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:

Sam in Disguise

You may remember that Sam loves to dress up.  Every day he's either a dinosaur or a super guy or a bad guy or an Electro-Sam or something else from his imagination.  Noah loves to follow suit, so we end up with these hilarious combinations of mismatched cast off clothes, bought dress up clothes, and bits of paper taped to belts, glasses, and vests.

So you can imagine Sam's excitement when, at the egg hunt last Saturday, he won Groucho glasses in a bean bag toss.  Added to his bunny face paint, he was completely in disguise:

Now, he'll regularly run upstairs, put on his glasses, and creep back to the table.  We rightly exclaim, "Where's Sam, and where did this man come from at our table?"  It's currently the most hilarious game in our house.

Easter Weekend

We've had quite the weekend, one that zapped our energy so much that the entire family (including Sam!) took a nap yesterday afternoon after church.

It started Thursday night, when I played the organ for our church's Maundy Thursday Service.  Then, Friday night, we went to hear Liszt's Via Crucis at a Good Friday service, and then Saturday night UMKC put on one of Joy's favorite pieces, Poulenc's Gloria.  The boys went Thursday and Friday nights and then had a sitter on Saturday, but were so wound up by then that they didn't go to sleep until almost 10:00.

They were also a bit wound up because Saturday afternoon we went to the Easter Eggstravaganza that Prairie Baptist puts on each year.  Since Noah is only 2 months from 3, he was among the oldest in his age group (1-2 years) and so got plenty of loot in the egg hunt:

Sam, on the other hand, had to fight it out with the bigger kids and so ended up with fewer eggs, but his eggs had cooler stuff, like a compass, stick-on earrings (which he promptly used to decorate his Crocs), and little popper toys (that Noah calls blow-pops):

All in all a good weekend (at this point in life, any weekend with a nap is a good weekend).  I even managed to get a few good pictures of the boys in their matching Easter shirts, but when you take 79 pictures, a few are bound to come out right.

Happy Easter!

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:

Thoughts on Lee Hoiby

Perhaps you saw today that composer Lee Hoiby died. Knowing my musical proclivities, you might be surprised to know that I caught my breath when I saw the news. Hoiby's music, firmly in the Samuel Barber, mid-century mold, is outside my normal research and listening habits. But I've had contact with him several times over the last 15 years and always found him a gentleman and lively conversationalist.

My knowledge of Hoiby began in college and grad school when I worked on a project concerning the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition's commissioned works. Hoiby was the first composer commissioned, so I learned his work and read letters about the commission and spoke to pianists who competed that year and played the work. It was a pleasant work, but did not have the impact of later Cliburn works like Copland's or Corigliano's and did not stay with me for long.

Imagine my surprise a few years later when I discovered that Hoiby played in Partch's ensembles while studying at Wisconsin. I decided that I had to track him down, and so one day in grad school, I received a call from him in response to a letter I had sent. We talked for almost an hour about his experiences with Harry Partch and learning the instruments. I could tell that he was a bit miffed that a musicologist had tracked him down only to talk about another composer, so at the end began talking about his Van Clibrn work. A few days after the conversation, I received a package of music and CDs.

We talked one other time about Partch, and though my interest in his music never progressed from my Masater's thesis, I'll always remember the generous composer willing to talk about another composer with whom he had little in common aesthetically. I just wish that spirit carried over to his publisher who put out a statement today complete with this line:

"During the period immediately following WW II, he also performed in Harry Partch’s Dadaist ensembles, studied with Darius Milhaud at Mills College and pursued a virtuoso career as a concert pianist under the tutelage of Gunnar Johansen and Egon Petri."

Dadaist ensembles? Alas, my musicologist's work is never done Somewhere two men are turning in their graves. God speed, Mr. Hoiby.

Noah vs. the Roller Blades, Part II

Thanks, everyone, for your kind words and thoughts and prayers towards Noah. Yesterday, we even had cards and cookies and ice cream arrive at our house from Noah's preschool and our church. Today, Noah is doing much better - he slept through the night and was ready to play bad guys vs. good guys with Sam this morning. He still looks a bit beat up, but the swelling on his head has gone down and he's moving with greater ease. He even feels well enough to going back to cheesing for the camera: