User:Svefngengar

Hello, I'm Xander. Yes, my username is a Sigur Rós/Pokémon pun. Gasp at my coolness.

Biography
I'm a twenty-something music student originally from Lincolnshire, now living in the greatest city in the world. I'm obsessed with music, language/linguistics and tennis, and also interested in politics, philosophy, art and literature. I'm not sure what else to divulge at this stage, so here are some userboxes:

Music
I started learning the piano at the age of six and since then I've focused on very little else. I'm mainly a performer, but also an aspiring conductor and teacher, an avid but weak composer, and of course an obsessive listener and concertgoer. Here's a neither concise nor comprehensive list of artists that mean a fair amount to me: • Alter Bridge

• Aphex Twin

• Arcane Roots

• Architects

• Arsonists Get All The Girls

• Ásgeir

• Kurt Atterberg

• The Bad Plus

• Ludwig van Beethoven

• Leonard Bernstein

• Between The Buried And Me

• Biffy Clyro

• Sergei Bortkiewicz

• Benjamin Britten

• Dave Brubeck

• Caravan Palace

• Cattle Decapitation

• Converge

• Culprate

• Miles Davis

• Claude Debussy

• Eleven Tigers

• Enter Shikari

• Everything Everything

• Fjørt

• George Gershwin

• Guillemots

• Heisskalt

• Paul Hindemith

• The Hirsch Effekt

• The Human Abstract

• Dmitry Kabalevsky

• Kairon;IRSE!

• Aram Khachaturian

• Keane

• Bohuslav Martinů

• Felix Mendelssohn

• Muse

• Nirvana

• Oceansize

• Arvo Pärt

• Periphery

• Portico Quartet

• Francis Poulenc

• Sergei Prokofiev

• Protest the Hero

• Queen

• Sergei Rachmaninoff

• Maurice Ravel

• Radiohead

• Ottorino Respighi

• Royal Republic

• Camille Saint-Saëns

• Alfred Schnittke

• Alexander Scriabin

• Dmitri Shostakovich

• Jean Sibelius

• Sigur Rós

• Snarky Puppy

• Soundgarden

• Veselin Stoyanov

• Richard Strauss

• Igor Stravinsky

• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

• This Will Destroy You

• Thy Art Is Murder

• Ralph Vaughan Williams

• William Walton

• The White Stripes

Language
I'm a keen language-learner, particularly passionate about European languages; especially Germanic. I started French at primary school and continued up to GCSE level – since then I've lost a bit of confidence in it, but occasionally resurrect it when I get the chance. I've studied German though for about 11 years now and pretty much use it every day, and it's become one of my favourite languages. This has made starting to learn Yiddish fairly straight-forward, with only the Hebrew alphabet being a rather new stepping stone on that front.

I spent most of 2015 in Parma, so after arriving with the basics of Italian I became more and more fluent, until being more or less in fully competent flow by the time I left. Otherwise, I have a slight obsession with the Nordic countries, and therefore decided to set about learning their languages, Icelandic and Norwegian being favourites. In general, I intend to improve my Icelandic quite a lot in the short term, as well as Russian, which I had always been interested in because of my love for Russian classical music (see above), and recently began learning. At some point in the future I'd like to take on the challenge of even more languages, including something non-European: • Arabic

• Bulgarian

• Danish

• Greek

• Hindi

• Hungarian

• Irish

• Japanese

• Polish

• Portuguese

• Scottish Gaelic

• Welsh

Tennis
I also used to play tennis rather often as a youngster, but the more music commitments I had, the less time for tennis I had, so I do it quite infrequently nowadays. But that doesn't stop me watching pretty much every main ATP/WTA tournament that goes on, all year, every year. In the interest of maintaining a pattern, here's a list of my favourite players, past and present: • Arthur Ashe

• Boris Becker

• Eugenie Bouchard

• Dustin Brown

• Kim Clijsters

• Lindsay Davenport

• Roger Federer

• David Goffin

• Steffi Graf

• Justine Henin

• Tim Henman

• Johanna Konta

• Petra Kvitová

• Ivan Lendl

• Sabine Lisicki

• John McEnroe

• Gael Monfils

• Andy Murray

• Rafael Nadal

• Martina Navratilova

• Kei Nishikori

• Juan Martín del Potro

• Agnieszka Radwańska

• Milos Raonic

• Laura Robson

• Pete Sampras

• Sloane Stephens

• Samantha Stosur

• Dominic Thiem

• Jo-Wilfried Tsonga

• Heather Watson

• Stanislas Wawrinka

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