A few quick pictures from the recent Canada trip.


We biked to Lake Erie:




We also biked to a nearby farm that had been turned into a nature preserve. They had amazing plants that appealed to Sara (awesome trees):



And plants that appealed to me (prairie grasses):



We also picked tons of blueberries and made several batches of blueberry jam. It's a hard life sometimes.

I got back two days ago from yet another trip. This time it was off to Poughkeepsie, NY to visit the new Chenette house. As always, it was wonderful to see the family, but it was also really great to see that our new home is beautiful and spacious with a terrific back yard, across the street from a gorgeous college, and located in a beautiful and fascinating area of the country. (I'm not as taken with Poughkeepsie itself, but there are a lot of good things to balance it out.) Mom, Dad, and May all seem to be doing great and enjoying their new experiences! I also headed to the wedding of Alaina and Mike Nigh, which was really fun. Congratulations to them!

All the traveling I've been doing this summer may sound ideal, and in some ways it has been: every trip has been terrific! But when so many trips are of extended length ( a week or more), these travels stop being a special thing you do as a break from normal life, and start to become part of it: it's like I've been shuttling between many different lives, all very exciting, but I'd be happy to have just one that is occasionally exciting. Still, I have a little traveling left before me. By the end of the summer, I will have been to:

Sugar Creek, IN (canoeing)
Boston and Western Massachussetts
various cities in Turkey
Ireland
Grinnell, IA
Squire Boone Caverns, IN (caving)
Poughkeepsie, NY
St Louis, MO
Rodney, Ontario (probably)
Davenport, IA

Suffice it to say I'm savoring my time in Bloomington. I made a surprisingly good Imam bayıldı last night and today am leaping back into some old scholarly favorites--the Liber Usualis, Machaut's Messe de Nostre Dame, and good old Guido of Arezzo in preparation for teaching this semester. It's an odd feeling to be getting back into the scholarly world, but a good one too, and I'm excited to be back to school soon!

Once again I have to recommend Nate's blog, this time for its coverage of our last visit to Grinnell as semi-residents. The Mac SE was indeed the prize of prizes for the weekend, even if some people don't appreciate it (the following is of course a re-creation):

Tim. ...plus I brought home... the SE!
Sara. Where are you going to put it?
Tim. I don't know--it doesn't really fit at my desk. Maybe I'll put it out in the living room.
Sara. Maybe you should ask Teddy before putting an ugly box in the living room.
Tim. Ugly???
Sara. Whoa. Sorry. Do you really think it's attractive?
Tim. Uh, I guess I hadn't really thought about it.
Sara. Well...
Tim. I mean, yes, I think it's very beautiful.

From Boston, I went straight to Turkey for two weeks. This was certainly the most unique part of my vacation: Turkey is an amazing place, filled with ancient marvels as well as (obviously) a thriving modern culture. It was especially fun to be there with Claire, who is now essentially fluent in Turkish, though she won't admit it: it made more direct contact with the country possible as well as increased our confidence! We did so much that it would be silly to try to relate everything and show every picture; rather, I'll just go over the highlights.

I met Mom in Dublin on my stopover there, and met Claire in Istanbul. From our first day, here are some views of Istanbul taken from Istanbul's Galata Tower. The first, especially, bears a distinct resemblance to the previous post's view of Boston from the Bunker Hill Monument. The water coming in from the right is the Golden Horn, which leads into the Bosporus:



The second is slightly more to the right along to Golden Horn. The minarets jutting up are, left to right, the Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque, and I'm not sure (the Mosque of Suleyman the Magnificent?).



Here's a picture of a stall in Istanbul's touristy but amazing spice market:



We took the night train to Ankara, where we met up with Claire's host sisters before climbing up to the old castle area, not really maintained anymore except by its inhabitants, the most visible of whom are now shopkeepers and craftsellers. We climbed past them to the top, where we had a view of this massive city which extends in all directions yet has virtually no natural water source:



We finished the day with a delicious meal at Claire's host family's house. You'll note the watermelon: apparently Turkey grows most of its own fruit, so people eat the things that are in season. Watermelon was in season while we were there, and we had it for at least one meal, and often two, every day.



After a quick trip to Konya, long-time home of Mevlana (generally known here as Rumi) and his dervishes, we were based in the coastal resort town of Antalya for several hot days. Much of our travel around there was to visit ancient Greek and Roman ruins.
On day 1, we visited Termesos with a smelly taxi driver. It's located in a beautiful national forest:



...and has, among many other ruins, an impressive theater in a jaw-dropping location surrounded by mountains. I would love to see a production there...




On Day 2, having reunited with Dad, we visited Aspendos, Perge, and a beautiful waterfall. All three were hard to truly capture with a camera, since much of the magic lay in roaming around extensive ruined cities, enjoying the freedom allowed at these sites (in contrast to anything historically valuable in the US or most of Europe), and gaining a better understanding of and appreciation for ancient life. Nevertheless, I took several photos, stitched together into a panorama, that give some idea of Aspendos. It holds the best-preserved ancient theater in Turkey (it seats 15,000), but more fun for me was wandering the trails behind the theater to other parts of the ancient city. We didn't meet a single other person on the trails until we were essentially back at the theater.



We also spent a day in Olympos, kind of a hippie town. Claire and I spent the night in one of the town's trademark "treehouses" (while Mom and Dad slept in a bungalo with AC):



From there we made it to the Chimera, a place on a mountain where escaping gas is permanently alight in many places...



...and of course to Olympos' main draw, a beautiful beach surrounded by mountains and ruins.



Next on the itinerary was Kapadokya (cappadocia), an amazing place somewhat rreminiscent of the American southwest in that much of the landscape looks completely unearthly:



Completely unlike the American southwest, on the other hand (mesa dwellings being the obvious exception), is that 1. this area was pretty well populated for a long space of time and 2. those people found the ash-rock easy to escavate, so they built into, rather than on top of, the formations. In the picture above, for example, the holes in the rock lead (as many do) to small churches. In fact, even a short walk through this very large area will uncover tons of rock-cut dwellings and churches, too many, in fact, to even preserve or mark them all. (In the modern towns, in addition, these formations and their ancient excavations are integrated into people's shops, dwellings, and homes.) Many of the rock-cut churches were beautifully painted, but only the darkest churches' wall-paintings avoided light damage.




Here's a dramatic rock-cut castle:



and the ubiquitous "fairy chimneys," formed by the different erosion patterns of the volcanic ash rock below and the basalt above:



Kapadokya is one place I'd go back to in heartbeat, and so is the Hagia Sofia (back in Istanbul). Built in the 500s AD in just 5-6 years, it defies the imagination in its scope, art, and history (Byzantine church for 900 years, Ottoman mosque for 500 years, secular museum for close to 100 years: traces of all three stages remain). Again it's hard to capture such a place in photos, but I got a few, of an old (original?) ceiling mosaic:



A later, even more beautiful mosaic:



And a little piece of the inner main body, Mary and Jesus in the upper left, Gabriel to the right of them, the name "Allah" (right?) (oops, my blog is probably on the terrorist watch list now) in Arabic calligraphy on a giant medallion, and the Moslem version of a pulpit below that.



This was truly an amazing trip, and Claire, Mom, and Dad deserve my many thanks for making it possible.

If anyone's interested in a good rundown of my (and my family's) Ireland trip, I highly recommend Nate's coverage, which is excellent and which I don't intend to duplicate.

Well, I have to catch up on picture-blogging one of these days, so I might as well start now!

One month and one week ago, Sara and I headed to Massachusetts. We spent 5 days in some of the hottest summer weather Boston has experienced. We started off by following the popular Freedom Trail, which takes you by some of the most important landmarks from the US's formative years. I have pictures of some of the oldest churches in America and some important peoples' grave stones, and then of Sara and I cooling off at Harvard, but those things are as easily conveyed by words as by pictures.

