Well, finals are over, classes are done, and tomorrow I am getting on a plane back to Colorado. It certainly has been an interesting few months – I’ve learned so much more than just music. I will try to finally get that series on classes wrapped up, perhaps on the plane ride tomorrow.

For those of you who always wonder if I have perfect pitch, the answer is still no. But now there is a caveat: I probably will soon. The ability to name notes at will is certainly very satisfying, but it has major downsides. For example, I hoped to practice the piano over Thanksgiving, but on arrival I discovered the instrument was almost exactly one note flat. In tune with itself, but A was equal to Bb instead. Interestingly, this made it very nearly impossible for me to play anything at all. I was literally incapable of stringing notes together, both my pieces and any attempt at improvisation. Hopefully, once my transposition improves (thanks to Ms. Aaron) I should be able to compensate for this, but at the moment it’s rather a nuisance.

Chorus - Mr. Nemhauser

I realized, to my chagrin, that I have two weeks left in this semester and there are still four classes about which I must write, including two that don’t continue into the spring. Oops. Anyway, on with the show:

This is both a fabulous and an annoying class. It is, literally, a choir. We spend an hour and a half, twice a week, rehearsing choral music and will be giving a concert in April. It is required for two years for all piano, composition, and voice majors, so – thanks primarily to the last of these – we have the potential to sound quite incredible. Certainly superior to any choir I’ve ever experienced previously. However, in practice many people don’t treat it seriously. The only saving grace is that we have a phenomenal director. In fact, during the beginning of term when he was absent for two weeks, the entire thing almost crashed down in flames.
Mr. Nemhauser is doubtless one of the pillars of this school. He has been here forever, and teaches all of the non-academic voice-major classes. His conducting itself is perhaps not quite on the level of a professional choir director, but his command of the rehearsal is incredible. He tolerates no ‘monkey business,’ knows languages, choir vocal technique, and practice methods inside out. Though the point of the class is probably primarily to have players of non-orchestral instruments still involved in some sort of large ensemble, I’m sure we are also expected to pick up rudiments of conducting, so I am effectively learning how to direct a choir in every way short of majoring in it. I also get to play the piano accompaniment on several pieces.

First of all, I must apologize for the extended lack of blog updates – this has been a rather crazy week. My Thanksgiving was quite wonderful, and almost completely (though unintentionally) devoid of piano. My life since returning last Monday has consisted of maniacal catch-up practice and other work necessary to be fully prepared for final exams, which start a week from now.

Yesterday I had a fleeting moment of self-doubt; my lesson last week did not go so well (I’ve been struggling with the same memorization issues that have been plaguing me for as long as I can remember) and all the assignments due were beginning to weigh on my mind.
However, the last 24 hours have been a sort of ‘perfect storm’ of all possible morale boosts: yesterday night I was invited to what turned out to be – though I did not realize it beforehand – a fancy, invitation-only (read: for wealthy donors) Mannes festival concert at Carnegie Hall (one major benefit to being part of the social group anchored by graduate students who get to play in such prestigious events); today I had an absolutely fabulous last piano lesson of the semester (I believe I finally understand the concept of proper memorization, which pleases me more than I can put in words); and the last English essay of the term, which is a research paper and something I fully expected to almost completely ruin my week, has turned out to be enormously satisfying, not least because it gives me an excuse to spend time in the big NYPL Research Library near Times Square.
Expending my life in practice rooms, I sometimes forget that I am in NYC. Being able to visit a place such as this library, which is like walking into a cathedral or something from Classic Rome, reminds me that there is still culture in the world. Then walking through Grand Central Station on the way home, in all its holiday regalia, was just the icing on my cake. The fairy-tale version of New York City does still exist, at least in my own mind.

One of the great things about knowing so many people on the east coast is there is never a shortage of invitations to escape the city for a few days. One of the problems with attending a music conservatory is the extremely limited number of opportunities for actually accepting such invitations. In fact, aside from Christmas and Spring Break, I believe Thanksgiving is the only time all year when I am given more than a single extra consecutive day of vacation.

And so it is that I am currently sitting on a bus which, I’ve just discovered, has wireless Internet, heading down to Baltimore. Most people ask if I’m going home and then are terribly confused because they all believe - correctly, of course - that I live in Colorado. A bus ticket costs less than 10% of a plane ride home, however, and I’ve been promising my friend Nick that I would visit for about four years now. He lives out on the Chesapeake Bay, but I won’t actually be going there because we are going directly from the bus station to his famiy’s house in rural Pennsylvania.

School technically lets out tomorrow, but the situation is more complicated due to the required number of class sessions for the semester. Suffice it to say that I have nothing academic on the morning and was therefore able to leave early. I’ll be back very late on Sunday night, which will
make the next school day rather interesting, but I ought to be able to sleep on the bus.

