Proud to be a Larry

My alma mater, Lawrence University, is pushing social media hard, as is my employer, DePauw University.  DePauw's School of Music has started a streaming radio program (and podcast), Music For Life, which will not only help make connections with the rest of the campus, but will also be a means of outreach into the larger community.  Lawrence's Conservatory of Music has an active blog.  Both schools have Twitter feeds and Facebook pages, which will end up being more important than direct mailings for the coming generation of students. 

Anyhow, when Brian Pertl shared a link to the Lawrence Con's blog on Facebook, I discovered a post there I had somehow missed, on the importance of improvisation.  We have also been pushing improvisation at DePauw, for the same reasons Brian mentions.  Our cello professor, Eric Edberg, leads an improvised chamber music ensemble, our viola professor, Nicole Brockmann, teaches improvisation within a first year seminar on Eurythmics, and wrote a book on improvisation games for chamber ensembles, and we have an active jazz program, including a weekly performance venue at the local campus restaurant, The Fluttering Duck.  This weekly series, Jazz at the Duck, has started including open jams interspersed with established acts.  And I have developed a core of collaborative composition/improvisation activities for our musicianship sequence, which I wrote about here (you need to purchase the article from the Dutch Music Theory Journal.)  By the time DePauw music students have finished their studies here, they will have had at least three semesters of personal experience with improvisation, and countless exposures to improvisation by their colleagues and professors.  Because improvising is fluency in the language of music, and musical fluency is both a professional necessity and a important part of being human. 

Tower in the Ivory Tower

This week is our annual Music of the 21st Century festival. The guest composer this year is Joan Tower, long-time composition professor at Bard College and former member of Da Capo Chamber Players. Yesterday many of my students were complaining about preparing her music, especially the very-wet-behind-the-ears First Year students. So I tried to give them a cold splash of reality, pointing out that unknown does not equal crappy. So many students come to school assuming they know almost everything there is to know about music, and just need a little polishing. With that attitude, they then think that anything new, anything they had never heard of before, must not be worthy of knowing. Fortunately most of these students outgrow this attitude, with or without the Mallet of Loving Correction. Those that don't learn to embrace the new end up unhappy as a musician and often unhappy in life. Because it isn't just about being comfortable with atonality. I expose my students to new ideas about music and new pieces of music so they will become life-long learners, whatever the subject may be that they are learning about.

Tomorrow I am moderating a public discussion with Joan Tower, as I do every year with the guest composer. I always take the opportunity to ask some questions of my own before calling on the audience. I plan to ask her about her views on the current state of the classical music industry, teaching composition, and why combining text with music is so unappealing for her. Let me know if there are any burning questions you would ask Joan Tower if you were here. And for my DePauw readers, please come and ask questions tomorrow. 11:30 in Thompson Recital Hall.

New DePauw Blogs

During my blog sabbatical, my students have been getting busy in the bløgösphére. Two individual blogs, one by a sophomore vocal music education major, and one by a First Year* instrumental major (probably education), reflect on what it is like to be a music major at DePauw, and what life has in hold for them. There is some excellent writing in here, it makes me proud to be one of their teachers. The third blog is for the collegiate chapter of the National Association of Music Educators (MENC). It appears to be a great way to bolster the communal spirit of the music education majors. All three blogs are now listed in my blog roll.

*At DePauw we are not supposed to say "freshman" or "freshmen" because that is too gender specific.

Hellos and Goodbyes

Yesterday I got to have lunch with Bryan Alexander, of NITLE. I had met him a year ago, and it was great to touch base again. He has my friend Carlos all excited about using online games to teach opera. This is basically using Second Life or Worlds of Warcraft to stage a performance, like in this Jonathan Coulton song.
Granted, it isn't perfect in any sense, but might help students to better understand the interaction of music and drama. We also spent time talking about blogging, Allen Ginsberg, and film music. It was a nice break after the bad news from the weekend.

The whole campus is mourning the loss of our friend and colleage, Stan Irwin. He died on Saturday after suffering a heart attack while driving to Indianapolis. Here is the impressive bio provided by DePauw's website:

Over the course of his long and distinguished musical career, Irwin performed at the Zürich Opera, Carnegie Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, Barbican Centre, and with major orchestras in the U.S. and Great Britain. As a 1987 winner of the World Wide Voice Competition in New York he was awarded contracts to perform Beethoven's Ninth Symphony at Lincoln Center and, in his 1988 British debut, the Brahms Requiem with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London. Irwin performed five times at Carnegie Hall, twice as a recitalist and three times as a conductor.

The New York Times called Irwin, "A performer who can project a wide range of subtle, shifting emotions." Hans Hotter, with whom Irwin studied in Munich, described him as possessing "a bass-baritone voice of high quality in timbre, which he is in good command of," noting a "fine artistic sensitiveness, together with a gift for interpretation ... especially evident in his singing of the German classical Lied."

