Comprehensives Passed

I passed my written and oral comprehensive exams, and I am now officially a doctoral candidate, on track to graduate in May. I'm elated! This time it feels like a major relief. I waited outside the room my committee was debating in (after answering questions and talking for two hours) and they all came out and shook my hand and gave me hugs.
Now, on to THE FUTURE. Though it seems intimidating right now, I'm trying to make a plan that will break down THE FUTURE into tiny manageable chunks that turn it into THE PRESENT, which is much easier to conceptualize. I'm currently working on a couple small music projects, and looking for other work in various fields. I hope to do some commercial work at some point soon, and also up the ante on my jewelry line. Then I'll look for some teaching jobs of various sorts, and possibly some other cultural activities (residencies, perhaps?). We'll cross our fingers that it's a fun transition from the last days of my life as a student into other opportunities!

Doctoral Comprehensive Exams

In about two week's time I'll be taking the most intense tests of my adult life, hopefully never to be repeated again. (Though I must say, I remember taking the GRE's and they weren't fun either). These are the doctoral comprehensive exams in music, which at CU Boulder happen over the course of five days (with a weekend in between for rest).

I really shouldn't complain. I got myself into this program and I think I'm going to be fine! It is also a piece of cake compared to other schools, which have different comprehensive exam rules. Sometimes, you sit in a room for hours, and your advisors grill you about basically any and every facet of music, oh, you know, from the dawn of civilization until the present. Who composed 'Viderunt Omnes' in the 12th century? Name all the instruments in the chamber music of Brahms! What does 'gesamtkunstverk' mean? What is a sawtooth wave? Provide a sample pedagogical approach to teaching augmented sixth chords! You won't know what they'll be asking you until you get there, so you basically study everything and everything. And then you feel awful about yourself at the expense of your superiors feeling really great about themselves. And then you can either pass, or fail. No grey area.

Thankfully here it is not like that. That prevents me from having a heart attack, and mostly the stress just causes some random anxiety (in which case I have a dance party in my room), or some random indigestion (in which case I go eat a TUMS and take deep breaths).

For me, I get to tailor a lot of my comprehensives to my own interests, which will hopefully help me later in my career. It's like a chance to further research topics of interest, and then write about them. I would have wanted to know about a lot of this information, so now I'm just forced to know it! Still, sometimes you don't have a choice of what your question will be. Sometimes you can get the questions in advance, and sometimes not. Sometimes it's open notes, sometimes all from memory; it's all up to your advisors.

I have five advisors, and each of them comes up with a question (or questions), and I choose one advisor's question(s) per day. I'm supposed to begin working in the library at 8am each morning, and then spew out information onto a computer for hours. I finish at 4pm (or before, if I'm out of thoughts), go home, and repeat four more times. 

Sometimes I hope that a higher power might be waiting to come to my aid and help me with technical questions to which I forget the answers. It feels a little like when I took the preliminary exams two years ago:


(http://midnightshoveler.blogspot.com/2012/02/graduate-preliminary-exams.html)

Some of my questions I'm researching are topics I already knew a little about: sound art, music and entrepreneurship, music and science/nature/architecture. Those topics I just need to research further, and feel confident I can make a lengthy statement about them in an intelligent way. And other questions are ones where I'm taking a little time each day to carve away at, 'cause I'm a little more clueless: music and dance forms, music in the middle ages and renaissance, oral and written traditions of music. The historical topics are the hardest for me; I'm hoping that my brain can remember timelines, names, facts, long enough to get them out on the computer and organize them into coherent thoughts.

Wish me luck. I've got a few more days to do a whole lot more note-taking. 

And Yet It Moves

I thought I'd talk a little bit about my doctoral thesis project in the works (well, the main one, at least). I haven't done something quite like this before, so it's probably good I write down the working process and figure it out as I go along. The piece, titled 'And Yet It Moves' is a 15-minute-long epic music video of sorts, and it features three locations on the CU Boulder campus: the Observatory, Old Main, and Norlin Library.

I've written/conceived of music for each section, which will then be recorded and layered on top of one another. Then, the recording will be 'lip-synced' of sorts into a music video, though the videotape will be much more abstract than a traditional concert video. I'm considering it more like a sound and image "collage" like my sound pieces for Origin of the Sun and Moon rather than a tried and true music video with narrative or a concert video showing all the little details of performance.





The three sections of the work all center around the concepts of learning and discovery, and of motion. Firstly, the motion of the sun-- the Observatory piece is about the chemical composition of the Sun and all of the elements in the Sun that give us the visible spectrum.