The next few days were packed with sight-seeing. We headed to the beautifully-sited Institute for Contemporary Art, where they had a really cool (and quite accessible) exhibit of works by Anish Kapoor (most famous for Chicago's Millennium blob). We went on the excellent Sam Adams Brewery tour and sampled several beers at the end. We went to the beautiful Arnold Arboretum and hiked to somewhat of an overlook, pausing by a huge quantity of beautiful roses several times:


We found our way to the first house I ever lived in, at 44 Ivaloo St in Cambridge:


We spent some time with my good college friends Kit (who was generous enough to host us), Ashley, and my fellow ukulele band ("The Foppish Lads") members Elton and Steven, but sadly I didn't get any pictures of them. A highlight was a restaurant and bar's trivia night, where Elton, Sara and I finished in the middle of the pack only after earning lots of points naming the first five Roman emperors after Julius (Octavius, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero). And we ate tons of ice cream, especially at the Scooper Bowl, where you paid $8 for all you could eat. They had Ben and Jerry's, Edy's, Breyer's, Hood, some gelato place, and just about any other national or Boston-area brand you could imagine. It really was magical:


On our final day, we finished up the Freedom Trail with the Bunker Hill monument and the USS Constitution. Here's the view from the top of the monument:


(My next post should include the view from the top of the Galata Tower in Istanbul: add some red roofs and minarets, and this could almost be the same picture.)


At the end of the week, we headed for Western Massachusetts for the wedding of one of Sara's friends. The town, Northampton, was quite nice (and well-off...) and had a beautiful, massive park. Sara and I spent some time walking around there, and noticed that in Western Mass, unfortunately, they don't let you throw your dogs away just anywhere:


Finally, I have to show off the car Sara and I rented to get to Northampton. We'd booked pretty much the cheapest we could find at Hertz, but when we arrived they said they didn't have any of those left and wondered if a Mustang would be okay. After careful deliberation, Sara and I agreed to the compromise. We were nervous the rest of the weekend that we might damage such an expensive car, but the worry was worth it for the chance to take this photo in the style of the senior pictures of half of Grinnell High School's class of 2001:

More later!

Life has been a whirlwind lately! Sometimes a a very slow whirlwind, but a whirlwind nevertheless. Sara and I both went to my college reunion (no, I'm not to 5 years yet--it was for my a cappella group) and then her brother's house in Michigan several weeks ago. Then I had a few days at home. Then Sara and I headed out to Boston for most of a week as a little vacation before her friend's wedding in Northampton on the weekend. Then it was off to Turkey to visit my sister, who's been studying there, for two weeks, and then to Ireland for a week for a family reunion and celebration of my uncle's birthday. Finally two days ago I flew back to Indianapolis (20 hours of travel) for the first time in a month. Sara surprised me by meeting me at the airport, which made me really happy! We extended my vacation a day by going to the Radical Lace and Subversive Knitting exhibit at the Indiana State Museum (highly recommended, by the way, despite the bizarre name and some issues with crowded installation) and doing some fun shopping, for running shoes among other things.

So finally today I had a semi-normal day, and that was good. But it was still really busy. Among many other things, I had to open a month's worth of mail and over 150 new emails, get rid of an undeserved finance charge on a credit card, buy an airline ticket for my NY and Missouri trips in August, work out my finances for the rest of the (income-free) summer, and figure out why I hadn't gotten my check from the company that accepted the return of a file cabinet that was the wrong size. (That last was the most exciting: turns out the company was losing money and abruptly decided to leave all the people it dealt with--customers and companies alike--out to dry and go bankrupt. I about exclaimed out loud when I read this. Well, that's clearly money I'll never get back.) It's amazing the things that pile up when you're "away from it all" for an extended period of time!

Speaking of which, I'm sure I'll put up some trip pictures and summaries at some point, but they may be slow in coming and a bit terse--I'll be plenty busy for this week at least, and I'm still trying to lay off my right hand. I'm sure Nate (and Claire, once she starts her blog) will fill in what I don't get around to!

As a quick foretaste, here's a picture taken from the location from which we watched part of the exciting Turkey-Germany Euro Cup semifinal: a big outdoor screen in Istanbul, with the Blue Mosque in the background:



More to come!

Vassar's announcement

Grinnell's announcement (now a permanent link)

Congratulations to Dad on his new appointment! It'll be a big change to say now that my parents (will) live in upstate New York, but I'll always be from Iowa...

