In which Daniel recalls the last days of sophomore year in a kaleidoscope of moments.

           Perhaps the word “snapshot” is an inaccurate description of this blog post, because rather than describe a single moment or emotional state I’ve experienced, I will instead present a series of fractured feelings and actions that I recall.  It was, after all, in this way that I closed my second year of college: confused, panicked, and chaotic. It was pretty awesome.

*

            I am lying upon the floor in the lobby of Schneebeck Concert Hall, three of my classmates from Music 231: Classical to Romantic Eras sprawled in various places around me.  Music history textbooks are strewn across the floor, hindering the progress of young music students as they attempt to get into the music building through the lobby.  In preparation for the long night of studying for the incomprehensible monster that is our final, I have brought snacks.  Many snacks.  But it is not so much the number of snacks that I have brought that impresses my peers, so much as the quantity.  It is remarkable what 64 fluid ounces of Boathouse Chai Tea can get you through.

*

            With only minutes to spare, I glare angrily at my very last Music Theory final, wondering how on earth the atonal twelve-tone rows before me are related.  Surely they must be, and I am just not seeing the connection?  But aha!  I see now how the lines are inverses, and with only a minute to spare, I scribble down answers that were most likely (hopefully correct).  Inverse of 8!  Retrograde Inverse of 10!  Retrograde of 3!…?  Close enough!  And with that, I turn in my last music theory test of college.

*

            Three people remain in the last few minutes of the Music History final: Kelton Mock, Minna Stelzner, and me.  Yes!  I think to myself, I remain writing in my test alongside the two students that are most likely to ACTUALLY know what they’re saying!  And this time, I am not the last person writing in my test booklet because I am taking time making up answers, but instead the last person writing because I have so much to say.  Who knows their music history?  This kid.

*

            “Hold on, please”, Dr.Padula – head of the School of Music’s vocal department – calls as I preemptively attempt to leave the stage of Kilowrth Chapel after only the second song of my jury (the school’s singing final).  “We’d like to request a third song”.  What?  I panic as I smile and step back to into place in front of the piano.  “Donizetti’s Me Voglio Fa’na Casa, please”.  Somehow, I glide through the song in a vague daze of exhaustion and panic, and all is going well until I reach a line that I’ve forgotten.  Damn, I think, I was so close, and I rapidly begin synthesizing Italian from the verses I’ve already sung, until my pianist comes to an awkward halt in confusion.  There is a slight pause, and I leap right to the closing section of the song, barreling through rather inelegantly until I reach the end.  Whoops.

*

            A small group of the brothers of my fraternity, Beta Theta Pi, are throwing a Frisbee on a lawn by a beach at Point Defiance.  One of us grills homemade hamburgers, hot dogs and chicken-apple sausages, the scent of it ashy and savory. We talk about nothing in particular as we play, and while I liked them all before anyway, I am certain that I belong there because we are all very bad at Frisbee.

*

            I received an A- on my jury!  How did that happen?

*

            Despite all the boredom, pain and suffering that Aural Skills has necessitated, I cannot deny the perfect, precise beauty of my completed final as I analyze the final chord of my harmonic dictation and officially complete sophomore year.  It was a good thing, really, to have taken this class… even if it required three separate tests for each unit, and the completion of an ear training computer program named MacGamut that may or may not be evil incarnate.  How wonderful that I can hear music and understand its harmonic language; how useful all that piano practice was.  But then again, these sorts of things always look better in hindsight.

*

            Worn out from a strenuous evening of packing my room up, but determined to seize one last opportunity for socializing before I leave campus, I prepare to head over to a friend’s house at midnight.  “You better take the dessert food”, my only remaining housemate instructs.  “We’ve still got a third of an apple pie and that enormous container of vanilla ice cream”.  “Do we have paper plates and utensils?” I ask, and she opens her nearly empty cupboard in the kitchen to pull out a box of paper plates, forks and spoons.  “I looked at these about an hour ago and said, ‘I’m going to need these later for some reason’, and this must be the reason”.  With great delicacy, I stack the paper plates and utensils on top of the pie, and fit that pie into the ice cream container – which is so enormous, the pie fits.  “Oh my god, that is so perfect,” Rosa exclaims, “I need to instagram this right now”.  I grin as we both take a picture of this perfect little moment.  College is, in fact, the best.

*

            One blog post remains before I am, at last, finished blogging for this semester, but before I write that final farewell, let me say this: that apple pie was absolutely delicious.

In which delightfully wicked fun is found at the final Senior Thesis Festival play.

If I were to select one major achievement that I am proud that I’ve done this year, a prime candidate would most certainly be my musical contributions to the last play in the Senior Thesis Festival, entitled The Skriker.  Written in the 1990’s by Caryl Churchill, The Skriker is the tale of the eponymous, shape-shifting fairy that is intent on destroying the world of humans – and in particular, the lives of two teenage mothers named Lily and Josie – in revenge for the destruction that humanity has caused the natural world she rules.  Filled with fragmented fairy tongue and sinister wordplay, the show is a rollercoaster of mythological beasts and social commentary, and when Sarah McKinley, the senior directing this production, approached me about writing music for the show, I was immediately drawn to the script’s distinctive writing.  The incidental music – meaning the music that would play between scenes and would otherwise accompany the show without being the primary focus – and the single song that would occur in the Skriker’s Underworld would, therefore, need to be just as seemingly circuitous and illogical, yet purposefully atmospheric and structured on its own unorthodox terms.

