Musings of a Music Major

2003-05-19T15:32:00.000-05:00

Moving to Movable Type

So I finally got tired of the Blogger/Enetation baloney and investigated Movable Type. I had NO idea how awesome it was. It's incredible. Setup is sorta complicated, but their directions are mostly clear. I've converted all my posts, and I'm rewriting the template as we speak---er, as you read.

This will be the last post until I'm done, which may be a tomorrow or the next day. You'll know I'm done when this post disappears (along with the Blogger and Enetation logos ).

When I'm done, though, I have a real cool post about my e-mail dialogue with a certain composer on its way. See y'all!

2003-05-19T05:02:00.000-05:00

Uru: Ages Beyond Myst trailer

E3 was this last week, and a lot of info on the new online Myst game was released. The biggest thing to come out of it was this trailer [Windows Media, zipped; 7MB]. It shows, among other things, an island that bears striking resemblance to the original Myst island. Goosebumpy stuff.

Y'all non-Myst people take a look; it's sweet-lookin' enough to be pretty enticing to even the casual gamer.

2003-05-19T04:29:00.000-05:00

So this is how the Blogosphere works...

I'm a relative n00b to this blogging thing. I don't really fancy that what I say is of much use to most people, it's really probably just an exercise in egotism to throw my random thoughts up where the whole world can see them.

So imagine my surprise when, while randomly clicking links to test my CSS, I find that The Peoria Pundit linked back to me after I referred to him as "this guy" in my below entry on grammar nitpicking. Surprising in a way that he looked at his logs to tell I'd linked to him; mostly surprising that one of the four people who read this clicked the link in the first place!

So here's a return thank-you for the publicity. Now I have to figure out something interesting to blog about.

2003-05-18T04:39:00.000-05:00

So?

So I was just browsing down my front page here, and I noticed that the last SIX entries all begin with an extraneous "So." And many of my paragraphs (usually ones after I go on overly explanatory tangents) begin "So yeah, ...".

So yeah, I don't know whether or not that's a bad enough habit to try to conscientiously break. Guess I'll keep an eye on it from now on.

</self-fulfilling entry>

2003-05-18T04:06:00.000-05:00

Weblog slowness and fickleness

So I thought for a while that my new host had problems with my PHPification, but instead I think it's the Enetation comments that are making the page terribly TERRIBLY slow to load. So I have a few options as to how to deal with it.

Pay for Enetation.: They'll put my commenting system on a less-congested server, and I can hope it'll make it less fickle.
Pay for Blogger.: Then my blog will have built-in comments and I can ditch Enetation completely.
Switch to Movable Type.: More complicated to set up, but I have PHP and MySQL, and I think all the modules I need to run it. I don't know how well conversion from Blogger goes, though. Don't want to lose anything.
Get hardcore into PHP and write my own commenting system.: I have absolutely no idea if I can even do this, but since Enetation can tell what post each link is at simply using Javascript, I presume I can write some PHP that'll do the same thing. It just depends on how in-depth I'll have to get to do that. Once I can do that, it's just a matter of writing code that can stick blocks of text in a database and retrieve it.

So yeah, there's my conundrum of the moment. This'll probably be my first project once I'm finally finished unpacking.

2003-05-15T18:14:00.000-05:00

Shallow pop philosophy

So I had this great entry written about how I've stopped keeping myself competent about politics, but Blogger ate it. Probably better that way, it was more personal than I probably should have posted.

So yeah, I keep seeing people---mostly movie critics---saying that the Matrix movies are full of shallow, meaningless pop philosophy. Ebert's review comes to mind, for one. They brush the philosophy aside, but then they sound like they haven't even watched the movie! Ebert asks all sorts of rhetorical questions that even a cursory viewing of the first movie answers. He misdefines Neo's and Morpheus's roles in the movie, and then he relegates their long-winded spiels to "the effect of meaning" rather than meaning anything on their own.

Now, granted: They do have to skim the surface of anything that can be considered deeply philosophical. After all, it's only a 2-hour movie, and you have to have the obligatory 45 minutes of fighting and still get a plot in somewhere. But I don't think it takes very much digging to get to a level where there IS real philosophizing going on in the movie, and especially in the Wachowskis' heads. I've wondered my whole life about whether I might be a brain in a vat somewhere, and the Matrix gave me a whole new twist on why that might be, if it were the case.

So guys like Ebert can call me a fanboy all they want, but just that the movie doesn't do ALL the thinking for them doesn't mean there isn't real thinking to be done about it.

2003-05-15T02:44:00.000-05:00

Grammar woes

So I was blog-surfing. Blogger.com sent me to this guy's blog. His top entry led me to this, the journal of a 16-year-old conservative high school student in California. VERY cool.

That led me here, the journal of a conservative AP History teacher, which further led me to her husband's journal.

His top entry at the moment is very interesting, as it leads to this story at the Washington Post, about a dispute over a PSAT question.

Basically, the dispute was about pronouns who take possessives as their antecedents. The sentence in question begins, "Toni Morrison's genius enables her to create novels..." According to ETS, there's nothing wrong with that. According to a high school English teacher, there is. If you substitute the pronoun directly, you get "Toni Morrison's genius enables Toni Morrison's to create novels." Sure enough, that doesn't make sense. Eventually ETS agreed and rescored the tests.

But hang on. Using apostrophe - s to indicate possession is just a shorthand way to omit the word "of," isn't it? "Toni Morrison's genius" resolves to "The genius of Toni Morrison." There isn't any semantic difference between the two, is there? Finishing the sentence with THAT substitution yields "The genius of Toni Morrison enables Toni Morrison to create novels," which is entirely proper.

Of course, the teacher would be undaunted by this; part of his argument was that multiple textbooks have conflicting answers; therefore, the question should not have appeared in the first place. And I can dig that reasoning. But I guess that's what irks me about this, and other such grammar woes; reasoning. Kids are never taught the reasoning behind grammatical rules. At least I know I never was. I imagine a lot of English teachers have no idea WHY grammar rules are the way they are, and so they just teach them straight out of the book as if they were ordained by God. The only reason I learned to write halfway well is because I knew that all grammar rules exist to facilitate speaking clearly and being understood. To most kids (and teachers, I think), they're just rules in a book somewhere.

I think it's the same way with behavioral rules. Kids are taught all their lives to do things "because I said so." And indeed, kids should trust their parents enough to do things at request. But that respect has to be earned, and it has to be earned intellectually, not just through discipline. It has to be earned through the child having confidence that the parent HAS reasoning behind his actions and words. If a kid hears "because I said so" his whole life, he doubts that that reasoning exists. That's where lack of respect comes from, and it's where disobedience comes from, too.

But anyway, the obedience tangent doesn't have a whole lot to do with this situation. I just think the teacher is wrong in his perspective on the rule. Maybe he's right about the rule's ambiguity on a test, but he also said "I have actually enforced it on people's essays." Ultimately, it doesn't matter anyway; the sentence IS perfectly clear, even if it's not syntactically squeaky-clean. If he's counting off of well-thought, well-formulated, and well-written essays because of what "Many grammar manuals" insist, then he needs to reevaluate his philosophy of both writing and teaching.

2003-05-15T01:15:00.000-05:00

.......Me too!

