What the----?

Yet again, another rant on contemporary art music.

On thursday, I had the absolute "privelege" of sitting in a darkened classroom listening to a ten-minute recording of a "pling pling" song done on the piano. It sounded exactly like that: imagine someone playing completely random whole notes on the piano for ten damn minutes. Let me explain. This year, our school is hosting three visiting composers who present snippets of their work, followed by a discussion about composition and all that that entails. A few weeks ago, Gunther Schuller came and we listened to one of his symphonies (10 minutes of diverse, stimulating music), followed by a question and answer session. He was amazing and adorable. He wore a blue-plaid blazer, short blue socks exposing elderly ankles, loafers, and bifocals hanging around his neck, while clutching a green-flowered tote-bag between his knees. He talked about how writing a score with pencil (as opposed to composing on the computer) connects the mind with the heart through the fingers, and how a score can be visually stunning as well as engaging. He talked about, how as a child growing up in Germany, had to sing Bach chorales everyday at the start of school. His parents were professional musicians who played music constantly, and little Gunther, like a little sponge, apparently sang Wagner's Tannhauser in the bathtub--imitating all the different instruments, while he played with his rubber duckies. At eleven he was studying medieval scores in the New York City Public Library. He also talked about jazz, and how it hasn't changed since the sixties--the bass players having to play the "same goddamn E-Flat seven chord over and over again," (direct quote--he swears like a sailor). The whole discussion was amazing and enlightening. Contrast that with this: a man in his sixties with messy, balding gray hair and wrinkled clothes, as if he had just rolled out of bed or walked through a wind storm, prefacing his presentation with the promise to discuss "compositional methodology" after listening to his compositions for an hour and fifteen minutes. I jotted down "compositional methodology" in my notebook because it sounded important. The lights were dimmed, and a fifty-second contemporary piano piece tinkled through the speakers. Great. Second piece: Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin, 3 minutes, 13 seconds (Okay, why is he playing this? There must be a reason? But must he play the whole thing? We've all heard it before...). Next: a 13 minute, 38 second EXTREMELY SLOW piano "pling-pling" piece (What the----?). For the first ten minutes I sat there stunned. Can he be serious? I looked around: the "composer" stood by the CD player, drinking, what I'll assume was coffee, out of a styrofoam cup. The screen was down and cast a blue haze around the room--I kept waiting for something visual to pop up to pique my interest. Nothing. I looked around. Everyone was looking at their desk--were they as confused as I was? I attempted to study for a forthcoming history test later that day. Meanwhile, I was feeling ill--it was such an uncomfortable feeling to sit there and listen to this, this utter bullshit--and I was getting angrier and angrier that he expected us to sit here and listen patiently. I looked on the list he gave us of other works he was planning on playing that hour. I just about passed out: the next pieces were, respectively, 3 minutes, 10 minutes, 12 minutes, and 19 minutes long. For f's sake! If this piece was any indication of what the rest of the pieces would be like, I'd rather watch ants eating crumbs for two hours. I was fuming. I sat there full well knowing that the vein in my temple was beginning to throb and imagined steam coming out of my ears like a Popeye cartoon. How arrogant! That we're supposed to sit here and take this crap, this utter waste of my time? His "music" embodied everything I hate about contemporary art music--it's inaccessible and borders more on annoying sound than music. Indeed, can this even be called music? I'm sorry, but John Cage was doing this in the forties, scraping seeds out of a pomegranite under a microphone. Been there, done that. I couldn't take it anymore. Knowing what torture lie ahead, I quietly closed my notebook (in which I had hoped to jot down some insightful thoughts on the compositional process), and left the room through the back door. Luckily there was a back door, and that I decided to sit there before the torture started. I was hoping that my leaving would start a whole stream of students walking out, to teach him a lesson. I'm still stunned. This man is supposedly a great theorist and composer, but what I witnessed was anything but. I was guessing that he had really come unprepared and just decided to thrust his crappy random whole notes onto us. For all I know they could have had a riveting discussion after the "music" was done playing. But the fact that he expected us to sit through this amount of "music" for over an hour made me want to vomit. If you want to present your music, please play only 1 minute of each. Then say, "Oh, it pretty much sounds like this for the next fifteen minutes. That would have been fine. I think I can tolerate anyone's music for 1 minute. Was it wrong of me to walk out? Should I have given him a chance?

Grrr....