Irwin joined the DePauw School of Music faculty in 1975. "As a professor, a mentor and a friend, he has impacted many lives at the University," notes DePauw President Robert G. Bottoms. "Our hearts go out to Stan's wife, Jane, and his family, and I express the feelings of a great many in the DePauw community who interacted with Stan over the years. He brought much respect to our School of Music, one of the oldest in the United States, and his warm presence and many contributions will be greatly missed."

Irwin performed more than two dozen roles in opera, most of the major works in oratorio, and an extensive song repertoire, including roles such as Boris and Germont, the Bach Passions, Elijah, the Verdi Requiem, Britten’s War Requiem, Berlioz’s dramatic symphony Romeo et Juliette, and Schubert‘s "Winterreise“ and "Müllerin" song cycles. He has also appeared in world premiere performances of John Eaton’s Peabody Award-winning opera Myshkin (Keller) for PBS and Italian television, Schibler’s The Late Expiation (Marquis) at the Zürich Opera, and David Ott’s song cycle "Renascence" (Millay) commissioned for Irwin and the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra. He has also recorded for the Gothic and Four Winds labels and has been artist-producer of two compact discs of American popular classics, Irwin Sings Gershwin (1999) and Night & Day: Cole Porter Songs of Romance (2003).

As a conductor, Professor Irwin made numerous high profile appearances at world-renowned sites such as Carnegie Hall with the New England Symphonic Ensemble and Chorus, the White House and the Vatican. He also prepared choirs for performances under such eminent conductors as John Nelson and Sir David Willcocks and orchestras including the Philharmonia of London and the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra.

Former voice students of Stanley Irwin, the longtime director of the DePauw University Choirs, have appeared with many orchestras and opera companies, including the Lyric Opera of Chicago, New York City Opera, Washington Opera, Opera Quebec, Minnesota Opera, Indianapolis Opera, Florida Grand Opera, and the Glimmerglass Opera.

Stan had a wonderful sense of humor, a very generous spirit, and a big heart to match his football-player physique. His voice was both powerful and rich, and he used it with incredible sensitivity. Now he can spend eternity teaching God how to really project with resonance and clarity. Good bye, Stan.

What is Music Theory?

This summer Carlos and I are revamping the four-semester music theory curriculum here at DePauw. We want the students to become independent thinkers, not relying upon a textbook to tell them how to perceive music. While we will still use a textbook as a reference source for the short term, we will also be assigning readings from scholarly articles and monographs for discussion. It will be particularly interesting when the students encounter opposing viewpoints. They will have to think about which perspective they agree with, and why (or why they disagree with both perspectives). I had some success this semester with the final analysis papers. The students had to analyze a multi-movement or multi-song Common Practice work, developing their own theses to argue. Several students looked for articles or books on their subject, but then confronted these previous analyses, arguing for or against various points. I was very pleased with the results, as well as their responses to my constant challenges to write of their personal reactions to the music, using specific musical facts to explain their reactions. They also practiced this type of analysis in their blogs, though they tended to stick to answering the questions posed in the exercises rather than using the questions as jumping points to create their own theses. The new curriculum will include compositional exercises, as part of the See it, Say it, Read it, Write it pedagogical stance. I want the students to be able to recognize musical features, and an important way for them to learn this is to compose these musical features for themselves. There are additional benefits to compositional exercises as well, but that is my main purpose for this curriculum.

I was sparked to start blogging again, and to write about my summer efforts, because of James Cook's misunderstanding of my perspective on music theory. I do like to talk about harmony, but my conception of harmony is not as a discipline that can be separated from counterpoint, form, or motive. I mash together Schenker, Riemann, Meyer/Narmour/Huron, Schoenberg, Hindemith, Helmholtz, Rameau, Weber, Koch, Riepel, Tenney, and countless others for my understanding of how notes interact horizontally and vertically. I like Schoenberg's conception of key relationships, Schenker's wisdom on hierarchical organization and harmonic prolongation through contrapuntal functions, neo-Riemannian spaces that show how strange progressions can make sense as part of a cycle*, David Huron's expansion of Meyer's and Narmour's work on expectancy, Hindemith's conception of harmonic tension and how it can be generalized to plus-triadic harmonies, Weber's and Helmholtz's very different empirical examinations of music, Tenney's exploration of consonance and dissonance, etc. I want my students to explore at least some of these theories for themselves, to develop their own conceptions of harmony, as well as rhythm, timbre, and various bigger pictures like semiotics.

