how long will this last..

That's a million-dollar question.

I'm not sure if it's out of laziness or a lack of enthusiasm for it, but blogging never lasts. I've made two attempts, and both of them failed. Well actually, the first one the contract for webspace expired, and the second one...well yeah that was just out of neglect.

But, since I'm leaving this town soon, perhaps this could be a good way to keep in touch with people. I'd like to think that interesting things happen in my life all the time -- interesting enough that it's worth typing about and letting people know about it -- but seeing that I'm going to have some time on my hands for the first time in my life, I might actually look for something interesting on a daily basis. We'll see.

Right now the life is taken over by thesis work. It's almost 2 in the morning. I've been procrastinating.

And just as I head to bed, I notice that the radio (CBC channel 2) had been playing a series of percussion ensemble music. A bunch of Japanese composers. In December when I went to Taiwan and Hong Kong for the UBC Wind Symphony tour, a percussion conference had been going on, and a university group from one of the local universities had been rehearsing on traditional Japanese taiko drums. Tossing the mallets, spinning, yelling -- the whole ordeal. It was pretty crazy.

I find that most percussion ensemble music composed by Japanese composers use taiko drums. It is, I agree, an amazing instrumental toy. If you hit it right (that's already by itself pretty difficult to do) it gives this reverberating umph in the the listener, a low-frequency tingle through your arms, but strong enough that, by the end of a movement your arms are dead tired, dead like broken twigs of a tree. Performing on it is quite another experience -- it's essentially like performing on a series of bass drums, or dense timpani. For all you keen percussionists out there -- you know how difficult it is to control the tone on a bass drum. Imagine playing a series of notes on a denser drum. Crazy.

This tune uses a couple of those taiko drums...then they definitely used some bows (as in bows used for playing violins) on some thing, or perhaps that was a string attached to the drum head, I don't really know. And a vibraphone. Neato.