June 3, 2005 at 5:49 AM

I really wanted to practice today, not to mention meet up with a friend, but instead I took a nap from 5 to midnight. I think I'm coming down with something that's going around; virtually everyone I know is sick. Better after the recital than before! So, the plan pushed back to tomorrow then is to start hard work on one of the fast movements of Shostakovich, either the Scherzo or the Burleske. As for today, I think laundry will have to be my biggest accomplishment.

Our last music history class of the year and my last academic class at Northwestern ever featured four doctoral student composers and was actually quite interesting. They were very articulate and visibly enthusiastic about not only their own compositional ideas and thoughts but also their deep respect for the past. Listening to excerpts of their music after listening to them talk, especially about the exact circumstances that inspired them to write the piece, such as the death of a famly member or friend, really made much more sense and made us receptive to hearing the music with an open mind. Supposedly in one study that brought 9- to 16-year-olds into contact with modern music (atonal and aleatoric, etc.), the kids not only liked the music more as their familiarity grew over time, but they even liked it the first time around because they were fascinated by the sounds. So in a way children are far more open-minded than the rest of us classically trained musicians, steeped in the tonal systems of Mozart and Beethoven. In general, the thing that we all really seemed to agree upon was that for any new music to really get off the ground, communication is key--between the composers and the performers, first of all, so that the musicians understand what the heck they are supposed to convey by all those squiggles on the page; and between the composers/performers and the audience, by bringing them in with program notes and explanations and anything at all that can give a better grasp of what this music is after.

The NAC YAP webpage has been updated: read about how I'm spending the next three weeks.

June 3, 2005 at 5:49 AM

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