As I'm thinking about this, one thing I need to include in the theory curriculum is a discussion on what music theory is for. TTU Music Theory Department explains the two basic approaches, analytical and compositional. I won't repeat Michael Berry's excellent explanation, follow the link to read it. Also follow the link to read James Cook's view on what music theory is for: to explain how music is composed, and to provide a metalanguage for describing all music. I want music theory to spark new ideas on how to perform music, to spark new ideas on how to listen to music, and to inform us more on our interactions with the arts. But again, I don't want to shove my definition down the throats of the students. I want them to wrestle with this, encountering James Cook's view as well as many others.

I welcome any suggestions of reading materials, perspectives, or topics to consider as Carlos and I work on our curriculum.

*At some point I will blog about the recent Science article, "Generalized voice-leading spaces" by Callender, Quinn, and Tymoczko. This is a recent development out of neo-Riemannian theory that is quite interesting.

Time to start

Today was DePauw's Commencement ceremony, made more poignant because it was the last for our retiring President Bottoms after 22 years of service. The student speaker pointed out that he was only six weeks old when Robert Bottoms became president. I waddled over in my post-race legs to play in the band, thus allowing me to get up and stretch during the individual names. Playing in the band did not save me from the dangers of regalia, as most performing faculty robe up. The suggestion of hiding things under robes came up today while chatting with a junior saxophone major. He wants to do something exciting when he walks across the stage next year, and I pointed out that he could hide a soprano sax in his robes and play a lick after getting his diploma. A colleague solved the handshake-grab-diploma problem with the neck-strap. I know, not an obvious solution for a saxophonist, but it still works.

Hail to the Chief

DePauw has a new president, Brian Casey. There was a nice reception for him at our new Performing Arts Center yesterday afternoon, so I was able to stroll over from my office without braving the winter storm. I was very impressed with his mini-speech, it felt like a Obama moment with stress on the value of DePauw and how we faculty/students/staff should be bragging about the wonders of DePauw. You can get a flavor from this video.

Birthday news

As is usual, my birthday is celebrated as a national holiday today (tomorrow in terms of bank and government vacation). The Packers are giving me a present by kicking the hated Vikings behinds (20-0 right now). The DePauw football team gave me an early present by capturing the Monon Bell in a very exciting game (missed extra point balanced by a 2 point conversion, interception on the Wabash 4, first-down conversion on 4th and 2, game-winning field goal as time runs out). And I've been enjoying cards, presents, and well-wishes from family, friends, and students. It is a little bittersweet, turning 38 as I'm newly single. I've decided to have my midlife crisis a touch early, yearning for a Wii.

Oh, and so much for aiming for a wide audience:


Update: And I've officially reached the 100,000 viewers mark on my birthday! The viewer who made the milestone at 6:41 pm (ET) was from Austin, Texas. This person was looking for "journal articles does warming up your voice effect the pitch of your voice girls chiors[sic]". I'm guessing my blog was disappointing to this person, but a view is a view. Now to see if the Colts will give me another present. My kids gave me cold weather running gear: long-sleeved shirt, hat, gloves and socks. The socks aren't specifically cold weather, but they are specific running socks, a step up from my cotton footies that could've started eating up my feet with the longer distances I'm running. I look forward to trying out the new gear tomorrow.

I've become ambient!

This week is DePauw's ArtFest, which has a new topic every year. This year's topic is Art and the Environment. Some things make perfect sense with this topic, like the decorated community bikes to encourage all of the community to bike rather than drive cars. Other events do not fit the topic at all, such as the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra's concert. In fact, the School of Music often has difficulty crafting performances that fit the year's topic well. But tomorrow I will be taking part in a performance that definitely fits Art and the Environment. DePauw has a beautiful Nature Park, which used to be a working quarry. One of my colleagues, Nicole Brockmann, has designed a 30-minute walking tour within the park, with musical performances planted along the way. The tour, called Quarry Sounds, ends at the new Prindle Institute of Ethics, where string ensembles will perform during a reception. Here is a Google Map that Nicole created with the tour and performers labeled. Click on the points or the labels to get more details. Most of the performers are students at the School of Music, but my meager efforts on the cornetto will be matched by faculty members Ronnie Pejril (ambient sound installation) and Gabriel Crouch (singing with students in a chamber group). I'm looking forward to this. The leaves are in full color change right now, and the weather has been gorgeous (brisk but very sunny).

