ARP

To graduate, I would require the completion of an ‘Advanced Research Project’. I have done a project last year, and am currently working on another one. However, I would like to do another one next year, a mathematical project next year, probably self-proposed, as I want to do something in which I know what I am doing, I am sure of, have passion in, and can be proud of. I want to graduate knowing that I have completed the requirement with indubitable honesty, to be able to answer to my conscience, not in projects in which I constantly speculate its direction, in which half the time I blindly heed directions and brushing through task after task. I need a project meaningful to me. Nevertheless, I am going to complete my current project seriously. I am not going to abandon it halfway, or let me attention deviate from it to focus on unfledged plans. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

I am fortunate to have those to encouraging me to pursue what I find is a deficiency in my academia, but what I find rather disappointing was the reasons some teachers gave to make me reconsider. If I take up a project next year, I might not have the time for it, as I ‘would have to prepare for APs’. I am dropping stats next year, giving me more time for other stuff. Still, what is this school’s obsession with APs? What is the big deal about APs, and so what if we have or not a perfect record of 5s? Not to mention, that the AP is not even an extremely challenging exam which marks the pinnacle of intelligence and learning.

Then I am told that if I do the project, I will not get to send it for any competitions anyway as it is too late to start. That annoyed me quite a bit, as competitions or not is not my concern. This is a field I am interested in and perhaps, even if i can’t put it on the top priority, I could work little by little in my spare time like a hobby, and see what I can come up with by the end of six months. If I can conjure a fully fledged project, good for me! If I can’t I still have my current ARP to back me up. (To be honest there is a little bit of me who is jealous of a certain someone (female) who got to do so many math projects. )

Let’s call it a field that I am keen to discover more about on my own, rather than a project which so many negative connotations. And I am thus told that it would be unfair to the teacher who guides me should I not put this new ‘project’ on a high priority.

Of course I am not saying that I won’t put it on high priority, above the more important things like…wait I’m not taking APs, and I’m doing better than many others in exams (not being arrogant, just stating truth), well what else, the only thing I can think of is my senior recital, and I don't even think the school takes music as seriously as their math and science. How hard could it be to not find time for something that I like?

But to say that it is unfair to the teacher who would mentor me is akin to saying that it is the quintessential desecration of music committed by those who play the piano as a mode to relax. I must reiterate that I am not doing this because I want more projects showing up on my transcript!

Although teachers hope the best for the students by not wanting them to overstress themselves and wanting the best for their transcript, I find it rather disappointing that many times they focus too much on the end result that they neglect the process of learning, or the ultimate objective of education of becoming an independent learner. The way things are done are not only not encouraging students to learn for passion, but also killing whatever desire for learning that students have when it comes.

All these, SSEF, Olympiads, APs; I’m sick with this obsession with ‘whatever is good for your transcript’. I have a passion in something, only to be run down by realistic expectations set by others.

Year 5–Part 2

One of the greatest challenges I had through the year, especially in Semester 2, was the chamber recital the music majors had to put after the exams. It was the source of immense stress on and inhibited my concerns for my grades in other subjects. In semester one, we rarely got anything done every week when we met. We would propose many ideas each session, but none of them solidified. Each session would almost end up with the rest watching performances on youtube, and despite how I did not like it as that was the most unfruitful thing that could possibly be done on a meeting, I did not know what to do in order to get us up and start practicing together as a group. It was not until the group of us were severely chided for our unproductivity we started to take a different approach. By then it was already close to the middle of the year, and the paucity of our accomplishments were appalling. We had a lot of catching up to do and that is when I started to feel the weight of it. I realised that the only way we could get things done more efficiently was for us to play from a proper score, so I had to take the initiative to arrange a piece of music for us to try out, whether the rest liked it. The first piece I ‘arranged’ was the Nocturne, hours spent in front of the computer trying to dictate the notes played by each instrument from a recording and entering them into the computer cumbersomely. When we met the first time during the holidays to try it out, we nailed it on the first few tries, and the beginner’s success felt wonderful. Then we moved on the the minuet and other stuff. But a lot more was in the way.

Differing musical tastes led to dissension for the choice of repertoire. I felt rather unhappy when some kept complaining how boring classical music is and that the audience would much prefer it if we played familiar tunes. Sometimes I feel that the obsession with having less classical pieces in a programme in order to captivate an audience has gone too far and tipped the balance to the other extreme. Although I wouldn’t mind if we did not play as many classical pieces, I felt indignant that I was the one sacrificing my time doing all the arranging, and it was easier to just do the talking and not try arranging. Now that I think about it I shouldn’t have got so unhappy over that, but rather tried to talk things through. Communication is of utmost importance when working in a group.