My hair has been getting awfully long lately.


Too bad the Barber of Grinnelle is so far away...

=

?

I didn't want to spoil the ending of Tigrane for anyone before it went up, but now I can explain it. It went something like this:

1. I'm about to execute Tigrane for trying to kill Queen Tomiri (who incidentally is in love with him).
2. Meroe suddenly shows up, admitting that it was actually she who had tried to kill the queen to avenge the brutal death of her father King Cyrus; Tigrane had tried to stop her and ended up looking guilty in the process.
3. Seemingly from nowhere, the head guard brings in a letter confirming this. Tigrane is released; Meroe is captured.
4. Again out of nowhere, the Egyptian king Policare appoears, saying "Great news, Tomiri! Turns out Tigrane is your son!" Apparently he got this information from a dying pirate (!?) who had captured Tigrane as a baby. Proof is offered in the form of a previously-unnoticed royal mark on Tigrane's arm.
5. Tigrane confesses his love for Meroe, and Tomiri is so overjoyed that she orders Meroe released, giving up her rather Oedipal claim on her son.
6. For no apparent reason but this, Meroe decides her father doesn't need avenging any more.

And this is supposed to be a serious opera??

It reminds me of these sliding number puzzles:

Some people like to try to do these in the fewest moves possible. Those people might have been able to end Tigrane with only a letter and one unbelievable character transformation. Scarlatti, clearly, was unconcerned about the number of moves he took...

Tigrane goes up tonight! I'm pretty excited--I think it's a good show. I took a few videos the past couple of days, but I think they're too big to practically upload them here. Instead, here are some pictures (sorry about the fuzziness--my camera didn't really know how to deal with the theater lighting).

The first photo is from Tuesday, when we didn't yet have full wigs and makeup, and only the continuo was there from the orchestra:


Here's the same scene with wigs and makeup on Wednesday:


And here's another scene (the guard's costume is very similar to mine):



This blog may be picture-heavy and content-light for a while: to give my injured right wrist some serious rest, I'm doing virtually all of my typing with my left hand. Even a post like this can take a while when typing one-handed!

My most successful bagels and tortillas yet! This is what happens when you have lots of free time and a bag of Canadian whole wheat flour.

I'll be performing in the Bloomington Early Music Festival (BLEMF) opera, Tigrane, by Alessandro Scarlatti, in two weeks. I was originally recruited for the chorus because they were short of singers. Then at the first rehearsal, our stage director from North Carolina did a workshop on Baroque dance (which will heavily inform most of the staging), and then recruited me and several other singers for very minor dancing roles. Then today I got an email from the staging director telling us when we'd be needed in rehearsals and mentioning in passing that she was recruiting another singer and me for another 4 or 5 dance numbers. These could be very short--this is Baroque opera, after all--but I really feel like I've been sucked in! I also go the third of three separate and occasionally contradictory rehearsal schedules in this email. One was from the director, one from the staging director, and one from the chorus director. This is fairly typical, I think, for the early music department here.

Anyway, I'm excited for that, and actually for all the concerts that are part of the schedule! They're all listed here. One of the highlights for me will be a performance by a good friend of mine in his group Liber unUsualis--they're very good and do really neat repertoire.

...

Two days ago Sara took a day off and went canoeing. It was just a little bit cool out, but otherwise it was pretty much perfect. Sunny most of the time, excellent water level, riffles spaced just perfectly so that the river stayed fun for the whole 15 miles or so, and amazing scenery. Sugar Creek is supposed to be Indiana's most beautiful river, and I believe it.

We started at the first of three almost identical covered bridges along the route.


(Incidentally, Nate, this might be the first picture I've ever taken with that tripod you got me last year, only because I always forget it. It's really nice!)
The whole route was surrounded by limestone, new green growth, and lots of hints of purple flowers.


There was also this beautiful, vivid green moss growing at the bottom of the river, which was surprisingly clear for Indiana water.


The rocks were very cool the whole way, but this segment was particularly striking, between rust deposits, grey limestone, and moss:


I'm pretty sure limestone is one of the coolest rocks in the world.


