Belfry at Mission San Juan Bautista

To summarize the linked story, Ascencion was a Native American and the last known native speaker of the Mutsun language spoken by the Amah Mutsun tribe in the Central Coast area of California (roughly San Luis Obispo to Santa Cruz.) In 1929, Ascencion was visited by the noted Smithsonian linguist John Peabody Harrington who recorded her oral history. After seeing a photograph of Ascencion in the San Francisco Chronicle, her story came to the attention of Fresno State University professor Helene Joseph-Weil who then created a libretto version that was set to music by her colleague, composer Benjamin Boone. (If you are interested, there is a nice audio slideshow with an excerpt from the piece linked to the NPR article. )

When I first saw the article, I was immediately reminded of the story of Ishi, the last known surviving member of the Yahi tribe, who in August of 1911 wandered into Oroville, California. (Very near where I completed my undergraduate degree.) Ishi was subsequently moved to San Francisco where he provided a wealth of information about his people and his native Yana language.

What I found particularly interesting though, is that one of the University of California linguists who worked with Ishi was a gentleman named Alfred L. Kroeber who in turn gave several lectures attended by a student at nearby Stanford University by the name of John Peabody Harrington. Perhaps not a surprise, but I like finding these sort of connections.

Jerry Holbert, from the Boston Herald via Daryl Cagle’s Professional Cartoonists Index.

It appears that my post noting how much that I think the recent reconstruction of Bach resembles Hank Hill’s father Cotton from the animated series King of the Hill was recently mentioned in Molly Sheridan’s “Friday Informer” column on the AMC’s New Music Box website.

Though I doubt that this is the beginning of my big move to the vanguard of American Music, it is still amusing. (I must admit that I’ve got the theme song from The Jefferson’s stuck in my head…)

It’s all over the news of course, but it you haven’t seen it in its 40 minute entirety and have any interest in the speech, I urge you to take the time to watch it through.

In an effort to provide good solid musical examples for my theory class this week, I found myself rummaging through a musty, coleoptera infested chest when I discovered a manuscript with the following fragment of music:

Based on my preliminary research, I learned that it might have been composed in Germany during the 18th Century by one of two obscure composers: Johann Wolfgang Länänn (1726-1788) or Jakob Paul Magürtnei (1742-1812). According to my reading, it seems that both of these composers were born in the city of Leber-Lache and surprisingly both lived and worked in the town of Apfel and were likely employed by a Georg Heinrich Marten at the famed Röder Abbey.

What I can’t puzzle out is the meaning of the inscription “Tschüss Judit!” in the margin…

Second semester theory is one of my favorite semesters to teach for a variety of reasons. However, after teaching it for so many consecutive years, a pattern has emerged and I’m hoping that perhaps some of my more experienced readers can chime in with their own observations.

It seems that just about this time every year some of my students reach their saturation point with the material. This generally results in a great deal of frustration and in some cases an inability to make decisions on the page, especially on test days. The students tend to start well when part-writing begins, but as the harmony and rules begin to pile up, there comes a point when the wheels to come off for a selected few, usually around the time that second inversion usage is introduced.

Fortunately, this is also the time when I typically switch gears and spend a few weeks talking about phrase structures and periods, leaving the minutiae of the SATB petri dish for bigger concepts and more musical settings. Experience has taught me that this break from the overt and relentless discussion of harmony seems to recharge most of the students and allows them to sort out whatever issues they might have been struggling with up to this point in the course.

This is important for me to remember because the frustration in this afternoon’s classroom was palpable. Has anyone else experienced this phenomenon and do you have any tricks that you’ve picked up over the years to help students through this period?

My First Dungeons & Dragons Book

I was never a serious player, and in fact probably only played a few times with my friends as a child and then a few games in college. For me, it was never about the game itself but rather the ideas in contained within those innocuous boxes. It was an entire world, ready to be explored and conquered and it provided fertile soil for my pre-adolescent imagination and led me on many wondrous flights of fancy.

Of course, in the current age of computer games that can provide online role-playing with hordes of like-minded gamers, the dice game that started it all might seem just a bit quaint and cliché, but for me it represents a nostalgiac touchstone of my childhood and I think that maybe quaint and cliché aren’t such bad memories.

CNN released a story today about an anthropologist who reconstructed Bach’s face from a copper casting of his skull. I think it’s pretty interesting to see what he might have looked like, but to be honest, it’s a bit disappointing to me.

For some reason, I have a hard time reconciling the fact that the composer of the “The Musical Offering” looks a bit like Hank Hill’s father from “King of the Hill.”

If you had told me a year ago that the message that would sweep America during the 2008 election would be that we Americans need to examine ourselves and take responsibility for our own future, I would have laughed. After all, this is a country where our leaders think that giving each of us an extra $300 will solve all of our economic problems and that foreign policy starts with a shotgun pointed off the front porch.