Haha, so I just got back from the 10:00 screening of Matrix Reloaded. I have a throbbing headache, because 1) the fight scenes made me so tense that it was traumatic to come back down, 2) I had to keep up with the philosophical crap while dealing with the headache from the fight scenes, and 3) the blasted right-front speaker (which I was sitting right by) kept flickerin' out the whole time. Wreaked havoc with my eustachian tubes. I plan on complaining to the theater about it. In the meantime, I think I'll graffiti "Now featuring Dolby (2.67).1 Surround Sound!" on the side of the building.

Anyway it was good, I may post philosophical musings later, when I can think straight. For now, here's my friend Matt's analysis:

Green Lantern 2814 (1:12 AM) :

... it was good. *gives you that understatement look*

Green Lantern 2814 (1:12 AM) :

Could've used some more fighting though...

Heh. Now here's the obligatory links:

2003-05-14T00:05:00.000-05:00

Wee, so my new webspace is finally up and running. I had to, um, ""BORROW"" a friend's DNS servers to see it, but it all works fine.

So yeah, hopefully this'll be the last totally techno-dork entry for a while. At least, until I dive head first into PHP here in a couple of weeks......

2003-05-13T21:32:00.000-05:00

Just a test

This is a test to try out my new webspace with Blogger publishing.

2003-05-12T23:08:00.000-05:00

Just read a story on Slashdot about Google's purchase of Blogger, and how Google is developing a Blog search engine. The first comments were griping about the word "Blog" itself, and how it's in the same vein as the ""words"" "alot," "looser," and "hella." I was taken aback; I'm usually the first to complain about that stuff, but somehow, "blog" never phased me a bit. I've noticed my typo tolerance increasing lately, too; why, just yesterday I found a typo in my entry that I decided wasn't worth going back to correct. Am I really becoming your average Joe Sixpack? If I ever find myself playing Solitaire for more than 30 minutes at a time I'm going to shoot myself.

I stumbled upon this guy's site a while back. I like it. He's a big typophile/web design guru, and other than being made for 1024x768, I dig it. He's got this CSS Zen Garden that's making the rounds around blogspace. Really nifty.

2003-05-12T00:36:00.000-05:00

"...ridiculously brown eyes."

So I'm home. Graduation was a disaster, just as we all knew it would be. We played a piece none of us had played in almost two months, with no rehearsal beforehand. It almost fell apart. Then we did Pomp and Circumstance without so much as a read-through. Of course, you have to pick a section to repeat 15 million times while people walked in. Well, the illustrious Mr. A picked the WORST POSSIBLE PLACE to end the section---right in front of a key change. So the bar before, you have this thing that sounds like it's changing keys, and then all of a sudden it goes back to the V of the old key. Ridiculous.

But so anyway, we got through it, and had like two hours to sit around. Thankfully, I thought to bring my CD player and a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, so I could keep myself occupied. Good thing, too, because two very disturbing personal issues presented themselves, but I was able to ignore them completely. One of them involved a very attractive female friend of mine (okay both of them did), and at the very moment she came and sat near where I was, I read Doug Adams's reference to Trillian's "ridiculously brown eyes."

I turned the page.

I hate weird collisions in time like that. They make me feel like my stupid personal situations are more significant or meaningful than they really are, and thus they make me dwell on them, as I'm currently demonstrating so vividly.

Oh, and speaking of Trillian, I tried out the IM program of the same name for the fifteenth time tonight. I never stick with it. This time was almost an exception. I got an MSN Messenger skin and it was fantastic. Now it has all the privacy features I want, all the list management features I want. The problem? The skinning API is too dad-gummed slow. IM windows take forever and a day to redraw after you drag something over them, and as many windows as I keep open, the standalone clients (even with all their memory-hogness) outperform Trillian by leaps and bounds. Maybe next version, Trillian.

Gotta finish hauling stuff in from the van now. Gotta big day of laundry, computer-desk-assembly, and closet-organization ahead o' me.

2003-05-07T10:09:00.000-05:00

FINIS!

It's official; as of 9:45 this morning, I am THROUGH with the ASU Fine Arts Building for SEVEN MONTHS!

Oh, sure, I still have bureaucratic mess to take care of, like getting holds off my record so I can register. And sure, I'll take a 30 minute composition lesson and a 30 minute trombone lesson next semester, but still---NO MORE BAND until January!! *sigh* Such a relief. Such a relief.

Okay, so about the huge entry I was going to condense.

Basically, the culmination of my college career took place two Mondays ago, when I conducted the Wind Ensemble in The Hounds of Spring by Alfred Reed. For two and a half years I've fantasized about conducting that piece. Finally, a week and a half ago, I got to do it. And although reactions were somewhat mixed, most people who talked to me seemed to have really enjoyed it. I sure did, even though I was scared. If nothing else, I proved that my conducting is legible, and my podium technique is workable. I made some cliche mistakes like misreading measure number and miscounting measures, but that's all right. My rehearsing was at least partly effective, and I know what directions I need to grow in.

It was just an incredible high. I gave everything I had in that 40 minutes with Wind Ensemble, and not three hours later, I did it again with Symphonic Band (that time with the less-involved Florentiner March by Fucik). Incredible high.

And after it was all over, I hit rock bottom. Oh, I wasn't really depressed or suicidal, but everything I had was gone. Every possible amount of effort with which to salvage my borderline classes was sapped. I was in a daze, a totally encompassing fog. I could hardly remember conducting either group, I could hardly differentiate the experiences from dreams. The only way it's been made remotely real is the videotape. I remember things when I watch the videotape, but even then they're just traces of memories buried in the cracks. I can hardly believe that it's ME on that podium, that I did those things.

And for a few days, the intense desire to conduct was gone. Completely. Even in the context of educating high schoolers, I couldn't get that enthusiasm back. My friend David said that was normal, and indeed I've found myself starting to recupe slowly. But still there's this feeling of.. .."What next?"

Well, I know what's next. Next is a semester almost completely away from music, and truly completely away from the monotony that's dragged me down to the funk I'm in now. A semester to pursue programming, web design, graphic design, maybe even 3D graphics, all these horizons to which I also have an itch to broaden.

Also a semester to learn what it's like to WORK, which I've never, ever known. Even if my scholarships are partially intact after this semester, I have to work. Even if it's a cushy job like being webmaster for some business in the area, I have to work. I have to be obligated to someone outside of academia, and I have to NEED the financial benefit from doing so. I have to get in some sort of touch with reality, even if it's a reality mired in computers and technobabble. It's more real than music, and it's sure as heck more real than that building.

That building. That I'm done with.

SFT

2003-05-06T04:20:00.000-05:00

Blog now ""accessible""

In a typical late-night web-design experiment, I've managed to get all the text on the blog the size I want YET be resizable by browsers. To do it I used an insane variety of percentage font-size declarations. This page is where I got the idea, and this, this, and this are all pages I went through on my way to finding it. If you're a real masochist, you can look at my stylesheet and compare it to my source code to see what I did. Enjoy.

2003-05-06T03:33:00.000-05:00

And now, for something completely different...

So I got out of bed to type an entry in my personal journal, when it struck me that it'd be okay to post it publically. So here you go, my first insight not directly related to music.

Tuesday, May 6, 2003
2:48 am
Song: Bernstein, Psalm 108 (verse 2) and Psalm 100

"Equality doesn't mean everyone is as good as everyone else, it means everyone should have the same laws as everyone else."

And with that quote I observe that marriage is a PRIVILEGE, not a right. It is a privilege to be identified by society and by government as a singular unit with another human being. What does this mean?