The section in CU's first building on campus, Old Main, is about the movement of human bodies in time and tells abstractly the story of Mary Rippon, CU's first female professor. Rippon, a foreign language professor, had a secret child with one of her students, and kept the whole affair (and the baby) secret from the University. This story takes place at a time when it was illegal to be a female professor and be married, let alone be a mother. Apparently at the turn of the 20th century, people (likely men) thought that all the intellect would get drained out of a woman if she were not single and childless. I digress. Rippon ended up taking a sabbatical and had the baby in Germany, and her husband/student Will took a boat to Germany later to pick up the baby at a care center. The child was raised as Mary's 'niece' for her whole life, and didn't know that her Aunt was her MOTHER until the baby was something like 60 years old. CU didn't know about this story until the 1990's, and I thought the story was too delicious not to tell. I set Mary's and her husband Will's texts into choral works for the piece.

The third "layer" is in the main Library on campus and is a very John Cage-like piece, with only minimal instructions and very little music score to be seen; people will take books off the shelves and read them in different tempos, and they'll throw papers in the air and generally have a good time being academic. Graciously the staff and faculty from all three buildings were very encouraging about me using their spaces.

I guess it's a bit of a love story, a swan song, to my time as an academic. My (ridiculous number of) years studying in the collegiate settting are coming to an end within a year or so, or so we hope if I can finish everything on time. I think I've selected a few places which have inspired me throughout the years, in one way or another, like the areas of science, and poetry, and architecture, and there's even some electronic music in there too. I like the idea of the large-scale "solar" section in contrast with the "human" section and the "neurological" section of thoughts flying around in the library. If it all works, it should be a really fun time.

Recording everything will be done in a million tiny pieces and then stuck together like a puzzle. Videotaping will probably be the same way, so in a way it is very much like a collage. And recording sessions start soon so I best get to typesettin'!

Goodbye Scissors

In the tradition of my Goodbye Pencil Sharpener and Goodbye Stan, Sexually Abiguous Cockatiel posts, I've had to bid adieu to an old friend, a pair of yellow and white scissors that I've had since second grade. I took them to college and they were amazingly useful for crafty projects (they cut paper with out cutting you!). My roommate and I bonded that we both had brought the same pair of kid's scissors to college.

The college years have since passed. The time had come where the safety scissors no longer cut, and I got a pair of fancy titanium scissors for the holidays, which cut like butter and are guaranteed for 10,000 magical slices. So I bid you a fond farewell, friend, you've served me well. May you rest in peace, dreaming of classrooms full of screaming second-graders, and piles of colored construction paper, miles high.

One Year of Teaching Music

I'm just wrapping up my first year as a Teaching Assistant for a class called 'Aural Skills'. I'd rather have the class be called 'Musicianship' but I have no decision in the matter. I did however, have a lot of decisions to make this year about what to teach and how to teach it. The saying that goes something like 'the thing you learn about something when you have to teach it' is totally true as well. Here are some things I've learned this year, in no particular order.

-Get people up and moving. I wish it was a Dalcroze Eurythmics class! Unlike most teachers, I have everyone stand at the beginning to warm up, and then during dictations, I have people come up to the blackboards to write examples. It's a new perspective, having to be 'on call' and work on a giant board rather than paper, but there's less pressure if you're not the only one in front of the class, and the whole class can also use the examples on the board to sing from or critique.

-I make a lot of mistakes, and sometimes the timing of the lessons isn't what I envisioned. But then I teach the class a second time to another section, and I can refine things a lot.

-I try to call on every single person at least once in class. Even for tiny questions or observations, it keeps people on-target. Even though they're put on the spot, it's also okay to be wrong or just take a guess.

-Perfect pitch people need extra challenges. How do you make it worthwhile for a student who can recognize every note played on the piano and write it out by rote? Bring in a different instrument to play the examples, or have students write out dictations in alternate clefs and keys.

-It's amazing how much you can learn about a student's learning habits and work ethic by hearing them sing individually for five minutes.

-Attendance is to be taken seriously. I'm super-forgiving about someone letting me know they might be gone for this week's classes because of a trip, or that they're not feeling well and they might not be in class tomorrow. But I'm not forgiving about just not coming to class and not letting me know. Take a tiny bit of responsibility, kidz.

-Some musical topics are just hard to explain, mostly because they're hard to hear. If you can't break down music into small chunks first, or play examples that show the relevance of what you're talking about, it's really hard to make people 'get it', and then hope that they do well on a quiz. Also, if you don't get the material, seeking out extra help=super bonus points with me.

-It's important to teach the material in conjunction with other classes, so connections can be made between what's conceptual and what's practical. The theory class just learned about augmented 6th chords, and now we're practicing how to sing them! We just learned about church modes and now we're dictating in Lydian! I wish I had more of those inter-curriculum connections in my studies.

