February 14, 2013

  • kankakee valley concerto competition

    was a failure.


    I was beyond pissed when I found out what exactly happened. 
    I got my CD back because I requested to get it back. Along with the CD was a list of the five finalists. I wasn't one of them, and neither were the two DM's at my school who I expected to get into finals. All of the finalists (after looking them on Facebook, haha), were old. One was probably in her mid 30's. The rest of them were DM students. Blah. 

    But that's not the reason why I was really pissed. There was a small post-it note on my CD when I got it back. It said in red, bold letters, "NO SOUND". 

    ...what?


    My heart started to race. No way. The one thing I was so scared to happen one day was slowly becoming my reality...

    I hastily popped the CD into my laptop to check out these files with "no sound". And to my utter amazement, my three movements of the Emperor Concerto were there -- but they were each 1 KB each. 


    I couldn't believe it. The whole reason as to why I was so stressed out in January was because of how hard I was working on getting the Emperor Concerto down to record it for the competition. I remember spending countless rehearsals and recording sessions with my accompanist Eugenia. I even had to learn the accompaniment part to her Chopin 2nd piano concerto because she was competing as well. So after all that hard work that I put into, all of it was put to waste all because of a CD error. 

    I think this is what happened: 
    I double checked to make sure my files were exported onto the CD. They were playing fine on my iTunes. The moment I pressed the eject button on my laptop, my laptop screen began to freeze. Also, my CD wouldn't eject... so I decided to restart my computer. I just completely shut down my computer by pressing the power button instead of safely restarting it because my screen was completely frozen. Once I got my computer to work again, the eject button properly worked and I was able to get my CD out. I figured since I already double checked to make sure everything about the CD was fine, I didn't need to put the CD back into my computer to check again. I think because I had shut down my computer in such a way, it somehow wiped my files away from the CD. I'm not sure if that is even possible since I'm pretty tech-illiterate, but it's the only possible explanation that I can come up with. I knew the files were working and everything before I restarted my computer.



    But once I finally calmed down, I knew that the world wasn't going to end because of this. And I strongly believe that everything happens for a reason. My goal with this competition was to motivate myself to practice harder and more efficiently on the Emperor Concerto. And because of that, I've gotten down all the movements solidly memorized. I even got a master class session with Israeli pianist, Asaf Zohar, on the first movement. And plus, I don't think I could've gotten all three of my movements down well enough for the final round that's happening in a few weeks. I know that based on how little experience I have with my concerto, I probably didn't deserve to get into the finals in the first place. And I'm thankful that the application fee was only $20, so I felt like I didn't lose a lot. And thanks to this shocking notice, I'm always going to be aware of how I'm burning my CDs for competitions and auditions. That would've been horrible if this incident occurred for a major prescreening audition. 


    It's just that I don't like the feeling of my efforts becoming belittled, especially in unfair situations. I feel that the "right" way is to have your hard work be proportionate to your rewards...... but the world doesn't work that way. Sigh. 

    But it's okay. I learned a lot from this. And I know I won't let this happen again.