Summer Update: Getting From Here to There and Music, Music, Music

Life as the world’s Oldest Living Ph.D. student has its ups and downs; the downs are usually missing family and friends, and the ups are times like this week when it hits me how incredibly lucky I am to be doing this, and how much I love academia (and, like all great loves, it is not perfect and does drive me nuts sometimes). I started the Graduate Survey of Music History this week, and as always when my schedule changes (usually at the start of the semester but in summer there are five sessions when new classes can start) I face a new challenge in the logistics of getting to class. The best possible solution involves several issues such as where to park, finding the optimum route whether by bus or walking or some combination, timing, etc. and is complicated by the weather and how much my backpack weighs. Now that I have a 9:30 class Monday through Thursday, as well as Latin MWF at 11:00, I find that I can’t avoid a rapid trek across campus from one to the other, in the middle of these 98-degree days, uphill most of the way with two enormous texts in my backpack. Fortunately I only have to make the Bataan Death March twice a week.

For over a year I’ve been passing this building and wondering what it was like inside. When one of my humanities classes was held in the Dance building, I really enjoyed prowling its halls, looking in at rehearsal studios, seeing its displays of costumes and notices of upcoming presentations and visiting artists. Now I have a legitimate reason to wander around the Music building, passing one room full of cellists, another with a chamber group, and various individual practice rooms with sounds of a harpsichord or clarinet filtering under the door. A divine cacophony resounds in the halls like a celestial orchestra tuning up. And I get to be in class with graduate Music students – future musicologists or performers or music teachers. This Music History class is a diverse group; there are several women my age, music teachers working on their master’s during their summer hiatus or "unpaid vacation" as one refers to it.

Thanks to the nature of my program, I’ve been able to enjoy going into the different departments and discovering their respective cultures. I loved being in class with the English grads, very pleasant people with their verbal pyrotechnics and phenomenal writing skills. Although I liked them personally, I didn't enjoy sharing the pain of the tense and high-strung Art Historians, a visually-oriented group who were up to their eyebrows in facts and could recite the history of research on any major artwork at the drop of a hat; and now I’m observing the Musicians, a slightly eccentric group who are apt to break into a 16^th –century madrigal in the most un-selfconscious manner as they walk down the hall. They appear to be having as much fun as the Humanities grads (who always seem to enjoy themselves hugely no matter what they are taking). And this fall I’ll go further afield and find out what the History grads are like.

The Graduate Music History Survey really must of necessity speed by, since it covers Western music from antiquity to the present day in just six weeks; but it’s still very exciting and I know I definitely want to teach Music Appreciation in addition to my standard courses when I get out. This week we studied Antiquity through the Middle Ages and once again, I find the Latin classes helpful as well as the Catholic upbringing. Professor Kite-Powell was describing the recitative type of plainchant and I knew it at once as “how the priest used to sing High Mass.”

He asked if any of us knew why Music was included in the medieval Quadrivium of subjects that made up part of the original liberal arts curriculum, along with Arithmetic, Geometry and Astronomy, and I had my hand up faster than Hermione Granger. Music is all about proportions, relationships, and intervals. It’s corny, but I like to think of it as Liquid Math.

I had known that Guido of Arezzo instituted the first standardized system of musical notation in the West back in the tenth century, but I didn’t know about his Hand – an instructional system he used with his sight-singing students, a method kids still learn by in some places. Maybe it would have helped me. Sight-singing was the only college class I’ve ever taken that so completely defeated me that I dropped it. I was taking it, Music History, and Music Theory for fun back in the early 80’s. I had no problem with Theory I & II; Sister Mary of OLV had taught us so well that I already knew much of it; but sight-singing was another matter altogether.