Cody Russell

A little poetry

Going to Cleveland
Now the bell tolleth for me
Shut up stupid bell!

Cleveland Audition

Well, it’s finally here. This weekend I do my audition for Cleveland Institute of Music. I’m really very nervous, and as someone in Fort Worth Symphony pointed out when I said that to him, I should be! I leave in the morning.

School:

School started again this week. For once, I actually think this is going to be a good semester. I’m actually looking forward to my History class with Dr. Prewitt. I’m not looking forward to German IV at all, but I’ll survive I hope. After my auditions are finished, I’ll start taking viola lessons again, and begin meeting with my quartet probably. The violinists went to Germany for the winter break. I hope they had fun. I’ve got a recital planned for April 29, and, of course, I’ll try to broadcast it live on Internet again. I’ll provide more information on that as it approaches.

Hacking:

Due to audition preparation, I have not done any hacking for over a week. I’ve got a lot of ideas for stuff to do, but I won’t get around to them for a few more weeks. My last audition is February 19. Then I’ll start going bugfuck on Ludwig van and my patches for Bonobo, GAL, and Evolution that I want to do.

Tom Demer’s Recital:

Tom, one of the awesome violists in Dallas Symphony, played a recital at school on Tuesday. He played Bach’s Fantasia Chromatica, a Vieuxtemps sonata, and the Rubinstein sonata. Of course the Bach kicked ass, but I think my favorite was the Vieuxtemps sonata. I think it’s a great piece and I’d love to play it now. I used to really dig the Rubinstein sonata, but each time I listen to it now I like it a little less. Of course Tom played it wonderfully, I’m just saying I like the piece itself less.

Ludwig van

I’m really happy. I got a lot of hacking done on Ludwig van today somehow. The new BonoboControl-based view system is working, and the zooming appears to be working perfectly.

Audition preparation:

Der Schwanendreher was kicking so much ass today, it was just unbelievable. Bach c minor was pretty good. I still haven’t looked at Schubert in weeks, though, and I just decided to change my second Bach piece today. I think I’m going to go with the Courante from the G major suite now.

GNOME on the big screen!

This new movie, Antitrust, appears to show GNOME on its laptop screens. Check out the screenshots of the trailers.

Ludwig van

I think I added between 200 and 300 lines of code yesterday and today. Too bad Ludwig crashes when I try to add a new view. =)

The new view code is still in the works. I’m working on re-structuring it all to expose a Bonobo::Control interface. This will allow us to view scores from Nautilus, the GNOME file manager, for one thing. Later on I’ll also need to expose a Bonobo::Embeddable interface in order to allow Ludwig to run as a client for a compound document editor, like a word processor or something.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Ligeti Viola Sonata

I’ve been in love with this work since the first time I ever heard Tabea Zimmermann’s recording of it. It’s just incredible. I was really happy when the Primrose Competition’s list was published for this year, and it included the Ligeti sonata. I had been waiting for a copy of it for months before I found out that it still isn’t published. This was a major bummer for me.

Two interesting things, though:

• Garth Knox’s new recording:
  I just got this recording, and I really, really dig it. Garth Knox absolutely kicks ass, and his interpretation of this sonata is fantastic. There’s also tons of other great music on this CD that I wasn’t familiar with, but that I think I like so far. It’s all very contemporary music.

• I’m getting the music anyway!
  Yeah, that’s right. Someone who already has the thus unpublished version of the sonata is sending it to me! WOOHOO!! I’m really excited, and I’m eager to look at the music. Of course, I’ll purchase a legal copy of the music as soon as it’s published.

This is all really cool to me. I certainly can’t begin to invest any time in actually learning the sonata now, because it’s unbelievably difficult sounding and I’ve got other stuff to do right now. But I really, really want to learn it.

My webpage

Yeah, I decided to start throwing together a little webpage today while I was listening to Philadelphia Orchestra’s recording of Shostakovich Symphony No. 10. It’s not much yet, and it will likely never become much. But maybe not. Maybe it will turn out to be almost cool someday. So far it’s just got a few collected links about graphics software, but I’m planning to put on pictures from Heifetz Institute, Bratsche con Brio, school in general, and put on mp3 and Vorbis recordings of my senior recital. Look at the top of this page for the link to the webpage.

Fort Worth Symphony

I played the New Year’s Eve concert last night, and it was pretty cool. The Hermannator was there, and we talked a little about viola recordings. I didn’t think to mention my new Ligeti recording of Garth Knox though, for soem reason. This concert was conducted by the new director, Miguel Harth-Bedoya. This was the first time I’ve played with Miguel, but I really thought he was great. He seemed very cool, and he seemed really competent, like no conductor I’ve played under in a long time.

Furthermore, I didn’t have to sit next to Glori in this concert and that made it much better for me. She’s mostly pretty cool to me these days, in total contrast to how she was for the past few years since I came to this school. However, she still pull shit on me sometimes, mostly when we’re standpartners. She sits there and forces me to keep moving away from her until I’m halfway into the next section over (last Fort Worth Symphony concert she pushed me into the bassoon section). However, this time I was given the honor of sitting next to Nikolai, who is a perfect standpartner. He’s nice to me, he doesn’t fucking shove my viola so that I almost drop it like Glori has done to me twice. English isn’t his first language, and he still doesn’t misunderstand every other sentence I speak and take it insultingly the way Glori does. All in all, Nikolai was the perfect standpartner.