Three days ago, it was bright and beautiful outside; I went on a hike and got sunburned.

Two days ago, it snowed most of the day.

??

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Teaching has been rather fun lately. I've been sensing that many of my students would like a greater challenge, so I've been trying to oblige them. Last unit we did a lot of structural reduction of pieces, that interpretive act that is essentially the gateway into Schenkerian analysis. I think they enjoyed it in class, though from the assignment I asked them to do and their informal out-of-class work I don't think they were very good at the interpretation on their own (it takes time).

This unit, we started by learning the modern modes, along with lots of non-diatonic scales (octatonic, various pentatonics, whole-tone, "Gypsy," etc.), which is pretty typical. But that same week, we started on pitch class set analysis; then this week we started transformational analysis. Both facilitate a rather mathematical view of music, which of course was very exciting for certain students. But in addition they allow me to talk about lots of advanced topics, like properties of triads and the diatonic set (maximal evenness, minimal perturbations of maximally even structures, axes of inversion, inversional and transpositional symmetry, etc.). A lot of what I'm teaching them right now doesn't have much "practical" application in music, but they seem to be very excited to learn for the sake of learning. Even more fun, some seem surprised and perhaps liberated to realize that that's okay. It may seem obvious that honors students would love learning for their own sake, but I will say that back at the beginning of the year, when I taught them a lot about early music and its theory, they were not so excited. I'm not sure if it's the time that's made the difference, the trust I've built up meeting with them 5 days a week for 25 weeks now (! that's a lot!), or their excitement for relatively modern music.