New template - I've never liked how big the sidebar was, so now all that stuff is at the bottom. Hope it's not too confusing.

I just ordered The Great Dictator on DVD. It's a really amazing movie, where Charlie Chaplin plays both Adenoid Hynkel (essentially, Adolf Hitler - seen here dancing with the object of his affection and here in possibly the funniest speech I've ever seen) and a nameless Jewish barber (seen here shaving to Brahms).
I can't wait to get this.

I was observing the class of one of my fellow Assistant Instructors this morning. A guy was apparently gafFurius about some Marx he'd gotten on the quiz. It was the beginning of class, so the AI offered to talk with him afterward, but he is apparently a pretty angRiemann in general, and just said, "Zarli, no." All she could do was Schenker head and start class. Afterwards, of course, Boethius ofForte to help him, and I think the situation's all okay for now.

I felt like putting up some more pictures, so here are some from my California trip in December. Nate and I did some mountain biking, which I don't have any pictures of, but we also did some hiking. On my third day (?) there, we hiked to the top of "Mount Baldy," the 3rd-highest peak in Southern California. We drove from Claremont up to about 6,000 feet and then hiked up to just over 10,000 and an extremely windy peak with gorgeous views of mountains that looked like they were floating:



and vast stretches of mountains in the other direction, along with windblown hairstyles that are easily made fun of by uncharitable sisters:



We also did some more hiking, camping, and beach-lazing, but one can only take so many pictures of a trip before they get boring, so I'll hold off for now.

But lest I seem to favor one sibling over the other, here are some older pictures from the trip Mom, Claire, and I made through Prague:



And Vienna:



The lesson here? Clearly, when I visit my brother, we're all serious and do healthy outdoorsy stuff; when I'm with my sister, we're goofy and unhealthy. It's a good thing they both exist to preserve a sense of balance.

The theorist in me cries out in pain at some of the more harmonically awkward and less contrapuntally inventive sections, but this is still a pretty cool, cute video on how to write a fugue. (He also has that unfortunate drawing on the board at first, but I can forgive little things.)

So Pythagoras walks into a bar. He walks up to the bartender, and starts complaining, "So I've got this problem. I had a hunch that if you take two 9:8 tones away from a 4:3 fourth, you actually don't end up with half a tone. So I did all the math - took the two tones from the fourth - and added the remainder to itself to get the result, and indeed, it's not a tone. So I don't even have any idea what to call that result."
"Gee, I dunno," says the bartender, rolling his eyes mock-sympathetically. "Sounds like you've got a real di-lemma."

I've done a lot of things today. I've done laundry, been entirely confused by Cleonides' Harmonic Introduction (things I've learned in History of Music Theory thus far: "proslambanomanos" sounds funny but is not a made-up word, and Aristoxenus is or was The Man - in an awesome sense, not a paranoid big brother sense, not that big brothers are bad, as we all know), wrote a quiz, and, most importantly, I baked several loaves of bread. That's right, now that I'm single, I need to exercise my marketable skills.

Nova Scotia Brown Bread:


I have to say, I'm pretty sure this is my best "free-form" loaf ever (despite the knob on the back/top side). It was incredibly moist and delicious, and looked pretty good too if I do say so myself. Which... clearly I do.

I've realized two things: 1. I haven't posted many images to this blog recently, which makes it less fun to read and 2. Now that I have my hard drive replaced and going strong, it is much easier to post said images.

So here are some essentials from break. First, the Nautica brothers, living the luxurious life of doing puzzles in their pajamas until lunchtime:



And then Mom, Dad, and Maple studying my Schenkerian analysis of Chopin's prelude in C-sharp minor, Op. 45:



I have some more deliciously cute ones of Maple and some beautiful ones from my visit to Nate in California, but those are for another day.

I've been doing a bunch of crazy things lately. First, perhaps craziest of all, I've been having tons of fun in class (teaching, that is). That's going really well.

Then on Wednesday I went ballroom dancing for the first time in probably about 3 years. It was tons of fun. Although I'd forgotten that, even when the gender balance isn't so bad (and it wasn't), as a male you quickly become a target, and I don't mean just as a dance partner. I also met two of my students there, which was amusing, and it was fun to interact with them in a less formal setting, though I think my "I'm a sort-of-professor so I must be much older than you" facade may have been destroyed...

And finally I just auditioned for an opera. I heard about the auditions after they started, and came at the end (about an hour after I'd heard about them for the first time), ducked in, introduced myself, apologized timidly for having absolutely zero solo repertoire, and then sight-read a recitative. It was funny - I thought I sounded great, much better than usual, but my sight-reading (which I teach) was horrible, so I guess you never can predict what you'll be good at and what you won't. I know they probably just wanted to get more reliable information on me, but I was still flattered when they asked who I studied with, and then if I was at least a choral conductor or something. Anyway, I guess I intrigued them, because they took my email address and learned how to spell my last name and I'll be singing for them again next week.

It's funny how my first impressions of classes - and even impressions of classes in general - are often wrong. It seems like my 10 o'clock lecture is actually the more motivated and interested of the two after all - I even had students shushing other students today! I don't think 8 o'clock went as well, but then again I thought much of last semester didn't go so well and I got almost universally good evaluations. (But then again, what do the students know about good classes and bad classes?)

I've been busy lately - I've started to look into doing some new things, so I've been going to more Canterbury events at church, which have been great (some really nice people and, oddly enough, predominantly music and folklore graduate students); I'm going to attend ballroom dancing (!) on Wednesday, I'm going out to eat more with my friends, and I'm thinking about volunteering on a regular basis. We'll see - it might be a bit much. Certainly I'm already kind of exhausted today.

