It’s been a wild and woolly time for all us teachers: auditions, interviews, quotas, deciding who to take, and wanting to admit more than we have space for. On Saturday, I went out to a new restaurant and had a lovely salad. Three hours later I was in misery from intestinal cramps and, well, food poisoning. In bed for 48 hours, the clouds finally parted on Monday afternoon.

Still fragile, but much better, I gave a 2 hour presentation on my life as a composer to my class. It was a cathartic experience looking back on a pretty wonderful life. The students seemed to enjoy my talk and my music.

That night I attended a pre-concert concert for donors and citizens of West Hollywood given by Vox Femina, who, with funding from the city, had commissioned me to compose HEALY MADRIGALS for their March 20 concert downtown. I got to meet lots of donors, and was happy to meet Abbe Land, the mayor of West Hollywood–a vivacious and gregarious woman who has a big heart and a personality to match.

The venue did not have reverberant acoustics and I realized some of the phrasing was suffering as I had expected there to be a certain amount of reverb in the hall. I also realized how composers’ music changes when we set different poets. Setting Eloise Klein Healy’s poetry really brought out some different music in me. I listened to some of it thinking: did I compose that??

Yesterday I met with my guardian angel, RC, who has been on my case about being so terrible about promoting my music. We sat and listened to about 6 pieces. RC loved them all and will be working with me to get performances. What a gift!

Another week and a half of school, then we get a break. I can’t seem to ever catch up on my email. I’m sure I’m not alone. Daniel came back from the Philippines yesterday, so it is wonderful to have my spouse home again.

Off to school!

This just in from the LA Times:

A Rhode Island school district has voted to fire all the teachers at an underperforming school.

Amazing!

Yesterday Profs Bourland, Stulberg, Lindemann, Dean, Snow, Rice, Lysy(s), and Loza flew up to Emoryville, CA to meet with future UCLA applicants and their parents, give overviews of our program and answer questions. Kavin and Laura were there to answer all the nuts and bolts and deadline info.

This is, of course, recruiting. Even though it was a bit beyond the call of duty for all of us to give up our Saturday and fly up and back en masse, it was a good bonding experience as well as learning first-hand about our program. It gave the faculty a chance to get to know each other better and create better departmental bonds. It gave moms and dads and their child an opportunity to meet face to face with professors.

This kind of generosity in faculty members shows a genuine and touching devotion to their work.

—

As Chair, I’ve been sitting in on lessons and classes to hear first-hand our teachers in action. What a joy! I wish all of our performance faculty would sit in on each others’ lessons: they couldn’t help but learn from each other. I certainly have.

Mark Carlson and I attended a concert given by the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts (LACHSA). My high school days are a very long time ago (1967-71), and I don’t spend any time around high schools these days, so I was prepared for a culture shock.

From a school of 579 students in music, art, and dance, we heard a GALA concert (read: everyone plays) with 203 high school musicians. WOW!

We heard a jazz band, a gospel choir, an opera excerpt, three piano soloists interspersed, the concert choir, a very large orchestra (!!!), and saw inspired and gifted teachers and leaders. The performances, yes they are young, were on a very high level. I am thrilled that LA can have such a terrific institution, and I encourage all donors to consider making a donation.

Mark and I sat through the 3 and a half hour concert without ever getting bored. It was so fascinating to watch and focus on individual young musicians, seeing their energy and musicality, seeing who are the young Elvises or Madonnas, the Chet Bakers (yes! there was one) and the cool jazzers, already thick with attitude.

I felt I was witnessing the ur-Glee.

I was impressed that the audience listened in rapt attention to the three piano solos, all brilliantly played. I would have imagined that the parents would lean towards jazz and yawn at the classical: but no, these are parents who paid to have their kids go to an arts school. They LOVE the arts. Silly me.

This is a high school where ALL the students are in the arts. There is no Marching Band or football team. Sounds like a dream to those of us who didn’t have that luxury. They are all shapes and sizes and ethnicities. One of the most remarkable observations I made last night was that the students seemed really happy. Most just beamed a kind of happiness. After the curtain went down after the grand finale, we heard a huge WHOOOOOOO from behind the curtain of 203 deliriously happy students who just put on a great concert.

