Monday, November 2, 2009

Newfound fangles

I like choral music. It's amazing that human voices can combine together in such brilliant ways.

I like tango music. It's amazing that different musical instruments can weave such exciting stories.

This is so fricking weird! These are two of the elitest things on the planet! But they make me so happy. Happier than I've been about them since singing choir some five years ago and dancing tango for some three. Sometimes I think about them more than I think about bicycles. How could I!?

I've been rehearsing with MIT's concert choir for a few months and it's a blast. We have a rockstar director who makes outlandish comments and does little tap shuffle dances to the music. And sings like an angel. And is five feet tall. He's perfect!
When we sing huge, harmonic choruses and quiet, sharp hymns (we sing a ton of Christian songs but-) it's so incredibly beautiful it makes my heard want to explode.

The unico, the ultimo Tango de los Muertos just passed through town, the best damned halloween tango festival on the face of the planet. I learned (amongst so many other things) to listen for, understand, and (try to) express the melodies, rhythms, accents and empty spaces that flow over each other from the various instruments in the tango orquesta tipica (which pretty much is a list of my favourite instruments). Now listening to a tango is like laying my eyes on a masterpainting.



Tango de los Muertos was a weekend of 5am mornings, biking home in the cold through empty streets, calves aching, tired. On the last day of the festival, I decided to stay til 4am and then bike school to camp out before my 9am class. After finding that being enrolled in an electrical engineering AND a computer science class didn't give me card access to the EE/CS building, I managed to find an open third floor window and climb a few roofs to make it in. After finding I didn't have card access to the lab, I slept on the lobby sofa until the sun came up and I crept into the lab to steal a few, much more discreet z's before class.