Sickness and Keys

Let's be upfront -- this has been a trashy week.

I suffered from a horrible tension headache episode last week that escalated into a full-blown flu attack that knocked me off my feet hard enough that I had to take 2 days of sick leave just to sleep it off.

It's dumb. I really don't like falling sick. I'm sure most people feel the same way, except maybe for those who are looking for an excuse to just have an extended holiday of some sort. I'm not of the latter, because work has a way of quickly piling up when one does not move fast enough.

Already I am going to work another half-day more tomorrow just to cover for the time lost over the past couple of days. Looking forward to it in one sense, and not looking forward to it in another since I don't want my body to be further weakened, leading to something that is more chronic.

Anyway, rants aside, the rest had been fitful. The whether is too hot and humid, and as such, sleep came in bursts of no more than an hour. The coughing is just plain annoying, and nearly half the time it is an ``unproductive'' cough, i.e. there is no phlegm that is actually cleared from the throat. In other words, half the time I get this hacking cough that does little more than annoy the crap out of my throat.

Oh well.

Last Saturday was an interesting day. I went for two different rehearsals, one for the upcoming SG50 project that my sister suggested I join in, and the other being my regular CO stuff. The music for the other SG50 project is interesting -- the keys and the rhythms used are a little more contemporary than the concert time that is prevalent. The scores are also written in the prevailing trend of writing in an absolute scale without the melody line, i.e. like what one might expect from say a concert flute score. I can live with the latter though not happily -- since most of the time I'm called upon to cover the melody, and if that's not present it is obvious that there's nothing I can do. But this isn't the more annoying bit.

The writing of the music in an absolute scale is something that I don't really approve of, even though I know that it is definitely easier since one only needs to learn ``one'' set of fingerings. The issue here is not in execution but the overall music sensitivity of the musician -- it makes understanding the intervals of the music that much harder since the music is not written in the scale that the music is played. Here's an example of what I mean: suppose the notes are written in 1=G as 7♭ 1 2♯ 3 or something. Sure, it is easy to execute the notes, but it takes a little while to realise that it is actually in F-major (or D-minor, but we rarely name minor keys in CO music). This means that a certain set of dizi fingerings get ``lost'' in the outcome, and that it makes transposition that much nastier.

But it's just a minor quibble from a curmudgeon huh.

Anyway, it's late. I ought to sleep so I can wake up early and drive to work and clear out some of the stuff that snowballed over the past couple of days. Till the next update then.