Music Students, Varese and AOL

Its been an interesting week here. Yesterday I spent half the day at the Saturday Conservatory of Music in Pasadena giving placement exams and helping kids with music stuff. I was subbing for my friend Jason McKee-Ota and had expected to be teaching a class on Harmony but on arrival found out that they were re-testing everyone into classes. I was kind of excited about teaching but I had fun nonetheless. Its really great to see programs like this in action. Its also an interesting look at the way music is being taught to young people. It seems that classical music (as in Mozart) dominates and the idea that music after 1900 or so exists is not explained at all. I got to have a long conversation with a fellow composer about the state of music education and its problems over a pastrami sandwich and a gigantic tub of chili-cheese fries (which was enough for the next year I think). In one conversation with faculty I mentioned that I was going to see the LA Phil play Varese's "Amerique" on Sunday and was met with the response "hmm.. never heard of Varese." That threw me back a bit. I don't know why but I thought he was a pretty big composer in the music world. Big enough to at least be a familiar name.

As I'm writing this I just got back from the concert conducted by David Robertson along with Crumb's "A Haunted Landscape," Zappa's "Dupree's Paradise," and Copland's "City." The performance was fantastic and I particularly enjoyed the Crumb. We grabbed some student rush tickets and lucked out with some great seats up front. It was nice to get blasted with Varese's extended percussion section.

This past month I've been working on about 3 pieces concurrently and as I speak I'm loading about 2 million records into a database for some data mining. The data comes outta this.
I find it a bit disturbing, especially since while this data is theoretically anonymous, with little to no effort each record can be traced back to its origin. It is, however, interesting data and certainly is a nice glimpse into internet surfing in the country.