It means not everyone should get married!! I'm tired of this attitude that says a spouse and children and a white picket fence is in every human being's plan for happiness and fulfillment. It rubs off on me WAY too much.

Even Mrs. Minx said that in my interview for the scholarship---I said something about me, personally, being a better band director if I weren't married. She dismissed that as a weird view, and a phase I was going through---"You have to have someone with you to be happy" was her quote, I believe.

NO YOU DO NOT!!! My life as a bachelor band director can and will be just as pleasing or fulfilling as anyone else's family plans, if not MORE so!! I mean really, there are just some people who are not suited to being spouses, and MORE who aren't suited to being parents. Whether it's because of their attitudes, beliefs, or just their basic personalities, there ARE those who are better off in other roles in society.

I'll tell you how I got to this train of thought, too---I was thinking about how my reasoning says that only those who would be ideal parents SHOULD be parents. I almost dismissed that, though, as I always do---what a ridiculous thought! Can you imagine how few people would have children, if only those who would be ideal parents had them at all?

And can you imagine how WONDERFUL that would be?! If all children had close to the right amount of discipline, close to the right amount of attention, close to the right amount of everything that parents are supposed to provide? Holy smokes! Not ONLY would that make for a larger percentage of non-dysfunctional chilrden, not ONLY would that make for an EXCELLENT population control model, but the pool of potential parents would increase every generation!! I've had no model for parenting in my life. This does not automatically disqualify me from being a potentially good father, but the parts of it that rubbed off on my personality DO disqualify me, I think. But imagine how seldom cases like mine would come about if people were honest enough about themselves to admit when they wouldn't make ideal parents!! Imagine if people would forego their desires to do what made sense!

*sigh* Me and my idealistic rants. People foregoing their desires to do what makes sense. Never happen, I know. And it's that that makes me want to be a parent sometimes.. ..the desire to convey to my children these ideas that most people find so ridiculous.

Was talking with an online friend of mine a while back, and one exchange went something like this:

Gah! This is so frustrating. My standards for parenting are so high they preclude ME from being a parent.

Her

Yes, I think so too sometimes. But without people like us being parents... ...who would pass on the standards?!

And I bought that. In fact, that's been the exchange that's settled the question for me everytime it's come to mind since then. But now I realize that to look at it that way is to LOWER the very standards I'm trying to perpetuate. It's trying to make an exception for myself. "Well, this wouldn't be a good idea for you, but here's why you should do it anyway." No! NO NO NO NO! That's the very thing I'm trying to avoid, and I'm not going to give in to it anymore.

I'm not going to resist locking up emotions anymore. Locking up emotions is not a bad thing. If I can intellectually come to the conclusion that certain emotions have no purpose in my life, then there is nothing wrong with killing those emotions. That's what everyone else says too, everyone else says you can't kill emotions, and even if you could you shouldn't.

Wrong on both counts. You can, and if they get in the way, why shouldn't you? After all, isn't my whole point that I shouldn't live up to the world's definitions and expectations of what I should feel?

Of course it is. Besides which, true emotion is just an extension of intellect. I haven't taken many education courses, but one thing I've picked up from a couple of the studio teachers in the music department is Bloom's Taxonomy, which divides a person's intimacy with a particular subject into six levels — knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. I haven't investigated or dwelled upon this enough to be able to fully defend myself, but I strongly believe that the seventh level is emotion. Emotion isn't just some vague amalgamation of thoughts and feelings, it's what happens when you're so intimate with something that a piece of knowledge MAKES you feel.

So if I can take this intellectual decision, follow through on it and discipline myself to the point that those emotions no longer bother me... ...it may very well be THE most emotional thing I've ever done.

3:27 am

2003-05-06T01:41:00.000-05:00

New URL! Update your bookmarks!

Oh yeah, I almost forgot---I got my own domain name, making me hopelessly non-anonymous. So both of you who ever check this, change your bookmark to http://www.75thtrombone.com/blog. The old Geocities URL will be broken in the future. (Hopefully, the very, VERY near future.)

2003-05-06T01:30:00.000-05:00

So I had this insanely long entry written, and I'm realizing it's way too long and verbose to be attention-keeping. So here's this. Hey! I'm back. Hope to blog regularly now. I'll try to condense the previous attempt into something interesting, that quickly gets things up to speed.

Suffice it to say for now that the semester's all but over. I have one final and some bureaucratic issues to take care of, the Commencement concert, and then I can go home.

I know for a fact that I've failed at least one class. Two others are borderline. I could look at my grades online, but I won't until I go home. It all doesn't matter anyway. No matter what happens scholarship-wise, this summer is the first season of the rest of my life.

I guess I'll probably rename/transplant my blog, too, since I hope it's not primarily about music rants for a very, very long time. I also want to remake it with absolutely-positioned DIVs instead of tables.

So bye fer now. Maybe I'll post something substantive in a day or three.

2003-03-07T22:48:00.000-06:00

Man, this week was bad. Bad bad bad. Bad. Ugh, bad. Terrible, horrible, awful.

I haven't blogged lately because Tuesday I had a nervous breakdown of sorts, and missed a lot of class that day and Wednesday, including opera rehearsal on Tuesday. But Monday and yesterday I had opera rehearsal, and boy howdy was it awful. Tonight we had our first performance, and it was even worse.

First there's the horn players. The second horn player is a high school sophomore who made first band All-State, and while her tone leaves some to be desired, she's all right technically. Then there's the FIRST horn player. She is a college sophomore who a lot of the time plays like an eighth grader. She's all right in lower stuff, but anything from the top half of the middle register up, she's unstable at best. And we won't even talk about tuning.

Then there's the timpani guy. He's in high school too, and he's obviously not very experienced tuning-wise. Just about all his pitches were at least a step flat, sometimes exactly that much----we had a LOT of V7 / IV chords tonight.

Finally there was the trumpet player. He's a lawyer in town, and an extremely nice guy, and very well in practice for someone who doesn't really play anymore. He's technically all right, but he tends to be sharp.

Combine that with the strings (some of them pros, so they sound better than the usual ASU contingent, but the ASU folks were scattered among them) and you get a whole lot of suck. The 1st horn player has a solo during the overture, and after cracking the first note, she just stopped playing tonight. (Yeah, she has that attitude.) The piano player came in to pick up the slack, and while it really pissed me off that the horn player just stopped, it really was probably for the best. Maybe the 2nd will play it tomorrow.

It all went downhill from there. Missed entrances, people being a measure or a couple of beats off but continuing to play, bad tuning galore and general mediocrity the whole way. Poor singers. They're doin' a fine job, and we're spoiling their show.

So that's the main rant for the week. As a lot of our majors are gone to the basketball conference tourney to play in pep band, we didn't have WE or jazz band the last two days. Thank goodness. The other two days of WE were the usual yadda yadda, as far as I remember. So was Tribe on Wednesday. I didn't go to conducting that day, I couldn't take it. Of course, I heard later that that day was a very good day; people just talked about conducting philosophy stuff. Of course, it might've been elementary, basic drivel and equally not worth my time. Dunno. *shrug*

Another performance of Don Pasquale tomorrow, and that's it for that opera. Thank goodness.