Post-Classical Symposium

DePauw University's School of Music will be hosting a symposium on Post-Classical music education next month (November 30-December 1). Members of ensemble-in-residence eighth blackbird will be involved, along with Joseph Horowitz and Greg Sandow. Symposium organizer Eric Edberg has blogged about the symposium, though unfortunately the blog he created for the symposium seems to be offline. But I thought I'd mention the symposium now because Stephen Brookes has written an article about Horowitz's Post-Classical Ensemble in the Washington Post, thoughtfully reproduced on his own blog. The idea of re-energizing concerts is good, but it must take into account the fact that many classical music lovers like the ritualized atmosphere of the average concert, with prescribed costumes and/or behavior. And that there is nothing wrong with that attitude. The difficulty comes in balancing the desires of the "old" audience with the "new" audience, as is shown in Eric's own experiment with a post-classical concert environment (read the comments). I think Horowitz's programming ideas are very interesting and seem to be successful, as is the Bang-on-a-Can model, and multitudes of other ideas. Alex Ross' latest New Yorker article talks about how the internet has been used in a wide variety of ways to promote music (sadly he doesn't give me any link-love). Much like the Long Tail concept in music publishing, I think many musical ensembles can adapt to the Long Tail concept by aiming for niche audiences. Not all ensembles need to do the same thing, there is no one magic pill that will work for all audiences. That is the frustration I get reading some of the polemics by Norman Lebrecht and Greg Sandow, that they portray an idea that there is one concept of "classical" that has died or is dying, and only they can save it. This is probably unfair, but it is still the impression I get. So, what are your thoughts on Post-Classical music composition/programming/education/etc?

New digs

eighth blackbird's Tim Munro has posted pictures from their residency here at DePauw last week. You can see several parts of our new building, including the Great Hall facing towards the doors to our main performance stage, the small rehearsal room (populated by various students and colleague Eric Edberg), and two shots of the large rehearsal room. I completely agree with Tim that the residency has started wonderfully. The students have been very charged from working with these great musicians, and the convocation on the business side of music was very eye-opening.

And We're Back From Commercial Break

Classes started last Wednesday at DePauw. The School of Music is in a new building, so I have a new office, new classrooms, a new music library, and new bathrooms. We also have a new dean, a new departmental secretary, a new music librarian, a new recording arts specialist, and a new assistant to the dean. And I'm teaching third semester theory with a new text book this year. So, same old, same old.

I'm almost done with my tenure file. All letters from students and faculty were due today, and my completed folders are due next Monday. If any of you are determined to have a say in my tenure decision, you can send me an emailed letter, which I can still include in the files by next Monday. The School of Music has two tenure decisions this year, along with two interim reviews and a promotion to full professor. I'm up first, so I'll know my colleagues' decision in October. DePauw has an open file policy, so I get to see everything in my file, including the report written by the School's personnel committee. I also get to write a response to their report, which is then passed along to the University's Committee on Faculty, which has the unenviable task of reviewing all the promotion, tenure, and interim reviews (and term reviews) for the university. I don't know when I will hear from them, probably sometime late in November by mid-December.

In running I've gotten up to 10K distances, though I'm pretty slow at those distances. I will be running in a local 4-mile race at the end of September, and will look for a good 10K for October.

I have finished a new draft of my articulation article, and am waiting for feedback from an adviser before sending it off for hopeful publication. I have a publisher's review to work on now, and then I'm going to start whittling away at the other two articles I was supposed to work on during my pre-tenure leave. Fortunately my teaching schedule leaves Fridays open for research, and unfortunately my personal life leaves many afternoons and evenings free for both research and class prep. So I hope to make some significant progress in my research.

I'm also ready to start back into blogging, though I have marked all 1400 posts in Bloglines read so I apologize for missing any excellent thoughts you have made. During my blogging sabbatical I watched the complete extended Lord of the Rings (yet again) and read Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End. Right now I'm watching the documentaries from the Lord of the Rings DVDs (yet again) and reading To Kill a Mockingbird. Stay tuned for my defense of harmony.

Het zoete huis van het huis

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.

What I'm doing this semester

I haven't written much about my teaching life lately, mostly because I've been so busy with my teaching life lately. But all my grades are turned in, and now I am done until August 22. Surely that is a typo, you are thinking, or DePauw has the longest winter break ever. But it is no error, and many DPU students and faculty will be back on campus January 3rd for Winter Term, or January 29 for the Spring Semester. The reason I have such a long break is because DPU has the most civilized approach to tenure, including a wonderful pre-tenure leave. This pseudo-sabbatical is taken in the fourth or fifth year to help bolster the files for tenure. I will be finishing four journal articles, heading off to the Netherlands, and hopefully starting a book (though the latter is not officially part of my sabbatical project). I am up for tenure next fall, so the extra time I have to do research and prepare my files will be put to good use. Hopefully the results will be as happy as Chad's.

As DePauw conquers the blogosphere

A DePauw student has started two blogs: Music and Music Education and Composition Blog. Chris Simerman is a trombonist, music education major, and budding composer. The first blog is mostly on his old music ed. assignments, something that should make my colleagues very pleased. The only post thus far to the Composition blog is by Chris' co-blogger, Kyle Wernke. I'll be curious to see what happens with both blogs.