From the category archives:
Having three premieres in March was thrilling. It corresponded with the end of the academic term. Daniel went skiing, and Mark and I fled the city to Palm Springs, he to finish grading a huge pile of papers, and I to veg. As fate would have it, several “chair bombs” (crises that department chairs have […]
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Early on as a blogger, I established some policies about blogging that I have mostly stuck to and may explain why I have not blogged as regularly as I have in the past few years: Don’t relay confidential information; keep certain things private. Don’t insult people; do no harm. Don’t blog when it is forced. […]
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It seems that so often I get most of my good work done, as Chair, at home via email and phone, when it comes to day to day decisions, communications, memos and other general business stuff. Rather than a day of endless one on one meetings, people email me and 90% of the time, we […]
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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 […]
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This just in from the LA Times: A Rhode Island school district has voted to fire all the teachers at an underperforming school. Amazing!
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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