11/4/13

As the second month of my CalArts graduate education concludes, I am venturing into vast new worlds of melody and rhythm. Latin salsa arrangements, frame drumming fingertip techniques, Ghanian Ewe stick drumming and dancing, Indian talas, arrangements in 7, and in 9, an arrangement in 63 (!!!) and a mountain load of music theory are expanding my horizons faster than a nuclear shock wave.

I’m enrolled in fifteen units and have no schoolbooks. I record my classes, lessons and rehearsals onto my phone and spend twenty to thirty hours a week listening to it all and practicing. I’m enrolled in weekly piano lessons to (hopefully) survive music theory, and hour-long private lessons with the indescribably talented Randy Gloss to (hopefully) survive my two-year-long World Percussion MFA curriculum.

Every day I feel like I’m drowning. At the end of every week I wonder if I’ll ever make it to the other side. For all the hours of concentration and sweat, I cannot perceive growth on a daily basis.  But now, after two months, I realize how fast and far this train may carry me, wonder how much personal growth may be possible, ponder how deep these new knowledge pools may really be, and imagine the possibilities to come.

I am indeed living the dream.

May I find the strength to persevere and the diligence to waste not a single day in the pursuit of these goals.

~ Amen