Happy Pi Day!

Happy Pi Day!

Google actually has a fantastic doodle celebrating this holiday, which became official last year when Congress passed a resolution declaring March 14th Pi Day.

I was away all last week job hunting. Happily, I met lots of interesting and warm people who offered to connect me with all sorts of other interesting and warm people. It was absolutely crazy busy. On the upside, I feel like I've moved things ahead enough on the job front that I can now concentrate on the million other things I actually need to do for school.

My oral exam presentation outline and bibliography is due in a little over a week, so I'm working all day today on fleshing that out. I'd like to just write the presentation and be done with it, so hopefully I can knock that out today. I'm supposed to give a 20 minute presentation on one song set from my recital. I've picked one of the Ariel sets. (Ariel is the sprite from Shakespeare's The Tempest.)

I also need to be prepared for questions on the rest of my recital. These will cover a broad range of topics: the composer and lyricist biographies, who influenced the composer, what else the composer wrote and how this piece fits in with that, performance practice and compositional technique for each of the pieces, and any music or art movements associated with this composer. I also need to have a high-level understand of the structure of each piece. For my presentation, I need to know the theory in greater depth so that I can support my hypothesis.

Lots to do. Maybe Pi Day will provide some magical focus and inspiration by virtue of its mathematical prowess.

~Hope