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.)