Happy Birthday, Lucy, Old Girl!

Yes, believe it or not, my eldest kitty will by seven years old on Wednesday. The posters in my veterinarian's office say that at age 7 and older, a cat is considered a "senior." All of our family cats that have died of natural causes have lived to be at least 21 years old. So with 2/3 of her life ahead of her, my Lucy is a senior?? I've got about 2/3 of my life left (if I live to be 87), and I'm sure not ready to be a senior citizen!

Oh well! Happy Birthday, Lucy!

What a morning!

I love my husband.

Around midnight, he came to bed because the power went out, so what else was he going to do? So, I set my travel alarm clock so I wouldn't oversleep.

Six hours later, I woke to several inches of snow worthy of a long list of school and road closures. I hurried to get ready so I could leave early, and my sweet husband, who didn't have to be up for another hour, got up with me and cleaned off and warmed up the car while I got ready to go.

The first half of the drive was really treacherous, and all the fish-tailing literally made me carsick. Visibility was only about 500 ft. I was kind of irritated to get to Greeley where you could still see the ground and it was barely even raining. No one up here even appreciates what I went through to get here this morning!

Believe it or not, I was only 15 minutes late for my first class. What is usually a 75 minute drive took 35 minutes longer than usual, but I got an early start thanks to Eric. Thank you, Eric!! :-)

School daze

I took my piano proficiency this morning. I'm afraid those professors probably think I shouldn't be teaching piano. But let's look at the mitigating circumstances.... it was at 7:45 AM, which means I had to leave the house by 6:15. And in the ten years that I studied piano, I never had a recital. I can sing in front of anyone, but playing the piano for people scares me to death. I can accompany my students, probably because the attention is not on my playing, but their singing. But this morning, my heart was thumping and my hands were shaking, and of course, I passed easily, but it was not one of my finer performances.

In my special ed class, we were assigned group presentation topics and presentation dates. Mine is Oct 31st, the exact same day as my other group presentation. Two group presentations this semester and they're both on the same day! Lucky me. Good to get them out of the way, I suppose. Oddly enough, they are very similar presentations involving how to apply material we have learned in class to the state standards for our content areas (Music, for me), but one is geared toward the average student and the other toward a student with Asperger's Syndrome.

What is "Art?"

Interesting excerpts from an article entitled, "Classical music: Why bother?" by Joshua Fineberg:

"Art is not about giving people what they want. It's about giving them something they don't know they want. "

"Real art cannot be an act of manipulation or marketing, but only an act of faith. Faith that great art is something remarkable. Faith that someone, somewhere, sometime might make the effort to understand what an artist has to offer -- and not merely seek what is already known.

It requires a tremendous leap of faith to surrender control of our perception to someone else, on the off chance that they may offer us something we never knew we wanted but now would not want to be without. If we don't really believe in this possibility anymore -- in the inherent importance and transformative potential of art -- then why would anyone in their right mind take the risk?"

The full article:
http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/music/feature/2002/10/02/classical/index.html?pn=1

It's a small world after all!

So, in my Musical Scholarship class, we're writing program notes. You know, a few paragraphs in the performance program telling the audience a little about the composer and the piece of music. For our first program notes assignment, we had to choose a piece for solo instrument with piano accompaniment that is between 10 and 30 minutes in length. That eliminates the vast majority of the vocal repertoire, so I chose a Flute Sonata by Lowell Liebermann that I heard a good friend of mine perform in his junior recital at IU.

To begin my research, I did a search on the composer and "flute sonata" in the IIMP article search index. It brought up this fantastic article which is perfect for the kind of research one does for program notes. I was amused and surprised to see that the article had been written by none other than my good friend from IU while we were studying together at IU.

Needless to say, this good friend just got an email from me asking why on earth I never knew he was a published author! What a small world it is!