I hadn’t realized how much I miss open sky, grass, and trees. Manhattan has none of these, though it has its own attractions and is such an utterly different world that I haven’t had any chance yet to be homesick. It will be nice to visit again over Christmas, but I really do already feel completely at home in NYC. I can objectively remember that I once lived somewhere else, but that already seems like the life of another person.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Last in the series

Force is an old paradigm, a thing that comes to us as an instinct inherited from our animal ancestors. For all of human history he who possesses the bigger stick, the longer sword, the heavier bomb has always been in ultimate command. This is a barbaric and uncivilized method of interaction; it requires neither truly intelligent thought nor any attempt to understand a situation. Though the theory of deterrence (“yes, you are free to hit me with that rock but be aware that my friend here will drop a tree on your head as you do it”) often proves to be sufficient for purposes of conflict resolution, men who have nothing left to lose are far less likely to be dissuaded by the threat of retaliation alone. Force can drive them underground for a time, but eventually they will bubble up again through the cracks, stronger than ever, like water through sand.
The way to the hearts and minds of men is through loyalty and respect. One could argue that fear – fear of retribution – itself is a form of respect, but, if so, this is regard built on corrupt foundations; true admiration does not cause men to be forever searching for an opportunity to to turn the tables. The effect of forceful intervention is frequently to cause hatred and ignite a simmering resentment. A man on the losing side of a physical confrontation will feel that he has not been treated fairly because there is rarely any form of compromise involved in the resolution.

Force occurs in many facets of life, but the variety which involves organized and intentional violence usually can be divided into two types. In the past force was often used as a tool by countries that were approximately equal in power, but in our modern world of imbalanced power it more commonly appears as something closer to a matchup of David and Goliath. Often these conflicts go back generations, even centuries, and the roles of strong and weak may be reversed on many occasions over time. A cycle like this will continue forever, much as a pendulum in a clock kept always wound, until either the losing side is entirely annihilated or the stronger one realizes the only way to break the oscillation is to offer an olive branch. It is, however, very difficult to erase and entire race or country, and groups in the superior position rarely wish to admit that the solution requires humility on their part. When the positions reverse, which frequently occurs, the newly-superior group usually feels justified in extracting revenge for past injustices. Objectively this is an understandable reaction, but it falls back into the most primitive of systems: that of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.
We, as intelligent and rational beings, must attempt to expose the root of these festering conflicts. Instead of forever trying to treat only the symptoms, we should find the original cause and develop a solution for that first. After this, the house of shadows will collapse as both sides discover that the original reason for fighting is not nearly so serious as they had believed. When everyone realizes that hostilities are often caused not by our differences but by the things we have in common, we will have far fewer opportunities to even consider force as an option. This is something that we as a race must do if we ever wish to see beyond the ends of our collective flat feet.

In the style of cause and effect. I have the impression our professor doesn’t actually give anything but perfect scores on these anyway

A butterfly flaps its wings and somewhere, on the other side of the world, a tornado no longer destroys the barn Farmer Ebert uses to house his cows. The idea that these two events are somehow connected, rather than being isolated occurrences, is the basic concept behind a branch of Chaos Theory more commonly, and quite appropriately, known to those of us without degrees in advanced mathematics as The Butterfly Effect. It is an incredible example of how the smallest thing can almost literally change the direction of the world.

To take the marquee example, imagine that butterfly once again. Imagine it happily fluttering along through a meadow, perhaps in Africa. As it floats past, the slight change in air pressure from its wings knocks a ripe berry from a solitary bush. Now what if this berry had not fallen to the ground and instead remained hidden from the bird flying past a few minutes later? Suppose also that this one berry gives the bird enough energy to fly an extra five minutes, allowing it to travel one tree further along on its summer migration route. Sure, a small enough difference, but perhaps this new tree already contains a full quota of birds – the addition of even one more is enough make it crash to the ground. Suddenly the small effect of a butterfly’s wing has caused something far larger.
But take the theory even further. Once this tree falls, the small spring that bubbles up through the rocks between its roots is no longer protected from the sun. Soon the water heats up and begins to evaporate far more rapidly, creating a small patch of humid air that drifts out over the Atlantic Ocean. Now, probably a hurricane would be forming right about this time anyway, but pretend the addition of more humid air is enough to accelerate the process by at least a couple of minutes. By the time this storm system makes it across the sea and comes ashore in Florida, these few minutes have stretched sufficiently to change the the point of landfall by many miles. Instead of passing quickly over the south end of the state, this hurricane slams directly into the hills further north and loses most of its energy. Now weak and incapable of re-strengthening over the warm gulf of Mexico for a renewed attack on the Texas coast line, it drifts aimlessly westward, slowly dissipating into the atmosphere. The torrential rains and tornadoes that would accompany a hurricane’s remnants as they move inland instead harmlessly expend themselves over the ocean and the cow shed is indeed saved.

Of course, many other elements in the system also contribute to changes of the whole, so no one can truly show that the simple beat of an insect’s wings is enough to alter the fate of earth’s most powerful forces. However, who can prove it isn’t?

Dr. Atomic

I received a call from my friend about an hour and a half before this show was due to start saying that he had an extra ticket. So, after rushing back to my room from the practice center, which ironically is less than five minutes from the opera house so sort of an unfortunate timing, we set out again.
Now, I went into this opera with high expectations. I’d heard good things about it, and the subject matter (the development of the atomic bomb) looked quite interesting. In other words, I had an open mind. However, after sitting through the entire thing, I can say it is probably one of the two or three worst performances for which I have ever paid money to see. The production itself was as good as could be expected (it is the Metropolitan Opera, after all) but the story line was close to incoherent, it’s debatable whether those notes could even be counted as ‘music’, and the words would probably have been more eloquent if someone had just repeatedly opened a dictionary at random and picked whatever happened to be at the top of each page. One of my friends left at the intermission.

