By Magnus Chenel, SUNY Oneonta
Since the last blog post not much has changed. I have been preparing heavily to perform, I hope to get at least one performance in before I depart from my journey. The music festival is much more relaxed than I initially anticipated. My colleagues are getting asked to perform with one day’s notice so my time could be any day. Just gives me all the more reason to put all my energy into my practice while I am here. During my time at the festival the executives found a need for a Stage Manager to help with organizing performances and they asked none other than me to do so. This threw a wrench into my plans of solely practicing during all my days here but they asked so I must deliver, and I had a great time doing so. My initial project is going great.
I have been studying the pieces thoroughly and I have been making immense progress on them. Being engulfed in music for 10 days with little to no distractions really shows you what you can do once given that time. My duet for Chamber music is going very well. Me and my partner have been practicing everyday since being here. One thing that shifted was that I did not know the person I was doing the duet with until I got here, to my surprise he ended up being a sixty year old man! I have absolutely no problem with this but the piece we are set to play is a blatantly ridiculous one, like I stated in my previous blog post, Mozart wrote the piece when he was nine years old for four hands (a duet) I believe he wrote it mainly to be played with his older sister so one can imagine he was trying to mess with her while performing. The piece calls for hands to switch and at parts you are literally on top of your partner, one person playing notes that you need to be playing on the next beat, so that makes it somewhat difficult. Despite this, me and my partner work well together so overall I am excited to be able to perform.
My first few days here have been absolutely spectacular, it is profoundly inspiring to watch musicians of this caliber perform, most of my colleagues have been performing their entire lives so their level of expertise is amazing to experience. The second day of the festival I watched one of the other students play one piece for forty five minutes straight. This honestly made me so emotional as I sat and soaked it all in. I couldn’t believe I was actually there! My faculty advisor Adam Kent did a lecture the other day regarding Spanish music and explained so much about the culture and influence of Spanish classical music. I still have another lecture to go to but prepare for an analysis on Spanish classical music in my next and final blog post. All in all the community of musicians here is so refreshing and i cant wait to perform as well as continuing to study here at the Burgos International Music Festival
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