2003-03-03T17:46:00.000-06:00

Well, the day started off pretty well. After Percussion Tech (the only class in which I'm learning anything this semester, and I learn a LOT and I LOVE it) came jazz band. It was the usual yadda yadda. Mr. A only ever says two things when he works us. One is about accents, telling us we're never accenting the right notes, or accenting them hard enough. Which is valid sometimes, but it's 80% of what he ever says, and he says it the same ways every time, and he always says "Yeah, there ya' go" whether there's any change or not. The other thing he says is about tonguing, and it's ALWAYS about how we should never ever ever start notes with the tongue. Accents are with air, not tongue, he says.

This sort of thing pisses me off worse than the Mars stuff. The Mars stuff is 100% due to his complete incompetence as a conductor. That I can deal with. I can deal with him being incompetent on something to grotesquely obvious. This sort of thing, though, is something I can't write off so easily. I can't say "No, you moron, it's this way!" and be done with it. The no-tongue thing may have some validity in certain circumstances; it may be a bunch of bull crap. The point is that I can't know one way or another, and I certainly can't judge by our performances because nothing changes, even when Mr. A thinks or acts like it does.

I lean toward believing that it's a bunch of baloney because he says the same thing in Wind Ensemble, and I KNOW it's baloney there. I want to know what he hears that makes him think bands don't use tongue accents, or at least don't use them often. Sure, sure, it's possible to get too brash, but that's not because the articulation is wrong, that's because we're not good at controlling hard articulations. The answer isn't to do away with that kind of accent, the answer is to keep working on it until it sounds good, until the sounds stop splatting and spreading and they can fit on the head of a pin the way they're supposed to.

That's another big thing that bugs me about this university. There's all this focus and cliché teaching about "Nice, big, round, warm, open sounds." And yes, those are very good in certain contexts. But not in all contexts. There are some cases where you don't want warm and open and rich. There are times when you wantbrassy, edgey and, I daresay, thin. Not "thin" as in pinched-off or weak, but "thin" as in compact and bright. That is not inherently a bad thing, even if we ARE a symphonic band.

But for some reason, the people in positions of musical leadership here can't grok that. They can't listen to an orchestral recording and tell what makes it sound good; they listen for clichés like "balance," "blend," and other stuff like that. And don't get me wrong---that stuff does matter! But these people just throw the words around like they suddenly make us astute, aware, competent musicians. They don't actually teach the concepts, or how to attain them, or why and in what forms they can make bands sound good. "Balance" to them is the homogenous, generic, middle-of-the-road "band sound." They have no concept of the character or personality of music, yet claim to teach us "musicality." "Musicality" is the ultimate vague, nondescript, generic cliché. Every time Mr. A says it, I say "There's that word again!" because it gets thrown around, again, like its very use makes us deeper, more keenly aware musicians. But 99% of the time, what's going on when they say that is NOT music. It's reflexive, arbitrary dynamic changes and tempo changes, which is what we've been taught constitutes "musicality."

And it's not like Mr. A has real interpretations of things anyway. We played excerpts from the Finale of a Mahler symphony on the last concert. Slow, big, broad, gorgeous piece. Highly rubato. You know what Mr. A said about it? "I'm not going to conduct the tempo changes, I'm not going to conduct the musicality, because it will be much more real if you guys do it yourself." How much more nebulous, vague, and irresponsible can you get?! "I'm not going to conduct the music?!?" Then why the HELL are you on the podium, sir? Your job as a conductor is to develop a unified interpretation for the ensemble, and to help us understand it intellectually so we can even HOPE to put any emotion into it. THAT's your job. And what do you say to us? "I'm not going to conduct the music, that's your job." Man alive, that burns me up.

Well... ....that was a little rant there. And I haven't even detailed Wind Ensemble yet.

In Wind Ensemble we read the last movement of the Sparke thing again. I really was totally through paying attention to him for the day, besides which we were going to read Mars again afterward. The one thing I remember from the Sparke thing was the 7/8 bars, which, as always, you can count straight through in 4 and never look back. I have "2 + 2 + 78" written in as the subdivision above those measures, but in reality it's a perfect 2 + 2 + 4. He conducts 4/4 in 7/8 better than he conducts 4/4 in 4/4.

Then came Mars. He prefaced our read with the statement "I've studied the score this weekend.... ....a lot...." and with a half-embarrassed grin he finished, "and I know what I'm doing now."

I gasped audibly.

Sure enough, we got to the 5/2 and he conducted first in 10, then in a slow 5. Bravo, Mr. A. You understood the most rudimentary tempo issue in the piece. I should really be happy; this is more than we can hope for on many pieces.

Then was Music History which was cool. Watched part of a really cool video on Shostakovich and the political strife he went through in early 20th c. Russia. Interesting stuff.

Then was conducting. Oh. My. Gosh.

The problem today wasn't really musical in nature so much as mathematical. As previously stated in the blog, we have not yet conducted to a piece of music in Conducting class (it's just after midterm as I speak). We get up in front of the class and conduct to thin air whatever tempo, dynamic, meter, or style changes we're working on that particular week. Today was a "Skills" Test on conducting with the left hand only, so it was an amalgam of all those things.

Me and Jon (the sax player) went first, and we're sharp enough with Mr. A's blunders that we read between the lines of what he says to understand what he actually means to say. Sometimes Jon acts like he doesn't, but it's only an attempt to get Mr. A to realize what a moron he's being.

For example, one set of directions was "In 4/4 meter, conduct from pianissimo to fortissimo back to pianissimo, changing gradually [crescendo/decrescendoing], 2 bars of each..."

So he wants a two bar crescendo and a two bar decrescendo, right?

"...for a total of 6 bars."

This REALLY confused a couple of people who got up there, and so they tried to do what he had told them, which was in fact different from what he wanted. He wanted 4 bars, two of which to crescendo and two of which to decrescendo. But because he'd called out 3 dynamics, he multplied by two and said "6 bars," leading to their great confusion.

This went on through the entirety of these two poor girls' tests. He kept changing his directions, giving misleading instructions and numbers of measures each time. He meant to give us all the same test, but he knew so little of what he'd planned that he gave them things completely different from what he'd given me and Jon, who'd just read between the lines. He was perceptibly irritated with them, and I'm sure it hurt their scores that they had to start over.

Argh.. ..he's clueless as to what to teach in that class, and even then, he's clueless as to how to teach the stuff he TRIES to teach. He can't even figure out what instructions to give people to make them conduct TO THIN AIR. Qualified to be teaching the Advanced Conducting class he is indeed.

That's all for now. Opera orchestra rehearsal tonight. I may not be done for the day even yet.

2003-03-02T03:28:00.000-06:00

There, mostly fixed. I've ditched the rounded corners at the bottom for now, until macromedia.dreamweaver comes up with an answer for me.

Also, this is attempt 2 to see my blog on the Blogger.com front page.

2003-03-01T17:58:00.000-06:00

Blog will be temporarily broken as I rewrite the template to not be dumb in IE.

2003-02-28T14:25:00.000-06:00

Mars, The Bringer of War Apathy Incompetence

Well, I pulled one of my trademark all-nighters last night. Or, well, it wasn't quite one of my trademarks because I slept about four hours yesterday evening. But I was up from 11:00 to.... ...well, to now. I goofed off on the computer and got some stuff ready for my comp lesson, as well as finishing a project that the drummer that lives on my hall told me wasn't due any particular time, but was actually due yesterday.

