Advent Begins Again

Every year on this day the Christian Church begins its celebration of Advent. In our consumer culture it is a strange practice because we are to live in the darkness for the month until the light of Christmas, not celebrating through lights and tinsel until the big day. Impossible to do. But there are little ways of celebrating Advent and we've been experimenting with them for several years. So we put up this video today to share with you, but also to remind ourselves of some of the commitments we are making this Advent season, commitments to value people and time more than money and things. We'll let you know how it goes.

Mr. Turkey Says Happy Thanksgiving

Remember Ricky? Well, Sam decided that Ricky needed a new friend, so Joy helped Sam create one and Mr. Turkey was born:And Mr. Turkey says "Happy Thanksgiving!" And "Think twice before eating my cousin. I'm watching you with my downturned eyes and surprisingly sharp array of feathers!"

The Current Lives of Students

A few months ago, I wrote about a professor over at Kansas State who is trying new ways of interacting with students both inside and outside of the classroom by using technology in interactive ways. I was impressed by his ideas and have been attempting to incorporate some of them in my own classroom with varying amounts of success. The reason why I'm trying so hard to stretch the internet to serve my classroom purposes is beautifully illustrated in a new video from the same professor that chronicles the lives and expectations of students coming into college today. This is not a top-down, what professors see, but instead the result of a google document he put together that his students edited in true Wiki style. The results, which resemble an old INXS video, are startling:

As always, I welcome reactions and thoughts of ways to harness all this new technology.

Some Listening for your Holiday

We're officially on Thanksgiving break now, as the Conservatory takes off the entire week for the holiday. Taking the full week is a good move as otherwise students either skip the last two days before break or their brains skip. Might as well give us all the time to catch up on sleep, grading, and projects.

As you're getting ready to travel for break, here is a bit of listening for you: David Borden's Double Portrait as performed by yours truly and Andy Lee last Saturday. There are a few bumps in the road, but the piece has a great deal of energy and was a great deal of fun to perform. And, as you are filling your iPod anyway, check out Andy's wonderful performances of William Duckworth's Time Curve Preludes. He performed them with sensitivity and panache, and I know you'll enjoy them.

Can Your Feet Do This?

In my music history classes, we have reached the end of the Baroque era and spent the first part of the week talking about the rise of the German style of composition through its organ music. The prototypical sound of the organ that is running through your head even now is that of late Baroque German music. It is the sound that has haunted many a silent scary movie, particularly the Phantom of the Opera pounding away in his subterranean cave.

Perhaps most unique to that style was the use of the feet. Organs had long featured pedals, but a virtuosic pedal technique really developed through Buxtehude, Pachelbel (yes, that Pachelbel), and ultimately J.S. Bach. My students generally have limited exposure to the organ before class, so they are always amazed by the pedal parts in some of the works we study and their mouths hang open that people can move their feet so quickly.

I found a new way to drive home the point or organ virtuosity this week through a performance by a young organist named Cameron Carpenter. Carpenter wants to change the way people view the organ through expanding the repertoire, expanding the organ's sound through digital organs, and expanding the audience by putting on an entertaining show (Liberace is obviously his hero as he dressing like the pianist, from the sequins down to his unfortunately named Maverick organ shoes that allow him to play intervals with his heels). My mouth fell open watching him play Chopin's Revolutionary Etude. I played the work for my sophomore recital and know how hard the left hand part is when you use the hands; Carpenter uses the feet:

This will certainly become a fixture in my lecture on the Baroque organ.

The Moment Your Heart Stops

This hasn't been a good week around our house. My sister-in-law remarked this evening that she wanted to find the person trying to kill us off one-by-one, and I tend to agree with her. I want to find the person and make them stop before it is my, or especially Noah's turn.

It started with a phone call this morning. Joy was putting Noah down for his morning nap and had the door to his room closed. As usual, Sam was trying to get in to be a part/disrupt the proceedings, when suddenly he left the door. Joy then heard a crash, followed by silence. The silence didn't last long - it was quickly punctuated by Sam's wailing.

Joy knew what had happened before she reached the door. We have a very large, very old mirror that is attached to the wall outside Noah's room, but is so heavy we also have it sitting on a bench. Sam loves the mirror because it stretches down to his height, so he can make faces in it and run his cars along the bench so there are two cars instead of one. Evidently after seeing that Joy wouldn't come out when he knocked on the door, he shifted his attention to the mirror. And somehow, that mirror came down on top of him.

We still aren't sure how the mirror came down; all Sam will say is that he touched it. We are sure of the results; Sam standing in a field of broken wood and glass. The mirror fell on Sam and evidently broke over him like a wave, leaving him standing in the middle of it. There was blood everywhere, so Joy frantically scooped him up and called me to come home. I told her to get Sam in the shower to get the glass off and find out where the blood was coming from and that I would be home soon. When I did arrive home, this is what I found:Miraculously, Sam only had a small cut on his nose and a small gash on his forehead. By the time I was home, he was watching Thomas - clearly shaken up, but no worse for wear. Tonight at his bath, I cleaned out his wound again and put butterfly bandaids on it, and he was completely fascinated by the new bandages, and I could see him thinking how he might get more on his body. The only after effects I've seen was when Sam climbed in my truck tonight. He reached back and touched the back window and quietly claimed "This window won't fall on me; it's glued to the truck."

After Joy stopping my heart on Friday night and Sam stopping it this morning, I'm not sure what else I can take. I'm ordering a calm Thanksgiving week this year.

How Not to Prepare for a Recital

Have you ever had one of those dreams where, when you wake up, you cannot shake the feeling that your dream was real? It is as if your dream sneaked a tendril into waking life and is becoming manifest. That feeling overwhelmed me this weekend.

It began Friday night. Joy had been having abdominal pain for the past day and a half, and while Sam and I were eating supper, she was throwing up food that had been in her stomach for the past day. Never a good sign, that food's presence convinced us to send Joy first to urgent care and then on to the ER.

While Joy was off to the doctor, I got Sam in bed and Noah back asleep (after both broke down and attempted to outcry the other) and sat by the phone waiting. Joy called periodically to say that the doctor thought she might have some sort of blockage and had ordered X-rays; that the X-rays didn't show blockage, so he had ordered a CAT scan; that the CAT scan showed a ring around her small intestines that could be a host of things, including Chron's disease; that she was severely dehydrated and was being hooked up to an IV; and finally, at 3:00 in the morning, that she was being admitted.

I know that Joy must have been a little on edge through all this (but remained remarkably calm and upbeat on the phone with me), but I was a basket case. I had a friend on standby to come over and stay with the boys, was calling parents frequently with updates and ultimately asking Joy's mom to come and help out no matter what happened, was trying to get Noah to take formula for the first time in his life, and was trying to control the urge to drop everything and go to the hospital. Through it all I got about three hours of sleep, just what you need when you are playing a recital the next day at 5:00.

This was the first time we've encountered the problem of having young children and needing care for them while one parent goes to the hospital. Of course, if Joy had been suddenly scheduled for anything other than "sit in a room while various doctors throw various opinions at you" I would have been there in a heartbeat, but we both had a hard time figuring out the balance between staying home and normalizing our boy's lives and being there to support the other one. Why are these things in the parent manual?

Ultimately, I had a friend come over Saturday morning early so I could go to the hospital, Joy was released later that same morning, and we still have no firm answer on what was wrong with her. The entire weekend was a waking dream, and I'm still not sure what fears were real and which were symptoms of being up at 3:00, utterly helpless before a 5 month old and an agonizing decision between staying and going.