[Email sent to M. Rufus Wainwright from M. Claude Debussy; 19 February 2007]
Mon cher,
Do not listen to that macho cowboy Ives about changing your name. He is an idiot.
I was assigned to oversee your work on your new opera, but told not to interfere. I have been in correspondence with Ms. Brown about my insistence [...]
Many teachers, myself included, wish they did not have to grade students. Grading can be wildly subjective and mean different things in different fields. Grade deflation in the arts is rampant, and I suspect and have heard that grade inflation is the norm in the sciences.
In teaching composition, the way I teach undergraduates is [...]
I have instituted a new tradition in my 2 year core music theory class at UCLA: Show and Teach. These are ungraded 3 to 5 minute presentations by a member of the class that are, truth be told, variations on “show and tell” where music or something related to music is presented to the [...]
I thought it would be of interest to report the feedback I got from our “honest interviews” last week. One student had an audition, and it was not a good one. He could not identify intervals, chord qualities and their inversions, couldn’t sight-sing a melody, and knew very little classical repertoire. I held up the [...]
We have just finished auditioning potential students for our undergraduate composition program at UCLA. Traditionally, at the end of the interview, we have not told the students our assessment of their audition. They simply found out later that they were either accepted or not. This year, I decided to give students who were way off [...]
It’s interesting to see how we are mixtures of conservative and liberal. Although this is likely an overgeneralization, I look at myself and see this quite clearly.
The most stressful times of our life have to do with periods of change, and many times abrupt change. If change is associated with stress, people can easily resolve [...]
In my music theory class I am experimenting with a new technique as an alternative to homework. (The homework involved is college level harmony exercises.) I have divided the class into groups of four (2+2) with similar abilities and temperaments. I hand out a set of in-class exercises for the class, and the students are [...]
For many years I began my 2 year music theory classes with a so-called “commercial.” Very often these were litlle pieces of big-brotherly advice to college freshmen, still adjusting to being away from home. The students loved them as much as I enjoyed telling them. Nowadays, I find I am less interested in giving unasked [...]
Why do we study music? Music schools and conservatories around the world teach their graduates to “analyze” music. I have always wanted my teachers to tell me why what they were teaching me was important. “Just because” or “Because this is the way it has always been done” or “it is part of the curriculum” [...]
Today at Hugo’s I had a new waiter. I noticed he had a treble clef tattooed on the inside of his right forearm, and a bass clef on the inside of his left forearm. I couldn’t resist asking whether he was a pianist, so I did.
“No, I’m a keyboard-guitar-bass-drums player” he rattled off as though [...]
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