I ended up skipping my 9:00 for like the dozenth time already. That's going to be a big problem at the end of the semester, I'm afraid. Can't drop any classes; I need all 18 hours this semester to keep my scholarship. 10:00 was my comp lesson with Dr. O and it went all right. We talked more about the Sparke symphony, talked about a performance date on the Brahms transcription I'm doing, and talked a while about PCs vs. Macs. He thinks most of the arguments people have are stupid, and on that I wholeheartedly agree with him.

11:00 came jazz band, and thank the Lord, the concert for tonight is CANCELLED. I dunno if it was his decision or that of the powers that be, and I don't really care. It was a whole lotta good news and really big weight off my shoulders.

Then came Wind Ensemble. We started with Mars again, but when we got to the 5/2, it looked like we were just going to go on playing as we should have. Mr. A wasn't on the right beat, of course, but he didn't complain when we played it the proper tempo. After a while, though, I could feel that he was just clueless; he thought he was hearing something completely different than was actually being played, because he has no grasp of anything when he's on that podium. So he stops us and """corrects""" us again. I wasn't going to say anything, but Jon (the sax player I mentioned before) raised his hand in the "Don't be dumb" sort of way. He, of course, phrased it in the form of a question: "Are we taking the 5/2 in 10? Are you conducting the quarter note?" or some such. Mr. A ""explained"" that he was conducting in 5. He was about to start again, when Jon continued: "Well, uh, er, uh, just, most of the recordings I've heard take it in 10.." I could tell he was really uncomfortable correcting Mr. A, so I jumped in with what I hoped was a clarification. "Quarter note equals quarter note." His response?

"No. Half note equals half note."

Repeating: To contradict "quarter note equals quarter note," he said "No. Half note equals half note."

Needless to say, I burst out laughing. I didn't have time to do it where he could hear, because he was too intent on starting us back up, now that he'd deigned to deal with our questioning him. He tried once to start us, but everyone knows the song well enough that they couldn't parse the incredibly idiotic stupid and retarded way they were being asked to play. They barely started at all, and Mr A just goes "Y'know what? Put that away." and he throws his score in the floor.

Good riddance.

We finished by reading Scenes from the Louvre, which is a pretty cool piece that we'll do a mediocre job of playing. Didn't have time to get to the Sparke thing today.

Sigh. So that's the end of the week. Another whole weekend in whose musiclessness to bask. See y'all tomorrow, when I'll be in a MUCH better mood.

2003-02-26T14:39:00.000-06:00

Woo-hoo! I found a free comment system that looks halfway decent! It's called enetation, and you can sign up at www.enetation.co.uk. You get full control over your templates, just like with Blogger, and to use it you just have to copy and paste the code it generates for you into your Blogger template. Looks like it's an independent thing, though, so DONATE! I'm going to. =-)

(Oh, and anyone who's out there, feel free to e-mail me, still, if ya' want.)

2003-02-26T08:48:00.000-06:00

I can't believe this. Apparently it sleeted some last night, and it was enough to make the roads bad enough that we're out of class again today. This is unprecedented.

And, music-wise, I bet this is making Mr. A really happy that the jazz band goes to concert Friday not having rehearsed in a week and a half. I'm sure I'll have a nice long update Friday night.

2003-02-25T12:31:00.000-06:00

WOOOO! No school! It snowed like crazy all night and our never-to-be-esteemed President of our never-to-be-esteemed University decided he wanted a day off.

Unfortunately, that means tonight's Symphonic Band concert will probably be off. Ah, well, I didn't really want to rant about an ensemble I'm not in anyway. ;-)

2003-02-24T16:01:00.000-06:00

Mars, The Bringer of Apathy

Hmm, interesting day today in Wind Ensemble.

Mr. A, after having seen the Intercollegiate Band rehearse and perform this past weekend, decided to make a change in our seating set-up. The horns, who had previously been smack in front of the trombones, are now in the center of the back row, followed clockwise by the tubas, us trombones, and the euphs. This delighted me, and is the only really truly good decision I can remember Mr. A making in WE in a long time (although I wonder what his reasoning was, if it exists). We're now behind the saxophones, which, other than one tense personal issue that it might inflame, is wonderful. Sitting next to the euphs is interesting, too. I sit next to euph 3, and he's not the greatest when it comes to pitch, but he's okay in the middle register. As such, he provides an excellent gauge as to whether my pitch problems are my fault or others'. It's a very interesting texture sitting between the euphs and the tubas as well, but I'm not sure how wise it is to separate them at all. I'm not sure whether there's any big reason to keep them together, but as they belong to the same studio, it might be smart to keep them next to each other. Speaking selfishly, though, it's a world of difference from what we had before and I'm pretty happy about it.

So rehearsal began with tuning, although I think he cut it short. Then we read the finale to the Sparke symphony. It went iffily, as per usual. I'm listening to the recording right now, and, as per usual, our tempos were way too slow. Yeah, that's typical for a first read, but I'd bet money that they don't get any faster by the time it goes to concert.

Then we read our arrangement of Mars from The Planets. This is a piece with which I'm intimately familiar, which made rehearsal that much more horrible. For starters, we played it WAY too freakin' slow. And I like it slower than most orchestras seem to like it; my favorite performance is the one on the old $5 Wal-Mart London Symphony recording. I think it's fantastic, and it's slower than the other recordings I've heard. But man, we took it ploddingly slow. We took it somewhere between 110 and 120 beats a minute, where the LSO recording is slow at 145. So that was bad, and the fact that he dropped beats in five or six measures didn't help.

THEN, though, we got to the transition from 5/4 to 5/2. Now, anyone who's ever listened to Mars, EVER listened to Mars, knows that the tempo stays the same, it's just the feel that changes. In fact, there are several places in 5/4 that have the exact same rhythm as the 5/2. It just spreads it out over two bars of 5/4 instead of one bar of 5/2. So yeah, the tempo STAYS THE SAME, the quarter note STAYS THE SAME. It even says so specifically on the orchestral score; I don't know about the band score. Anyone who has ever heard this piece knows that, and everyone has heard this piece. Right?

Well apparently Mr. A hasn't, because he took the 5/2 in double time. Instead of keeping the quarter note the same, he says quarter=half. So instead of this...

He thinks it's...

...which is entirely wrong and stupid sounding and generally idiotic. Can he not tell that's entirely wrong? Has he never heard the piece before? And if he hasn't, what the hell is he doing with a music degree?? Argh, it's frustrating. And this is something that I daren't say anything to him about, because the only way to do so would be to blatantly say "You're wrong and an idiot, sir.".

On the plus side of today, we didn't have jazz band. That's a good thing, except we have a concert this Friday. As layin'-the-smack-down as he's been lately, WHAT are we doing not having rehearsal the week of a performance? I'm sure he has his reasons, but as much of a hissy fit as he has if people are absent or late to rehearsal with an upcoming concert, he must have a dang good reason. Or a double-standard, one.

We had conducting, which was the usual yadda yadda. We started doing stuff with the left hand today, which, shockingly enough, is actually ahead of the time we introduced the left hand in Elementary Conducting. Of course that really doesn't matter, because all it means is we've ""only"" had half a semester of the thing we're learning as though it's new. Stupid, ridiculous. WE CAN ALREADY DO THIS STUFF, AND WE'RE SUPPOSED TO BE BUILDING ON WHAT WE DID LAST SEMESTER! Argh. I hate everything.

