Testing complete

Hello, world.

Coming to you live, from her newly-assembled IKEA computer desk! The first hurdle in the life of the novice graduate student at Westminster is done - I've finished all the assessment examinations. Results as followed:

Graduate musicianship: Passed. Has inspired me to study counterpoint, however, if not while I'm here, then sometime.
20th Century Analysis: Passed (easily.) Nailed the George Crumb which many missed. Knew it was him b/c of the font of the score, but was able to come up with more substantial arguments than that to justify my response. Even threw in some numerology. Go, me!
Music History: Passed. Aced. No idea how. I can only conclude I got bonus points for amusing the grader. Or else on every musical sample that I guessed at, I was right. I guess that really was the Emperor Concerto! And I discovered that I'm very grateful that Jeffrey Rink, my conducting teacher for the past year, led me through a major-works review for the past several months. That was a huge help for re-acquainting myself with some major composers, styles and works, and since the music history essays was very open-ended, I could concentrate on what I did know and ignore what I didn't.
Piano Proficiency: Passed. Was told to work on open choral score-reading, and to practice my string quartet score-reading as well. Intend to do so.
The Other Piano Proficiency, called something slightly different: Passed.
Sight-reading: Passed.
Diction: Failed. But I've never studied the IPA, so I need to learn it. Am also incapable of pronouncing Italian (not surprising) and English (humiliating.) Am adequately capable of pronouncing German (not surprising) and French (odd.) So I'll be auditing English and Italian Diction, which also teaches IPA. Perfect, huh?

Tomorrow is meeting with our major concentration fellow faculty and students, and then meeting in our major performance area (it has some sort of academic name, but I forget.) Mine is voice. I'm quite looking forward to taking voice lessons, I must say! And even though I'm paying out the [censored] for this education, it still somehow feels like I'm getting voice lessons for free.

Am quite liking the fellow students I've had conversations with so far. I hung out with one of my fellow conducting students for a while this evening, talking about mostly music-related things. (I'm unsure of what balance I want to aim for between work, school, and social life (should I work at all? How important is it, really, to date?) but that's a topic for another entry.)