I need to vent. I feel like I'm working a 60-hour a week job with none of the benefits, like a salary, pension, or health insurance. Ok, yes I get most of my tuition paid for, and 80 bucks every other week, but still, I'm really just a slave working for 2 cents an hour. The amount of homework and paper-grading I had to do this past 3-day weekend was insane. And I was only able to get about 1/3 of it done. Saturday was spent recovering from the previous week, but Sunday and Monday I worked literally all day long. What is this slave labor that pretends to be graduate school? Ever concerned with how things ought to be done in education, rather than the way things actually are, it seems counter-intuitive that graduate students, A) have more work than undergrads (grad students have more responsibilities in general: bills to pay, children to feed, etc.), and B) the graduate students with assistantships have to take at least 10 credits a quarter, but yet they have more work to do outside of school work (grading papers, teaching classes, running the recital hall, making copies, sending out emails, heading committees--ie--the busy work of professors). And this makes sense how? I'm so busy with miscellaneous "stuff" that I don't have time to do the thing I came to grad school for: music. Writing music, performing music, listening to music. I'm wondering how I'm ever going to put together a recital when I've been averaging about one composition per 3 quarters. Seriously, I just finished a composition I started at the beginning of fall quarter. Ug! Not only do we have all this misc. "stuff" to do, our graduate program here is so stuffed with credits (60, compared with the 30 of most grad programs) that I am forced to take large ensemble and private lessons even though they are indirectly related to my specific degree program. Even more aggrivating, it that it is an unwritten rule that all grad students take 2 years of lessons and large ensemble when the graduate catalogue says I only have to take a year.

On top of all this, I don't have time for real life: exercising, corresponding with friends and family, sending thank-you notes for birthday and Christmas presents received, reading for pleasure, writing for pleasure, making crafts, playing piano for fun (I don't have time to play the used piano I just bought! It is a beautiful upright I found for 300 bucks), and the list goes on and on. By the time my weekend comes, I am spent. But if I don't do homework during the weekends, the next week is completely shot. If this is what being in the academic or real working world is like, I want nothing to do with it. I don't want to spend my life feeling frazzled and stressed out. I'm crabby, tired, always feeling like I'm coming down with something, stiff and sore from not exercising, and just plain not happy.

It all makes me wonder about the efficacy of graduate school, and of institutionalized education in general. I feel like I'm not learning anything except how to cut corners, speed read chapters in my music history books, practice once a week and get away with it, and in general, half-ass everything. I really feel like I won't be a "master" of music when I'm done--just a master of faux-learning.

Rainy day feeling

Since I've turned 29, (or really, when I turned 27), I've been realizing that people my age and younger are doing amazingly cool things with their lives. I've been feeling lately that I've wasted my twenties. This is partly in response to Kelly's latest blog on feeling envy for those Gen X'ers that are published authors now. I also feel not only jealousy but anger: what opportunities did they have that I didn't? What allows them to bypass all that mental bullshit that I put up with every time I try and create? Are these people trust-funders? Do they have the energy to create because they don't have to work? How do they get stuff done? Mostly it's anger at myself. I'm really just lazy. Every time my brain tells me I need to practice or write or whatever, I make up a good excuse like, I need to go outside and enjoy this beautiful day! Or I need to watch this Rick Steves show on Toledo so I can imagine that I'm there. What's the deal? Why do I deny myself happiness and creativity at every turn? Lately I've been suffering from extreme boredom, which K has told me might be a sign of depression. Which explains a lot actually. I always have to remind myself that I'm doing something exciting with my life now--working on a master's degree in a subject I love. But when I get home from school, and it's dark out, I feel extremely bored and apathetic. Which also might be seasonal disorder. Anyway, depression or not, I've decided I just have to do "it" and not think about it. A friend of mine in Eugene who plays the saxophone regularly at a local jazz club says "I practice whether I want to or not." I always try to keep that in mind. If I can just get to the intrument/notebook/canvas/sewing machine, that's the hardest step, and the rest takes care of itself. I also remind myself that Laura Ingalls Wilder didn't start writing the Little house series until she was in her 60's. I think sometimes seasoned creators are better than young ones anyway, because they have real life experiences behind them, and not just some MFA from Columbia.

