Rebirth of the music (student) within

Guillaume's Travel Journal - October 9, 2006

A lot has been happening over the past few days.

First of all, I went to town for the first time on Friday. There, I was able to sample the staples of British culture - everything from tea shops to "Bob's Bargain Booze". I went for a tour of the castle grounds, and ended this quick escapade with a trip to the local supermarket. On the whole, I found it all to be quite charming; I'll definitely need to go for a proper Lancaster Castle tour sometime (I spotted they do a "dark" tour of the Castle every month, complete with costumes and "other surprises" - definitely sounds like something I'll have to do. Beyond that, I picked up some local concert brochures for the county opera tour (Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin) and a local Mozart concert series.

Today was the first official day of classes; about time too, I've been waiting to take up a few more academic challenges lately. With this in mind, I started off with a trip to the library to take a look at some of the recommended readings for my Musical Psych class before heading off to my 2-hour lecture on Renaissance Music. Despite being the oldest guy around the music department (most professors are surprisingly young, at least half of them less than 40 years, 90% under 50), he seems to be quite sensitive of what is required to make compelling and memorable lectures, offering lots of information (I've never taken so many notes in one theory/history lecture), but also interspersing this with lots of other ideas, not the least being:

I once tried to teach 40 primary school children to play a descant using recorders. Biggest mistake of my life.

I can't help but appreciate that practical aspect on spreading the sound of Renaissance music.

One of the things that's quickly becoming apparent is the amount of independent reading required on this side of the Atlantic - every class seems to have about 15 iterations of various books more or less loosely tied to the main subject material, all of which I may or may not have to go through before end of term. Students here seem to be seeing Renaissance music for the first time (and comparing it to Wagner and Chopin, if you can believe that), while I'm hear to gain a much deeper knowledge of the topic. From the looks of the outline, I think I'll be satisfied with what will be covered - score transcription, social ties of music, and studies of various factions of secular polyphonic madrigals.

One non-music class that I'm very much looking forward to is Media and Cultural Studies 204: New Media and Audiovisual Culture. In basic English, I think this means "how computers, the Internet and video games are changing traditional media". One of the topics I'm diving deeper and deeper into as I progress in my academic career is the association of music with various emotions, feelings and locales (something a knowledge of Musical Psychology will help me better understand), and I hope this course can provide me with the basic tools of evaluating digital environment music within its context. That's basically a fancy way of saying that I want to understand how the tunes that play when you boot your computer or play your video game assist in establishing a better framework for the task you (or software designers) wish to accomplish. I'll have to wait till thursday to find out what the class brings though. Until then, I'll have the local debate society and choir to check out, as well as hopefully getting my composition lessons underway.