Tenure

After a long year of waiting, I finally received word on Monday that I was awarded tenure at UMKC.  For those of you unfamiliar with the process, it involves the candidate putting together a hundreds-of-pages document that is then reviewed by people in your field outside the university, your colleagues in your division, your Dean, a campus-wide committee, and then the Provost.  All those people in all those levels make recommendations that are finally weighed by the Chancellor who makes the final decision.

Needless to say, I am ecstatic to be through the process successfully.

It also means that I need to put aside my long-held back-up plan if the job here didn't work out:

Or, photoshopped at the suggestion of a friend in the field:

Final Listening Journals

My students have finally reached the end of the semester (in fact, today marks the final exam for the writing intensive students).  Their final act in my class was to write about music since 1945, and they all gravitated toward music a bit out of the mainstream, including Anthony Braxton and Philip Glass's great opera Einstein on the Beach.  Watch a little early Braxton and then go read the journals:

New Listening Journals

If you are interested, another round of listening journals has gone up over at my class's site.  This time you can read about Zemlinksky's Lyric Symphony, Carl Nielsen's Clarinet Concerto, and Carlos Chavez's fascinating Xochipilli:

Time for Listening Journals!

My writing intensive students are at it again, exploring music outside the traditional canon of Western music and blogging about it on their personal sites.  Here's my class blog that I use to direct students to their colleague's blogs and where you can find the newest listening journals.  Each student looks into the cracks of the Classical period (1750-1810) and finds startling music that I think you'll enjoy.  Take a look!

Post-1945 Journals Available for Your Reading Pleasure

My students have finished their final round of listening journals, and you can find them over on the class's blog. My recent profile linked to the blog, so hopefully the students have been getting useful feedback from complete strangers and you can help that process by going, reading, and commenting. Enjoy!

Something Good to Remember at the End of the Semester

New Listening Journals Available

Just in time for Spring Break, my students have posted their listening journals for music from 1900-1945. With this unit, we've entered into music that many are either unfamiliar with or perhaps a bit nervous about. In fact, this video sums up many people's reactions to this music, and I often play it for my students just to break the ice a little.

Music in the early 20th century certainly was full of brash experimentation, but it produced music as strange and as beautiful as any ever produced. You can find out about some of that music by digging into the blogroll on my class's main page.

More Reasons Why I Teach

I just gave a big music history test yesterday to my undergraduate students and endured the typical grousing about how the subject doesn't relate to what they do and they get tired of memorizing facts.

No matter how many times I tell students the ways in which music history can enrich their musical vocabulary and make them better performers, many refuse to see. That's why I was encouraged by the article "In Search of Lost Sounds: Why you've never really heard the "Moonlight" Sonata" that appeared on Slate.com yesterday. In it, Jan Swafford gives wonderful audio examples of the differences between the pianos Beethoven wrote for and our modern, equally-tempered and equally-voiced Steinways. The article is an ear-opening read, and I encourage you to jump over to Slate and listen. For me, it was encouragement that music history is important. As a pianist, hearing those recordings opened up new interpretive strategies in my mind and made me hear the music afresh, a goal of all performers of others' music. It is a concrete example of why music history is important. Do you have to play differently because Beethoven wrote for a different piano? No. Do we always have to try to replicate the exact circumstances and choices of pianists in Beethoven's day? No. But I would argue that our music takes on deeper resonance when we understand the choices we are making and the options open to us as musicians rather than blindly playing whatever is before us on the stand. The musicians in any realm or genre that last, that continue to impact us 10, 20, 100 years after their life and work are the ones who understand this simple rubric. History, style, ideas, do matter and matter deeply.

Classical Listening Journals

For those of you who like to keep up, my first round of listening journals in my undergraduate writing intensive class is now up for your enjoyment. Just head over to the class blog, peruse the blogroll for Spring 2010 listeners, and find something that interests you.

Words for Muggles

For your Friday, here's an excellent graduation speech on the power of failure and imagination, two ideas I would love my students to take to heart (thanks to Peter Witte):

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

On Easy Nostalgia

Every once and a while, you get one of those opportunities like I've had this weekend, to remember former times in a physical, not just mental, manner. It is too easy to romanticize the past, especially when the present is as difficult as it always is, and forget the true lessons of life in favor of easy nostalgia.

This lesson was brought home yesterday while I was having tea with a former grad school colleague. We're both finished with the degree, officially with Dr. before our names, and so spent time catching up on shared friends and experiences. Stories, as they often do, turned to those who didn't make it through school for one reason or another and our own times preparing for comprehensive exams.