Bursting Pomegranites=Sexy Symbolism

I did something I never thought I'd do. I read The Da Vinci Code. I wasn't ever planning on reading it although I've had coworkers recommend it to me. In fact it was my office mate at school who loaned it to me after I loaned him a few books from the Narnia series. I'm like, yeah, whatever, I can't read something that's on the NY Times bestseller list. I'm not snooty or anything, but I thought it would be a really cheesy read. Which it sort of was. But the thing is, I really enjoyed this book! I couldn't put it down! Do you believe that? It has everything a good novel should have--cheesy dialogue, a good plot, accessible, good writing and short chapters. It read kind of like a Hollywood script--the main characters are good-looking and virile, and it's non-stop, fast-paced action. It's a really damn compelling read. I had heard what the story was about--about the possibility of Jesus being married to Mary Magdalene, but it was more than that. It opened my eyes to the world of symbology, art history, iconography, cryptology, mythology, egyptology, and all those other -ologies that one could study at Harvard or some other such school. I became obsessed with this story--and not just the Jesus/Mary myth, but all the supposed symbols hidden in art and literature that tell this story. The author really did his research. All the stuff he talks about is based on real scholarship. I know, because I'm researching it all right now, in the midst of starting school and having to read about Renaissance music (which is related! There is tons of symbolism/numerology hidden in medieval/ren. music).

I'm getting reacquainted with my old love of ancient history. In sixth grade I was obsessed with Ancient Egypt and did book reports and diaramas on the Book of the Dead. I also loved the myths of Atlantis and the Loch Ness monster. I secretly want all of these myths to be true, because they're so magical. And, if you haven't read the book, did you know that supposedly the Holy Grail isn't a thing, but a person--Mary Magdalene? The ancient symbol for a woman is a "V", which was called the "chalice." And supposedly the "grail" once held the blood of Jesus. Which, when you look at this literally, you know what that means, right? And all this talk of "vines" and "branches" in the Bible--I wonder if they're secretly referring to Jesus' bloodline--his actual descendents. Wow, isn't that cool?

This interest in mystery, I think, all comes from my love of Nancy Drew and the History Detectives. Da Vinci Code was kinda like a combination of those two things. And it's full of art history and conspiracy theories! What more could you want? There's even a line in the book that made me laugh out loud: "Please.....no. That's Madonna of the Rocks!"

Happy New Ear

This is what the sign in front of the General Store said. I wonder if someone stole the "Y" or some cheeky employee made the sign that way. It's so fun when people tamper with public signs, don't you think? This past summer, Kelly, Ken and I had lunch at the Highland Grill in St. Paul, and while we were waiting for art history prof. Joanna to show up, we witnessed this very phenomena right across the street at the Highland Theater. I think the sign was supposed to advertise Bill Murray in "Broken Flowers" but some smartass changed the letters around so it said "Big Boner Shower." We laughed heartily and took a picture--and just in time too--not moments later an employee changed the letters back. It's not too often that I witness little passing moments like that. Just think of all the people who missed it. Fun with letters! It's like Sesame Street, but dirtier. Speaking of Sesame Street, Ken just downloaded the 12345-6789,10-11 12 video from Sesame St. It's so trippy, and it was sung by the Pointer Sisters. Have you listened to it lately? It's very funky and cutting edge for a kid's show. And now it's all watered down with Elmo's World. Grrr, don't get me started. Lately we've been immersed in the first season DVD of the Muppet Show. Talk about trippy! Their heads are always blowing up, or the monsters eat each other. There's even smoking and drinking! I love it. I have a new love for Sweetums, whom I used to be afraid of when I was little. He is kind of scary, but when you get the humor, he's funny too. How fun would it be to make puppets and then have them throw pies in each other's faces? Now that's art.

I just sent 11 inches of my hair through the mail the other day. What a relief! I had been thinking about cutting my hair for awhile and finally just did it. I managed to find a great hairstylist who isn't one of those annoying Aveda types. The salon is just this mom and pop kinda place where they played 80's music (getting my hair cut to Abba and Huey Lewis!). It was a great time. I was having anxiety the night before, wondering if I could actually go through with it, because it takes so darn long to grow out. But my horoscope in the newspaper said, "Try something different." So I decided to go through with it. It wasn't even scary. I got a cute short cut that's very Amelie, with some lowlights and highlights. It's weird. It doesn't feel surprising to me, or different in a way. It's like I was in this long, enchanted sleep where I dreamt I had long hair, and when I woke up it's just like I've always had it--short. I don't miss it at all. It was very heavy and tangly. And old-fashioned. I donated it to Locks of Love. The woman at the post office was pretty impressed I had just cut 11 inches off my hair. It's a brave thing to do but totally worth it. Especially to give it to someone who can use it.

