Alright... first daily post. I'm not sure how I'd like to format these, so today I'll just try the all-purpose list.
- Today I watched the movie "All the President's Men" as part of an assignment for Classical Seminar (304 with Dr. Brian Harker). Dr. Harker wants me to use Woodward and Bernstein as models for the research process. A post on this subject should come out after our class discussion of the film.
- I also attended Dr. Steven Johnson's 302 class as a Teaching Assistant. I was particularly impressed by his organized lecturing style. He uses PowerPoint very well, and includes score excerpts in his presentations. At the beginning of his lecture, Dr. Johnson said, "With such a broad topic as music history, a professor must make some sacrifices about what he will or will not teach in the semester. For me, I have decided that since you are all musicians, we should focus more on the music, rather than little details about the lives of composers." I appreciate that sentiment.
- I'm reading Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment as a reaction to my paper that I wrote about Mussorgsky last semester. The book was published just a couple of years before the first edition of Boris Godunov, and both works discuss similar themes of class conflict in Russia, and the true source for moral truths.
- I also read a few pages in the chapter about comic opera in Taruskin's Oxford History of Music, volume 2 (17th and 18th centuries) as part of my reading for 304. The focus of today's reading was about Bach's sons, particularly Wilhelm Friedrich Bach and his use of the galant style in F for harpsichord. I await my own copy of this volume, so I had to go to the library and read from the reference edition; my notes, then, were taken electronically. I'd much rather be able to highlight passages and mark up score excerpts in the book itself. But this will do for now.
- Finally, I learned brief definitions for the following 20th-century musical styles: spectral music, pulse-based minimalism, heterophony, micropolyphony. We may be discussing these in my 20th-century counterpoint class (taught by Christian Asplund).
Tuesdays are going to be interesting days for me, since I only have to attend Dr. Johnson's 302 class as a TA. The movie took up a lot of my reading time, but hopefully on future Tuesdays, I'll have lots of time to read.
Paper Progress Report: My topic for The Creation was approved, though Dr. Johnson encouraged me to perhaps explore some lesser-known masses by Haydn. My goal for tomorrow is to identify five sources (more general in nature) for my bibliography.
Reading Progress Report: No work done in either my LaRue or Oliveros books. This takes precedence tomorrow morning.
German Progress Report: I learned one word (Buben = lads), but other than that, nothing for today. I plan to start the long road to translating Goethe's Faust tomorrow, doing two pages a day. Perhaps more as I get faster at it.
SHMRF Progress Report: I figure I should finish LaRue's book before I really start SHMRFing pieces.
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