I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living
I dreamed that love would never die
I dreamed that God would be forgiving
Then I was young and unafraid
And dreams were made and used and wasted
There was no ransom to be paid
No song unsung, no wine untasted

-lyrics from "I dreamed a dream", song from Les Miserables


Memories.....


Reproduced here is my very first blog post.


Life was nearly perfect then.


Wish it was just the same, now.....


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Blog up. There isn't really much point in building a blog, but, well, I'll just write down stuff here about the orchestra.
Yeah, everyone knows I'm ASL of the cello section, 2006 by now. Big responsibility. OK. First things first. Before I can fix an entire cello section, I have to get myself up to standard first. Not an easy task. Especially after I joined one year late. I've always regretted that, and I think I always will. If only I had followed my musical interest instead of going to Judo. And I realised that String Orch was a much better choice for me. Who knows if the Judo people are genuinely interested in their EP3? Everything's run by Mok, who controls everything down to the last detail. Us, we either come regularly or we SKIP. Teachers don't seem to care. So what we have here is a group of people fully committed and interested in their EP3. Not bad. The weird thing is that it's so informal and it still works! Tiap spews vulgarities in front of the conductor and he merely goes "tsk, tsk". Say anything remotely resembling a swear-word in Judo and you immediately get 100 from the coach. Or seniors. At least when I was there. I heard they reduced the punishment amounts. Thank God. If I hadn't done it once(and faked through a lot of it) I wouldn't understand how people like them can do 300-odd push-ups at one go. Well some people would consider it boring to sit in the same spot for hours and play the same thing over and over again until it's perfect...but I don't mind it. For one thing there's friends around to crack jokes and liven up the atmosphere, and for another it's a really nice feeling to see something which everyone has worked hard to perfect displayed in its full glory.

Enough crap. Currently practising Dotzauer like a madman. I'm trying to practise at least 2 hours per day. WTF. I'm practically the slowest in my section. Wang Zhuo is somewhere around 24, Sijin is at 22, and Min Jun is leading me a bit at 5. I'm still on 4. Not for long: I spent this morning working on 5 and 6. 5 sounds good, 6 is ok but could use a bit more work. An ASL must set a good example for the section. That means no more squeaking. Some parts of the Mendelssohn violin concerto squeaked horribly when I played it. Current target: Calvin Wong standard. By 1 Jan 2006. Well Lenard thinks Sijin was joking about the Dvorak concerto at next year's concert but he wasn't. We're going to go for it as hard as we can, and maybe we can create a miracle. Hope Albert and his section work hard enough to catch up with us. If he doesn't do something soon the cello section will own him. Seriously. Maybe I should organise extra practices on Saturdays=D.

Will try to post one after each practice. That is, if I have time. Practice generally ends at 7 nowadays...

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Nope, I didn't get Dvorak. But a concerto nonetheless. And I'm proud of my achievement- and yet I know I can and must do more.


Dotzauer? Finished the first book already.


it was a long, long time ago....and yet, only a single year.


So much has remained constant. So much has changed.


So much I fought to preserve. So much was lost.


So much.....of a teenager, his cello, and his aims and ambitions.


So much of an orchestra from this little island that became famous in a city far, far away, across the oceans of the earth.


Life will never -can never- be the same again.