Tomorrow we are headed for Portland, and then the Oregon Coast for a mini-vacation. I can't wait. I'm sure I'll have tales of sea lions (hopefully not puking ones. We witnessed that once and it was the most disgusting thing I had ever seen--or smelled) and octopi when I get back.

My new year's resolution? To stay motivated and find my creative process. And to not procrastinate. And to be flexible enough to do the splits.

So This is Christmas

I just found out today that a friend of mine from college has cancer. How can this happen? How can a young person have a malignant tumor in her colon? It seems so unreal, like a horrible dream. Christmas seems so superficial now, with all the shoppers buying last-minute thoughtless gifts. They're like zombies, expressionless and wandering through my store grabbing whatever off the shelves as a last resort. To quote Holden Caufield, "it depresses the hell out of me." That Charlie Brown "Christmas Time is Here" song keeps going through my head. It's the perfect soundtrack to this depressing holiday season. It sounds so blue--and it makes me think of people shuffling silently through the snow, going from store to store, not talking to anyone, not enjoying themselves. To top it all off, I just read the newest Banana Yoshimoto book, which is all about death, like a lot of her stories. The stories are so simple, beautiful, and mystical but a little depressing. Oh, and all the snow just melted, and it's raining.

Christmas morning, K and I will wake up, have some Christmas crepes filled with Nutella and bananas, open our presents, go to a buffet at a fancy hotel with a chocolate fountain, and maybe go bowling or watch a movie. K has to work for a few hours on Christmas, so we opted not to go home again this year, even though that would have been nice. But it's easy for us--unlike my friend, who is too young to be going through this (no one at any age is supposed to go through this). It makes me think, wow, this could happen to anyone. It seems so heartless and random.

Insomnia on St. Lucia Day

I've been trying to fall asleep for about an hour and decided to get up and get something productive done, like writing this. I'm planning on waking up at 5:30am to bake a St. Lucia Day coffee cake. The dough is all ready to go--I just have to braid it, let it rise for twenty more minutes, then bake it for thirty minutes. Hopefully it will be done before K has to go to work. I get in these moods during the Christmas season--wanting to be Martha with baking, making my own cards, decorating the apartment in lights and fake evergreen garlands from Michael's. It's a combination of boredom and my growing domestic urges, which I think, are brought on by age. I dream of being a retro housewife, with a totally 50's decorated house, with a pink-tiled bathroom, a bright yellow kitchen with pastel appliances and sheer white ruffled/yellow polka-dotted curtains on the windows, Ikea-like atomic-age/Palm Springs furniture in the living room, and a peach bedroom with a fluffy white rug below the peach satin bed and peach satin ballooned wall hanging, with a writing desk to write letters on my monogrammed perfumed peach stationery, and a white vanity with a big square mirror-- and not a speck of dust anywhere, with gleaming kitchen floors and glittery formica kitchen counters. What's gotten into me? A few years ago I wanted to be a hippie living in a VW Van, travelling the US and staying in random state parks, living off of my crocheted hats, scarves, and doilies. Now I dream of domesticity and read vintage homekeeping books and "Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House," by Cheryl Mendelsson--a huge book about seven-hundren pages in length devoted to housekeeping. But does my apartment reflect this dust-free/shining floors peach daydream? No. It's a mess, and there's dust bunnies on the hardwood floor, I'm ashamed to admit. Yesterday K came down with a little bug and wanted to take a warm bath and I had to scrub it out before he used it. I'm sure the nastiness is making us both sick, as I am trying to fight an oncoming cold. As in everything I want to undertake, whether it be writing music, writing stories, painting a picture or cleaning my house, I seem to come up with a billion reasons why I don't have time, yet spend endless hours in the library, at the computer (surfing), watching the same Simpsons episodes over and over, and trying to read about ten books at the same time. I really think I could do with some Ritalin. It seems I have a hard time with focusing and self-discipline. I'm out of shape, have bags under my eyes, and yet still do things to my body that make me feel like shit. Will I ever learn? Kelly and I have a theory that the people who make it in the art/writing/music world, are those that aren't necessarily super talented, but have the ability to cut through the mental bullshit and create/practice no matter what. I tend to stop myself before I ever get started. If I keep this up, how will I ever have my clean and lovely aparment? Or a career in the arts? Or a body that doesn't feel tired and tense all the time?

