Yesterday I made a fancy meal:

Appetizer: Baked brie in individual puff pastries

Main course: Roasted asparagus, Beef in a balsamic vinegar reduction with carmelized onions

Dessert: Chocolate oblivion with strawberries

I really think I need to set up a restaurant, not go into music theory...

I realized I never posted any pictures of the caving expedition Sara and I went on several weeks ago through IU Outdoor Adventures.

Our somewhat unprofessional guides suggested at the beginning that it might actually be illegal to go into this cave, and though they quickly took it back, it inspired several people to drop out from the trip. We ended up going with only one other person from IU, though several other people met us at the cave, and then yet more met us in the cave. Anyway, the entrance to the cave didn't enhance the impression of the legality of what we were doing:



Even though the entrance was a torn-open drainage grate, the cave was pretty cool. We were walking (and sometimes crawling or slithering) through (and sometimes deep within) water for most of the trip:



As well as narrow passages between cool walls (and, apparently, making bizarre facial expressions):



And climbing under or over little bridges:



Here is the skinniest, scariest part of the cave. That tiny tunnel was maybe ten feet long, and there was the space of about a foot where there was even a ledge coming down from above. Slithering along in shallow water, getting very wet, coming upon that one really skinny part, was pretty scary: it really didn't look like we'd fit through! Fortunately, we all did, and made it out this small opening into a larger room:



It was a really fun trip. And though it never felt that dangerous (just a little claustrophobic sometimes...), if we had gotten in trouble at some point, it turns out we would have been fine, because there was a church nearby with a bus apparently bound to a rather attractive destination:

I really shouldn't be surprised, but boy, do chocolate chips and heavy whipping cream taste good boiled together.

In the meantime, it occurred to me yesterday that a thousand years ago, Guido of Arezzo was alive. It also occurred to me that in 2033, it'll be the thousandth anniversary of his death. (Okay, the date after which we're sure he died.) I mentioned this to Sara, and she seemed unimpressed:

Sara: Where will you be?
Tim: At one of the celebrations, I imagine.
S: Like I said, where will you be?
T: Well, I'm sure I'll have to choose one of the many.
S: Uh huh.

Still unimpressed, I guess. But seriously, without Guido, The Sound of Music wouldn't have been possible. (One of my colleagues has suggested an alteration to the famous song to more directly draw on Guido: "Ut, the sound a French owl makes; re, a drop of golden sun;" etc.) He was the founder of modern Aural Skills, and that solfege system that everyone knows today is amazingly similar to his, considering it's had 1,000 years to develop. And seriously, staff notation? That was pretty brilliant, and revolutionary.

In 2033, I'll be holding a celebration no matter what anyone else thinks. There'll be read-throughs of "Ut queant laxis," giant hands on sale, and even maybe an imaginative reenactment of whatever it was he did that made the other monks so mad at him. So who's going to celebrate with me?

When we were in Aspen, Mom asked me if IU was like that: lots of conservative music programming to satisfy the (generally) older, rich people who seemed to be in control of everything. I told her no, or just a little bit, but I think I'm revising my opinion. Certainly the New Music Ensemble is much more visible here, as is the Early Music Institute, but that's partially a product of our size. I was at a concert last night of the IU Philharmonic Orchestra (holy cow are they good), headlined by two of our "big names" (Sylvia McNair and Leonard Slatkin) doing pretty conservative music (some light piece by an unknown French guy, Elgar, and Barber), and the "upcoming orchestral events" revealed a lot of not-so-adventurous names: Berlioz, Vaughan-Williams, Berlioz again, Dukas, Verdi, Sibelius, Beethoven, Grieg, Rossini, Brahms, Wagner, Schubert, more Verdi and Beethoven, more Sibeluis, Smetana, Dvorak. I've skipped a few names, to be fair: Joan Tower is on there, as are Shostakovich and Stravinsky, and a few names I don't know (who I assume are living composers). However, all of the pieces by these people (who themselves are not exactly avant-garde) are pretty short or "accepted" pieces: Tower's Silver Ladders, Stravinsky's Fireworks, Shostakovich's Festival Overture, etc. Even Mahler would be welcome to me (though they did a lot of his symphonies over the summer), but I'd love to see some Bartok, Schoenberg, more Stravinsky or more Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Berg, Adams, I don't know, anybody... To top it off, Sara and I were sitting right in front of about 20 seats reserved for "guests of [IU] President McRobbie" as well as guests of Music School Dean Richards and whoever the Provost is. These guests were a bunch of elderly, rich people. As you might expect, nobody else gets reserved seats.