I bring this up because I'm drowning in comprehensive exams from the other side at work. We're gearing up for the comps in history and theory that all DMA students take, I'm writing my own comps for student committees I'm on, and I'm also part of a committee re-examining our comps process and making changes. In all the discussion about current and future comps, it is too easy to romanticize my own experience, to talk about all I learned and mastered and conquered without remembering the struggle and long sleepness nights and attempts to connect the process to my ultimate goals. Meeting with my friend was a good reminder that when dealing with students and milestones in their career, easy nostalgia is no substitute for honest appraisal.

This is Why I Should Have a Minimalism Class Every Semester

I need classrooms where I can legitimately share discoveries such as this one:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
We Are at War - Philip Glass
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Economy

Teaching at the Speed of the Internet

I'm always trying to make music history come alive for my students, so when a colleague mentioned that she wanted to get some pianos tuned in historical temperaments for her advanced ear training class, I jumped at the chance to have my early music history students experience the temperaments for themselves. Our piano technician tuned three harpsichords for us, one in just intonation, one in meantone, and one in Kirnberger well temperament. He then took the time to explain to the students why these various temperaments existed and the types of music written for them (if you'd like to know more details, let me know in the comments). Once he was finished demonstrating, he invited the students to come and try out the harpsichords. One student came down and tried a bit of Scarlatti, another played a little Bach. Then, one of my jazz studies majors, decided to try a little improv on the Kirnberger and modulated all over the place. Now, all of these temperaments have keys that aren't fully in tune, though the well tempering does make all keys usable; just some are more usable than others. When he modulated, he was able to find all the bad keys and the result was amazing.

After the demonstration, we headed back up to the classroom and discussed the various instrumental genres that wrote in those temperaments. When I got back to my office after class, a student had e-mailed me the following video:

That's right, a friend of his videoed my jazz student and then posted it to youtube while we were walking back up to the classroom. My classroom is instantly expanded where the students can now go back and hear the temperaments whenever they want. Technology is truly changing teaching.

New Listening Journals

In case you are interested (and have a burning passion for Josquin or Palestrina), my students have all posted their latest round of listening journals. I need to figure out a way for them to stream musical examples to make the journals that much more engaging, but they are fun to read as they are. Enjoy!

More Listening Journals for your Enjoyment

We're about 1/3rd of the way through the semester and that means that it is time for listening journals again. This semester, five students are braving the writing intensive class to produce writings about recordings they are exploring and what their friends are hearing as well. We're trying something new this semester by writing together on a wiki before we post our thoughts for the outside world to see. Hopefully, we're building a bit more community and polishing our prose a bit more as well.

You'll find the list of blogs if you head over to the class website in the toolbar on the page's right. Dig into these journals, find new music you've never experienced before, and join us in opening up our ears to the sounds of the medieval world.

My Teaching

Ever wondered what it's like to be in my classroom? Here's your chance. Last May I gave a presentation to the faculty on my use of blogging in the classroom. The presentation was recorded and then posted to UMKC's youtube.edu website as a resource.

Most of you are familiar with the end product, as I post links whenever a group of listening journals is finished, but you might not know the pedagogical reasons why I use blogs or even the mechanics of it. So if you are curious and have roughly an hour to kill, here's where you can see that particular talk. Enjoy.

Why I'm Not Around This Week

Here's a heads up for all of you wanting your (mostly) daily mix of kid stories and musical musings - I'm swamped. For the past two years I've been helping organize the 2nd International Conference on Minimalist Music. It started when David McIntire sent me an e-mail from the 1st conference with two words: Charlemagne Palestine. I've long found Charlemagne's music fascinating, but since he rarely performs in the states anymore, I'd long since written off experiencing his concerts live. David knew that name would get my attention and get me on board with his new project - co-hosting the 2nd conference.

Since that e-mail two years ago, I've helped plan the conference, referee the papers and organize the sessions, and work myself silly on music I love. This week it all kicks into overdrive with the conference starting on Wednesday. We've gotten some good press in the local paper and on blogs and have everyone lined up to arrive in the next few days, so this conference is happening whether we are ready or not. Needless to say, I'll be overrun with all things minimalist until Sunday night when I collapse and try to put my brain back together to teach again on Tuesday. At least the minimalist fun won't stop then - I'm teaching a class on the subject all semester long.

