Monthly Archive for April, 2008Page 4 of 7

LA LA Land Football

Published
by
michael lee
on 17 April 2008
in asides
. 1 Comment

Here we go again. This guy wants to build an NFL stadium here in LA. Good luck, and welcome to the land of broken dreams and wasted millions.

Rote or Wrong?

Published
by
Sharolyn
on 16 April 2008
in art and culture, groupthink and life
. 25 Comments

My philosophy of music is changing, slightly.

I used to give little credibility to musicians who couldn’t read. What would be the use of a great poet, I thought, if she could never write down her words to share, and couldn’t partake in the words of others? The same must be true of music.

Furthermore, when I became a music major, it was somewhat shocking to me that some of my peers didn’t know their key signatures. I took annual theory tests since first grade, and in hindsight had some inner-snobbiness about that. There was even one classmate in college who was learning to read music, and while I heard people praising him, it caused me to struggle inwardly with the legitimacy of my education.

This past Christmastime, a family friend named Marc* asked me to show him some things on the piano. Marc is 17. I used to babysit him. He is a kid you can often see in his family room or on the front porch playing his guitar. Marc has had some guitar lessons and is also self-taught. While I can’t praise his techniques in detail to someone like Corey, I do know that it is pleasing to listen to Marc’s guitar playing. I think he has whatever it is that you sometimes can’t teach.

With this in mind, I looked forward to meeting with him weekly to mess around on the piano.

A few months ago, Marc enlisted in the Marines, and he reports for boot camp in August. (His 19 year-old brother is already in Iraq.) These conditions turned my ideas of education upside-down. At first, I did what I knew how to teach – intervals, basic symbols from the Adult Piano Method, etc. Then one day, he asked, “Will you teach me Claire de Lune?”

I’ve played this Debussy piece on some occasions, but had never taught it – let alone to some who isn’t a proficient reader of music. It contains five flats, complex rhythms, arpeggios that encompass several octaves… and the boy asking me is about to risk his life to protect mine. “Sure,” I said, having no idea what to expect.

And so it was that he began to learn Claire de Lune by rote. I teach him 4-8 measures each week, and he comes back playing them well. He is my hardest-practicing student. I don’t know, maybe he uses it to woo young women. And just maybe it works!

I tease him that he brings the sheet music for my sake, but it’s true, he does. Perhaps he would not survive a piano jury of judges, but it doesn’t sound half bad. If I tell him to linger on this note or create more tension in that measure, he does it. But usually I don’t have to tell him.

This week I sent him home with a Grieg lyric piece. We’ll see what happens.

So what would I say today, to a poet who couldn’t write? Maybe, “Tell me a story.”

*his real name

Big Shoes to Phil

Published
by
michael lee
on 15 April 2008
in technology and university
. 26 Comments

As of yesterday, I am the new Phil.

In a tense, embittered, deeply sectarian 30 second meeting with the Dean, I was officially made the Director of Music Technology for the APU School of Music. The position comes with, among other things, new business cards, and the long-sought respect of my peers that I so deeply crave. Well, for sure the business cards, at least.

It’s easy to forget, now, what a visionary Phil was when he started building this program. In the early 1990’s, Phil was insisting that facility with music software was going to be an essential skill for musicians, regardless of their particular emphasis. He fought the uphill battle of getting all of our faculty teaching theory, arranging, and orchestration using notation software, which gave us the ability to hear, analyze, and modify student projects live in class. Because of his efforts, we were one of the first programs in the country to make musical technology a required part of the curriculum for all music majors. He pushed hard to make laptop leases mandatory for the school of music, so that we are still one of the few programs in the country where every music student has an identical setup, and uses music software as an integral part of their
writing and arranging.

Those of us who teach here take all of these things for granted - we just assume that any student who has a question about brass voicings for big band can simply email us the file they are working on, and we can both have copies open to modify and change, that we can be hearing exactly the same thing while we are working. We take for granted that we can ask our jazz piano students to sequence their own rehearsal combo to practice 12 bar blues solos. We assume that our education students can create and print technical exercises to help the community children who are part of the youth music academy that we run. We don’t even pause when suggested that our composition students email a copy of the file they are working on to the string section leader, to get suggestions for bowings - we know they are using the same laptop and software, and will be able to view each other’s work without difficulty.

None of these things happened by accident. They are all the result of Phil’s visionary efforts to make music technology a core part of our curriculum, so that when our students graduate, no matter what their degree or emphasis within music, they find themselves unexpectedly equipped for the present state of the industry. I was the beneficiary of that foresight as a student, and I am the beneficiary of that effort as a faculty member.

Thank you, Phil, for building this program, and for trusting me to carry it forward.

Everyone’s a Winner

Published
by
Sharolyn
on 14 April 2008
in asides, laugh! and life
. 7 Comments

Do you know what I love about Oprah’s Big Give? Everyone did a great job this week, so no one got kicked off.

A Little Bedtime Theology

Published
by
michael lee
on 13 April 2008
in faith and theology and life
. 16 Comments

An actual bedtime story that I told my daughter tonight:

A long time ago, a young man named David was chosen by God to be King of Israel. In those days, the people in the north part of Israel didn’t trust the people in the south part of Israel, and the people in the south didn’t trust the people in the north.

Now David was from the south, but he knew that God wanted him to be the king of ALL of Israel, not just the south. He had to choose a city to live in, and it couldn’t be in the south, and it couldn’t be in the north. If it was in the south, none of the people living in the north would trust him as king. If he chose to live in a city in the north of Israel, all of his friends in the south would think that David had abandoned them.

So, David did a very wise thing; he chose to live in a city right in the middle, the city of Jerusalem. It wasn’t in the north, and it wasn’t in the south, so the people in Israel knew that David wanted to be king of all Israel. His decision was so wise that all of the elders of all of the tribes of Israel come together in Jerusalem, and they crowned David as King.

Yes, that’s right. I sent my daughter off to bed with the mesmerizing tale of the geopolitical tensions surrounding David’s ascension to the throne of Israel. At what age, do you think, will she realize that her father is a Class A dork?