Today I taught my final class at WCU and then told the students that I was leaving. I’ve been pretty satisfied that I’ve made the correct decision and that there would be great opportunities for me in St. Louis, but it was still a tough day. The students seemed genuinely disappointed and if they were being honest, it really makes me feel pretty good about what I was able to achieve in just one year.

The orchestration reading that I mentioned last night went about as expected. When I say that, I mean it was a mild disaster. What a way to go out!

Tomorrow is the day that my orchestration students have a chance to hear their final projects read by a group of volunteers drawn the from the University’s band program. Last semester this went off without a hitch and with only a little bit of extra work required of me, primarily because my colleague who directs the bands is a great organizer and goes out of his way to help the students in my course. The whole thing went very smoothly and was relatively easy to manage.

This semester is a completely different story. My colleague is out of town, the marching band has its leadership retreat, and the jazz ensemble has a rehearsal, all on the same afternoon of the reading! To top it all off, the printer in the music department computer lab is being fickle and not working properly. This is exactly the type of logistical nightmare that used to drive me crazy as a high school music teacher!

Despite the problems and challenges posed in organizing the reading, I would do it a hundred times over. Besides the obvious value of the students hearing their arrangements, it is precisely these types of situations that create the best “teachable moments” and bring the greatest rewards for all those involved. After all, it is the end of the semester, and the stress of this time of year is both motivating and gratifying. I’m not sure if the student’s feel the same way as I do, but I think they will look back and be pleased with the experience.

It’s been two weeks since my last update primarily because we’ve been absorbed in trying to make the correct decision about our future. For those who don’t know the details, it is now safe to let you know that about two weeks ago Marta was offered a tenure-track faculty position at Southern Illiniois University, Edwardsville to teach cello and chamber music. This is the same university that she has been teaching at for the past year while we have been living apart. Since my job at Western Carolina is only a term position at this time, we have decided to accept her offer and move to the St. Louis area. Ultimately, job security and the larger metropolitan area trumped my full time employment and while I am a bit disappointed and concerned to resign from my job we both believe that this is the wise decision and the best choice for our future.

I don’t plan on sitting around all year on my hands and will be actively seeking opportunities to teach in the greater St. Louis area, most likely as an adjunct professor teaching whatever is available. For all the uncertainty, there is a certain amount of excitement associated with any move, and I’m holding out hope that something comes my way to make this all a bit easier for me. Time will tell.

I spent most of my Sunday working on our taxes. Back when I was single and teaching high school, it was a relatively quick and painless task, but now that I’m married and we are working in two separate states, it has become a huge task. For example, Marta plays a lot of gigs with orchestras and almost all of them do not deduct taxes and issue 1099-MISC forms. This means that Marta has to be set up as a business and this adds multiple steps to the process. Furthermore, since Marta did not have income in North Carolina and I did not have income in Illinois, not only did I have to prepare a 1040 “Married Filing Jointly” I also had to prepare TWO more 1040’s “Married Filing Separately” in order to get the correct figures for the individual state returns! I hope that they are correct and don’t raise any audit flags, because I have this queasy feeling that I’ve made a mistake somewhere. Of course, I have that feeling every year.

Back in 1995 when I was working towards my MM at Colorado, I had the chance to work in one of the College of Music computer labs where I had plenty of time and energy to teach myself HTML. It was pretty early in the internet revolution, and I created a home page that had some really naive graphic elements as well as some links and a curriculum vitae. I even went to great lengths to teach myself some basic coding and created a guestbook for folks to leave comments. One of the early comments that I received, and one that I have never forgotten after more than a decade, was a criticism of my site and the comment that having a personal website was the height of arrogance.

Now I look around at an internet awash in all manner of professional and personal websites, message boards for almost any topic, and blogs of all shapes and sizes and just have to wonder if that person has changed their opinion.

The premiere of the brass quintet went well and judging by the positive feedback, the audience really enjoyed my piece. It’s a very unnerving experience for me to listen to my music for the first time because all I can think about are the things that I’d like to fix. However, since I have several performances coming up in the near future and an ensemble willing to try some changes this is an ideal opportunity to tinker with a few spots. It shouldn’t be much work since I feel most of the music is just fine.