That's all for now. I'm off to listen to Mars to remember what it's supposed to sound like.

2003-02-23T20:09:00.000-06:00

"Conniving, deceitful, coarse little creature!"

Well, I went to the first rehearsal of our school's production of Don Pasquale tonight. I'm always taken aback by the voices that these people who're my age have. I mean, I know they're not ready for Carnegie Hall or anything (although I think our choir actually performed there a couple of years ago). I can tell the difference, especially since I played this opera before.

Two summers ago I took part in what's called The Wildwood Festival. It's in Little Rock, and along with a bunch of other artistic stuff, they do two or three operas every summer. Well, thanks to the hook-up from our oboe professor, I got to go. We did La Boheme and Don Pasquale, and those singers were pretty awesome. They weren't perfect, either, but they were almost to the point where someone who's not a voice connoisseur (and I'm sure not one) couldn't tell.

The education was good, and the pay was good, but I made the experience pretty awful. I wasn't as in practice as I should've been when I went, for starters, but that was overcomeable. What wasn't overcomeable, however, was my complete inability to tune when I'm playing. I don't know if it's a big mental block or something that actually happens to my hearing when I'm playing. But the good sense of pitch I have when I stand in front of a group totally goes to pot when I pick up my horn. And for that month of rehearsing and performing those two operas, I was the problem in the orchestra. I was the one everyone bitched about when we got back to our rooms. I was the one who the conductor had to ignore because I was hopeless. I almost got fired for it.

Man, that was an eye-opening experience. And it was brought back to me really strongly this afternoon. Because I can't tune here, either. As horrible and awful as the pitch here is, I'm still part of the problem. I've been thinking "If only I were somewhere where people can really play, where there were REAL musicians, I'd be able to shine." But I had that chance. I had that month at Wildwood with some damn good, if still young, players. And it only amplified my weaknesses, instead of giving me a chance to overcome them. I played this part that I played two summers ago, and I remember all the desperation, all the pointlessness I felt two summers ago when I was THE problem. I felt it like it was yesterday. And then I wake up, listen to myself play, and realize that I don't sound any better in this context. I'm just as out of tune, just as technically deficient --- and this is not a technically demanding part --- around these people. And these people are nothing to scream about. Our string section.... ....gyosh. Horrible. There's one girl I'm sort of friends with who's really good, and then there's Dr. B's wife who plays cello, and she's pretty good. Our own violin teacher is horrendous. The woodwinds are good, but the rest of the brass is nothing to write home about. And I still sound like crap in relation to them. I have no business thinking I'd magically be better if I were somewhere where there's better leadership. And I have no business thinking I can teach something I can't even figure out how to do well myself.

2003-02-22T20:22:00.000-06:00

This is really cheap, but I'm just testing to see if this appears on the blogger.com front page. :-)

EDIT: No, it sure didn't! It skipped right from a set of 10 at 6:21 to a different set of 10 at 6:23. Jerks. :-P

2003-02-22T15:40:00.000-06:00

How Sacred is the Page?

Well, I haven't updated as regularly as I thought I would. That's mostly due to the fact that I felt a little guilty about being so overtly critical of this school that pays me to go here. I AM here voluntarily, more or less, after all. So instead of just being rants, I'm gonna post all sorts of musical musings. Many of which will no doubt be rants, but at least I won't feel guilty about 'em. That probably means I'll be even harsher than I originally planned to be. ;-)

So I've been having this interesting musical philosophy debate with a few people lately. The Wind Ensemble finished our concert on Tuesday with the first movement of Philip Sparke's Symphony for Band, "Earth, Water, Sun, Wind." The first movement is Earth (obviously), and to set it up for a transition to the next movement, it ends on this big fat unison A. The problem is, we didn't play the second movement, and the end of the first movement is (more or less) in the key of D. So you get these huge D major and Dmaj7 chords, which lead up to ending on A. The dominant. The fifth scale degree. This is not a good way to end a song, and this was our concert closer. We ended a concert on a half-cadence.

Well, we found out the program order four days before the concert, and I spent those four days fuming, trying to get someone to realize how stupid this was. My list of allies, however, grew thinner than I expected.

First I said something about it to Mr. A himself after rehearsal. I didn't expect this to get me anywhere, but I wouldn't've had a clear conscience if I hadn't tried. I explained to him what I thought about the harmony at the end, and how I thought it could be easily fixed if we just changed the last note to a D across the band. I had my trombone in my hand and so I played "before and after" examples of what I thought would make sense. He contemplated that for maybe half a second, and then muttered some stuff about "Yeah, I know, that ending is so abrupt.. ..I had thought about doing something like just holding out the last chord really long..." He obviously was completely clueless about what I'd said about the harmony. Didn't get it at all. I nodded my head and wandered off.

Then I said something about it to my friend Jon (sax player). He quickly discounted what I thought. "So? That's what he wrote. You can't change what the composer wrote; that note isn't 'wrong.' " And that's true; the note isn't "wrong," per se. Indeed, there are many who think what Jon thinks, that the note a composer writes on the page is immutable. I disagreed with that to an extent; my opinion was that in a situation like this, where we're taking a piece out of context (by playing it apart from the other movements), the damage is already done and we are obligated to repair what damage we've done by making the piece make sense on its own.

In the case of the Sparke symphony, that note at the end of the first movement serves two functions.

It ends the movement. How does it do that? By being a big, loud unison hit.
It sets the listener up for the second movement. How does it do that? By being an A.

Since we don't play the second movement, (2) is made obsolete, and therefore I think you hurt the piece more by leaving the pitch the way it was written. The pitch's task is changed to augmenting the closure of the piece, and in our case, the concert. So I think it's okay to change the note.

Well, at this point, I was more than aware that I had a music philosophy debate, and so I got online to talk to my friend David. David lived in the dorm until this past fall, and we'd always go back and forth about whatever piece of music gossip or philosophy was on the table at the time. The important (and maybe interesting) parts of that conversation (sans smileys, which MSN doesn't save) follow:

SFT says:

Hey

Dave says:

hey

SFT says:

Okay, I have a hypothetical situation for you. Say you have a multi-movement piece, all of whose movements are connected. At the end of the first movement is a unison V. Not a V chord, just a V... ...it's set up plain as day with a bunch of I stuff preceding it, and then ends smack on V. 1) Is it acceptable to play just this movement as a standalone piece? 2) If you do, is it acceptable to change the last note to the tonic for purposes of being a complete piece?

Dave says:

hmmm

Dave says:

i believe (1)

Dave says:

what time range of piece are we speaking of

SFT says:

Contemporary... Last 10 years

Dave says:

contemporary? oh yeah. end on v all day long

SFT says:

Okay, one more piece of information: What if this were the last piece on a concert? Your closer, your finale.

Dave says:

hmmm... i still say ok

Dave says:

but... i would not program the piece there

SFT says:

Okay, so you think it's vitally important not to change the note because that's what the composer put there?

Dave says:

yes

Dave says:

however, i have a reputation for being wildly faithful to original pieces in transcriptions

SFT says:

Well, transcriptions are different, kinda sorta.

