So here I am again, after spending
some time trying to find something interesting to share with you.
As most
of you know, reading Cervantes is not the only thing that makes me have no time
to visit my friends or to go to the gym to do something to avoid being such a
flabby set of bones. If you follow all the invitations to the concerts I send
you on Facebook, you know that I also try to be a professional musician with a
respected academic title (what makes me have quite athletic shoulders).
I’m
sure that you have some kind of an image about artists and, as a consequence, about
musicians: they are usually absent-minded, living in a parallel universe full
of sounds, they hum symphonies even when you’re trying to talk to them and they
are unable to understand that there are some universal rules valid for everyone,
so they can't spend the whole lifetime without visiting the dean’s office from
time to time.
Each
stereotype is prejudiced and we should stop using them and making them
stronger. However, this stereotype perfectly reflects how the Academy of
Music works. In comparison to the University it is like a huge mess impossible
to control, in spite of the fact that the ladies from the dean’s office are
wonderfully helpful and irreplaceable.
That's
why the whole timetable and the plan of study seems to be more disorganized
than a headphone cable after being left in the bag for a moment without taking
care of it. But there are still some classes that I'm obliged to participate
in, for example, the seminar of public lecture. I was required to prepare a
kind of a commentary that would introduce people to the piece of music that I'd
like to share with them on the radio. Apart from the fact that it turned out I'm
totally unable to talk about music without falling into a trap of using a language
that is totally incomprehensible to the people who haven't spent all their
lives studying music and its theory, and (what's definitely worse) I should probably
consult a speech therapist, I really enjoyed putting into words what I usually
express without them. Especially because the piece I'd chosen is like a huge
post-modern jigsaw puzzle composed of plenty of elements.
But, as I told you, I'm not good at
talking about music to the 'normal' people. That’s why I won't bore you with my
gobbledygook and I'll just encourage you to listen to the Alfred
Schnittke's String Quartet no. 3 and to try to see it as an essence of
post-modern aesthetic with its fragmentariness, intertextuality and feeling that's
there's nothing left.
