All the music people around me have been chunking the month in weeks. Get through this week; regroup, learn the music for next week; get through next week. It is December. Last week was the big week; one more week to go, but relatively light. (Which is good, because the Yuletide deadline was Tuesday and this is, uh, the second latest I've ever turned in my draft.)

Me, grading the music I've had to do in the past month:

- Play piano with one of the youth (*): music was not so hard, kid is great and one of my ward favorites (I've known her since she was 3 and she's just lovely), I get a kick out of accompanying, would do again!

- Organize ward Christmas program: okay fine this kind of falls under my stake music calling right now, but I'm very slightly bitter that the person whose job it is to organize the ward program is not... really doing it, so it has become my job instead. On the other hand, organizing the stake Christmas music evening is prooooobably supposed to be my job (the reason it's not is historically that everyone in the job before me has said no to it since they started doing this ten (?) years ago, so they didn't bother to ask me, and also they probably knew I would also say no) and is a LOT more work, so okay.

On the other hand, it wouldn't be Christmas if I got out of it without hurting at least one person's feelings, and that part I could do without. (In this case, it is Accomplished Pianist's feelings, as I'd asked her to accompany the Hallelujah chorus which none of the rest of us can play, but then, possibly because I'd miscommunicated when I asked if Accomplished Organist would be back in town, Accomplished Organist totally moved around his family's schedule so he could be back in town to play it, and... well, now he kind of has to play it. But my point here is that none of this should have been my job and that the actual ward music coordinator should have taken on this emotional labor! And who knows, maybe she would not have screwed it up either?)

- Arrange music for stake youth choir(**): okay um this was fiddly but really lots of fun and I'm really taken by MuseScore which I never used before but which Awesome Music Guy recommended to me

- Play piano/direct/rehearse group of 6 youth: Fine, and the kids are super sweet, but wow why did the composer make the piano part so haaaaard. (I don't think it would be hard for a real pianist, I'm just a poseur -- but it's true that some of those arpeggio-like bits were not written in a way that has reasonable fingerings, and I had to write in a bunch of non-obvious-to-me fingerings to get it to work)

- Play piano for choir: this is fine, we are doing Candlelight Carol by John Rutter which is super pretty. I would just like to note that a) whyyyyy 6 flats John Rutter?! (I know why, because G flat major is just a snuggly sweet key, but agh) and b) I would rather sing

- Sing Hallelujah chorus while someone else plays organ!: yes good please more of this

- Play piano for Awesome Alto: really a very good time -- accompanying actual musicians is maybe one of my favorite things to do, and Awesome Alto is professional-level, and the piano part is both easy and one I already know (Bach-Gounoud Ave Maria for the win!!) so minimal practice required -- but AA, you play piano yourself, what is this not telling me that she wanted to sing it in a different key from the one I had already learned until we were literally about to rehearse it?? (She knew she should have and was very apologetic :) But it was definitely not as useful a rehearsal as it could have been.) Also, SO glad that I learned how to use MuseScore so I could find a copy of the prelude and transpose it...

- Rehearse E so she learned her multiple parts for the stake music event: this certainly gets easier every year. And I am so pleased that E can just make up a viola part based on the bass/tenor lines in a Christmas carol in the hymnbook, which is a Very Useful Life Skill but one which I really don't know how to teach, so I'm glad she picked it up

- Rehearse/conduct music for one piece for stake youth choir (**): plunking out notes is not my favorite (it's not something I dislike, it's just... fine) but conducting once they've learned the notes is AMAZING and SO FUN and A+++++++ so glad I volunteered to do this, WOULD DO AGAIN.

- Accompany Primary (3-12-year-olds) and Awesome Alto again on a different piece at the last minute, because of people realizing they would be out of town: thank you for choosing stuff with a really easy piano part, Primary and AA!

(*) "youth" is a standard LDS term meaning "kid aged 12-18" and is almost always used in the plural: you would say "the youth" to mean all the kids aged 12-18 in the ward but "one of the youth" to mean a singular kid

(**) Stake youth choir is a bunch of kids from multiple wards (congregations) -- basically anyone who will show up for rehearsal, which is a surprising number of kids (20-30 singers and 5 instrumentalists, of which E is one) -- and was organized and put together by Awesome Music Guy, who in addition to being good at All The Music is also greeeeat at organizing and is organizing the entire stake Christmas music evening (thank goodness because I am NOT DOING THAT THANK YOU). He made this youth choir happen earlier this year, and because they're so good he also organized them to sing for the stake Christmas music evening.

He asked me to arrange one of the (two) songs for youth choir (he did the other one, of course -- this guy does everything and he does it really well!), which I agreed to do. And thankfully once I learned how to use Musescore it wasn't nearly as much of a time sink as I had worried it would be, though there were a lot of little fiddly details that did take a while and I still did not get enough dynamics on the page. Awesome Music Guy had said he could conduct my song as well as his but I volunteered to. I was thinking it would free up a little time for him but he has been staying behind for my part of the rehearsal too and singing loudly with the boys (who need the help), so idk if it actually saved any time for him. But I guess at least it was less stressful for him?