Dave says:

so, it might be ok

SFT says:

I think you have more of an obligation to be faithful in a transcription than you do in a performance of the original, actually. But....... .............I really think it's silly to say "The composer wrote that note, therefore you have to play it." Because he wrote that note in the context of the whole symphony. If you play just one movement of it (which I think is acceptable), no matter WHERE you program it, I think you have the right to change the last note to tonic (since it makes sense that way) to make it a complete piece. That's like saying to play anything from the Nutcracker at Christmas, you have to hire dancers and do the ballet part...... ......if you take a piece out of context, it's okay to make changes since the most major change is made by taking it out of context in the first place. And if your conscience is burning at the thought of changing one note, you need to rethink your decision to take the piece out of context in the first place. IMHO.

Dave says:

well, depends on which philosophy of transcriptioning you subscribe to (i know it's not exactly the same). some people believe as you do, some do not. Dr. O [composition professor]... would probably side with you. however, i still don't. i believe the audience would understand that there is more to come

SFT says:

The audience doesn't want to think that much. The audience wants a performance. They want to think, but they don't want to meta-think about the bureaucratic part of the music

Dave says:

i think changing that one note makes it an arrangement of the piece, whether one is intended or not

SFT says:

So does playing a single movement not then make it an arrangement as well?

Dave says:

if someone changed the last chord of the chaccone of 1st suite, you would be infuriated, true? ...if it were played alone (i know it's not V)?

SFT says:

You don't NEED to change the last chord of the Chaconne of the 1st Suite. It's all about programming, it's all about entertaining. I don't like the idea of playing the Chaconne alone that much. But you could, and it would be a complete piece. Playing the first movement of the Sparke thing and ending it as written is like..... ....like.... ....it's like Martin Luther King Jr. giving his I Have a Dream speech, full of declamations and exclamations, then ending with "BUT!!" ..............and walking off the podium

Dave says:

well, then don't just play the 1st mvt. if he said "BUT", he meant to say something else, eh? you should let him finish speaking

SFT says:

But see, I think then that we take composers too seriously... ...the way he ends the first movement is INTENTIONALLY to bridge 1 and 2. That's its function. If you don't play 2, it's not needed in its current form, and can be changed. It's not like he wrote that note and got God's seal of approval. We might excerpt part of King Jr.'s speech, but we wouldn't end on a transition just because that's what his index cards said was at the end of that part of the outline

Dave says:

well, then why not just rewrite any parts of any piece you don't like? we have to respect composer's intent to an extent, even if we don't like it

SFT says:

If they don't make sense, sure! for starters, that horrible transition by Robert Smith in Encanto. I'd have no problems changing that if I could find a way that made sense.

SFT says:

Because you KNOW Robert Smith was looking for a better idea and then hit his deadline

Dave says:

well, many people out there disagree with all of that. first, if you don't like the transition of encanto, don't play the piece. that means that it is a poorly contrived piece and bad music

Dave says:

well, you asked my opinion

SFT says:

I wasn't meaning to lambast you, I just wanted to pick your brain further

SFT says:

But one more example.... One more thing to throw at you: When the ASO played that Rachmaninov symphony, they talked about how there are a few cuts that orchestras have put in it ever since it was written. CUTS in a piece. And some of the old symphonies have repeats that aren't observed all the time. Is there a difference between those two things and what we're talking about?

Dave says:

i say no difference, and i believe they are wrong

Dave says:

or *i don't agree with what they did*

SFT says:

Heh, okay. Well I'm actually thinking about seeing if I can e-mail Philip Sparke and get his philosophy on it

Dave says:

you're just not going to rest, are you?

SFT says:

Haha, it's just something that intrigues me

Dave says:

well, in my defense... what other form of art or literature do we freely change what the author/artist/composer intended? or at least without specific notations of why and what?

SFT says:

Anytime we translate anything into English, like every opera every written

Dave says:

translation is much different

SFT says:

Which is FINE because it DOESN'T MAKE SENSE for English-only-speaking audie------------Oh realllllllllly?

Dave says:

changing words in literary terms as you speak of is a sacrilege. changing things in translation is much different. it's like an edition, much more liberty in an edition...

SFT says:

Okay fine.... .....I say that changing the last note of Sparke Earth is a //translation// to the language of Single Movement Piece

Dave says:

...because we change into another form to explain the composer's intent

SFT says:

YES! That's exactly what I'm doing! Composer's intent is to end on a big, low short unison hit to complete the movement. The fact that it's a V is ONLY because of the fact that it attaches to movement II. It does not change his intent one iota to change that to tonic

Dave says:

but...you can't call it philip sparke

SFT says:

Yes you can!

Dave says:

you must call it sparke...ed. heidbreder

Dave says:

nope, and that's pushing it

Dave says:

for all the time composer's spend crafting each specific note of a piece, to let you *change a note* just because you can't play the last 3 mvts of his piece... ticheli wouldn't stand for this

SFT says:

Yes, but that note is a node.... ..... ..... ....that pitch isn't part of his grand scheme of things.. ..it's a transition... ...it's not something he spent time crafting

Dave says:

then you should learn the last 3 mvts

SFT says:

Well we're gonna

Dave says:

then you should wait to play it then

SFT says:

Do you believe in EVER separating a movement from its piece?

Dave says:

of course

SFT says:

Well as much time as that composer spent crafting all those movements to go together, I don't see why you shouldn't play all of them like he intended

Dave says:

adagio cantabile, my transcription... 2nd mvt of beethoven piano sonata

SFT says:

Ah, right. Respond to what I just said, then. =-)

Dave says:

i specifically notated that we were doing an excerpt. and if i didn't, shame on me. just like when you quote part of someone's else's quote in a newspaper

SFT says:

Okay, so if you denote on the program that you've changed, you think it's okay?

Dave says:

yes. but i was incredibly faithful to beethoven's original

SFT says:

So if we did that and put "Edited for play as a standalone piece" it would be fine by you

Dave says:

oh sure

SFT says:

Ahhhhhhh okay... ...now it clicks. =-)

SFT says:

Yeah, I probably agree with that, actually.

Dave says:

(gasp)...we actually agree on something

Well, Tuesday we had our concert, and we ended on V. Then Thursday I had a composition lesson with Dr. O, the one David said would probably agree with me. Well, turns out he did NOT agree with me. He said that it's never acceptable to change the note on the page, and if the note on the page is that wrong then you shouldn't program the piece there, or program it at all. Then, though, he said that he didn't notice anything wrong with the last note. He's a really sharp guy when it comes to that stuff, and he said it sounded like the concert was over just fine. So I went back and listened to the real recording I have. And in listening to the way he scores the last few chords, I now think that I was a little too set in my ways. I think Sparke wrote the Dmaj7 chord just before the end specifically to obscure the harmony. It sounds like a I on the bottom of the band, but like a V on the top. So while the note definitely functions as a V if you go on, it passes as a I if you just end there.

So for this particular piece, there's an easy out; Sparke wrote it to go either way, and my fuming was pointless. But that doesn't change the underlying philosophical question; is the page, as written by the composer, sacred? Or should a responsible, thinking conductor (or a conductor with responsible, thinking musicians) be able to change things when it seems appropriate? If any of you composer-types are reading, or if anyone else has a strong opinion/philosophy on the issue, e-mail me.

2003-02-17T14:05:00.000-06:00

Hmm, well today was a very light day, really.

Mr. A was sick and only came for Wind Ensemble. We didn't have jazz band or Conducting, which are two of the main sources of complaints. And because he was sick, he wasn't as fury-inducing as usual in Wind Ensemble.