I received an interesting comment from an emeritus faculty and his wife after the concert. I hadn’t met this couple before, but they introduced themselves and we began talking about the work and I was eventually asked about my “main” instrument. I told them that I started my career with the trumpet and they then remarked that they had guessed that I was a brass player. I found that mildly amusing, and somewhat disturbing, because I’ve intentionally avoided writing for brass for that very reason. I don’t want to pigeon-hole my compositions into one genre (or at least not yet) but it is interesting that even after years away from being an active performer, I still have a pretty good feel for brass writing. In retrospect, it was nice to get back to my roots and it looks like there is at least one more brass work in the near future, as the trumpet professor here has asked me to write a short work for his trumpet ensemble to perform at the next ITG festival. It’s an opportunity that I can’t refuse.

A happy corollary effect of writing the quintet is that I’ve picked up my horn again and have been putting some time in every day in an effort to get my chops to a reasonably respectable level. At this moment I don’t really foresee putting in the hours to actually perform, but perhaps something will come along and I can actually sit behind the stand again rather than just sitting on the sidelines handing out my own music. I feel good about it, no matter what the result.

Tonight is the official premiere of my latest work, a seven minute piece for brass quintet titled Persistent Echoes. I wrote the piece at the request of The Smoky Mountain Brass, the faculty quintet here at Western and they will be taking it on their tour of the United Kingdom in May.

I’m pretty happy with the way the work turned out, though the proof will be in the performance tonight. I’ve had several works that I hated when I finished them that turned out great, and several that I thought were going to be more effective turn out to be pieces that I’ve grown to dislike as time has passed. I’d like to believe that I am getting a better handle on this as I grow older, but I think there will always be some small doubt in my mind about every piece before it’s premiered, and that’s probably a very good thing.

Two topics tonight: First, as a Florida State Alum, it is truly painful to watch Florida win the NCAA Basketball tournament. It’s not like there is anything wrong with the school. In fact, I know several of the faculty and several students and am proud to call some of them my friends. However, to try to ascribe rational thought to the emotions stirred by sports is probably a fool’s errand. Oh well, congrats to the kids and the school for their very impressive run through the tournament.

Second: I’ve been modifying the original “Green Track” theme to arrive at the current formatting for the page. Besides the changes to this template I have borrowed some elements (blockquote and bullet images) and changed their color from the original green to blue. I’ve got to find a good way to give them credit for their work so I’ll be thinking about that for the next couple of days while experimenting with different changes. One thing I ultimately do want to change is to make the content pane and the sidebar float, similar to the original “connections” theme but as it stands, I don’t really have the knowledge of CSS and DIV tags to make it work properly. I’ll have to do some research, perhaps this weekend to figure it out. If you’re curious to see the changes, here are the elements that I’ve changed:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
and sorry I could not travel both
blah, blah, blah
~Robert Frost

This site is based on:

• The format of “Green Track”
• Graphic elements from “Connections”

I’ve been wrestling with the idea to start a blog as a means of communicating with my family and friends for quite some time, but I’ve never really gotten around to it before today. I always thought that I had plenty to say, but to be honest, my natural self-editing instincts (which I seem to lack in conversation) are taking over and censoring virtually everything that comes to mind. I suppose that this feeling of panic strikes all but the most shameless of us as we begin putting our thoughts and opinions out there for just any passerby who happens to want to take a peek. I’m sure it will pass.

Now that I’ve dipped my toes into the world of web logging, I suppose the first place to start is to mention that there is a big decision to make in the next two weeks. It is one of those choices where each possibility seems to have an equal balance of pros and cons and the only thing you can do is trust your instinct and dive in headfirst. Perhaps this is why Robert Frost’s “A Road Not Taken” remains one of his most enduring poems because at some point or another, we all looked down one road as far as we could. We’ve been discussing it (the decision, not the poem) virtually every day for the last several months and we are both thankful that it has almost reached resolution, one way or another. It is not appropriate for me to discuss the details now, but everyone will know soon enough.

The “Artist-in-Residence” orchestra performed here at Western today and I was impressed by the performance of the students in the ensemble. (The AIR orchestra is a yearly event where professional string players are hired from the Asheville Symphony and the students fill out the wind parts.) It was quite a challenging program and I was proud of the way the students acquitted themselves. Kudos to all of them! In Theory II tomorrow we continue the discussion of leading-tone diminished seventh chords that began on Friday and then on to secondary dominants. Though the students don’t yet know it, it will open a whole new world for them, and that’s a good thing!

I’m not sure if there is an appropriate analogy between applied harmony and blogging, but now that I’ve planted the seed, I’ll let you use your imagination.