And These Are The Days My Friends

The Pub, originally uploaded by vansgirl12.

I got a copy of 'Einstein On The Beach' from the library today. I had not listened to the opera before but it's always been a title floating around in my head. So I decided to have a listen.

I don't have a comment on it yet. Sometimes it makes me laugh especially when one of the voices is keeping count. I like "Knee Play 2" at the moment.

I wonder if I should be frightening my classmates with my comments. Haha. I am pretty awful. Yesterday I said that Mark Slobin was a jerk and everyone was shocked that I could have said that about someone. I guess my idea of jerk is not the same idea as everyone else. Ah well, it is always fun to get a rise out of people.

I don't know how I feel about my seminars, to be quite honest. The discussion starts off when us trying to piece together what the articles were about and then discussing certain ideas in the articles. "What's your opinion on so and so?"

My goal is to say something that will make people argue against me. I generally try to get to the controversial point of the argument of the writer because I know at least then, hopefully, it will spark a discussion. However it doesn't always work and I feel like I am sometimes hogging to the discussion.

Actually, there was a point where a debate involved the entire class. It was mostly about what place Ethnomusicology has in today's academic world. However, we had to cut that discussion short because it was going off from this week's main discussion.

The other day I spoke to someone who thought that Reich was hardly accessible. That was interesting. I don't think I have ever met anyone who didn't think Reich was easy to listen to and enjoy. I guess that might be saying something about taste more than anything. I would say that it is because I am an academic musician that he is highly accessible to me but I know people who aren't even musicians who can enjoy Reich. So I don't know.

If you want to know an interesting fact about Ethnomusicology, here it is: Ethnomusicology comes out of a field known as 'Comparative Musicology' that originated in Europe, specifically Germany and then more so in Berlin, that was school of academics/scholars/scientists that were not actually musicians but had degrees in other fields like Chemistry and many of them had degrees in Psychology.

I find that to be rather interesting. Ethnomusicology is more credited to a guy named Hornbostel than Bartok even though Bartok was more of an Ethnomusicologist than Hornbostel could ever be.

We like Bartok.