Today was a lovely, sunny, warm day here in the swamp lands. I gave and then graded a quiz this morning, which was less than spectacular for the students and, therefore, not such a fantastic experience for me either. However, after lunch, I sat outside at Highland Coffees for almost two hours working on post-tonal analysis exercises. The music we're studying is very mathy, which, as I've already mentioned here, is a picnic for me. Getting to spend some quality time figuring out nit-picky details while sipping iced tea, barefoot, in a patio area under a nice blue sky was sort of heaven-like. I was joined by the lovely Jeannette for a little while before she had to go to class (poor fools who have afternoon classes!! Ha!), and she was reading some of her medieval Latin, which is not such a picnic for her. Anyway, there is little in the world that is better than finding something you love to do and being able to do it outside on a nice day. My favorite outdoor activity used to be writing poems about small inhuman things to which I could give human characteristics (my two best poems are entitled "Tomatoes" and "Inchworm"); now, I think working on post-tonal music analysis might take over. It's still not quite as portable as creative writing, because I generally need more than a scrap of plain paper for music analysis, but it still travels better than a piano, which would be my favorite outdoor activity were it more conducive to the outdoors. But wouldn't it be great if it were? I could be like Floyd Cramer in his CD commercials or Elton John in some of his music videos and play a piano in the middle of a field of wildflowers... sadly, no. But at least sheet music lends itself to carriage, even if I do need to return to a piano when I find myself unable to sing the tone row.

Labels: music, school

• posted by erica 3/18/2004 07:21:00 PM
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