well things are going a bit better for me in regard to my courses.
sometimes i wish i would have stayed around fullerton a few extra years and studied composition but then at the same time i think that i would have shot myself if i had said there longer. when i applied to fullerton i applied to study composition (for those of you who didn't know) and i used to do advisement with lloyd for a while until i switched to oboe and realised i would not reach the 300 level for ages and that meant i would be at fullerton for six years. i never wanted to teach so that is why i decided to do music history and theory because it was the next best thing. i should go back there and do a masters with lloyd in comp. ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. but then, i could just see them making me take lessons with pamela madsen instead. i would quit. i would withdraw from the university the very next day.
sadly, i haven't read anything particularly interesting. we were supposed to have a lecture on tibetan music. or well, it seemed like tibetan protest music since the articles were all about communism in china and tibet's use of music as protest. of course, i love music that has a political motivation. but the lecturer was an hour late to the seminar because she thought it was at 4pm instead of 2pm and she didn't actually talk about the readings. so it was a bit of a waste.
in ethno, we've mostly been reading about issues related to the field, to doing "field work" or as one ethnomusicologist wrote, "field experience." however they have been less than remarkable. we read a slobin article for this week's seminar about ethics in ethnomusicology. i think that he made some good points, about possible ethical problems. he also said that ethnomusicology has only begun to acknowledge this problems. it seems like a lot of ethnomusicologists were not particularly interested in that subject.
of course, i am. i think i may be too overly concerned with the ethics part of the job of being an ethnomusicology. i can't help it. i was raised to be conscious. my father was an activist in the sixties and seventies and he raised me to be one, too. i think he may have tried to raise all of his kids this way but somehow...i was the only one that ate it all up. i remember a story one of my older sisters told me about when they were younger. she said they would sit around the tv waiting for the presidential election results to come up and when it showed who was victorious she would ask my dad, "how come we always lose, dad?"
i guess i'm starting to realise that no field is perfect and that in every field there is going to be ideas that one might find entirely ridiculous, useless, or completely incorrect. however, not everything that is done within that field is going to be bad. it's just that i wonder where all the good stuff is? and what is good stuff? i don't even know.
i watched "the draughtsman's contract" recently and the music, beside the film, was really great. i was always a mild fan of michael nyman but i really liked the score. it reminded me a lot of lloyd's music, actually. but also, it reminded me of albinoni. i think because when we played albinoni in scratch we used to say that it was hard not to smile after that one.
i'm guilty of not playing my oboe. i miss it a lot. but i haven't had time to make reeds or attempt to make reeds. maybe i should ask carl to buy some reeds for me from rdg's in hollywood. it's not that i'm not being a performer at all because i am playing in the gamelan and that is a lot of fun. i just miss what i used to be able to do on the oboe. i guess i feel like i need to be more than just an academic---i need to be a musician.
well, speaking of performing, this thursday i will be peforming with gamelan in the drama department's production of "the law of java." i think it's going to be a lot of fun. gamelan is the closest thing i have to scratch, which is saying a lot because it's nothing like scratch. i guess i just enjoy playing in it as much as i did in scratch.
