Contact
crantila at GMail
About Me
I am a university student in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. I am studying Music History and Music Theory at Wilfrid Laurier University, and have taken some courses in Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.
Music and computers are always competing for attention.
History with Music
My musical beginnings were relatively late, with piano lessons starting at age 7. After several years of lessons, the problem of practising came to bite me: I took a leave of absence from the instrument. When it came time to choose what kind of music to study in middle school (this is grade 6), I fell in love at once with the brass instruments, and ended up with a tuba. Through the following seven years, I played in the school bands. Starting in about grade 10, I began to take music more seriously, joining a youth orchestra and wind ensemble, and studying theory and history outside of school. I arrived at university with the intention to become a composer, but eventually realized that - regardless of whether it sounded pleasant - my compositions were mostly a means by which to explore the sounds created by other composers.
Now entering my fifth and final year of undergraduate studies, I intend to graduate with a double specialization in both Theory and History, continuing to graduate studies in England or North America. My interests focus on Western orchestral music of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, including such composers as Bruckner, Mahler, and Sibelius. My scholarly work (as much as is possible with undergraduate studies) tries to explain the aspects of this music that are appealing to both expert and non-expert listeners alike.
My quest for musical understanding has yet to even realize what questions should be asked, never mind their answers. That is, while the questions and answers may exist somewhere, I have yet to find them.
History with Linux
I have been using Linux on and off since 2001 (at the age of 14), when I started with Mandrake 8.2. With the advent of the aluminum Apple iMac, I took a break from Linux, but found OS X to be unfulfilling. My return in August 2009 was accompanied by building myself a new PC, and preceded by months of research both in hardware and software. Although I tried many different operating systems (including a legal Windows 7 beta version, several variants of BSD, and just about all the Linux distributions conceivable), Fedora Linux kept surfacing as my platform of choice. The four-F focus really shows, and my favourite aspects of this include the adherence to standards, the non-favouritism of desktop environments (always a concern for KDE users), and the willingness to do upstream development work.
(This is unfinished).