When school reopened, it seemed as if we have almost settled our whole repertoire. What I did not expect, was that the stuff accomplished over the holidays was only less than a third of what was about to come. As we practiced the pieces, we realised that quite a few of them had to be scrapped, and many new pieces had to be added in. with only 2 months left to go, it seemed like we were never going to make it in time, unless we practiced frequently enough. The problem was that everyone of us had varying commitment levels to music. I put music above all my other subjects because it is the subject I take that stands out from the rest, being in math and science school. To me this module is not just a mere enrichment module, as some others have put it. To me it is the essence of being a music major, to make music. We are expected to put up a performance and it is unlike exams in which if we screw up the only thing we will be grades. I felt that we had to live up to the expectation of being a music major. I did not want to run the risk of failing it and disappointing our teacher, much less undermine what others schoolmates expect from us, or maybe even disallowed from continuing music as a track. From this perspective, the only reason why chamber music is designated an enrichment module rather than a core is that it is so crucial that it deserves to be graded more than just by numbers and letter names.

However, it seemed that my teammates were caught up in other aspects of their lives. Some were frequently away from school, some had the constant need to revise for tests and quizzes and others were frequently busy with ARP. I was quite mad that none of them seems to be feeling the urgency and importance that should be given to chamber music, but I had no means of motivating them. The madness turned into hopelessness and I became rather upset that no one was treating this seriously. Maybe now that it is over, perhaps I need to be more understanding of others who aren’t as privileged as I am to be able to put music first on their priorities. There came a point where I could no longer visualise putting up a successful performance. When I had nothing to do, chamber music will creep into my mind and I would feel the urge to make hypothetical plans of practice schedules in a desperate attempt to do something related to chamber music even when the rest are not free to meet.

As the date drew nearer, I found that I started to look at things more openly. Perhaps it is because the burden of schoolwork after exams have been lifted. I started to see potential once again of salvaging this performance, if only we could practice more often now. But once again, the same upset feeling returned when even our post exam schedules could not find much common timeslot for us to practice to meet. I thought, if I could give up studying for my chemistry exam and physics exams, why couldn’t some of us push back their ARP for a week or so; it is only that week till the chamber recital. I got over is soon enough when we got together practicing in the orchestra room. It was one of the few times when we could practice together, chat and make music without having the urgent need to rush off to study for an upcoming test. It was a time when we could focus and savour the present. No matter how different our commitments, abilities and attitudes are, music brings us together because it means something to us. When we sat down and talked, I could feel the bonds between us much stronger after much dissension over the years. I found it reassuring that even after the up and downs of my school year, at least I could feel myself in the presence of people then who remotely cared for me. What a sad person I must have been.

I realised that I was not carrying my attitude I have towards exams to this – there is only so much one can study. In this case, although maximum practice would be ideal, too much of it, especially when we are all enervated from the hassles of school, would not yield much more productivity. I reminded myself that it is okay for us not to be perfect, we are merely high school students trying to put up a performance, it should be fun and not become a chore, which is what I have been treating it as all the year. I never thought that I would miss this ordeal, but as the final days of our practice passed, I thought about how much I would miss chamber music. After all the hard work, it is hard to imagine that everything would be over soon.

When the recital was over, things felt more normal than I expected it to feel. The normality of it all felt strange enough. I expected a huge relieve for myself, or an internal celebration within me, but none of that was present. Frankly, I was a bit disappointed that it had to be over, and also that when it was over I didn’t feel that it wasn’t a big deal, neither did too many others as I had hoped. I really wished I could have more friends I could share my life with.

After this experience, I learnt when democracy is not possible, someone must be there to start telling people what to do. Anarchy will only lead to aimless wanderings and nothing will be done, most probably due to everyone else thinking that someone else is going to take the initiative. Why not let the person be oneself?

I also learnt that we cannot force a fish to learn to climb a tree. Rather than making people who can barely play the violin play the viola just to fill up the parts of a piece, we should employ the merits of a person to maximize efficiency. After much trial and error, we finally managed to come up with a combination of instruments which best suit our abilities. Another instance of forcing a fish to climb a tree is when I tried to make the violin’s and clarinet’s lower register play the bass line. That is flagrantly ineffective and the instruments can be put to much better use instead of playing something that it is not meant for. Considering that most of our instruments are soprano, we should turn this into our advantage by having multiple interactions between melodies and counter melodies, while letting the piano play a heavier role in the bass line.

After the recital there was Grade 8 music theory exam. I didn’t really like the way music theory was taught – too much like the math and sciences. We were never given the chance how the Neapolitan sixth modulations sounded like, or how the augmented chords sound like when played in a progression. Rather, we were told to memorize them. Nevertheless, really thankful to having absolute pitch and the ability to hear the notes in my mind, preferably not more than three lines at the time, learning grade 8 theory was not as hard as I had expected it to be.