Arguing Beethoven's Fifth

Every once and a while I'll put up a video both for your amusement and to remind me to use the video in class later on. Today I've got one such video for you. From about 1953, here's Sid Caesar and Nanette Fabray miming an argument to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony:

Their gestures immediately bring out points in the Fifth Symphony that make those musical points instantly memorable. Visuals like this are invaluable in teaching young undergrads about musical form and rhetoric. And having videos like this available is why I love teaching in the age of the internet.

Academic Presentations

I've been away from posting this week because I've been attending a conference at my school on teaching with technology. I gave a presentation Thursday afternoon on my use of blogs in the writing intensive music history I teach, which went very well, and spent the rest of the conference going from session to session wondering why at a conference on teaching with technology, the presenters used technology so poorly.

What technology you might ask? Why PowerPoint, of course. The first presenter had excellent ideas but used his PowerPoint like a paper, with footnotes and long quotations and so many bullet points it looked like Bonnie and Clyde's car. What was sad is that the presenter knew his PowerPoint was working against him because he jokingly referenced having seen Death by PowerPoint, but obviously didn't take any of its lessons to heart. The presenters after him were no better, simply taking bullet point list after bullet point list and forcing us to read them in bad templates. *sigh*

The other cloud hanging over the conference was the spectre of e-learning where an entire class is online. We're all crusty academics who value face-to-face interactions with students, but with the decline of newspapers, some doomsayers are forecasting the downfall of universities as well, especially after commercials like this:

Kaplan is one of the crop of for-profit online schools and have made several great commercials like that one. But what the articles and lectures and videos don't understand is that there is more to college than lectures. Much of the learning that goes on in college happens in dorm rooms, in the cafeteria, playing Frisbee on the quad. Those experiences are not replicable online; in facebook we're usually friends with people we already know, not making new friends and sharing deep conversations late in the night. Plus, many seem not to realize that classrooms are more interactive than ever before, harnessing new technology to encourage student participation. The old "I talk, you listen" paradigm is still in use, but is constantly changing. Many professors may not know how to use PowerPoint, but they certainly are learning to bring learning in powerful new ways.

Graphic Notation in the 21st Century

Since my undergraduate days when I was first introduced to George Crumb's Makrokosmos, I've been fascinated by graphic scores. If you don't know that piano work, in it Crumb famously notated every four piece graphically to represent the work's title. So the final piece, "Agnus Dei" is notated as a peace sign since the final line of the "Agnus Dei" in the Mass is "Lamb of God, who took away the sins of the world, grant us peace."

From Crumb, I quickly branched out, and discovered two simple truths about notation that are glossed over if even discussed in most music curricula: First, that notation hampers musical development. Harry Partch encountered this frustration again and again as he tried to notate his justly tuned music. He noted in his treatise Genesis of a Music that "Our system of notation must be held partially responsible for the inelasticity of our present musical theory, and for the misdirection of many intonational ideas that have been proposed - it is so 'easy' for the notation of 'quartertones,' for example. But historically, in the establishment of current musical habits, there was little if any causal relation. Significant developments in notation, naturally enough, followed the development of musical artifices." Second, that notation has an impact on the ways in which music is composed and the way performers plays a piece of music. Morton Feldman noted that “The degree to which a music’s notation is responsible for much of the composition itself is one of history’s best-kept secrets.” Notation has a psychological impact on the ways in which we approach music, a fact even borne out in a recent study on creativity in grade schoolers in Australia.

Perhaps the book that most introduced me to notational practices of the past fifty years was John Cage's Notations, which featured graphic scores and traditional scores he collected from friends and colleagues to show the state of notation in 1969 (you can download all of Notations if you're interested). I came across the book through Partch, whom Cage approached about submitting a score. Cage's idea was simple - each composer got one page to show a score without any explanatory note and a section of their writings were included elsewhere in the book, all placements determined by the I Ching. The composers included were from a wide spectrum of approaches, from Boulez to Bernstein to the Beatles, and all were treated equally. Partch submitted Verse 12 from And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell on Petaluma and all was going well until Cage responded that wanted to use 43 letters in Partch's writing because of Partch's 43-tone scale. Partch rebelled against this pigeonholing, but his music was still included on page 208.

Imagine my joy when today I discovered today the website for Notations 21, an attempt to recreate Cage's book with scores from today. I've been spending moments between grading papers and tests digging through some of the fascinating scores already submitted. But therein lies the problem with this new collection - it is still small and the collector, Theresa Sauer, is dealing with an even more pluralistic composing society than Cage did and seems to lack the contacts Cage had in the composing world. So spread the word and see if more score samples can't be added. Think of the next generation of young minds that could be opened through this project.