-Nobody actually wants to be there, and it's not your fault. The class I teach is required; it's mostly practical applications of what they learn in another class. Though you can't do much with making diminished sevenths fun, you can make class as amusing as you possibly can by playing ridiculous music examples, warming up with tongue twisters, and very seldomly but surprisingly, bring a snack for everyone. Nobody turns down cookies!

Violin Phase Torture

The other day in my music theory class full of graduate students, we got to talk about Steve Reich, one of my main music role models. We've studied a lot of other composers this semester: Schoenberg, Beg, Webern, Carter, Dallapiccola, and I was looking forward to hearing about some theoretical interpretations of minimalism, music written since around the 1970's with repeating patterns that often change over time or have more conceptual frameworks. The teacher asked the class what this piece, Violin Phase, reminded them of.


To me, it's music to my ears. Steve Reich's 'Music for 18 Musicians' was the first piece I ever heard when I walked into my undergraduate advisor's office for the first time. It changed my life, I could safely say. I love the concept of Violin Phase, usually for four violins (or a number of pre-recorded violin tracks); I love Reich's use of diatonicism; I think the subtle tempo changes that lead to intricate overlapping rhythms and hidden 'ghost' melodies that pop out unexpectedly is pretty genius. (Though side fact: I finally got to meet Steve Reich and tell him my life-changing story involving his music, but he only seemed meh about it. Such is life, when you're so over the work you wrote 35 years ago, and people are still talking about how great it is.)

But instead, the loudest voices in class said that Violin Phase was, literally, torture. They could only listen to the first couple minutes of the piece (it's only about ten minutes), and they had to shut it off. Of course, they couldn't articulate why they felt the music was torturous. I'm assuming it's because the repetitive patterns were too chaotic for their ears; they didn't like the simple use of patterns which can become monotonous for some. To me, it's paced beautifully, you sometimes don't know something is changing until it's changed, and then you wonder, how did we get here?

Why such fervent responses though to this piece, seemingly unexpected and conservative? And why strangely, not the same kind of anger directed toward more traditionally 'thorny' and theoretical music like Elliot Carter or Milton Babbitt, who we discussed in classes prior without a lot of dissent? I left class disappointed in my colleagues.

I have come to appreciate my open-mindedness when it comes to listening to new music, but I think I might be in the minority. I am in full support of all that is new, interesting, and often eccentric. I at least want to judge it on its own terms, not compare it to Beethoven. Learning about new(ish) music helps me write my own pieces, and helps me interpret works of the past in new ways. Of course I have my own preferences to what I like to listen to and don't; I love historically valued music too. What I don't understand is that there are still lots of people I'd consider the young pplz that think that the only classical music worth listening to comes from the 18th and 19th centuries, and MAYBE the 20th century, if you let in Debussy and some Stravinsky (but don't go too crazy). If these people don't land a rare job in an orchestra, I don't know how they're going to wrap their brains around a hybrid career that I think will be necessary in this day in age. Nowadays you might have to have a different performing career than just the one established in the 1900s and passed down through weird, underfunded, greying institutions. Why not join a slightly more hip crowd and give new a chance?

My boyfriend noted that music people still talk about the twentieth century being 'contemporary music'. The start of the twentieth century was now one hundred and twelve years ago. I think there were giant ferns growing then, and dinosaurs, I'm pretty sure. I'd rather think about the recent past, the living composers, and all the exciting potential for what comes next.

The next post: likely less ranting, and more comics.

S, M, L, XL schools

I realized the other day that I have attended four universities, all of different sizes! Small, medium, large, and extra large. And here are some size-queen thoughts about college.

Small schools like my undergrad are so great. For me at least, I like the homey feeling where most everyone you need to know, knows you back, and you get personal attention. I know it's not for everybody, but I highly recommend a small-school experience. Vassar was a great school for this. It was an arboretum, it had teeny-tiny teacher-student ratios, and on-campus housing all four years. It's also a bubble, for better or worse- sheltering students so they can learn, but then again they never get out into the surrounding community unless they really make the effort.

While at Vassar I took a semester in Edinburgh, Scotland, and studied some music at their 'state' university there. I'd call this a large school, as I never saw most other departments and felt pretty anonymous, but then I was also plopped down in a foreign country so I felt generally anonymous. Payment for class was somehow done the same way since the middle ages, where basically every single student in the university formed a giant thousand-plus person queue to hand one lady a check or a credit card. However, there was something redeeming about a university within the urban setting, you could just walk outside the music building to a café next door! And my 'meal plan' was more than generous in the nearby cafeteria, so I was able to feed some homeless people on my extra lunches.

Moving right along, I went to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, which is more like a Large School but feels like a Medium School. It was relatively self-contained, but the music/arts building was grand and I felt very important being able to learn there. The spaces I worked in and had class were also small and kept to few students, so it maintained a medium-size environment. Though I can't say the same thing for their bigger departments like computer science, where I don't know if I'd ever meet all the students in my own department.

