A visit from JS Bach

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. I may give up on the blog - we'll see. I do keep coming across things I want to draw to other people's attention!

This is inspiring.

Hooray!

Wow. Why didn't my high school marching band play Shostakovich and Schoenberg?

I enjoyed this:
"Rock Festival in Pyong Yang

If you are a band playing any kind of rock, including heavy metal, then you can participate 'ROCK FOR PEACE' in Pyong Yang, the capital city of North Korea. This is the very first time in history that North Korea allows western musicians in the heart of DPRK territory to play capitalist popular music. There are few restrictions and conditions on participation but any band will be considered even though you are from USA. The lyrics should not contain admirations on war, sex, violence, murder, drug, rape, non-governmental society, imperialism, colonialism, racism, anti-DPRK, and anti-socialism. The concert will be held from March 01 to March 04, 2007 under the management of Voice of Korea. We currently received requests of 35 bands from 19 countries and participations are increasing everyday. ROCK FOR PEACE will be the 2007 version of Woodstock rock festival in 1969 but in different location and in different goals, We welcome every musician as long as they are purely music based without political intentions. For inquiries, email to Jean-Baptiste Kim, the head of Voice of Korea."

Found the following on one of the many excellent music/musician blogs I've been finding recently (much to my detriment - they're far too fascinating and take far too much time), disagreeding with another writer's take on the future of Classical music:

"To cite my main qualm, I guess I feel he’s a little too comfortable with generalizations, and with the deadly Grouping Of Stereotypes Fallacy (“scholarly, detached, analytical”)... Scholarly does not have to be detached, or analytical, for instance. Analysis is not necessarily detached either. These are all free-floating "connotations." And then he equates the scholarly attitude with the detached immobile performances, claiming a causality. But often it seems to me just the opposite: the scholars are the ones getting excited about the music while the performers, who are too busy to hear from them or don’t want to hear from them or think they don’t have anything to offer, ignore them and offer up the same old same old conservatory crap."

I have to say, that last sentence really struck me as absolutely true, at least where my students are concerned. (I'm happy to say that I feel the opposite around my excellent if often brutal piano teacher, Dr. Karen Shaw.)

Lots of interesting results from the election yesterday! Democrats won in all but one of the races I was watching: Indiana's 8th (my district) and 9th districts, Iowa's gubernatorial race, Lamoyne Gaard's epic quest for county supervisor, and Grinnell's state house race, with the Iowa Secretary of Agriculture as the only (and unfortunate) exception. Democrats also handily took not only the national house (and possibly senate) but, to an even greater extent, their Iowa counterparts.


One piece of sad news - James Hill, Pirate for congress, was defeated in the Iowa 1st district. It was a heated race, though the Democrat, Bruce Braley, won in the end pretty handily (55% to the Republican's 43%). James Hill finished third. But - and I think this is probably a record for the Pirate party - he gained 1.06% of the vote (2184 votes) in that district, finishing well above the Libertarian candidate (Albert Schoeman, 1,229 votes or 0.59%).

I got a check from my health insurance company to reimburse my wrist-problem visit, and it occurred to me: I actually *make* money when I get sick. Sounds impossible, perhaps, but it works! See, my school-related insurance covers 100% of expenses at the IU medical center. But they only reimburse me after I've paid, so all I need to do is pay for my visits with my credit card, which gives me 1% cash back on all purchases. Voila, I make money! I think I have a get-rich-quick scheme on my hands. So, let's see - on this $18 visit, I made... 18¢!!
All I need now, clearly, is to get much sicker. Or, more importantly, more expensively sick.

In other news, I just received the go-ahead from the "Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin - Preußischer Kulturbesitz Musikabteilung mit Mendelssohn-Archiv" (full name; known affectionately as "some German library") to get my honors project (an edition of a cantata by Georg Benda, transcribed from their manuscripts) published. Now the final hard part (of about 10) starts - finding a publisher who's zealous enough about good Baroque/Classical music to publish this but not zealous enough to care that it was transcribed from only one of about five manuscripts scattered around Germany by some undergraduate at a liberal arts college.

Had a great visit from Sherry! We went to the art museum a few times, attended a concert, spent some quality time together, and went out on a hike from Griffy Lake to University Lake, the latter pictured here:



It had frozen the night before, so here I am over a waterfall festooned with icicles:



We also went to Bloomington's very own Tibetan Buddhist monastery, which looked a little out of place in front of dark, almost dull late-fall Indiana colors (especially next to a trailer park, not pictured here):



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In the meantime, I've been thinking about grad schools recently, especially after talking with Nate about his grad school plans and mom's suggestion that I look around. By grad schools, of course, I mean other grad schools as well as this one. I was looking through some good schools for music theory, and checking out application procedures, etc., and finally just looked at how many faculty's names I know at each school:
Indiana - all, of course.
Yale - James Hepokoski (not technically theory, but still), Richard Cohn, Allen Forte (!)*
Columbia - Fred Lerdahl, Walter Frisch (again, a musicologist, but a good one), Marion Guck, Tristan Murail (composition, but cool)
Eastman - Matthew Brown (but only because his wife lives across the street from my family), Robert Gauldin, Elizabeth West Marvin (I guess they write textbooks for a living at Eastman)
U. of Chicago - Thomas Christensen (history of theory! sweet), Shulamit Ran and Easley Blackwood (composers... I wonder why I know of them...)
Florida State - Jane Piper Clendinning, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (composer)

Wow! I know more names than I thought, though of course nothing like some of my colleagues. I also realize you (even my family - a good 90% of my extremely occasional readership) probably don't care that much about this list, but it seemed as good a place as any to put it all down. I need to get some advice from someone, but I'm not really sure who to go to. We'll see. I also need to start saving money for massive application fees.

*interesting fact not having to do with Allen Forte: my starting stipend at Yale, should I get in and go, would be at minimum well over twice my starting stipend here, and would require less than half as much teaching (though the latter is not much of an advantage, from my perspective).

Got the news almost simultaneously by blog and email (I think that says something about today's digital culture...) - Leonard Slatkin just signed on at IU. Yet another in a long string of high-profile faculty hires, and the article puts it well: "He is one of a number of high-profile artist-teachers to join the IU music faculty in just the last three years. Other notables are pianists André Watts and Arnaldo Cohen, singers Sylvia McNair, Marietta Simpson and Carol Vaness, ballet master Michael Vernon, violinists Mark Kaplan, Jaime Laredo and Alexander Kerr, and cellist Sharon Robinson." Though some of these hires were made beforehand, I suspect some of this is due to the massive 40 million dollar gift we officially got last year.

And then, of course, there's the theory department, which basically got turned down two years in a row by its top choice scholars simply because we don't offer enough money to get someone to move to the middle of Indiana. (Incidentally, to see how much a theorist at IU gets paid, go to this website and run a search for "music theory." Not bad, until you remember that these are top experts in their fields.)

Okay - I've been surviving on 100% homemade (by me, that is) bread for about a year now, and yet today I didn't realize that I'd set the oven temperature 100 degrees (!) too high until the fire alarm went off. Ah well. The loaves actually came out fine, aside from the black on the bottom of the one that was on the lower shelf. In fact, more than fine: they were some of the best-looking loaves I've made, though of course that has nothing to do with the temperature.

In the meantime, oat groats, those much-made-fun-of (at least in my family) Harbingers of Health and Ridiculously Rhyming Foods, have definitely entered my cooking repertoire. They made the bread look really awesome today, and the little crunchy effect in the bread is really nice too. I also had them in a ridiculously healthy dish the other day (beans, oat groats, spinach, mushrooms), and they were kinda nice.. If they didn't take forever to cook, they might make a nicer breakfast cereal than rolled/instant oats.

And finally, from another blog:
A guy and his Saint-Bernard walk into a bar. The guy says to the bartender, "This dog knows everything about music and can answer any question you have."

The bartender says, "You're nuts!" The guy says, "Go ahead -- ask him something."

So the bartender says to the dog, "OK, who was the greatest contrapuntal composer of the 17th century?" The dog replies,"BACH." The bartender says, "Aw, c'mon he's just barking, he doesn't know anything."

The guy says, "Hey, go ahead, ask him something else." The bartender tries again. "OK, who was the greatest composer of Lieder of the late 19th century?"

The dog replies, "Wolf." The bartender says, "This is ridiculous -- he's just barking. Get lost!"

The guy says, "No he's not -- go ahead, one more time, ask him a question." Disgustedly, the bartender tries again. "Who was the greatest German composer between the two world wars?" The dog answers, "Orff."

The bartender says, "That's it!" and proceeds to physically toss the guy and his dog out of the bar onto the sidewalk on their behinds. The dog looks back at the guy and, from the street, tries once more:

"Hindemith?"

Sorry to put so much material up here lately, but some things are too terrific to resist. The last post was an example: here is another. From here, as made up by the previously-mentioned Professor Frank Samarotto, the Top-Ten Bad Dissertation Titles List. I particularly enjoy number 5. (He mentioned to me recently that the hardest part about coming up with this list was actually coming up with titles he could be 100% sure no one would ever use. I'm not sure he was successful...)

1. Uncertainty in Music: A Definitive Survey

2. The Catalan Influence on the French Augmented Sixth Chord in the Music of Engelbert Humperdinck

3. The Voicing of the Final Chord in Music of the Classical Period

4. A Syncategorematically Recursive Hedra-Lattice of Poly-PC Postponement: A Theory of Atonal Silence

5. Heinrich Schenker: Threat or Menace?

6. Prolonging the Agony: A Schenkerian Approach to Muzak in the Dentist's Office

7. “Where Are All My Favorite Notes?” A Statistical Tabulation of Every Pitch-Class in the Serial Music of Webern

8. A Violist Walked into a Barline: Rhythm and Meter in the Structure of Viola Jokes

9.Three Times a Lady: Triple Counterpoint in the Music of Britney Spears

10. The Whole Step: Our Misunderstood Friend

Now I don't usually like to support youtube, but this was just such amazingly sophisticated humor for the site that I simply had to share. So I present to you: Dudley Moore's simultaneous parody of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears

Wow. It turns out that my little adventure-evening (described below) involved an argument with none other than Douglas Hofstadter, writer of the Pulitzer Prize-winning, subversively influential Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. If I'd realized who he was fully, I probably would have been a bit more respectful! But for any who are interested, his thoughts are essentially as follows: Sounds Like Bach. (I know I described our discussion below, but only very briefly - this article gives much more of the sense of how he comes across.)
The program he refers to, EMI, is written by David Cope, and has some sample mp3s online, which can be found here.
To me, the fake-Chopin lacks dramatic direction (through a lack of structural coherence), and the fake-Bach and fake-Beethoven are nearly-prosecutable ripoffs of Bach's F-major invention and Beethoven's Sonata Quasi Una Fantasia, well known as the Moonlight Sonata. As Nate explained (he's heard a lecture by Cope), this is largely because the program takes apart and reassembles. It goes through a set of actions that could be undertaken by any human, with the end product of a piece with lots of stylistic similarities to the model. While I think the program is incredible - it certainly writes stuff a hell of a lot better than my students - I still take issue with Hofstadter's sci-fi doomsaying (Computers will render us obsolete!), Pulitzer Prize or no, and think that the incredible in "great" music may be a bit more ineffable than he thinks. (I wanted to encourage him to take a class in Schenkerian analysis with Prof. Samarotto - a man equally as weird and and perhaps more so than Hofstadter - and see what he said then, but I was afraid of sounding too pompous. I'm glad now that I refrained...)