There was another level for me. Dr Dan Castro is the musical and organizational force behind this program. I was Dan’s Chair for his Masters and Doctoral degrees at UCLA. In front of a near sold out Luckman Theater on the Cal State LA campus, Dr Castro publicly thanked me for being a mentor and teacher. He also acknowledged Mark Carlson for whom he was a TA, and Jackie DjeDje, Chair of Ethnomusicology. UCLA got a warm applause from the appreciative audience, many obviously proud parents.

So, in a sense, I felt like a grandfather of the event, or better, a godfather. And to be thanked is always a nice thing.

Take a listen to what they do.

This is NOT indicative of what we heard last night, I found this reading of a student arrangement of “Turning Japanese” [do they KNOW what that means??] scored for full orchestra.

After decades of wishing, the composition program at the UCLA Department of Music now has a Composition for Visual Media track in its Masters degree. In its second year, we have started slowly and accepted only two per year–although we plan to expand to eight or so.

And after decades of wishing, we now have a very nice bridge between the Department of Music and the Department of Film––as it should be, but for years, it was out of commission.

Today I met with the Chair of the Film program who has two terrific projects funded by major donors (I’ll let her reveal that information when it’s time). The first project involves eight, three-minute animated films on various themes funded by a well known animator; and the second is about global education, told in three-minute films, made by the UCLA Grad students in film, and UCLA student composers.

These relationships are so important in the growth of both artists––learning how to collaborate. For composers used to the dictatorship of the classical world, we must get used to rewrites: “Sorry Roger; it’s a lovely piece of music, it just doesn’t work for this scene. I need you to try again.” Composers must smile and get to work without attitude.

If the director is not especially music-savvy, and he has met a composer with whom s/he is simpatico, very often, they stay together. Think: Henri Mancini and Blake Edwards; John Williams and Steven Spielberg; Tim Burton and Danny Elfman, and so on.

Tossing your students together like this, knowing that something fabulous is going to happen, is one of the great joys of teaching.

In an area known as “Music Education” which, for Schools, Conservatories, and Departments of Music means K through 12, there appears to be a national problem. Potentially gifted teachers may not always be the best performers: sometimes yes, sometimes no–and vice versa. So the question arises: if instrumental lessons are required of all future K-12 teachers, from who can they study? Teachers have limits on the size of their studios, and insist on the best student performers; taking a music education “major” who is below the level of many students that were just denied due to lack of space, seems unfair to all those that were rejected, but better performers.

One solution is to have music education majors come from the performers already admitted who are already at a high performance level. Another is to have doctoral students teach the undergraduate MusEd majors. The problem with that is the perceived “upstairs-downstairs” of it all. The best solution is to just hire more teachers; but if you add one more for every instrument in the orchestra, that is a LOT more faculty–That is quite a challenge in slimming-down times.

There are stories of famously fabulous teachers who never performed, and amazing musicians or composers who are terrible teachers.

It’s a puzzlement.

After going through several rooms filled with musical instruments, we have discovered a wide variety of instruments in various conditions and of widely varying value. I was deighted that several instruments previously thought to have been missing were found.

This week we found a blue baritone saxophone. It will go with the milk green UCLA Les Paul guitar that we found this summer. We found a Wagner tuba in fairly good shape and two more that had been poorly repaired decades ago; a rediscovered a set of instruments given to us by the late Jack Lord (Hawaii Five-0), including 3 old Martin guitars, 3 old 4-string banjos, and 2 wonderful old mandolins–a “The Martin” and a Washburn; a treasure trove of historic autoharps; and a number of clarinets that even our clarinet teacher didn’t know about. As I reported a few weeks ago, going through all these instruments with the faculty has been like going through your grandparents’ attic. Everyone loved it.

As I reported these wonderful finds to the faculty in our meeting yesterday, I saw the voice faculty looking glum. Michael Dean spoke up: “Did you find any tenors?” The faculty roared with laughter.

