Choir

Lots of singing these days: rehearsals tonight, tomorrow and Friday (dress rehearsal), and then performances on Saturday and Sunday. Rehearsals take more than three hours now, which is heavy training for my voice. But, so far, it has held out, and actually learned something :). We do also have some breaks, since the conductor keeps swearing at us, for breathing all at the same time, for not keeping pitch, for not knowing the pieces well enough, etc.. It's quite instructive, really: they don't teach you swearing in language courses...
I shouldn't complain, though: sometimes he says something positive, and most of the swearing is not at the basses. The altos come first, for contiually keeping their faces buried in their sheet music and not paying attention to his conducting. Then come the sopranos and tenors, for not keeping pitch and not singing lightly enough in the high ranges. If he addresses the basses, it is usually for simply singing something wrong, but this happens, on average, about once per rehearsal. So far, I was wondering whether that was because he considered us hopeless cases anyway, or because we were actually doing relatively well. But, in one of today's attempts at being nice, he said that when one stands far enough away, it sounds relatively passable, especially the basses.

Unfortunately (?), the performances will not be recorded, or at least not recorded with the purpose of publishing on CD. At tonight's rehearsal, someone asked whether they would, which caused the conductor to exclaim: 'Um Gottes Willen, nein!' He has a point, actually: the type of music is rather unusual for people who sing mainly German church music, the language is a problem, since people can't remember the text by meaning (cf. Japgrad, for UC choir people), and it's a capella, which is also unusual, so on the whole it would require more work to make it recordable.
But, on the whole, I very much enjoy the whole thing: the conductor's swearing is not only instructive but also funny, and I like the music. It also begins to sound roughly the way it should, and I think we'll be able to pull off good performances. For those who would like to come but can't: I have a recording by the St. Petersburg Chamber Choir of Rachmaninoff's liturgy, which is much better than anything we might hope to achieve, even with more time available.

Job

Professor Schmidt has asked me if I would like to continue writing the script during part 2 of his course, next semester. So I'll have a job for the last four months of my stay here as well :).

Oh, and the winter has indeed disappeared again, as was predicted :(.

Winter!

...well, snow. Heidelberg doesn't have the amounts reported by the Süddeutsche Zeitung: the traffic is not noticably affected. And no ice, of course, since all the water we have here flows to the Rhine, through the Neckar. But still, everything looks really nice and wintry, especially the mountainsides with bare trees.
The weather reports say it will disappear in a few days, as the cold will go back to Eastern Europe :(, but until that time, we can pretend we have winter here :).

Completely unrelated: the language school where I did a German course in September has asked me whether I'd be interested in teaching a beginner-level Dutch course. Which I'd be, of course, if I had time. However, I don't have time: I am very busy trying to keep/catch up with studying, rehearsing for the choir performance (this weekend in one week) and typing up lecture notes for QFT.
These few weeks there will probably be fewer posts than usual so far, since I will have less time to do interesting stuff, so less to write about, and less time to write.

Wissenschaftliche Hilfskraftanstellungsbürokratie

"Ich gelobe, Verfassung und Recht zu achten und meine Dienstobliegenheiten gewissenhaft und uneigennützig zu erfüllen."

Yesterday, I finally got to sign the contract for my job. Before being able to do so, however, I had to state that I would fulfill the obligations I would be taking on conscientiously and without considering my own gain. I was asked to go to someone's office and read out the above sentence aloud. Having done so, I got a stamp and signature on the paper, signed it myself, and went back to the secretary's office, where I actually got the contract.
Apart from the Gelöbnis, they also made me sign a paper saying that I would respect the constitution and gave me a paper specifying the Dienstpflichten für Angestellte nach dem Bundesangestelltentarifvertrag (I love German word-glueing). And an extract from the criminal code, which tells me what will happen to me if I were to steal secret documents or violate the confidentiality of the spoken word, and more such things.

And all this is just for a wissenschaftliche Hilfskraft. They even explicitly state somewhere that the Gelöbnis does not mean I'm a civil servant now. I wonder what they make those people do...
Maybe I'm just biased because of the informal nature of the proceedings at UC, but it all seems a little overdone to me, even when taking into account that my contract is officially with the Land Baden-Württemberg. It also stands in rather sharp contrast to the light way my professor deals with the whole thing. And all the people in the instute, by the way.

But, I don't mind, as long as I get my money. I just call it an interesting cultural experience, and try to tell myself that Germany really is different from Holland after all...:p

Choir weekend

Отче наш, иже еси на небесех...

Regardless of whether He exists, God has inspired people to write music of a seemingly unearthly beauty. I spent the better parts of Saturday and Sunday singing such music, as my choir had a rehearsal weekend. We went through the entirety of Rachmaninoff's Chrysostomos liturgy, about half of it for the first time, and although tiring, it was wonderful.
As befits a good rehearsal weekend, there was, apart from lots of singing, a party on Saturday evening, to activate other parts of the body than the throat. Enjoyable as this was, it did result in a slightly hungover feeling on Sunday morning, as rehearsals started at 9:00 in the morning. However, as this feeling was shared by the entire choir, it provided for a kind of bonding only found on similar occasions.
Surprisingly, the deep bass parts came out a lot better on Sunday morning than on Saturday evening :p. 'Deep' does fit the stereotype in this case: I've never seen any bass lines go as low as these Russian ones do. The low basses are at two instances required to sing a b flat... (which only two of us managed, and only on Sunday morning; in the afternoon it already proved impossible).

The performances will be in the first weekend of February, in a town somewhere near Heidelberg and in the Peterskirche in Heidelberg itself. The Peterskirche is the traditional university church, where university choirs usually have their performances.
Apart from Rachmaninoff's liturgy, adapted for concert performance, we will also sing parts from Tchaikovsky's all-night vigil and Cui's Magnificat. All Russian, all church music, all Romantic or late Romantic era. Anyone who'd happen to be in Heidelberg at the time is most warmly invited to come :).

Biological clock confusion

To make up for the lack of warm water, we do have warm weather. Apart from the birds that I have seen flying in the wrong direction, and the flowers that are still, or already, blossoming, it also confuses me sometimes.
I seriously had the idea that it was March when cycling home today. The municipality workers were busy removing the dead wood from the Neckar shore, just like they always clear the ditches in Groenekan. In March. It's cloudy, windy and slightly rainy weather, some ten degrees centigrade. I notice a tacit assumption with myself that in a month or so, we're going to have warm days again. If it weren't for the calendar, I'd believe I had been hibernating for three months.
But although skipping a winter would be very interesting from a climatological point of view, I'd personally rather have a bit of cold from time to time, if it helps keeping Holland dry. Maybe we'll have something like last year, with deep frost in late March, and sunny summer two weeks later.

In conclusion: 'global warming is making climatology just a little more interesting than I like.'

A warm welcome

An die Bewohner im Schlierbacher Schiff

Aus technischen Gründen ist die Heizung und Warmwasser am 8-9.1.2007 bis 13:00 ausgefallen. Wir bitten um Verständnis.

Hausmeister

Unfortunately, one always sees these notes after having tried to shower with cold water... Also unfortunately, there was no warm water this afternoon, either. And there still isn't, so he must have meant until tomorrow 13:00, rather than tomorrow until 13:00. Which strikes me as rather long for fixing a boiler, especially if it is one that provides 90 people with their warm water and heating.

Oh well... cold but clean water is still better than brown water¹ :p.

P.S.: Yes, I'm back in Heidelberg, and safely so, for those who were wondering. This time only for five weeks, though: I'm coming back to Utrecht on the 10th of February.


¹The state of affairs in Phwezi, Malawi, apparently.