Like many musicians, I try to visit the New York Times’ Arts and Music page a couple of times a week and read all of the contemporary music articles as well as any other items of interest that seem interesting at the time. For the most part, I find the headlines are relatively benign and rarely engender much reaction, but I have to say that the following headline made me laugh out loud.

The “humble” trombone?

One other item of note that I caught this week was the article about the premiere of David N. Baker’s Concertino for Cellular Phones and Symphony Orchestra. I am certain that many, many composers have had this idea, and I can remember talking about it with a few friends several years ago at a new music festival, so when I first read the review I gave myself a little mental kick. I doubt that I would have ever written a work for cellphones, but it is always good to remind myself that every idea, no matter how frivolous it seems, deserves at least a cursory examination.

Congratulations to Dr. Baker for the premiere and to Paul Freeman and the Chicago Sinfonietta for the courage to commission and program such a work! I bet it was great fun for the audience and a memorable night.

My year of adjunct work is going very well and I am enjoying both the variety of classes that I’m teaching and the students. The biggest (and most rewarding) challenge so far is trying to breathe new life into the Maryville University instrumental ensemble. Prior to my arrival, the course had been run as a small jazz group with whatever combination of instrumental music majors happened to sign up. For example, this fall I ended up with a violinist, two flutists, a clarinetist, a trumpet player, three percussionists, two guitarists, a double bassist, and a pianist. I knew that I had neither the numbers nor the instrumentation to field a reasonable wind ensemble, so with some consultation from the department chair, decided that chamber groups were the way to go.

Fortunately, and through a very happy coincidence, I ended up with a jazz quintet (trumpet, guitar, piano, bass, drums), a flute and guitar duo, a percussion duo, and a mixed trio (violin, flute, clarinet). This configuration has allowed me to find good literature for each ensemble and also cater to the individual tastes and performance desires of the various musicians. The trio is playing a Haydn string trio, the guitar and flute duo is playing works by Ibert and Corelli, the percussionists are working on a piece by William Kraft, and the jazz combo has 4 tunes that they’ve almost got worked out. Overall, I’m pleased with the progress we’ve made so far.

The musicians in the jazz combo are a mixture of jazz enthusiasts (piano, trumpet, drums), rock and roll experts (guitar), and one classical musician who wants to learn jazz (string bass). All of them are at varying levels of competence both on their instruments and in their understanding of the genre. This has led to some rather tender moments in rehearsal, particularly since jazz is hardly my expertise. We’ve managed so far, but I’ve found myself facing the task of taking the lead sheets and working out the jazz scales in B-flat as well as trying to write “walking” bass lines. Now, I understand the theory perfectly well and I know generally how to create a walking bass, but every now and then I run across some changes that require a bit more thinking on my part than others and often launch into a trial and error session that can eat up a bunch of my time. Tonight’s project was Wes Montgomery’s “Four On Six” and I think it came out pretty well, but I’m not entirely convinced. If anyone has a good walking bass for the solo section and wants to send it my way, I’d appreciate it!

Next semester we are hoping to recruit enough musicians from the general student population to start a true wind ensemble, but a part of me is really going to miss these chamber groups and especially the combo that has (re)taught me so much of what I had forgotten about jazz.

It’s been more than three months since the World Cup and the NFL is in full swing so I feel compelled to make another sports post. I came across an article on CNNMoney.com that highlights The Blind Side, a new book by Michael Lewis (the author of Moneyball) that deals with a supposedly unkown aspect of the National Football League. Here is the beginning of the article:

Three years ago Michael Lewis helped change the way average baseball fans and front-office types alike felt about what made a ballplayer valuable.

Now he’s about to shake up the thinking of football fans with his new book, “The Blind Side.”

When I first read through that opening, I truly believed that perhaps Lewis had uncovered some aspect of the game that I had missed and was going to reveal a “dirty little secret” to all of us football fans. It turns out that the entire premise of the book is based on the high salaries of the men who play Left Tackle in the NFL. I’m willing to wager that all but the most casual of football fans already knew that tackles were among the highest paid players in the league. One more quote:

“I have talked to many NFL coordinators and coaches and when I said left tackle is the second-best-paid position, their response was, ‘No way!’” Lewis said.

Sorry Mr. Lewis, but I doubt it.

If you are a football fan, do you think I’m being fair to question the author on this? Do you find this surprising or even worthy of a book?

Happy Friday the Thirteenth.

If you didn’t see the news yesterday, a part-time instructor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison is coming under fire for an essay that he wrote entitled “Interpreting the Unspeakable: The Myth of 9/11″ in which he claimed that the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were actually staged by the government as a way for the Neo-Conservatives to “inaugurate their new era” in the same way that the Nazi’s burned the Reichstag in 1933 to mark the beginning of their rule in Germany.

Believe it or not, the politics have absolutely nothing to do with my interest in this article and I really don’t want to open it up for discussion. What actually caught my eye and made me do a double-take was the following passage:

Sixty-one state legislators denounced the move. One county board cut its funding for the UW-Extension by $8,247 — the amount Barrett will earn for teaching the course — in a symbolic protest, even though the course is unrelated to that branch of the UW System.

For anyone who has taught as an adjunct, $8,247 is an eye popping number! If that number is for just one 3 credit class (which I doubt), I would urge any of my unemployed readers with an expertise in Islam to send your CV’s to the University of Wisconsin immediately. I suspect that there will be a job opening up fairly soon.

