I apologise, I just re-read that and I sound very whiny. I'm going to go for a walk.

sympathise with everything except the Berlioz thing - sorry, you're wrong, Berlioz ROCKS. Other than that, I feel your pain, it'll be over soon and you can have a nice summer.

Berlioz was a rubbish composer

I don't agree with you in this case, but I would love to see this take off as a meme similar to "[X] has a posse". I would love to see stickers slapped up in random places that said "Tippet was a rubbish composer" and the like.

Heh ok maybe not totally rubbish... it's just hard to be objective when answering past exam papers with questions like "Judging from his work, what did Berlioz think a symphony was?"

Other composers are treated equally badly - "Defend Bruckner against the view that he wrote, not nine symphonies, but the same symphony nine times."

and "Why did it take Brahms so long to complete his first symphony?"

(In case you're wondering, the module is called "The symphony from Beethoven to Mahler")

Sy Snootles was a rubbish composer.

Also: Poor Bruckner. So mistreated. So misunderstood.

Haha:

[Bruckner] never married, though he proposed to a large list of astonished teenage girls.

Ew:

He had a morbid interest in dead bodies, at one point cradling the head of Beethoven in his hands when Beethoven was exhumed. He left extensive instructions that he was to be embalmed.

Berlioz was my favorite Aristocat.

I think that someone should do a Dead Rock Legend vs. a Dead Classical Legend comparison and see who wins.

You need to take some time off to relax, see people you like, and have a little fun.

I'm convinced that taking a break (albeit with strict end-points) is better than studying straight through and burning yourself out.

I didn't do a music degree, so such questions are a joy to argue over at length down the pub now - hope you retain the joy somehow!

What is there to say about why Brahms took so long, anyway? How can you make a decent essay out of that? (genuinely interested, by the way - wondering what music degree syllabuses are like).

altolinguistic: Two words - Beethoven. Paradigm. Basically post choral symphony etc all the would-be symphonic composers were like "Oh Noes! We can't be as good as him!" And some, like Brahms, freaked out a little and spent AGES revising and re-doing huge chunks of his first symphony in order to get it *just right*.

Others, like Berlioz for example, said "Fuck it" and went off and did their own thing, namely write a bunch of fairly un-symphonic pieces and call them symphonies.

ok, so how do you get a whole essay out of that?

If I knew that I wouldn't be panicking quite as much right now :(

sorry :) you probably get a choice of questions, no? The Brahms question is crap, don't choose questions like that... sorry, scant comfort I know...

Berlioz only called one of them a 'symphony', didn't he? I think Harold in Italy is perhaps subtitled 'symphony' but the Symphonie Fantastique is (arguably) the only one that's really properly intended as one. But then it has such a massively obvious and explicit programme and you wouldn't normally expect that in a symphony... but then you could bring in argumentation based on motives, themes etc., show that it is thematically tight and well-structured (is it?) as well as illustrating a programme, and argue that it really is a symphony.

christ, i'm glad I don't have to do uni exams any more. good luck! do these count?

I do indeed get a choice of questions, but having to learn so much about each composer and their main symphonies in detail is slightly overwhelming! I think I'm just going to concentrate on a few of them.

Berlioz called HiI "a symphony with an obligato viola part".. that can assist with both sides of the argument really, which is nice.

Thanks, and nope, these don't really count. I'm only a lowly first year, so all I have to do is pass all the modules. For this one an essay was 40% of the module and I did pretty well, meaning that I've almost passed it without doing the exam at all. I'd still like to do a little better than a pass, though..

agree with porpoise about not cutting yourself off from human contact - I had a friend at uni whose mother advised him to 'go out and get wrecked' the weekend before finals started...

right, speaking of HiL, am now off for my first viola lesson in 7 years... eek...

Heh you're in the UK, right? I bet we can do the six degrees of separation thing in less than six.