Hooray!

Wow. Why didn't my high school marching band play Shostakovich and Schoenberg?

I enjoyed this:
"Rock Festival in Pyong Yang

If you are a band playing any kind of rock, including heavy metal, then you can participate 'ROCK FOR PEACE' in Pyong Yang, the capital city of North Korea. This is the very first time in history that North Korea allows western musicians in the heart of DPRK territory to play capitalist popular music. There are few restrictions and conditions on participation but any band will be considered even though you are from USA. The lyrics should not contain admirations on war, sex, violence, murder, drug, rape, non-governmental society, imperialism, colonialism, racism, anti-DPRK, and anti-socialism. The concert will be held from March 01 to March 04, 2007 under the management of Voice of Korea. We currently received requests of 35 bands from 19 countries and participations are increasing everyday. ROCK FOR PEACE will be the 2007 version of Woodstock rock festival in 1969 but in different location and in different goals, We welcome every musician as long as they are purely music based without political intentions. For inquiries, email to Jean-Baptiste Kim, the head of Voice of Korea."

Found the following on one of the many excellent music/musician blogs I've been finding recently (much to my detriment - they're far too fascinating and take far too much time), disagreeding with another writer's take on the future of Classical music:

"To cite my main qualm, I guess I feel he’s a little too comfortable with generalizations, and with the deadly Grouping Of Stereotypes Fallacy (“scholarly, detached, analytical”)... Scholarly does not have to be detached, or analytical, for instance. Analysis is not necessarily detached either. These are all free-floating "connotations." And then he equates the scholarly attitude with the detached immobile performances, claiming a causality. But often it seems to me just the opposite: the scholars are the ones getting excited about the music while the performers, who are too busy to hear from them or don’t want to hear from them or think they don’t have anything to offer, ignore them and offer up the same old same old conservatory crap."

I have to say, that last sentence really struck me as absolutely true, at least where my students are concerned. (I'm happy to say that I feel the opposite around my excellent if often brutal piano teacher, Dr. Karen Shaw.)

Lots of interesting results from the election yesterday! Democrats won in all but one of the races I was watching: Indiana's 8th (my district) and 9th districts, Iowa's gubernatorial race, Lamoyne Gaard's epic quest for county supervisor, and Grinnell's state house race, with the Iowa Secretary of Agriculture as the only (and unfortunate) exception. Democrats also handily took not only the national house (and possibly senate) but, to an even greater extent, their Iowa counterparts.


One piece of sad news - James Hill, Pirate for congress, was defeated in the Iowa 1st district. It was a heated race, though the Democrat, Bruce Braley, won in the end pretty handily (55% to the Republican's 43%). James Hill finished third. But - and I think this is probably a record for the Pirate party - he gained 1.06% of the vote (2184 votes) in that district, finishing well above the Libertarian candidate (Albert Schoeman, 1,229 votes or 0.59%).

I got a check from my health insurance company to reimburse my wrist-problem visit, and it occurred to me: I actually *make* money when I get sick. Sounds impossible, perhaps, but it works! See, my school-related insurance covers 100% of expenses at the IU medical center. But they only reimburse me after I've paid, so all I need to do is pay for my visits with my credit card, which gives me 1% cash back on all purchases. Voila, I make money! I think I have a get-rich-quick scheme on my hands. So, let's see - on this $18 visit, I made... 18¢!!
All I need now, clearly, is to get much sicker. Or, more importantly, more expensively sick.

In other news, I just received the go-ahead from the "Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz Musikabteilung mit Mendelssohn-Archiv" (full name; known affectionately as "some German library") to get my honors project (an edition of a cantata by Georg Benda, transcribed from their manuscripts) published. Now the final hard part (of about 10) starts - finding a publisher who's zealous enough about good Baroque/Classical music to publish this but not zealous enough to care that it was transcribed from only one of about five manuscripts scattered around Germany by some undergraduate at a liberal arts college.

Had a great visit from Sherry! We went to the art museum a few times, attended a concert, spent some quality time together, and went out on a hike from Griffy Lake to University Lake, the latter pictured here:



It had frozen the night before, so here I am over a waterfall festooned with icicles:



We also went to Bloomington's very own Tibetan Buddhist monastery, which looked a little out of place in front of dark, almost dull late-fall Indiana colors (especially next to a trailer park, not pictured here):



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In the meantime, I've been thinking about grad schools recently, especially after talking with Nate about his grad school plans and mom's suggestion that I look around. By grad schools, of course, I mean other grad schools as well as this one. I was looking through some good schools for music theory, and checking out application procedures, etc., and finally just looked at how many faculty's names I know at each school:
Indiana - all, of course.
Yale - James Hepokoski (not technically theory, but still), Richard Cohn, Allen Forte (!)*
Columbia - Fred Lerdahl, Walter Frisch (again, a musicologist, but a good one), Marion Guck, Tristan Murail (composition, but cool)
Eastman - Matthew Brown (but only because his wife lives across the street from my family), Robert Gauldin, Elizabeth West Marvin (I guess they write textbooks for a living at Eastman)
U. of Chicago - Thomas Christensen (history of theory! sweet), Shulamit Ran and Easley Blackwood (composers... I wonder why I know of them...)
Florida State - Jane Piper Clendinning, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (composer)

Wow! I know more names than I thought, though of course nothing like some of my colleagues. I also realize you (even my family - a good 90% of my extremely occasional readership) probably don't care that much about this list, but it seemed as good a place as any to put it all down. I need to get some advice from someone, but I'm not really sure who to go to. We'll see. I also need to start saving money for massive application fees.

*interesting fact not having to do with Allen Forte: my starting stipend at Yale, should I get in and go, would be at minimum well over twice my starting stipend here, and would require less than half as much teaching (though the latter is not much of an advantage, from my perspective).