Angst

Spent some quality time with the second movement of Dmitri Shostakovich's String Quartet No.8 in C Minor. Our conductor told us yesterday that it's very difficult to spend too much time working on this piece at once, because you find yourself very deeply immersed in another person's suffering. We've been working on it for months, and at the end of class yesterday, he said that we were finally earning the right to play it. And something about what he said stuck; I feel like I haven't taken the time to truly understand the complexity and depth of this piece before. But it's starting to come into focus.