Project 365

I love this song! I love their new album 🙂

Indeed, I am hoping that this would be the start of something good. Be it in career, spiritual, social, and love life. Amin!

I’m feeling a little melancholy… not sure how to describe it 😐 A mixture of everything, really.

I found this new song by Anggun. I love the French version more than the Indonesian one. The French lyric kinda fits more to my mood.

Des larmes de sel
Voyage au long cou
L’amour et la mer
L’écume de nos jours
Nos années lumières
Partis en pousières
Des allée-retours
Autour de la terre

Je partirai
Revisiter
Je partirai
Ne rien Garder
Que le meilleur
De nos 2 coeurs
Je partirai

Toucher le soleil
Quitter la forturne
Gomber et plus renaitre
Descendre
De la lune
Amour éphémère
Eternel retour
De nom des légère
Avant des beaux jours

Je partirai
Que nos secrets
Je partirai
Nouveau de près
Je partirai

When I’m homesick, one of the ways to cure that homesickness is by eating Middle Eastern foods or by listening to Arabic music! 😀

This song, Ally Gara, is one of my favorite songs and probably my only favorite classical Arab music. I don’t know who the original singer was, but this classical song was made popular (again) by Saber Robaei and Asalah Nasri. Saber and Asalah are two of the best Arab singers. Their voice is just amazing. Both of them have performed this song on separate occasions. If you watch this video, you’ll notice it’s a rather  spontaneous performance at a random party attended by many Arab celebrities. You can see how they made gesture to each other to tell whose turn to sing next. But despite the spontaneity, both Saber and Asalah did a great job!! I even think Saber can survive without Asalah there haha.

The song is quite long (more than 10 minutes) — the video that I embed here is the second part of the performance. It’s common for Arab singers to prolong a song by “playing” with their voice (like what Saber did at 2:34 and Asalah at 4:40). They do that quite often when performing a classical Arab music. I’m not sure why. Perhaps, it’s to show the greatness of their voice and how long they can sing without breathing.

You can download the mp3 of this performance from here. Saber and Asalah never recorded this song, so the one from this performance is used and was widely played in the radio across the Middle East when it was first broadcasted on TV. So you can hear the voice of Asala asking for a glass of water in the beginning of the song hahaha. It’s a spontaneous performance, I told ya!

Yay! Finally it’s here! The festival that we’ve all been waiting for is coming up very soon. I’m thrilled and super excited. I can’t wait to perform and promote our culture 🙂 I also can’t wait to watch the orchestra. It’s going to be awesome! I’ll post the videos when they’re available.

Since the theme of this year’s festival is Russian music, so we decided to play the following songs (I include the links of the past performances too): Kalinka, Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini v2, Swan Lake, and Sleeping Beauty.

Wish us luck!!!

One of my most favorite piano songs. It gives me shiver every time I listen to it. If a guy played this song for me with a piano, oh I would probably be kissing his feet!!! HAHAHAHA. Of course, I’m exaggerating. But this song is my weakness. Thankfully it’s a hard song to play :P. Unless you have a kind of bond or connection with the song, it’d be hard to play it with the right tempo. This is definitely going to be in my wedding. LOL.

I’ve always been a fan of Hans Zimmer, a composer of many great movie soundtracks, ranging from The Lion King, Pearl Harbor, Pirates of The Caribbean series, Da Vinci Code, Inception, and The Dark Night.

He’s one of the greatest composers of all time! Every time I listen to the Lion King’s song "To Die For", I can clearly picture the time when Simba’s dad is killed. Both the scenes and the song are so emotional! 🙁

I’ve been listening to the soundtracks of The Pirates of The Caribbean these days. I LOVE THEM! The violin sound mixed with some rock elements… Just GREAT! He seriously needs to have a concert of his own!

Nice orchestra concert! 🙂 Great to hear Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5 and Strauss’ Blue Danube!

I always love Mozart’s Symphony No. 40. I don’t really understand music and all those weird looking notes, but THIS is a beautiful piece of work! I’ve been watching different performances done by many orchestras and I have to say that this version conducted by Leonard Bernstein is by far my favorite one! The tempo is just right on the spot.

And yes, I’ve been watching orchestra performances again, after feeling so bored of James Blunt which I played it over and over again.

Not to forget that I’m going to watch an orchestra concert on Thursday night! I wanted to book 4 tickets, but due to some technical problems, I got 8 tickets in total! So I asked my angklung friends to join me. Hope it’s going to be an awesome evening. Can’t wait 🙂

* NOTE: you have to watch this video in FULL volume. It’s much more amazing!!!

One of my ultimate dream is to watch the LIVE orchestra concert of Distant Worlds (from Final Fantasy). They came to Singapore last year when I was still in the Netherlands. They did go to Sweden to perform, but I didn’t have much money at that time. I hope one day I have the chance to see it live!!!

This was us, the angklung team, performing at the Angklung Charity Concert at our campus, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. The concert was a SUCCESS! We all had a wonderful time! 🙂

Alhamdulillah, up until today, we have received a total of 916.52 euro and the amount is expected to increase as people can still donate through electronic transfer until 3 December! I’m so relieved!!!

Thank you all for coming and for supporting the event :). And thanks to the lovely one and only conductor, teh Ida, and to those who worked hard to make this event a success (including teh Desi!). Great job everyone!!!

P.S. this is the video (final version) I made for the purpose of fundraising, which was shown at the concert: