What will you be working on this week?

This week the main focus of my activities will center around our upcoming organ duet recital on Saturday where Ausra and I will play Lithuanian music program on the occasion of M.K Ciurlionis' birthday. We will go to practice at church every day but Friday because on Friday Ausra has classes to teach from 8 AM until 5:30 PM (with a lunch break, of course). So practicing on Friday would be too strenuous.

I want also to be able to work on transcribing my "Sarbievijus Rhapsody" improvisation from the video to Sibelius notation. This will require some dedicated time as my schedule is quite full already but I'm certain I can find at least 15 minutes a day to work on it. In fact, when I'll finish writing this post, I'll take a short break, move around to get the blood flowing and come back to the computer to do the transcription.

Tomorrow at the Cultural Center of Vilnius University we will have our first meeting this semester. I'm not sure about the specifics but the meeting should center about the upcoming activities of the Center. We have 2 theaters, 3 choirs, 2 orchestras and 3 ensembles in the Center. Oh, and 2 organists (myself and Ausra). So you can imagine each group is quite busy with their events and therefore the team of the Cultural Center as a whole will have lots to talk about tomorrow.

Wednesday morning our 2 assistants will come into the church to help us with the registration changes for our Saturday's recital. This is the only time all 4 of us can work together and it's really crucial to have this practice uninterrupted. We have already set up registration changes in advance on paper but still the assistants will need to be mentally ready to change the stops manually (because it's purely mechanical organ). I expect the biggest challenge for them will be in symphonic poem "In the Forest" by M.K. Ciurlionis because they will have to create dynamic waves from pianissimo to fortissimo from memory - in the music we will only notate combination numbers 1 through 6 for the sake of simplicity. So they will have to remember what each of the numbers mean.

Because of this rehearsal I had to cancel another meeting at the organ - this time with the group of students from Academy of Art with whom I'm doing a collaborative project about the origin of organ sound this semester. I hope they can come in later in the day.

Then on Wednesday afternoon I will have our 2nd "Unda Maris" organ studio rehearsal in the church. I'm not sure how many people will come back from the first time but it would be nice not to have unmotivated people around. Last time we had 15 students and you can imagine that playing time for everyone on the organ would be quite limited. Plus I got a couple of more inquiries over the weekend from Vilnius University community. Maybe I should do a contest just for the entry of this studio, haha!

On Thursday morning I will have a podcast interview with Auke Jongbloed, a Dutch organist who publishes early organ music editions from the manuscript sources and enjoys participating in our weekly contest on Steem. You can check out his profile @partitura on Steem if you are curious. He has a website http://www.partitura.org where he publishes his transcribed music scores. So I'm sure we will talk about his transcription process as well.

On Friday I will work at home to get ready for Saturday's recital and on Saturday Ausra and I will practice at church from 4 PM (the recital starts at 6 PM).

On Sunday I will publish podcast interview with Andreas Spahn, an organist from Germany who visited Vilnius on the occasion of his son starting his studies at Vilnius University. We had a conversation a few weeks ago where we met at the church and talked about his organist activities in a couple of churches that he plays not far from Stuttgart. He even played our organ a bit. I was surprised what kind of music he plays in his church. I'll reveal on Sunday, of course...

What will you be working on this week?

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