Once again, it’s that time of the semester where I hold sight-singing midterms. Unlike my entry from last May when I was teaching fourth semester aural skills, I find teaching first semester to be a very enjoyable experience. It is a bit of a generalization, but it seems to me that most first-year music majors are still in good spirits about aural skills and haven’t acquired the bitterness and cynicism that must come sometime around the moment that they are asked to do part-writing for 15 straight weeks or sing chromatically altered pitches as a matter of course. The first semester is about simpler tasks, like being able to sing the leap from SOL up to MI, hearing FA’s and LA’s properly, and learning how to take a dictation. It is just plain fun and energizing to be back teaching this level after 4 years of second year aural skills. I have much less cheerleading to do and don’t feel compelled to fight a frustrating battle for their hearts and minds each day of class.

Then again, maybe it’s the introduction of harmonic dictation that changes the mood. I’ll find out in a few weeks.

So just when you think there is something that you can’t buy online, along comes the L421 Badonkadonk Land Cruiser/Tank, available through Amazon.com for the bargain basement price of $19,995.95.

Of course it’s a gag, but I love the comments, particularly the one from Isaac Rabinovitch in San Jose who wrote:

Check the stats! The sound system is more powerful than the engine! No machine gun, and the windows are too big. Good for parties, lousy for fighting off post-apocalyptic barbarians. If you’re serious about surviving the collapse of civilization, get yourself a basic armored vehicle and use the money you save to hire some mercenaries.

Good advice.

So yesterday was Columbus Day, unless of course you are a resident of one of the many states and territories that celebrate a different holiday, such as Discover’s Day in Hawaii, Native American Day in South Dakota, or possibly even Puerto Rico-Virgin Islands Friendship Day. I’m not sure what they celebrated in Minnesota, so I need someone to clarify if they officially observed Leif Erikson Day or just took the day off for no good reason.

Now I’m a pretty steadfast progressive, but even I am a bit confused about all the fuss over a holiday started by Italian-Americans as a celebration of their heritage and named after a guy who owes most of his fame to Washington Irving. Don’t get misunderstand my intentions, as there can be no doubt that European treatment (genocide, even) of the native people of North and South America was tragic and I understand the symbolic nature of Columbus Day, but I find that taking potshots at Irving for his lack of research far more interesting and less controversial than worrying about a guy who wasn’t even the first European in the New World. For me, it’s much more fun to talk about Martin Behaim, the geographer who constructed the first globe in 1492, thus proving that Columbus certainly wasn’t worried about falling off the edge of the map and that Irving made up this celebrated myth.

While I’m digging myself a hole, I also wanted to comment on two other Autumn phenomenon that, for me, have racist connotations. The first is the name “Indian Summer” for the weather pattern that most of us understand to be a period of unusually warm weather in late September and October. According to both Wikipedia and USA Today, the term itself probably does not have racist connotations. However, once Marta told me that Bulgarians call this time of year “Gypsy Summer” I knew that the term didn’t come from markings on merchant ships in the Indian Ocean. Draw your own conclusions.

Another important event (depending on your perspective, of course) in the Fall is the advent of football season and especially the start of play in the National Football League. This past weekend, the New York Giants, the NFL team that is my passion for 3 hours on Autumn afternoons, played (and soundly trounced) the Washington Redskins. We can talk about Columbus all we want, but in my mind, the blatant bigotry of this nickname deserves far more attention and energy than arguing about Columbus Day.

So far my freshman theory classes at SIUE are going very well. We finally wrapped up the fundamentals this past week with the introduction of triads and figured bass. Tomorrow we will deal with the basics of harmonic motion on our way to part-writing sometime at the end of the week or early next.

Figured bass is a funny topic to teach. At its most basic level, it’s simply “paint-by-numbers” above the bass, but since it is almost always taught after the concept of triadic inversion (something I need to re-examine in my own teaching), students always seem to want to make it more complex by skipping the literal understanding of the figures and going directly to the harmony. This is not such a crisis in the early days but when chromaticism rolls around (and especially the +6 chords) this will ultimately come back to hurt the students. I know this from firsthand experience, since I was one of those students who tried to take shortcuts with the figures. I suspect that my problems with figured bass started with long division.

The one constant throughout my life is that I’ve really disliked math and to be honest, have never really been very good at anything beyond pre-algebra. I’m not really sure why, but I suspect it is because I can’t outsmart numbers and formulas, and that irritates me no end. Part of why I like composing is that I can impose my own rules on my music, or if the rules don’t work I can either temporarily ignore them or change them altogether to fit whatever I’m trying to accomplish. With math however, I can’t change the rules, so my solution was to try to find ways around the rules, usually resulting in disastrous grades and endless frustration. For me, undergraduate theory and especially figured bass was simply another set of rules that seemed relatively straightforward, and therefore subject to taking shortcuts. I was fortunate enough to have someone take the time to show me just how simple it really was early enough to save me from myself.

Therefore, to save my students this frustration, I will continue to repeat to my students that they should first solve the figures before applying Roman numeral labels. I will say this every day for the next two weeks and at least once a week for the rest of the semester and probably all of next semester. Some of the students will take longer to get the message, but ultimately I will be more stubborn until I’m sure that they’ve received the message.