I teach my first class as visiting lecturer two weeks from today!

This class, Music Theory and Literature V, has a broad mission: to teach students a core repertoire of 20th- and 21st-century music, to learn techniques of analysis for this repertoire (particularly pitch-class sets and serial techniques), make them aware of major musical, aesthetic, and philosophical trends of this period, and maybe even get them to like some of this music. We meet for almost 4 hours every week for 15 weeks. In short, it's a lot of responsibility, but I also anticipate it'll be really fun. I love the repertoire and really look forward to testing my ideas about teaching it.

In the meantime, I have a few long-term projects that I'm working on. My hourly test-designing job for the school has been extended by the family emergency of one of the professors who I'm consulting with. I have to give a paper at this year's meeting of the Society for Music Theory (really, get to do so, but while I'm writing the paper, it feels like an obligation): they have such an early deadline for proposals (I think it was in January) that I'm quite ready to be done with this particular topic. And I have a year from mid-July to finish all my qualifying exams and my dissertation proposal. Each one of these tasks is relatively long-term and self-directed: theoretical/speculative papers, theoretical/speculative dissertation proposals, tests, and classes are all things on which one could spend an infinite amount of time preparing and never feel quite done. So I'm starting to feel that frustration, and the difficulty of prioritizing between long-term projects. But all of them have some amount of excitement (at least when I don't let them bog me down) and I think it'll all work out well.

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Two and a half weeks ago Sara and I went on a quick tour of some interesting sites in southwestern Indiana. This trip feels like old news by now, but I have to share some pictures:

Vincennes, Indiana, is pretty unknown today, but at one time it was the capital of the large Indiana territory; and from 1804-1805 William Henry Harrison governed all of the Indiana and Louisiana territories (that is, the entire western half of the US) from here. It was also the site of the Battle of Vincennes, the only major Revolutionary War battle west of the 13 colonies and north of the Ohio River that was won by the Americans, and thus the primary reason that the United States acquired all the land between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes (sorry, Canadian friends).

The town is a bit rundown now, but they have a cute downtown, as well as a rather incongruous National Park with a (70 foot tall?) neo-Classical monument:



The monument houses 30-foot-tall murals, including one depicting the settlement of "the West" by, among others, a distant Chenette relative by the name of Boone:



We also toured the mansion of William Henry Harrison, a rather interesting figure and the shortest-serving President in our nation's history:



Then we headed to New Harmony, host of two utopian settlements in the early 1800s. The short version, as told by the interpreters there, goes something like this. A bunch of German immigrants, expecting the coming of Christ in their lifetimes, gave all their money to their leader, George Rapp, and moved here; they were celibate and led lives of austerity, work, and prayer; and their handcrafted goods were so highly prized that they left after ten years to go back to Pennsylvania for access to eastern markets. They sold the town wholesale to Robert Owen, an idealistic British industrialist, who wished to create a utopian society of artists and intellectuals. Unfortunately, no one really knew how to farm very well or how to fix things, and with a bunch of artists and scientists you're bound to get a few big egos, and this community was a flop in about 3 years. However, the Owen family was tightly connected to the town until Jane Owen's death about a month ago (actually, maybe even still).

Unfortunately, we didn't get any pictures of the neat old houses, barracks, etc. (children moved out of their parents' homes and into barracks at age 14). But we did get a taste of the old in the labyrinth:




and the new (there's a lot of idealistic modern art and spirituality there now) in this structure, the central focus of the "Roofless church," which houses a Lipchitz sculpture:



We camped that night in Harmonie State Park, which was decent but sadly didn't open their pool for us the next morning; still, we got to see the sun set on the Wabash:



And on the way home we stopped at Hemlock Cliffs, an "area of particular beauty in the Hoosier National Forest," which certainly lived up to its billing:



This (at the time mostly dry) 70-foot waterfall with a walking ledge behind was particularly spectacular (though, sadly, they did not allow rock climbing):



It was a lot of fun!