jportela

Fellow developers and staff, if you have a LinkedIn account, I would be honored if you accepted to be my colleagues in there. If you don't have a LinkedIn account I'll still be honored to be your colleague here :P

Here's my profile:

http://pt.linkedin.com/in/joaoportela

Because in August I'll have more free time for the piano and music theory than the rest of the year, I decided to create a list of the pieces I want to learn this month:

Piano:

Chopin - Preludes nº 4, 7 and 20. The easiest preludes by Chopin. Number 4 and 7 are almost memorized.

Bach - Inventions nº 1, 4, 14. These two voice inventions are really fun to play and the easiest from the set of 15, although my teacher said I could tackle anyone of them, if I don't exaggerate on the speed

Bach - Some pieces from the Anna Magdalena Notebook, mainly to train sight reading and keyboard technique

Beethoven - Sonata nº 20, op. 49 nº 2. Considered the easiest sonata by Beethoven, but still challenging enough for me.

Schumann - Some pieces from Kinderscenen and Album for the Young, because they are very beautiful and not very difficult

Tchaikovsky - Some pieces from the Album for the Young, same reason as above

Mozart - Variations on Ah, Vous Dirai-je Maman (Twinkle-Twinkle Little Star). They are so beautiful and impressive, although I feel they are somewhat above my technical level.

Czerny - Some studies from Op. 849. I normally don't like studies, but Czerny's are actually pretty good musically and I feel they really help articulating the fingers, plus I'll sight read through them.

Music Theory:

Mostly I want to improve my sight-reading on all clefs, by solfeging from a book I had from the time I was in the Conservatory (Principles of Elementary Rhythm by Fontaine). I'll also do ear training (interval and chord recognition) with the EarMaster software and try to learn counterpoint.

I'll also try to learn improvisation from the Definitive Piano Improvisation Guide by Yoke Wong.


Pheww, that's a lot and I'll surely won't be able to do half of that, but I'll try :)

I was overwhelmed with the amount of work the end of my school semester brought. As a positive outcome, I completed all my school projects and I'm counting on a good evaluation on all of them. I've also learned to work under pressuring deadlines and to work a large amount of hours (averaging less than 4 hours of sleep per day - not necessarily continuous - during the last two weeks, and only pausing to eat and the occasional walk to stretch my back and legs. I didn't thought working more than 100 hours in a week was possible). 

I´m now entering my school exams, but I don't expect them to be nearly as time consuming as my school projects, and it's actually good to do other things than studying the whole time, so I'm doing GSOC my hobby, and I expect to use 2-3hours a day for it, during these couple of weeks.

I'm hoping that I start showing something already by Friday, so stay tuned!

I also would like to thank my mentor, denise , for her infinite patience and comprehension ;)

Since most of you are writers in some way or another, I thought I could share a poem I wrote around 3 years ago. It's the only poem I've written in English, and I don't intend to write anymore poetry, since I feel I should read more poems before even attempting to write more. I'm definitely interested in starting short-stories, though!

Here it is:

You won't have my life.