Currently I'm in Boulder, Colorado, whose university is like the destructive goatweed that someone thought was a good idea to plant along the highway. The university is a giant-XL-supersized megalomaniac and taking over everything in its path. During some football games, there are so many people and cars and bicycles that the streets are closed and the libraries close, and I avoid campus altogether. It is almost too big to walk across (though you could do it, if you had all afternoon) and there are bus routes that cut through the campuses. I don't think I'll ever step foot in 95% of the buildings there. During the first weeks of school, the university bookstore set up temporary cash registers and a queue for book pick-up; there were 35 cashout stalls to be corralled into. But the pros of this 30K student body are in the infrastructure of the campus; there are tried-and-tested plans for transportation, dining, electronic systems that really do work for people's benefit and efficiency. I get emails for every book i check out from the library. And each department is sort of its own separate entity; I almost forget that I am not just at the College of Music but part of this city of students. Comforting as well is while many of the other students at CU are here basically just to ski and snowboard, and 'oh wait, I guess I have to take this quiz ugh'; the music students are as hard-working as ever, and are more likely than my tiny undergrad to escape out of the safe walls of campus and into the big world. And once they get out into town, they find conveniently close to campus boundaries: the marijuana dispensaries.

Goodbye Pencil Sharpener

This weekend my favorite pencil sharpener (Did know you could have a favorite pencil sharpener? Well, you can, so now you know.) broke, and it had been with me, faithfully sharpening #2's since second grade. It was pink. Now the one I'm using is my fifth grade pencil sharpener, which is black, so I hope he's happy now that he's promoted after all these years.
Rest in peace, ol'sharpener! (More like rest in pieces, at the bottom of my trash bin.)

Sax World

In addition to meeting some cool people this month, and having the orchestra performances, I had the pleasure of hosting the Erie Saxophone Quartet at Carnegie-Mellon. The group from SUNY Fredonia played two concerts, a select performance for music majors, and then an evening concert for the public. Both concerts went swimmingly well! The earlier performance included a premiere of one of my pieces which I wrote specifically for that concert: a saxophone octet! (We're all pictured here on stage.) We also had a composer visit from Norway, the delightful and attractive Peter Edwards, who also wrote a piece for Erie Sax Quartet. It was his first time in the States, and I'm amazed that he found his way to Pittsburgh from Manhattan, on a bus, and was waiting patiently for the quartet in the lounge of the music building!

I've decided that saxophones are my jam: I think the sax and I have a lot in common. We both felt a little left out in our skewed interests about classical music (we're both newbies to the classical world, all things considered) and we both like lots of different things. I like dance music and chocolate-covered pretzels, and the sax likes Miles Davis and Milhaud. We both hate Kenny G. He says potahto and I say mash 'em up with butter...okay, maybe we don't really have that much in common, but I love the sound of the saxophone and I want to keep writing for it! Its sound can be smoky or bright, sexy or stoic, crazy funky or mysterious. And how great is the contrabass sax, or the tubax, which I will probably never see in my life. Though for some reason our high school band had a bass saxophone, which I hear is not all that common either.

Photo courtesy of Peter Edwards, who managed to get all of us without red eyes. Though the magic of stage perspective makes me look less tall here.

Sick, Classes, Vitamin C

Classes started again this week and I of course got sick, with all the new germs having arrived back in town and stopping into the tiny closet where I work. Sadly I couldn't skip class, as it's the first class of the semester and I didn't want to lose my spot. Thankfully I feel better and I'm now ready to start many new exciting classes, like Choral Arranging, Communication Design, and an Architecture+Art course. I'm also excited about hearing a saxophone octet I wrote premiered in a couple months (8 saxes! Adolph would be proud), and I'm getting down to business in editing parts for the orchestra performance/reading. But I think for safety's sake I'm going to start the next few days off with some extra Vitamin C.

Sleepy at Work

It's really humid here and after not sleeping well for the past week, the air-conditioned music office closet seems like such a welcoming place for a nap. And then the phone rings and I have 65 placement exams to grade and actual office work to do! Drats.

The Big Bag Theory

Summer vacation started for me 45 minutes ago. Unfortunately, summer work started 4 days ago. I took my last exam this afternoon and let out a sigh of Stravinsky relief, and now I'm looking forward to working at the Music Office and the Ceramics store, and hopefully starting my orchestral piece. I do wish I could hide in this big bag, though, and go with you to some place magical. You could store so much in here! It could be the next big thing in haute couture. Yes, I'd set up a little pillow and a book-reading light in there, if only for a little sleepover, 'cause I'll be off to work again in the morning. Thank goodness I can get paid for looking up celebrity fashion online and generally just smiling a lot, otherwise summer vacation would be kind of a bummer.