To church job or not to church job? I've been offered a church job here before, but it was in Indianapolis, which quite frankly is too much of a drive. This one's in Martinsville, about half an hour away and right next to beautiful Morgan-Monroe State Park (and the impressively ugly and annoying Martinsville/SR 37 intersections).
The pros: extra money, fun singing (and with the head of the choral conducting department no less), working with new people.
The cons: two hours of driving every week (for rehearsal and service), tireder voice, less flexibility (especially to attend the church of my own choosing...)
Hm. Writing "two hours of driving every week" may have made the decision for me. I had to write it down, though, and I'm still thinking...

Thank you to all who offered your support with regard to my last post! It really means a lot to me. And for those who are concerned, I'm really doing fine. It helped a lot to have things to jump into right away - the drive back to school, replacing my laptop's hard drive and restoring everything from backups (more fun than it sounds), preparation for much more substantial teaching responsibilities, and finally school itself. I certainly have had plenty to keep me busy, and some things are even going great! I will probably take some of you up on your offers of calls, getting together, and all that, but mainly because I'd love to see/talk to you.

The new set of musical skills students is, in a word, huge. They had to up enrollment caps to (gulp) 90 per lecture, which is a heck of a lot of people. Today was the first day of lecture, and I was pretty nervous, but I thought it went pretty well, especially at 8. I think people are more willing to deal with you as a person at 8 - by 10 they've woken up enough to have settled into their "anything a teacher says can't be funny" and "are you kidding? only losers have fun in class" attitudes. I'm exaggerating - even 10 o'clock was fine (especially the vast majority of students), but there was a little more distance, I think. Both classes got done much earlier than I'd intended - I actually added material to what I did last year on the first day, and we were done early! It certainly points out the difference in ability level between the "on" and the "off" semester - we probably have just as many people who have failed in the past or were held back by their entrance exam this semester, but now they're surrounded by 80 other students who have higher ability levels. So the percentage of people who will need out-of-class help should be much reassuringly lower (last semester it was easy to think I was failing for this reason).
I'm also indefensibly happy about the website I've made for the class. I'm particularly pleased with myself for having included a "jukebox" made with Flash so they can do homework dictations on their home computers, despite the fact that I just downloaded it from a website and just changed the code to work with my tracks. (Don't worry, it was all legal - the download was made for that purpose.)

My history of theory class is really bringing me back to my liberal-arts roots. Not because it's a different subject - obviously, I'm still studying theory - but I'm getting back into "life of the mind" sorts of issues. I love analyzing music and all, but sometimes you just have to gain some of your pleasure from scholarly inquiry, and this class will clearly satisfy that itch. Long reassuring lists of Latin and Greek names and titles, a small class of sufficiently-nerdy-looking people, and an instructor who is quite frankly the top of this field and actually translated a lot of the sources (Dr. Thomas Mathiesen - you can get some idea from all the italics on his profile; he's also in charge of this) combine to make a course that I can be genuinely excited about.

Finally, my choir (Pro Arte) is as exciting as ever. It still sounds amazing - though we're singing the Haydn mass too uniformly loudly - and we're adding yet another exciting project for the semester. In addition to our Telemann concert and our two Haydn concerts (here and in Chicago), we're going to have a recording session where we make the first recording ever of some music from colonial-period Guatemala from manuscripts located at IU's rare books library. You can only imagine how excited that makes a guy like me...

Well, I guess it had to come sometime - Sherry just broke up with me. I'm really sad about it, of course, but in some ways it's good. After all, she has always lived far away, so most of my day-to-day life is just going to be exactly the same. The most numerous changes will be positive - I won't have to worry about whether or not she's going to call, whether or not she's going to finally buy a plane ticket to see me, and that sort of thing, which had become worse and worse in the past months, and I'll save tons of money on plane tickets (maybe I can even visit some old friends who I've neglected!). Of course I feel wronged in some ways - who doesn't in such a circumstance? I'm not going to pretend that it's Sherry's fault and she's a bad person - but I stuck with her during a really hard time, when it was not easy to be with her, and she didn't have the willpower or the money to buy any tickets on her own so any non-donated tickets were bought by me, and just as she's getting better she decides that this person who's been through that and, it has to be said, forgiven some pretty serious stuff, isn't good enough. I shouldn't put it that way - I know it's not correct, it's more like "not the right person to spend the rest of her life with" - but I'm sure you all understand it feels this way and probably will necessarily for a little while.
I also am not going to pretend that this was my only hope for happiness - that'd be pretty stupid. I'm sure there are other people out there who I will be very happy with. But the life I've been living at IU has sometimes been a bit lonely (and, very seldom, more than a bit) - and it's been wonderful to have someone to talk to about anything a phone call away (when she was reachable). I hope not being in a relationship will mean I will have a bit more of a social life - but I do wonder sometimes. I'm not really a very outgoing person socially (though I think I am personally). And I will say that the dating pool (as far as I've been able to tell - admittedly I haven't really been looking) at the music school at the graduate level is pretty abysmal, especially since so many people are married. And I sure don't want to be the creepy professor going out with the student (not that there's anything wrong with that... in case certain colleagues are reading this...).
Well, what will happen will happen.

I'll blog more when I get my hard drive replaced, but for now, though it's nothing my friends and I don't complain about at least weekly (and more in certain classes), here it's particularly amusingly done.

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%).