Vacation All I Ever Wanted...
Hooray! As of 8 this morning, my work for the quarter was done. I got about 4 hours of sleep after getting my ethnomusicology project submitted, and spent the afternoon watching reruns of Deep Space Nine. The weekend will be spent outside with any luck.
A quick assessment of the academics of Winter '06:
Music in the US: Good class, really glad I took it. It was a straight lecture class, and covered a huge amount of material I didn't know at all. Going into it, I knew a bit about Cage, Ives, and Adams, could recognize "The Banshee" on one hearing, and was pretty solid on the blues, tin pan alley, musical theatre, and Scott Joplin. Lots of the rest, though, like Billings, Crawford, Gottschalk, and Carter, were mostly unknown to me. Some of the music (yes, we actually *listened* to music in this class - around 40 hours of it) was gorgeous, some weak, and some - notably "The Battle of Trenton" - were just absurd.
Best moment of the quarter: Toss-up between "Battle of Trenton," which includes the narrator shouting "General confusion!" over the music, and learning that Dr. A. was in the Navy marching band during Vietnam, and that their motto was "We'd rather toot than shoot."
Romantic Music: Also really good. More of an issues class than a lecture, although we got to listen to music for this one too. A bit of trivia: even if we had been required to listen to the entire Ring, rather than just Die Walkure, we still would have had more listening for US than for Romantic. The professor seems to share my love of movies and my bizarre sense of humor, which is a nice bonus.
Best moment of the quarter: I'm really proud of both my final project, talking about the adaptation of Carmen into Carmen Jones. I'm also pretty pleased with my final exam, in which I was able to do a Connections-like narrative through more than half of the identification items.
Introduction to Ethnomusicology: This was a tough one. I love the subject, and I really like the professor, but she was very disorganized, and the class was out of control. My comment at the end of the quarter was that it was a very good 5-credit class. Sadly, it was only 3 credits. Evidently they go back and forth on this every few years. If it's going to be a 3-credit class, that's fine, but then it needs to be taught like one. Instead, I spent more time on this one class than on the other two combined, and I know I'm not alone. I'm not sure what she'll think of the final project for this class. It's experimental and non-narrative, which she knew was going to be the case. We'll see if she decides to reward the innovation, or if it distracts her from the content.
Best moment of the quarter: Hard to pick one - there weren't any big victories in this class, just occasional moments of "well, that went pretty well." I think maybe the best moments in this class happened outside it, during my ethnographic research. I'll be taking Russian Opera with this same professor next quarter, so we'll see how that goes.
So now I am off to Kroger to buy food, so that I can cook dinner for the first time in weeks. I'm hoping for decent-looking salmon.
posted by Alison @ 6:27 PM
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