On the plus side, Pro Arte's listed on there with some Bach. Our concerts are Oct. 21, where I'll sing the tenor solo in the Bach Mass in A major, BWV 234 (it's a very short solo, don't worry) and Dec. 2, when we'll sing Bach's Cantata 10 and a Magnificat for Baroque orchestra and choir by IU composer and all-around extremely strange man Sven-David Sandstrom. (He looks exactly like that picture.)

I'm pretty sure this is my favorite blog, and posts like this one as well as incredible analyses are the main reasons.

It's a beautiful weekend! Just what I needed after a stressful week. Kyle, Sara, Sara's friend Adriana, and I went out on a hike in Brown County State Park yesterday, and it was gorgeous. I really like the cool weather, even when it's too cold: at least for now, the cold is made bearable (and even refreshing) by the knowledge that later in the day it's going to get warm again.

Crazy story--this morning in church, I got there late and sat in a side pew: someone else got there even later and moved in with me. At a lull in the service he leaned over and said:
"You have a really nice voice. Are you a music major?"
"Thanks! Yes."
"We need to talk."
After the service and the postlude he introduced himself as Vance George, the Emmy and Grammy winning former conductor of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. (I couldn't quite hear, so I asked, "Vince?" "Vance--past tense.") Pretty cool! He went up to see who had built the church's organ and I left, but then when he saw me sitting outside with the student group after the service, he come over and invited me to his presentation for a conducting class tomorrow. I'm definitely planning to go.

Slight disaster recently--somehow I got to talking to Sara about the Beatles (or, really, more blathering/rambling on and on--as I tend to do when talking about something I like). I decided my favorite album was Abbey Road. So when I got home I wanted to listen to it. To my horror, my CD case was empty! I searched for it on my computer to burn a new copy, but it wasn't there either! It didn't occur to me at the moment, but once when I was visiting Sara I thought to check our university's streaming audio system. It was there! But in the middle of the third track, it started breaking up, and nothing I could do could fix it. So I tried on my own computer when I got home, and the system denied me access! Turns out there's a four-hour period each week when they do maintenance to it, and that just happened to be that period. Clearly, I am not meant to listen to this album ever again. But in defiance of all odds, I am finally listening happily to Polythene Pam....

Finally, Nate, you're right that our respective Nerd Scores clear up who's the superior brother. I invite you to simply look at the statistic at the bottom of the chart. In the meantime, I'm waiting for Claire to take the test and, even more intriguing, Mom and Dad...

I originally had a post here about how frustrated I was about certain courses I'm taking. Upon rereading it, it was a bit harsh and sounded more frustrated than I really was (which was enough anyway). Anyway, suffice it to say that it's frustrating when professors seem to need to take your pedagogy courses more than you do. (Or, for that matter, when they pretend they're more expert in their field than they really are.)

This morning:


Craig. I'm losing my mind!
Tim. How so?
Craig. I've put both of my contacts into one eye!
Tim. Wow! Weird!
Craig. And I'm trying to figure out which one!

As if to prove my previous post, I've been intrigued by a text difference between "Ave verum corpus" settings by Mozart and Josquin. (Craig says that Elgar's setting, and a few others', agree with Josquin's.) The text is:

Ave Verum Corpus natum de Maria Virgine.
Vere passum immolatum in cruce pro homine:
cuius latum perforatum aqua fluxit et sanguine.
Esto nobis praegustatum in mortis examine.

(Note that "A" is the first letter of the first line, "E" the second of the second, "I" the third of the third, and "O" the fourth of the fourth; there's a fifth line not set by Mozart that continues "O Jesu dulcis...")

The first three lines are approximately as follows (my translation, a bit free with the cases, which don't translate well in this text):

Hail true body born of the Virgin Mary,
Who truly suffered and was sacrificed on the cross for mankind:
Whose side was pierced, and water and blood flowed forth.

The last line is both harder for me to translate and where the textual discrepancy lies. Josquin switches the words "in" and "mortis":

Esto nobis praegustatum mortis in examine.

The first part of the translation is no problem; "Esto nobis praegustatum" is "Be for us a foretaste." However, the rest I have trouble with. Various sites have the different translations. This site has a literal translation which, while mostly correct, doesn't help much with the subtleties of meaning:

Be / for us / foretaste / in / of death / testing

And it also has a bizarre nonliteral translation, which interprets a bit:

Be for us a foretaste of heaven, during our final trial

This site has the translation I found most places, which I really dislike for its sing-songiness; it also alters the meaning, not only for interpretation's sake this time, but also for singsongy rhyme:

be a foretaste sweet to me
in my death's great agony

So I've been trying to figure it out on my own. It's mainly a matter of figuring out which words go together. "in examine" is definitely a semantic unit; examine is the ablative form of the noun "examen," which means, among other things, "weighing, consideration." (That's why I say the literal translation above is only "mostly" correct; it relies on a synonym of a cognate, rather than a dictionary, for this word.) Ablatives and understanding the subtleties of prepositions like "in" are very hard for me. "Mortis" as a word isn't hard at all; it's the genitive form of "mors," and means, "of death." So I have two theories, each of which finds some evidence in one of the textual variations (though of course word order in Latin isn't rigid, so either could go with either meaning).