We lunched in the middle of the river, after making some ducks very nervous.



Limestone is cool, and even cooler when it juts out over the river with a bridge across it.



The end!

I'm in between final exams (giving, not taking), and reflecting on the semester. It's definitely been my best semester of teaching. It's amazing how much there is to learn about teaching musical skills (sight reading, musical dictation, identification of chord and interval qualities, keyboard harmony). My first two semesters, often when I'd have a student who couldn't even tell when the melody goes up or down or whether it's stepping or leaping I'd just have no clue what to tell them. Now I feel like I have suggestions for any situation I could possibly be in. (Students are forever surprising, though, so I'm sure that's not quite true.)

So that, I think, is the success of my time as coordinator of this course. The things I perceive as successes of this semester stem from that and my always-increasing understanding of where the students are coming from, what their goals are (if any), and what my goals are. I know the dogmas that are important to me (for example, a consistency of approach: scale degrees OR solfege but not both, lots of structure in pace of learning, etc.) and when they're not useful. I often know when students will think material is too hard or irrelevant to them, and how to preface it in such a way that they understand its usefulness and how to approach it. Because of that, I have had very few student problems this semester. (That's not quite true. I had a few cases of academic dishonesty, and the inevitable attendance problems. But nothing directly relating to the content of the course or student attitudes towards me.) In the past, I've had students get very upset about my stances in the class: not allowing people to use perfect pitch as a crutch, using scale degrees instead of solfege, expecting them to do work outside of class. But I've had no big complaints this semester. What few I've had have been reasonable requests and presented as constructive criticism. That may be because the class is bigger than ever (about 70 at 8 AM and just under 100 at 10:10) and they feel less connected to me. But it could also be because I frame the material better now than I used to, or because I introduced myself one-on-one to at least a majority of them and they are more amenable to seeing where I'm coming from.

Most heartening of all have been comments from students as the end of the semester grows near. In all of my cases of academic dishonesty, I've met with the students, heard them out fully, and let them suggest an appropriate penalty before making my decision and sending it out by email. In response to that email, most of them wrote me back. That was mostly to tell me that they found my decision acceptable, but many also wanted to make sure I know that they got a lot out of the course. Today after the exam, another student came up to me and said, "I think I'm actually starting to get better at this aural skills thing. But I don't want to lose it over the summer. What can I do to keep it up?"

I'm sure getting my evaluations will give me a more discerning view of how the semester went and reveal both some good things and some bad things that I've overlooked. But right now I'm quite happy with how it's gone. I've learned a ton being in charge of this class, and I really look forward to bringing that knowledge with me next year as I teach honors sophomore music theory. Those honors students had better be ready to sing!

I decided at the beginning of the semester that I'd get to know all my students by face and name. I kind of ran out of steam about halfway through the semester, but still, here at the end, I'm up to 96 out of 166. Not bad! (Especially since a lot of those don't ever show up...)

Last night I woke up at maybe 5:30 to vibrating windows and bed. Being half asleep, I was astounded but had only the vague thought process "wow, I wonder if that was an earthquake... maybe it was someone driving by with their speakers on really loud... or a huge gust of wind" before falling back to sleep. But this morning I looked it up online--definitely an earthquake! 5.4, centered in Illinois.

Okay, I'm gonna get caught up on here. First some news, then some pictures. In the past week, I've:

1. registered to vote in Indiana
2. auditioned and gotten accepted into a vocal studio for next year
3. accepted a part-time job (pending approval) from the IU Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature proofreading Latin texts to be entered into the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum
4. cooked a delicious Turkish meal (red lentil soup, pita bread with hummus, spinach borek, iskender kabob, and--not made by me--rosewater almond pudding)

Two weekends ago, Sara and I went out to McCormick's Creek, Indiana's oldest state park. It was really beautiful.

We were there for (much of) the sunrise:


There were lots of little springs like this lining the river:


And lots of cool rock formations:


I have lots more beautiful pictures of McCormick's Creek, but there are enough pictures up here right now. And I'm caught up! So more maybe soon.