I've resolved recently to be a better person, in a "life of the mind" sort of sense. (Isn't that one of Kenyon's slogans? "The life of the mind?" Or maybe Grinnell's? Oberlin's?) That a while ago involved starting to read some of the classics in the world of literature, starting with some Dostoyevsky and Joyce (I loved The Brothers Karamazov especially), and now continuing with Moby Dick, which I'm finding full of wisdom:
"All our arguing with him would not avail [to convert Queequeg]; let him be, I say: and Heaven have mercy on us all - Presbyterians and Pagans alike - for we are all somehow dreadfully cracked about the head, and sadly need mending."
And wit:
[The landlady, when she thinks Queequeg's committed suicide]: "'He's killed himself,' she cried. 'It's unfort'nate Stiggs done over again - there goes another counterpane - God pity his poor mother! - it will be the ruin of my house... Betty, go to Snarles the Painter, and tell him to paint me a sign, with - "no suicides permitted here, and no smoking in the parlor;" - might as well kill both birds at once.'"
In the meantime, I've also recently gone to a poetry reading (as mentioned before), an exhibit of modern Chinese paintings at the art museum, a talk by Australian High Justice Michael Kirby about Alfred Kinsey's continuing effect on law and jurisprudence, and a play by Harold Pinter (The Birthday Party). I'm already getting excited about plans for this week, which include a panel on recent events in Lebanon, perhaps a visit to the Mathers Museum of World Cultures, perhaps a talk on Degas' "Woman with a Bandage," events from the Bioneers Annual Satellite Conference on "Visionary and Practical Solutions for Restoring Earth and People," and maybe even more. I'm really happy that I feel like I'm making up for all the wonderful opportunities I didn't take advantage of at Kenyon. It's all very exciting.

It's gonna freeze tonight!  Ack!

What a fun afternoon! I've had wrist problems lately, leading to a fair amount of free time (two hours of practicing a day suddenly taken out of the schedule makes a difference). Unfortunately, of course, I live alone (well, with an apartmentmate, but you know what I mean), and most of my friends are busy a lot and not incredibly social creatures. So I've been stuck sitting in front of the computer far oftener than I'd usually like. I checked out Moby Dick to help, but still, these things get old after a bit. So after Advanced Schenkerian Analysis today, as I was heading home, I thought to myself, "What am I going to do at home? Work more on long-term projects? Sit in front of a computer? How about instead I do something different?" So I turned around and headed to the Lily Rare Books library which I knew had a new exhibit up. The exhibit proved less exciting than I would have liked, but I noticed something going on in the next room. It turned out to be a poetry reading, and the lady at the front of the library said I could probably go in even though it was over half over.
So I headed in and settled into a huge chair at the back. It turned out to be a lecture/reading by poet/translator Bill Smith, who I guess is 88 year old (!) though I would have guessed mid-seventies. He read from translations of poems by foreign poets, largely French and Russian but also Hungarian and others, and talked about his life, which was fascinating - there was a time when he was "the" ambassador for American culture in the USSR, and it was interesting to hear about all his travels. The poetry was also wonderful. I will admit, his speech was very slow, and he paused fairly often to remember some unimportant detail, but you can excuse a lot of that in a person of his age. At the end, someone from IU's Institute for Advanced Study, which sponsored the event, explained that people should feel free to take a book of poetry. I stuck around afterwards and asked him afterwards confidentially if he had really meant that, and he said absolutely, and I should get it autographed. I did, but not after talking to the IAS guy for a while. Our conversation was a little awkward:
"So your name's Tim. Are you in translation?"
"No, actually."
"Ah, but you're in poetry?"
"Actually, not at all."
"Well, you're into literature."
"Sure, definitely."
He invited me to join "us" at Samira, a local Afghani restaurant, as a (non-paying) guest, an offer I somewhat incredulously accepted. (I guess there's a benefit to supporting the less-popular arts - there were only about 16 people in the audience, including me, and I think he was excited to have people there.) I got on his mailing list for future lectures by famous translators and had a wonderful dinner with fascinating conversation. Most of the people there were in foreign languages or translation, so there was much talk of world events from a much savvier perspective than I'm used to, and there was tons of discussion of literature, which made me slightly ashamed to realize how little I knew about the authors these people threw around like it was normal. I also explained my "connection" (rather, lack thereof) to the party to several somewhat baffled people. As it turned out, I was the only student there - whether because others hadn't been invited or what, I don't know. I even had a heated discussion with a somewhat weird faculty member about EMI, a computer program that writes new music in the style of music you feed it. He was arguing how incredible it was, and how people can't tell the difference between EMI-Mozart and real Mozart, and I was arguing that, however incredible the program, even a lot of musicians can't tell the difference between, say, Mozart and Pleyel, and there are lots of studies of music students showing that they don't tend to notice when the order of movements in a piece is mixed around, and trying to explain what that says about how people listen and how little people know about musical convention. (Incidentally, I think this perspective is from the wonderful, incredibly concrete and detailed perspective I've gained on music and how it works: I found it fascinating to compare this with the absolutely abstract terms they were all using about poetry, and, when it came up, music. It's so interesting to me that the type of powerful framework that I take for granted isn't how most people interact with art. You can't tell Mozart from Pleyel if you just listen for "pretty sounds" or "music that works." You can, though, if you listen for structure, gesture, expectation, tension, and even less specific things like drama - all of which we theorists have such wonderful language for understanding and discussing. No, it doesn't explain everything - but in fact it enhances everything.)
Anyway, a completely unique evening, and well-spent. It's probably hard to see in my account of it here, but it really felt like a bit of an adventure - following my nose to the library museum and then to the lecture and then saying "what the heck, sure" when invited out to dinner. And I even got a book of poetry out of it! So, without further ado, Clair de Lune, by Jules LaForgue, translated by William Jay Smith:

It comes with the force of a body blow
That the Moon is a place one cannot go.

The world is yours when you advance,
Moon, through magical August silence!

When you toss, majestic mastless wreck
In seas where black cloud-breakers break!

Ah, if my desolate soul could mount
The steps to your pure baptismal fount!

O blinded planet, fatal light
For the migratory Icarian flight!

Great sterile Eye of Suicide,
The disgusted have convened, preside;

Icy skull, make mockery
Of bald, incurable bureaucracy;

O pill of absolute lethargy,
Be dissolved in our cranial cavity!

Diana with overly Doric chlamys,
Take up thy quiver, do thy damage.

With thy one dart inoculate
Wingless Love that sleepeth late!

Planet flooded with powerful spray
May one chaste antifebrile ray

Descend and bathe my sheet tonight
So I may wash my hands of life!

Some of the funnier reactions I've seen to the pirate for congress website on a forum:

Yeah, but I can't shake the feeling that he's just parroting the party line.

I hear he is not very good in political debates. In fact, at times it seems... He doesn't have a leg to stand on. I understand that he leans hard starboard in his politics. If he wins, he'll be known as Representative James Hill (Aaarrrr - Iowa).

I was under the impression he worked at Home Depot. Everytime I would place an order for decking material he would Deliver me Timbers.

At least he's not repeating the standard cannon.

Some of the funnier reactions I've seen to the pirate for congress website on a forum:

Yeah, but I can't shake the feeling that he's just parroting the party line.

I hear he is not very good in political debates. In fact, at times it seems... He doesn't have a leg to stand on. I understand that he leans hard starboard in his politics. If he wins, he'll be known as Representative James Hill (Aaarrrr - Iowa).

I was under the impression he worked at Home Depot. Everytime I would place an order for decking material he would Deliver me Timbers.

At least he's not repeating the standard cannon.

I've been doing a lot of online research before filling out my absentee ballot for Iowa, the most interesting result of which is here: James Hill, Pirate for Congress. It sounds like Democrats may be in a really good position in Iowa.

In the meantime, the trip to Savannah over the weekend was great. Sherry and I did some kayaking, recumbent bike-riding, and played some tennis, as well as watched the USTA's Men's 40s championship. Hopefully I'll post a couple of pictures soon (if Sherry gets around to sending them to me...)