I heart Music Theory | 12/10/03
After being sick the past two days (hence no updates) I feel a bit better today. Yesterday I went up to school to pick up my grade sheets and to talk to Dr. Clendinning about my HoMT/Thesis. She pointed out something seemingly very obvious to me: if I wanted to do a Spanish translation, at least my major professor and preferably the committee would have to speak Spanish. I don't know why that thought didn't occur to me, but it didn't. She volunteered her knowledge, so it looks like she will be my major professor. I can't decide if this is good or bad just yet. She is without question, one of the most widely respected people out there, very popular in theory circles and from what I can tell, very highly regarded. She also, though, has made people cry. And while I have a pretty thick skin ("Your music sounds like a corpse with make-up on" -Ellen Zwillich), I fear that she will assume that my lack of interest in HoMT is a lack of interest in Music Theory. Now, I'm not saying that I live for music theory. I don't think anyone will mistake me for someone who is madly in love with theory. I do respect her knowledge and her straight-forwardness, so if I'm going to screw things up, at least I'll know ahead of time. Apparently, I need to make a couple different translations of this treatise, which sucks. I understand the point but just by the sheer amount of work of translating the same material a bunch of different ways--well, it sucks because I can be lazy. Yesterday Chris and I drove up to play at a Baptist Church is Bluntstown. Some people are not meant to live out in the country and I am definitely one of them. His friend Joanna is in charge of the kids (directs the kids choir..stuff like that) and she asked us to come play Christmas duets on pan. I also hate kids. During "dinner", they were playing this game where they had to smack me on the back and run back to their table before I got up and beat the leaving Jesus out of them. I feel kind of bad for Joanna, though. She's stuck in the middle of nowhere with a phenomenal voice and very apparent skills in music education and is just going to waste them in Bluntstown, FL (pop. 7). I guess, being from the city and lacking the dream of marrying the town's pharmacist, I don't really understand how people can be so content with such an average life. ESPECIALLY, if they're not average people. I guess complacency is a-ok. When we got back, Chris, Mike and I hung out for a while and when they left I started grading all of projects. I got them all done around 3:30am last night. All that's left is to fill in the bubble sheets and write down why some people failed (I guess this is the new system). I had a reverse-bell curve...well, more like a slide at the amusement park, actually, about 75% A's, handful of B's, C's and D's and about 15% F's. Some of the people receiving F's I actually feel badly about but the numbers don't lie. And, if you make an accommodation for one person then you have to make it for all of them. Not wanting to give zero F's, I had no choice but to not be accommodating.
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