Thank you to all who offered your support with regard to my last post! It really means a lot to me. And for those who are concerned, I'm really doing fine. It helped a lot to have things to jump into right away - the drive back to school, replacing my laptop's hard drive and restoring everything from backups (more fun than it sounds), preparation for much more substantial teaching responsibilities, and finally school itself. I certainly have had plenty to keep me busy, and some things are even going great! I will probably take some of you up on your offers of calls, getting together, and all that, but mainly because I'd love to see/talk to you.

The new set of musical skills students is, in a word, huge. They had to up enrollment caps to (gulp) 90 per lecture, which is a heck of a lot of people. Today was the first day of lecture, and I was pretty nervous, but I thought it went pretty well, especially at 8. I think people are more willing to deal with you as a person at 8 - by 10 they've woken up enough to have settled into their "anything a teacher says can't be funny" and "are you kidding? only losers have fun in class" attitudes. I'm exaggerating - even 10 o'clock was fine (especially the vast majority of students), but there was a little more distance, I think. Both classes got done much earlier than I'd intended - I actually added material to what I did last year on the first day, and we were done early! It certainly points out the difference in ability level between the "on" and the "off" semester - we probably have just as many people who have failed in the past or were held back by their entrance exam this semester, but now they're surrounded by 80 other students who have higher ability levels. So the percentage of people who will need out-of-class help should be much reassuringly lower (last semester it was easy to think I was failing for this reason).
I'm also indefensibly happy about the website I've made for the class. I'm particularly pleased with myself for having included a "jukebox" made with Flash so they can do homework dictations on their home computers, despite the fact that I just downloaded it from a website and just changed the code to work with my tracks. (Don't worry, it was all legal - the download was made for that purpose.)

My history of theory class is really bringing me back to my liberal-arts roots. Not because it's a different subject - obviously, I'm still studying theory - but I'm getting back into "life of the mind" sorts of issues. I love analyzing music and all, but sometimes you just have to gain some of your pleasure from scholarly inquiry, and this class will clearly satisfy that itch. Long reassuring lists of Latin and Greek names and titles, a small class of sufficiently-nerdy-looking people, and an instructor who is quite frankly the top of this field and actually translated a lot of the sources (Dr. Thomas Mathiesen - you can get some idea from all the italics on his profile; he's also in charge of this) combine to make a course that I can be genuinely excited about.

Finally, my choir (Pro Arte) is as exciting as ever. It still sounds amazing - though we're singing the Haydn mass too uniformly loudly - and we're adding yet another exciting project for the semester. In addition to our Telemann concert and our two Haydn concerts (here and in Chicago), we're going to have a recording session where we make the first recording ever of some music from colonial-period Guatemala from manuscripts located at IU's rare books library. You can only imagine how excited that makes a guy like me...