Which as a digression, I still find it frustrating how I am unable to compose beautiful melodies without it turning out sounding pop. To me the difference between classical music and pop music is that in classical music, something new lies around each corner, like telling a story, while pop songs are mostly a ride around the merry-go-round.

The final frontier to cross would be the senior recital, considering that our batch has already completed the year 6 music modules this year. That is one of the reasons I am looking forward to next year, and I hope that the experience will be enjoyable. Now being in year 5, I still remember that in year 1, I have already decided that I want to be a music major, and so went up to Dr Wong and told her, who was obviously unable to take me seriously, as would any other person having a child standing 1.4 m go up to him or her telling about his ambitions. But some parts of me haven’t changed at all. I am in a math and science school, and I wanted to be someone more than just scientific logic; I wanted to be a balanced individual and take something else on the other extreme of the spectrum. More importantly, music was part of my childhood and is still part of me. I love it and want to play it for others to listen, and whether I play it good or bad, I wanted to make that effort.

I did not always feel that way though. There were times this year where the stress was so intense that I started to doubt my choice in having taken music as a major, but I’m glad that I ploughed through chamber music and did not give up on music. It is also this year that I finally started to enjoy practicing my violin. It all owes to my experience taking the diploma exam for violin. I knew had to stop playing through my pieces and focus more on small segments if I wanted to improve. I started to take it slow, and it is through this I manage to feel the mellifluous vibrations of the string reach into me; I realised that even single notes, played unwaveringly, with care put into feeling the vibration of the whole individual as an instrument, can make the most beautiful music…It was the reason I have disliked practicing the violin all these years, I played so fast and hastily all along that I did not take time to feel the music. To practice means just more than to play the notes, it means to play them such that every single one is music. I find my own definition of music I formulated in class staring right back at me – music is only there if there is intention to make music.

Not only do I feel that I have learnt how to make music better, I also feel like I enjoy listening to it even more now. Many times this year, when my mood was in the pits, I listened to music, not happy music in an attempt to lift my spirits, but to let it cry along with me, or what ever emotion I was feeling. Like I have said I dislike having to made to feel some other emotion that I am not feeling. So, I let music embrace it, rather than to counter it. And sometimes when I listen to certain pieces, memories are invoked, and whether happy or sad, those memories are missed by me…

To be continued…

Year 5–Part 1

Living in hostel is a totally different experience from living at home. I still remember the first few days of this year when I was excited about living in hostel. It felt like living in a holiday chalet. Now whenever I use the meleleuca shampoo and body soap I started using during those days, those feelings of excitement and adventure come rushing back. I remember the first few weeks, when everything we did was exciting, because everything was a new experience. Waking up at six in the morning to go for a morning run was something that we would do with enthusiasm. Then we would have breakfast in the peaceful atmosphere of the canteen, while little people were in school. In between lessons, being able to return ‘home’ to rest was a luxury which I find extraordinarily gratifying. But after time, the lethargy started to set in and the initial hype about hostel life drained away. I started sleeping in as long as I could, and life didn’t seem so fresh anymore. I started ‘getting used’ to how things work around here. I would have preferred if I didn’t at the expense of the enthusiasm I used to carry to school on a daily basis. I ponder, what would it be like if we could do something extraordinary on a regular basis, and to live life as if everyday were an adventure?

Living independently is something quite new for me. I had to do many things on my own I didn’t have to do in the past.

I used to have a free flow of clothing to wear, but now I had to send my clothes to the FREE laundry service every alternate day. And I had to wash my own underwear, if one is allowed to classify soaking them in dynamo water and stirring it as washing. Then I started getting bored of climbing the stairs to the laundry room and filling up the form so I sent my laundry less and less frequent, accumulating many dirty clothes in my room. I stopped folding my clothes and there was no distinct pile between the clean and the used. Anything that didn’t smell bad was considered clean to me then, and sometimes I used loose pieces of clothing as bath towels if I have exhausted my dry supply of them. And to think I used to wonder why people could not fold their clothes. I try to do it regularly and now I know why some people do not see the point of it

I also tried to keep my room clean and tidy. It was fine at the beginning, perhaps even fun and satisfying when I lay back down on my bed to admire my masterpiece. It still is, but throughout the hectic school year, many times I could not find spare time to focus on cleaning up. I was shocked to find how fast dust settles on a surface and how bad stray food crumbs are for one’s table. I didn’t think it was a big issue before. Over the year I found myself owning a big lizard, a couple of bite-sized ones, this slimy slug like thing residing behind my laptop, and a colony of white fungus draping over my bowl which looked a lot like cobwebs, or white candy floss, or the shredded stuffing you find in soft toys. Now that I have tidied up again, I all of a sudden feel the difference between a clean and tidy, and a dirty and messy room, a change that used to transit so gradually I was unable to do so.