I honestly don’t understand modern art. It’s as though all semblance of skill has been replaced with weirdness. John Adams (the composer) has some good pieces – I’ve played several – but this is not one of them. Someone is going to read this and say similar things were written about, for example, The Rite of Spring, but can an objective case really be made that such a piece is actually an IMPROVEMENT on anything written by Chopin or Mozart? It’s as though art in general is engaged in an exponential free fall where the only goal is to be more obnoxiously strange than the next person in line.

Now that I’ve been here for two months, there is definitely a standard schedule developing. Each weekday morning I wake up at 7 (earliest on the floor), check my email, take a shower (as the earliest, I get to use the bathroom while it’s still clean), eat my cereal with yogurt (anyone who hasn’t discovered the joys of Greek yogurt is leading and incomplete life), and put together some sort of lunch (my current favorite is fresh bread with brie and onions). I load my backpack with whatever notebooks and other supplies are needed for that day’s classes and take a bus to school, invariably arriving at least an hour before my first class of the day (which is 10 am except on Wednesdays and Fridays). This way I can score a practice room for an hour and never have to worry about being late due to traffic or an unforeseen event in the dorm. After classes, I walk two blocks to the subway and spend the next four, often five hours at the practice center.
I’ve already joined the ’social circle’ there, which does have benefits when it comes to scheduling rooms with nicer pianos, though the only other undergraduate in the group is a senior and I’ve been mistake for a Masters’ student three times so far just this week. I’m not quite sure when and where the other undergraduates practice – sometimes I wonder if they even actually DO – but I’m finding I prefer to be around older students anyway as they generally tend to be a bit more focused.
After the practice center, I take a different bus and a second train back up to my dorm. One of the few things (other than sleep) that I still do for fun is cook, so I often spend up to an hour on that each evening. Of course it doesn’t always take that long, but there are only a few of us on the floor who get more ambitious than frozen pizza or macaroni and cheese, so at least I don’t often have to fight for the kitchen. My homework is still quite simple and never too challenging, but, as you know, I tend to be quite obsessive about such things so I use far more time than is really necessary for doing it. There is also a certain amount of wasted ’slop’ time caused by living in a dorm, so I never get to bed before midnight. If go back to school for recital in the evening, which happens not infrequently, I often will be up past one finishing things off. This is by choice though, as I easily could keep normal sleeping hours if I wasn’t pushing myself to do so much extra practice. I don’t especially miss Colorado (alright, I hardly even think about it at the moment), but I think this is mostly due to being always busy with something. I have no opportunity to sit in a room and rot, and I’m still actually enjoying the big city. I expect by the time I get to Christmas I’ll be ready for a break.

Another essay, this time comparing two things. Also full marks

Ever since the invention of fire, humans have used heat to cook food. For thousands of years the preferred method of containment while heating for anything that could not be impaled upon a stick was placing it inside a metal vessels; items we now know as pots and pans. These devices can range from a most simplistic metal cavity to a work of art most appropriate for only a professional chef.
Our modern cookware comes in two major varieties: non-stick and not non-stick. Both share the obvious similarities of holding food, transferring heat evenly from a heat source, and being of roughly comparable shapes. Both are generally made of metal, usually have handles, and frequently include matching lids. However, a standard pot or pan is likely to be made from a far greater selection of materials than one with a non-stick coating. A normal piece of cookware is likely to have a base and, for high-end models, side walls made either of copper or aluminum – both highly-conductive metals. Copper is generally considered superior but is usually far more expensive. Unfortunately copper and, too a much lesser extent, aluminum react chemically to various types of food and must usually be coated or treated in some way to prevent the metal from changing the flavor of whatever is being prepared. A favorite way to prevent this from happening is to apply a layer of stainless steel, which is both hard and highly-nonreactive.

A non-stick pot or pan is also typically made of aluminum – which is much cheaper and lighter than copper – but instead of another metal layer it is instead coated with Teflon, a plastic which is well-known for its non-reactive and anti-stick qualities. Teflon is a relatively recent invention, at least compared the the history of cooking, so while non-stick dishes are popular in homes it would be rare to find them in a professional kitchen.

Nonstick and standard cookware each have specific advantages and disadvantages when compared to the other. Non-stick pans are not only very easy to clean, they also are less likely to cause burned food. A regular pot requires significantly more oil to prevent food from fusing to the metal, but in most cases but can be heated to far higher temperatures – something which damages a Teflon coating and invariably hastens the demise of the kitchen piece. While non-stick is doubtless easier to maintain in day-to-day use, it can be TOO non-stick, making fried foods difficult to manage unless a significant amount of extra oil is used. In the end, it is a choice very much open to personal preference and style of food preparation, and many people own examples of both varieties in order to have available which ever is more suited to the current need.