Brahms Cello Sonata No. 1 (part 2)

So I finally played the first few pages of this fabulous cello sonata with Laura today. Holy. Cow. It's going to take a lot of practice before we play it very well, but even with the ~45 minute session we had tonight we made MAJOR progress. Man oh man, it sounded so cool. The timing is a little bit difficult in places, but we got synchronized amazingly fast. The time absolutely *flew* by. I'm really, really glad I found somebody with whom to play.

Well, I feel better.

Brahms Cello Sonata No. 1, Op. 38

I've never really played anything but solo piano music. I'm even trying to learn Schumann's piano concerto as a solo piece. I don't have any particular affinity for playing solo music - on the contrary, I think playing with others would be magnitudes more enjoyable - but as the piano is more of a hobby than a focus for me right now, and I play only relatively sparingly, and I am not exceptionally talented, it is difficult to collaborate with other musicians.

Then last night, for some reason unbeknownst to me, I decided to ask my cellist friend Laura if she wanted to learn to play one of the myriad cello/piano compositions in existence. She jumped at the chance, and suggested Johannes Brahms's Cello Sonata No. 1 in E minor, for which she had copies of both the piano and cello parts. I started practicing it not five minutes after she gave it to me, and I absolutely adore it. We're both terribly excited to start playing it together. It is rather difficult, however, so I've started doing lots of finger exercises to improve my speed and dexterity (I've actually found that the 3rd movement of Schumann's piano concerto serves this purpose wonderfully, along with being a marvelous piece of music in its own right).

Gah! I'm so excited. The cello and the piano are my two favorite instruments of all time, and putting them together is just about the neatest thing ever.

Cluster#$&! to Geneva

(Please don't sue me, Daily Show folks :-( I use the phrase with complete reverence.)

So I applied to a bazillion physics internships for this summer, and, just like two years ago, the first reply I received (last time from Texas Tech, this time from U. Florida) just happened to be the only offer I got. Today I got a response back from CERN, but I didn't make the cut there. Apparently there were 160 students applying for 14 positions (see the title of this post). So tomorrow it looks like I'll be signing on at Florida! I was hoping to work for a German experimental astrophysicist there named Guido Mueller (you read that right) but that didn't work out. I'll be doing theoretical solid state physics instead. Oh well, an internship is an internship, as far as I'm concerned. Dr. Chen said there's no money in astrophysics anyway, so if I want to make a nice living he suggested that I rob banks instead.

I'm almost convinced.