on the last page. Fun stuff, that.

In other news, the first performance for FASS 2010 was last night. It seemed to go well with no noticable major gaffaws (unlike skipping 20 lines in scene 1-4 in the dress rehearsal) and the audience was larger than is typical for opening night so that may be a good sign. The audience named the Silent Protagonist "Balthasar" last night which is respectable choice. Tonight we have the double feature, including the infamous "Friday Late" which will make for a long night.

Slightly related to that, I've had a cold this week and, as a result, did not sleep well at all on Tuesday night (or that's what I'm blaming, anyway) which meant I was veeeery tired on Wednesday. Tired enough that I had a nice two hour nap when I got home. I felt nicely rested afterwards, but was slightly disoriented as it felt a little like Thursday morning and had to check my watch a couple times to reassure me that it was, in fact, still Wednesday. I figure that was at least partly because when I woke from my nap I basically went through my typical morning routine: turn on computer, prepare food, eat whilst surfing the web. Ah well!

Anyway, that's all for the present.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Musical Stylings

Update:

One of the violinists spontaneously broke into the Mario Brother's theme while warming up. And now the Godfather themem.

-TFitC

Those Wacky Russions

This week was the first rehearsal of the UW orchestra for the fall term which is the open rehearsal at which the newbies get to check things out and decide if they want to join or not. (It also seems to be traditional for me to mention it in my blog.)

We basically sight read two pieces at the rehearsal. One was an overture from some Verdi opera, the name of which escapes me at the moment. We've played this piece before during one of the summer terms. It's an easier piece and was used as a warm up (it's not one of the actual pieces we're playing this term).

The second piece, and one of the pieces we are playing for read were the 2nd and 3rd movements of a symphony by Shastakovitch (if I'm spelling that right). He's one of those crazy Russian composers. We've played a shorter piece by him in a previous term.

I'm not quite sure what I think of the Shastakovitch symphony just yet. It sounded... strange. Now, part of that is probably due to the fact that everyone was sight reading and I'm not at all familiar with it yet or how it's supposed to sound. Even so, it sounded fairly different from most of the other stuff we've played. If I had to try to describe it, I'd compare it to more atmospheric music or perhaps movie sound track-ish, perhaps even more "modern" (whatever that means) than other stuff we've played. Well, we'll see how it goes.

There were 9 cellos at the open rehearsal this term (down from our high of a whopping 13 over the summer) so it seems like a decent amount and, assuming everyone who came out decides to join, everyone will probably get it. If I recall correctly, we had 8 cellos during the most recent winter term. The most we've had during a non-summer term was 11. (Yes, the cellos went to 11 one term.)

On a related note, I am current doing some wrangling for some of the string auditions and have my trusty lap top to entertain me (hence this post).

That's all for now, so until next time,
Freak Out.
-TFitC

Someting Weird's Going On

Yesterday I listened to nearly my entire collection of Weird Al CDs. The only one I didn't listen to was Straight Outta Lynwood, which was down in the car and I didn't feel like going to get it. That was 10 CDs that I listened to in total, which means I have 11 Weird Al CDs.

I did this for two reasons: one, because I hadn't listened to some of the CDs in a while and decided I wanted two, and two, to serve as background music whilst writing my latest FASS scene and doing other assorted chores.

It's interesting hearing not only how Weird Al has developed over the years, but how the popular songs and styles have changed over the years since each Weird Al CD more or less gives a snapshot of the popular musical stylings of the day.

Anyway, that is all.

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Music for the Soul

I caught an episode of The Simpsons last night (which I watch occasionally) and, without going into the episode details, got this little gem of wisdom from Homer which quite amused me that I wanted to share:

"He who tires of Weird Al, tires of life."

Freak Out,
-TFitC

Classical Cacophony

With the start of the new term, the UW orchestra is starting up once again with the open rehearsal last night. So, I dusted off the cello (much neglected over the summer) and off I went! It's looking like there'll be 9-10 cellos in the section this term, which is pretty similar to the past few terms. There were 11 signed up on the list, 10 showed up to the rehearsal and 1 left part way through proceedings. If I'm remembering correctly, the largest cello section we've had was a whopping total of 12, so I'd imagine that all the cellos that decide they want to stick with it will get in.

This term, we're playing Borodine's 2nd symphony (we played the 3rd movement two summers ago, and it's one of the easier movements so it won't take long to polish that one off, the rest of the symphony, who knows?), a flute concerto from Mozart, I think, and other things. In addition to our regular end-of-term concert, we're playing at convocation this term, and one of the things we're playing there is a medly from South Pacific, which I gather is a Rogers and Hammerstein musical, though I'm not familiar with it. The medly actually seems more in line with my actual skill level than our normal fare, but I couldn't help thinking that it was more boring than the harder stuff.

Of course, I use the term "boring" relatively in this case, as it's always fun to be playing (and easier means less practicing for me).

Freak Out,
-TFitC