In four and a half hours I will attempt to wake up and bake my coffee cake. St. Lucia is the patroness of light, and it's an old tradition in Sweden for the oldest girl to don a white robe and a wreath of candles upon her golden head and bring this braided bread to her parents in bed. Sounds pretty dangerous if you ask me. But lovely, nonetheless.

Crossing the Fission Boundary

Ug--I'm in the process of writing yet another paper I don't give a hoot about. Countless times since high school, I have been in this predicament--procrastinating until the last minute, sitting down at the kitchen table trying to straighten my thoughts out, drinking loads of coffee (half-caff, lots of soy creamer), sleepless nights, anxiety attacks, more procrastination (anything to avoid the uncomfortableness of slinging words onto a page that you know come from half-assed thoughts and b.s.-ing)....
This time my paper is about the psycho-acoustics of voice-leading--based on a 65-page article the graduate students had to read in our graduate counterpoint seminar, written by a man named David Huron from Ohio State. Here is one sentence from the article I'm using for a partial thesis statement:

"The principles of tonal fusion, the pitch proximity principle, and the pitch co-modulation principle all contribute to the achievement of the same goal--namely, the optimization of stream segregation."

It took me all quarter just to figure out what that means. Tonal fusion? Stream segregation? It's basically saying that the rules of voice-leading, i.e., avoiding parallel fifths and octaves, avoiding large melodic leaps, etc, can be backed by science--that the biological way our ears hear sounds apply directly to these rules. Therefore, this is why the rules exist. Okay, it's somewhat interesting, but to study this for a whole quarter? I enjoy and appreciate science, but sometimes I just don't understand it and all the scientific lingo that goes along with it. Which is okay, because I don't expect everyone to understand Neapolitan sixths and dominant sevenths and all that other music-talk. But just because our professor finds this article endlessly fascinating, does this give him the right to foist this upon us for the entire quarter, and then just two weeks ago, announcing that we must write a 10-15 page paper on it? What is it about our education system that gives professors/teachers and higher education in general the right to bore us with topics that only interest them? Is this what grad school is all about--pretending to care rather than actually learning something and enjoying it? Is this what my diploma will attest to? That I was able to withstand extreme boredom, sleepless nights and anxiety attacks due to the writing of research papers on topics of no interest to me?

What I don't understand is, why don't college professors go through the same training as elementary and high school teachers? For all practical purposes, the average college student is still a teen-ager, and therefore not too different from a high-schooler. Most teachers have to take classes in educational and developmental psychology, which, if college professors had to take these same classes, would learn how to facilitate discussion, how to teach so students care about what they're learning, how to motivate students, and how to teach toward different learning styles. I guess if you can get through a P.h.D. without killing yourself you can teach whatever the hell you want. Screw learning theories! You will learn about pitch proximity principle and you'll like it!

So what is the point of all this long-winded rambling? I just get so sick of college professors and their complete ineffeciency and teaching incompetence. Having studied education as an undergraduate, I am aware of learning theories, and get so frustrated when profs have these great classes to teach (Music history! Ear-training! Counterpoint! Theory! Piano!) yet they teach them in such a boring and inefficient way that I want to scream. How many hours have I spent in a music history classroom with a monotone-voiced professor on the cusp of retirement, reading from his lecture notes from 1965? How many hours did I waste trying to decipher Huron's article, and when I did, how many hours did I complain to friends about "crossing the fission boundary"? How many years of boring piano lessons and "Hot Cross Buns" playings did I have to endure before I could play Fur Elise (which is easily taught by ear/rote to a ten-year-old in her first year of lessons)? Here is a poem by Richard Brautigan that perfectly sums up my feelings on the whole deal:

I remember all those thousands of hours
that I spent in grade school watching the clock,
waiting for recess or lunch or to go home.
Waiting: for anything but school.
My teachers could easily have ridden with Jesse James
for all the time they stole from me.

Goodbye, land of diaries

I've decided to ditch diaryland because I just noticed they've deleted most of my old postings. Jerks!

This morning, walking to the bus stop, I came across a pile of cooked spaghetti and a pair of tennis shoes lying in the middle of the sidewalk. Feel free to come up with a story for that one. Oh, and then, not 2 seconds later, a truck drives by with a small, bare tree standing up in the middle of the bed of the truck, ala Harold and Maude. It was a very odd start to my day, which was full of foggy/clammy weather, my flute teacher helping me get through a tricky run in the Chaminade Concertino by having me imagine giving birth to a traffic cone, and procrastinating on homework, again.