What is Music Made Of?
Pyotr Ilyich, trying to FIG-ure out the answer to this question. (Disclaimer: I am not responsible for my appalling sense of humour. It's inherited from my father.) "So tell me please, what have you all learnt in my course over the past year?" - asks our teacher of a subject called "Foundations in Opera Directing" which all conducting students must take in Third Year of the five-year conducting course at the Saint-P Con. Lectures were inconveniently held on Monday mornings, therefore naturally, students rarely ever turned up, forcing the poor old lady to often sit in the classroom waiting by herself for the entire duration of the 2-hour lecture (often she'd be sitting in the very corner of the empty classroom with the lights turned off... kinda creepy). Occasionally I would be the only student present in her lessons (although not always, I was also guilty of truanting, often loitering at the rehearsals of the St Petersburg Philharmonic i