My apologies for the dead air this last week. My parents were visiting, requiring serious house cleaning. And then I had to finish my paper and get packed for the conference. But I've traveled to Holland and back, slept long enough to be mostly over my jet lag, and ready to start writing again. I got back just in time to see DePauw get in the national news. I'll only comment that two of my students get on the air, Lynsay Moy and Kim Lee. And a few other music students are in the background of the Good Morning America story. Kim is a music education major and a good flutist, Lynsay is a double major in voice performance and studio art and an excellent student.
The conference was quite good. I was scheduled to play in two jam sessions on the night before the conference officially began, but was also roped in at the last minute to mimic a bombard on my decidedly twentieth-century trumpet for the first piece of the concert. I was too jet-lagged to say no, though I had to fight a sticky first valve for that performance. The conference itself included sessions on jazz improv, early music improv, British free improv, and improv pedagogy (including my paper). Being a European conference, there were plenty of coffee/tea breaks, which we had to use very specific little tickets to get. And being in the Netherlands, the lunches and one dinner provided were nothing to write home about, unless you really want to hear about the Dutch version of chinese food. There was a round table discussion at the end of the conference, during which a retired local professor announced that jazz music was banal, crappy, and not worth analyzing. That provided plenty of conversation for a group of us at a restaurant afterward.
Due to a canceled flight, I ended up "sleeping" in the Philadelphia airport one night and arriving home a day later than planned. But now that the conference is done, I can get back to writing my sabbatical articles. I'm sure I missed all sorts of interesting issues in the classical blogosphere, but I'm not going to try to catch up. Don't take it personally.
No comments:
Post a Comment