Day 62 "In the trenches" (phones, staff, teaching, rumba, overseas edition)

Busy day today: teaching, pitching for public radio, working out passport and visa details for China tour with the trad band, staff meeting, rehearsals this weekend for a visiting artist's master-class and concert of Afro-Cuban folkloric drumming. All good stuff to do, all elements either coming to fruition or laying good foundations for the future--but time-consuming and demanding nevertheless.

Today's class for the undergrads was Webern Op. 21, the Symphony, which we use for starting to talk about pointillism (blurring of boundaries, indistinct combinations of color, and, in musical contexts, emphasis upon fine and/or minute musical events distributed in space), klangfarbenmelodie (a wonderful portmanteau German compound noun for "sound-colors-melody"), the technique of isolating the single sequential notes of a (typically angular, atonal, or serial) melody...

Urrr....11:30pm and out of time. Will continue as "Part Deux" tomorrow.