Theory 1: "Be for us a foretaste of death upon contemplation"; ie, when we think of you, let that be a foretaste of when the same thing will happen to us. This matches up very well with "Esto nobis praegustatum mortis in examine" (Josquin, Elgar, etc.), and seems to me to mess with the meaning of "in" the least.

Theory 2: "Be for us a foretaste of the trial of death." This one matches up best with the translations I've read, and would support Mozart and putting "mortis after "in," with "examine," since they'd be a semantic unit (the trial of death). However, while I can justify "trial" because the "trial" of death could be God's weighing of us, I have a hard time justifying translating "in" as "of."

Well, I think I should email my old Latin instructor about this, but of course it's more fun to write a blog post and get all my thoughts out in writing.

In case anyone had any misconceptions.

This phrase is much funnier in Latin (found at The Word Detective, though I've put the "V"s in):

SEMPER VBI SVB VBI

This has truly been the Summer Of Camping, between two trips to Colorado, one to even-more-southern Indiana, and finally a trip last night to Morgan-Monroe State Forest. Sara and I briefly thought about Brown County State Park (I haven't been there for a long time) or McCormick's Creek SP (haven't been there ever) but realized that on Labor Day weekend these were likely to be mobbed, while Morgan-Monroe is usually very quiet. Well, we headed up, and checked out the campsites, but they weren't that great, mostly really open with maybe a single tree between successive sites, and plenty of large men with scruffy beards and tattered clothes standing over grills with suspicious looks on their faces. So after doing the 1-mile "Dendrology Trail" (for those of you non-scientists, the map translates that as "Tree ID Trail")--Sara did really well at dendrologing, I didn't even try--we headed to the "back country area" and walked our equipment in to the first site we found. It was basically just a flat space on the ground, but it worked out great, and this morning we did the ten-mile Low Gap Trail through the back country area, past the rock shelf I've visited with Mom, Dad, Nate, and Heather, and back to our site. All in all, a beautiful trip, and the weather was spectacular, compared to the roastings we've been getting lately.


Unfortunately, in the past couple of weeks I've felt the least excited I've ever been for a semester to start. This is partially because my degree stretches out before me like a lonely road.


Well, okay, so there are a few cars heading that way with me, and a few back at home, but still, it really hit me this summer as I completed my master's degree that I have more to go than I've already done (of graduate school, that is). However, and this is worse, I wasn't really excited about any of my classes. My advanced music theory pedagogy class looks to be much like my music theory pedagogy class from the same instructor last semester, and while she knows about as much as anyone in the entire field, I am not a huge fan of the format of the class, which entails a lot of discussion of minutia and doing of assignments with multiple parts with multiple subparts ad infinitum (nice Latin there).

My history of music theory class is worse off than this, considering that it is, if anything, less advanced than the history of music theory class I took from the musicology department last semester. (Ah, but requirements are requirements.) My current instructor has admitted that, given the choice, he'd gladly take the musicology version, and our first class, on Greek music theory, was a good example of why: he didn't even mention tetrachords, Pythagoreans and Aristoxenians were classified as if there were no gray area, students who'd read no more than a 14-page introduction to "Greek music theory" were passionately saying things like, "I think a really important aspect of the Pythagorean school is...," and for no apparent reason we have to calculate ratios for all the chromatic intervals through the octave for next week, even though ratios for sevenths (and maybe even sixths) are kind of irrelevant.

But worst of all is my Bartok class, with our expensive books and disorganized classes. One of the books the instructor had put on order isn't even in print anymore, but we still have plenty of readings from it (not awful, though it kind of is awful that she had no idea until someone emailed her after the first day of classes--and it'll run up the copying bill). Then on the first day, she had us write information cards about ourselves, which were to include "one thing you know about Bela Bartók" and "one thing you want to learn about Bela Bartók." Okay, a bit silly already, but then she taught from these cards for 15 minutes, going into little enough depth on each subject that we didn't really learn anything but enough to waste a fair bit of time. And we have two group projects, culminating in... five minute presentations. I wonder if she remembers the difference between undergraduate and graduate students...

Oh well, I'm trying to get the most I can out of my materials. And teaching is going fairly well, though I still hate teaching at 8: I and my mind make it to class no problem, but that's more than can be said for most of the students. I've managed to be quite industrious already--I've even worked ahead a little--and Pro Arte is singing a beautiful Bach (redundant) mass. So, onward down that road!