We started off with our usual tuning routine. Or, more accurately, our "inevitable, immutable" tuning routine. It goes something like this:

Remington F warmup (F, E, F, Eb, F, D, etc.)
Tuning F from 1st clarinet
Tuning F from band
Tuning F from 1st clarinet
Tuning F from band
Tuning F from tubas, adding low brass, then low woodwinds, and on up the band
After adding all sections, Remington F warmup

It's the same routine. Every. Single. Day. And it does no good, because there's no work done other than that. Occasionally, when we're really lucky, he has all the prinicipal players play an F, then adds seconds, thirds, and on down, but it's the same situation. There's no attempt to find a pitch center. And it's worse because after tuning to our 1st clarinet, then we tune to the tubas, who are inevitably sharper than the clarinet. No attempt is made to fix this, or to even point it out. So we start rehearsal with awful pitch, and a lot of people not even knowing it.

It's especially funny lately, because Mr. A has taken to telling us how very very close we are to really centering in on a pitch center. Trust me, it's no better than it's ever been... ...in fact, compared to last year or the year before, it's much worse (even though he's touting us as "the most in-tune Wind Ensemble ever." Schmeh).

Gotta run, will finish later.

SFT

2003-02-17T00:20:00.000-06:00

CSS tip: Don't ever use percentages for top-margin values. I just spent three hours tracking down a problem to a single CSS declaration.

Anyway, now that I'm done giving the vital stats, I thought I'd give some backstory about each of these guys. (There'll be more guys in the future to be sure, but these are the main ones I have day-to-day dealings with.)

Mr. A gets the majority of the griping around the building, and for good reason. Good a guy though he may be, he's grossly inept to be the director of the top ensembles at a major university. His sense of tempo and rhythm is non-existent. His concept of pitch is sketchy and inconsistent at best. His conducting patterns border on illegibility, and his rehearsal technique is generic, cliché, and static.

Conducting class is little better; after a MONTH of Instrumental Conducting, he just now has us conducting meters other than 4/4. What we've covered so far takes us three or four weeks into the semester of Elementary Conducting, which we all had last semester. We have not yet conducted a piece of music in class.

He's mentioned rehearsal preparation many times, emphasizing that you have to try to figure out ahead of time what mistakes will likely be made. And indeed, he seems to practice what he preaches. But these are the only mistakes he hears. He doesn't use his ears in Wind Ensemble, not a bit; he seems incapable of detecting mistakes and fixing them on the fly. Every day he comes down with his big book of band director clichés and gives us whichever ones he planned for that day.

And these are just general, universal things he does. Wait 'till you see each day's complaints.

Then there's Dr. C. I won't be complaining about him very much (except in flashbacks) since Marching Band isn't in and I'm not in his bands. We still have run-ins occasionally, though.

Dr. C is a slight improvement on Mr. A in most departments. His conducting is legible, his musical decisions have SOME modicum of thought behind them, and he's capable of hearing mistakes as they happen.

I suppose the biggest complaint about him is his personality, and the way it shows in rehearsals. He seems more intent on using big words and elite terminology than actually fixing problems. In marching band, he'll use drum corps terms that only a few people know, with no offer to explain them and no chance to ask for clarification. Same goes in concert band---he'll use musical terminology that's completely valid, but unnecessary and totally unhelpful.

Sometimes this personality is a plus---at least there's something to pay attention to, unpleasant though it may sometimes be---but more often it's so glaring that it distracts completely from any progress he might otherwise make.

Dr. B is incredibly more competent than either of the other two. He has real musical opinions and ideas and interpretations. His conducting is very clear. The problem with him is his demeanor and attitude. He has the nickname "Capt. Adagio" (or Lt. Largo, or Admiral Andante, if you prefer). There's a reason for that, and it's more than just his choices of tempo.

He's laid back, man. He's very laid back. He's so laid back he's comatose. He's so laid back, you can never tell whether he's enthusiastic, bored, irritated, ecstatic, or any variation in between. So he comes across as never being any of those things, and all he exudes is a middle-of-the-road apathy. And it's saddening (and maddening) because he's NOT apathetic. He really does care, he's really passionate about music and about teaching it. But in striving to change from the throwing-chairs-across-the-court type of teacher he used to be, he's become just the opposite. Not an iota of oomph or exertion is allowed to escape him, and as such, he doesn't bring any out of his ensembles. His philosophy is that the students or players should care enough to exert all the energy themselves, and in utopia that's true. But this isn't a perfect world, and without a lead to follow, people are lazy and default to whatever's comfortable. And playing music with passion can't be done in a comfortably lazy way.

SO... ...there's my initial rants. Please remember as you read this blog that I really REALLY like and respect all these guys personally. But the position I'm in right now is so much of a joke that I can't take it without some kind of release. This is my release, and you may not hear very many more positive things come out of my mouth about them in this blog.

SFT

2003-02-16T20:00:00.000-06:00

Okay, I've got it looking quasi-acceptable, and I've set up an e-mail account in case any of you Blog surfers want to comment (for starters, if any of you know anything I could do with the massive expanse of white space to your right). Don't say anything you don't want posted, though, 'cause you'll be rare enough for me to post everything I get. ;-)

So I thought since I'm bored and have time, I'd give brief bios for the main people I'll be ranting about. These will just be dossiers, with rants saved for actual blog entries. I'll do my best in future posts to separate my professional opinion of these folks from my personal opinion. Should the line get blurred, however (as it's wont to do when I'm pissed off at one of 'em), my personal opinion expressed here takes precedence over anything I say later.

Mr. A

Director of Bands

Director of the Wind Ensemble (1st concert band)
Director of the 1st jazz band
Assistant Director of the Marching Band
Teaches Methods and Materials class
Teaches Instrumental Conducting (read: Conducting II) class

Mr. A's a very cool guy, and very intelligent in a lot of ways. In addition to his band directing career, he has computer programming in his background, although it's been a long time since he was part of that scene.

Dr. B

Director of the local community orchestra
Director of the Orchestra
Director of the Trombone Choir
Trombone studio instructor
Graduate studies advisor

Dr. B's a great Christian guy, whose advice I respect a lot. He's never abrasive or harsh with any of his students, content to let them be their own disciplinarians.

Dr. C

Assistant Director of Bands

Director of the Marching Band
Director of the Symphonic Band (2nd concert band)
Director of the Lab Band (2nd jazz band)
Saxophone studio instructor

Dr. C just came on the faculty in Fall '02. He's got a very VERY outgoing personality and a propensity to crack one-liners constantly.

2003-02-16T12:48:00.000-06:00

Hey, all.

I'm a music ed major at a midwestern state university, and I've recently found the need for a forum to vent my spleen of the idiocy and incompetence I surround myself with every day. A personal journal just isn't cutting it anymore, plus I wanted others to hear my rants and possibly comment on them, either to sympathize with me because they're going through the same thing elsewhere, to assure me that it's not so bad elsewhere, or even maybe to ask me further questions if they're thinking about coming here, so I can counterbalance the rose-colored recruiting they suffer from everyone else.

I'll try to make an entry each day, and those days where I don't have anything to rant about (i.e. weekends) I'll try to post some backstory, or faculty bios, or incidents from months past that I feel are particularly telling.

For now I'm just formatting the thing, and it will probably move to my own webspace soon. So for any hopeless band nerds (like me) that stumble across this blog, stay tuned. If nothing else, you'll learn how NOT to teach music some day. Lord knows I have.

SFT