Another thing is food. Food was a big problem. The hostel vegetarian food did not taste that bad initially, but as time passed, I realised that the only reason I did not find the food bad was that I am not used to consuming such bad food, and I thought it was only a matter of getting used to. I tried cooking, but the furthest I got to was cooking plain noodles and dumping spaghetti sauce onto it. Or heating up tofu, which I still find the most convenient source of palatable food. Sometimes I would go out of dinner, but I liked it better if I had someone to eat with. Well, there was a rather emotional period when I liked to go out for dinner on my own, when I would bring my laptop and listen to peaceful music on the bus and type stuff, while immersing myself in self-pity for my lack of food and companionship. But I didn’t always like eating with people. Sometimes I just liked waiting alone at a table in hope of meeting someone I liked at the dinner table without anyone else to interfere, or have quiet moments pondering over my life.

And many other things just got worse as time passed, just like I have described in my post new hostel semester. Recall how I told myself that I would do my best in semester two. This is a continuation of that post and here is how it went. Frankly I am no match for my own workload. Whatever I have resolved to do my best and not slack off utterly failed. There comes a breaking point when too much stress stops giving the drive to carry on, and one just crumbles under its weight. I had to start shedding some weight. There were so many points when I felt that everything was hopeless.

First major difficulty which came was my violin exam. Being on the 27th of July, I had not more than a month to prepare for it, with technical mistakes still prevalent throughout my pieces. This was an exam I was most unprepared for, and my impression was that the standards would be pretty high for a diploma exam. Technical proficiency would then be nothing but fundamental. I neglected my homework and started to seize every opportunity I had, in between lessons, free periods, to practice any short passages. I still remember how terribly I played on a student’s recital a few days just before the exam, and I was so panicked that I woke up the next day at 6 am to start practicing before school started. During the exam itself, the moment I screwed up a set of four notes, I kept on thinking about those few notes, and lost focus on the present. Thus I started making more mistakes, and the more I made the more I thought about them till a point when I started thinking about how I should start preparing to retake the exam. My weakness is concentration, and I cannot sustain the initial energy and emotion I always have at the beginning of a piece till the end. When my violin exam was over, I could finally start catching up on my work.

Then there was TIP as well. I had no idea where this project was going, and with all the things I was handling, such as fitting my ARP into my packed schedule, and chamber music, was too enervated to bother thinking about how to salvage it. This was the first thing I abandoned when I realised that there was only so much I could handle. I was prepared to fail it for lack of contribution.

Modern Physics. This was a module in which I never understood any of the lessons, superficially even if I could claim I did. The attempts to understand it always ended up in vain and I was initially unwilling to write a term paper for a topic that I did not understand, as I felt that I would be cheating myself, so I left it till after the exams, and wrote the whole paper off my knowledge without much research. It wasn’t too bad, for the amount of time I put into it. I had to move on to other matters. Oh yea and assignment 4 was in only after the final results were keyed in.

I think it is only fair to say that this semester, above all, the module which I put in real effort and hard work into is chamber music. I fretted over it and constantly thought of ways to pull the chamber recital off, regardless if those ways will be actually put into action. When my mind was empty, only two things would creep in, either chamber music, or her.

After a typical day at school, I would return to my room, and the first thing I would do is lie down on the bed and try to reorientate my mind into the right direction and think about all the stuff I have to complete, and ordering them based on priority. I would then fall asleep and narrow down the list to one or two crucial things I have to complete, and sometimes those things aren’t even on the list I created for myself, such as an organic chemistry quiz the next day. I will then feel hopeless and unaccomplished and take a break, going up to my friends’ room to chat, sometimes even up past midnight, and I believe it not to be a timewaster but a necessity to maintain my sanity.

I then decided that making any plans were no longer going to work, and my plan reduced to a pathetic ‘do work when I feel like it has to be done’. I got past assignment over assignment, without much of a big picture of what I was supposed to accomplish but a plethora of assignments yet to be completed still.

By the way, where does running and exercising come into the picture this semester? Come on don’t be ridiculous.

Lying beneath all the work I have to do is yet another layer of hardship and impedance - emotional burden. To try to work feeling so despondent about one’s relationships with others is a real challenge, most of it coming from getting out of bed and stop thinking about the source of despondency itself, especially with little people around to encourage me.

But it is through the crazily stressful circumstances I have been in that have initiated a few paradigm shifts in me and gave me vastly different outlooks on life.

To be continued…