Although I have praised UCLA’s decision to be three separate music departments, sometimes it’s a pain in the butt. Take, for instance, our new terrific core class. There are six musicianship sections, divided by their musical abilities. On Tuesday I discovered that there are actually 18 sections. Each of the six sections has three subsections dependent upon their department. So, while AJ Racy was lecturing on trance and ecstacy in music, yours truly got to sit outside the lecture hall, enrolling students into their damn sections. “What department are you? What section are you in? What is your PTE number? Uh, ok, let me find it. Ok, here it is. Now what it your student ID” and I had to do that 90 times. Sheesh. As Monty Python says: MY BRAIN HURTS.

As it has been the beginning of classes (yes, we begin later than most), there are constant fires burning everywhere that the Chair gets to put out. After Monday and Tuesday I was emotionally exhausted. I have decided to take Wednesdays off and work from home to get me through the week.

Yesterday I caught up on zillions of overdue emails, creating committees, and making reports. Today, I go from 10 am through 8 pm. Friday is our first faculty meeting, and I have to do our taxes this weekend.

I flash forward to my retirement and won’t miss busy times like this. I think about being a composer and wonder how in the past I’ve composed a musical or a film score while teaching and being chair. I guess that where there’s a will, there’s a way. I look forward to a bit less busyness.

School started with a bang at UCLA.

The first day featured a faculty strike, with students and staff encouraged to join in. Robert Winter put it succinctly: “I’ve waited for 25 years to teach this class; you think I’m gonna strike?” — this referring to our new first year core course offered for the first time. This term I am joined by Robert Winter, as well as ethnomusicologist, A.J. Racy. All majors in performance, composition, music education, music history, world music, and jazz are required to take this one year team taught class. (By the way: we didn’t strike, nor did the students.)

On the first day, Winter set the tone for the course, explaining what were about to do, and setting the ground rules for the course. They, I coordinated a “getting to know you” session. Each student said: “My name is [their name], I play the bassoon and I am from San Francisco. An interesting thing I’d like you to know about me is [I am an Ultimate Frisbee expert].” We got through 90 students, the TAs and the teachers. Then the class closed with AJ Racy who will continue his talk on Tuesday.

On Saturday night, I hosted a party for the three music departments. A good group showed up and we had a blast. The young’s and a few oldsters as well, played Wii downstairs. Lots of cross departmental zapping occurred which is always a good thing.

Today, I ran the combined musicianship classes while the TAs worked to divide the 90-some students into six sections, each one divided by musicianship ability. We tried this for the first time last year and it worked quite well.

As I mentioned a few weeks back, I have been going through our considerable collection of musical instruments with our performance faculty, evaluating which ones have curriular value, which ones can be used by our Music Fundamentals in Music Education classes, and which ones are valuable and should be sold. Everyone has enjoyed the “going through the attic” experience, expressing surprise as they find some real treasures.

It is thrilling to see supercharged, ready-to-teach teachers, and the excited students ready to learn. No one is thinking about the terrible California budget; the educational process is alive and well at UCLA, and we are thrilled to be a part of it.

I spent a total of three days this week going through old musical instruments in three different rooms at school. We were dumbfounded to find the most amazing instruments: viols, sackbuts, shawms, recorders, and many other well-known early music instruments, but the most amazing discovery was a Cecilium. The most lovable, if not slightly homely instrument I’ve ever seen. It’s a cross between an harmonium, a proto-accordian, and a cello (sic). I found an image of one, but ours is actually a bit older. There were only 310 of them made, and ours was likely one of the earliest. Here is a French video of one. (You have to wait through a minute of reporting.)

In another room, I went through our extensive violin, viola and cello collection and found quite a large number of 17th and 18th century instruments whose value has likely appreciated. Although we have an inventory of most of the instruments, there were some beautiful instruments, new and old, tucked away in corners, behind boxes, hidden in locked cabinets, that were unidentified and not in the inventory. I am no expert or conservator, but one of our staff members who has expertise, and I have carefully locked them away in a humidity-controlled room. We will be hiring a museum scientist to go over all these beauties and advise us on their condition and worth. You can imagine what a joy it has been spending time with these beautiful old instruments. And who knew that being a Chair could occasionally be like a Hardy Boys episode?