This is where studying atonal music in Music Theory IV and Music History II: The Classical to the Romantic Periods came in unexpectedly handy.  Pioneered and brought into the public sphere in the late 19^th century by Post-Romantic-era composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, atonal music has no pitch center that the music leads to, and thus, no musical goal of the sort that European audiences are so accustomed to.  As atonal composers of the 19^th and 20^th centuries toyed with this unpopular concept, a new form of structuring this music arose and was entitled “twelve-tone theory” due to its primary tenant: all twelve of the kinds of pitches in the Western chromatic scale must be used by a musical line before any can be repeated.  Through this system, new forms of clarity and purpose and arose in atonal music so as to create focus in the music’s creation, just as the many monologues that the Skriker has in the play are seemingly pointless but hold a unique sort of clarity.

Although I did not employ atonality or twelve-tone technique directly while writing for the Skriker, learning about this sort of order-from-chaos thinking became progressively clearer to me. Of particular use was the melodrama “Pierrot Lunaire”, a song cycle written by Schoenberg in 1912 and performed by the sole vocalist in the “Sprechstimme” style in vogue at the time of its genesis.  While often seen at first glance as exhaustingly chaotic, this song cycle’s construction is by no means frivolous.  Each poem is of the same type of poetic structure (a rondel), which entails lines of importance repeating themselves in each song, and despite the modern use of atonality, a great number of the songs are in a popular form from the Baroque period, such as a fugue or rondo.  The numbers three, seven and thirteen are repeatedly given importance, with the song cycle encompassing 21 songs (the product of seven and three), each poem containing 13 lines, and a great many songs using seven-note motifs, among other techniques used to give numbers significance.  A link to a full performance of this song cycle can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd2cBUJmDr8

With all of this in mind, I wrote something that, to my ears that were still unaccustomed to this music, sounded awkward and uncertain, but as I continued, I could not help but begin to enjoy it.  There is something liberating about not needing to account for every aspect of a harmonic and melodic action, and instead making something that can twist in a snake-like manner through number and the mathematical structure of music composition.  But credit must be given where due: Sarah MicKinley, her cast and her crew – in particular, clarinetist Daniel Peterschmidt – brought my newborn quasi-atonal music to brilliant life.  I am most proud of my musical contributions to the Skriker not because I think that my music in and of itself was remarkable, but rather because I contributed to something remarkable alongside some very talented people.  You’d better watch out, Theater Department; I’ve gotten a taste, and there’s no stopping me now.

And just in case, dear reader, you too desire a taste, here’s a MIDI file of some of my incidental music to quench your thirst for The Skriker:

1) Into the Underworld MIDI

2) Into the Underworld PDF

This is the song sung by the Skriker’s monstrous minions when Josie, one of the protagonists, is stolen away to the Underworld to feed the Skriker’s power.  Written for solo Bb clarinet and unison voices, with voices played by cello in this MIDI file.

Until next time, dear reader, and perhaps you’d best check under the bed for monsters tonight.  Who knows what is lurking in the darkness…

In which Daniel realizes that counting is hard, and explains a day in the life of a Logger.

I have often made the joke, whilst among peers commenting on the difficulty of my music major, that it can’t be so hard considering the fact that I am not forced to count past four.  Unbeknownst to me, however, seven was in fact my limit, as has been demonstrated by the way that I skipped over eight while numbering these posts.  And so I thought to myself, whatever shall I do to fill in this little gap in my number posts?  It then occurred to me that, at this time, plenty of anxious students have just accepted their offers to attend this school, and they alongside their parents may in fact be the ones reading this post.  So, to assure that you’ve made the right decision and that the school will not, in fact kill you, I will now present an average day in the life of a Logger – specifically, me.  There is, of course, no typical day with respect to the fact that every day of the week is different, but a general overview would be something of this nature:

1) Grab Snacks, Skip Breakfast – As irked as I am to say this, I have too fallen victim to the terrible college habit of going straight to class without eating breakfast.  Some days – particularly my Wednesdays, wherein I have class straight from 10 AM to 5 PM – I will have no real meal until dinner, and thus will fill my backpack with all manner of goodies.  Protein and carbohydrates are usually my priorities, so one can often find a combination of oats, strawberries, bread and cookies in my backpack, and a cup of green tea in my hand.  New students, I highly encourage you to make time to eat your breakfast somewhere in your morning – you deserve it.

2) All the Music – The morning and early afternoon are a sort of blurred rollercoaster of music classes, ranging from Music 231 (Historical Survey of the Classical Period to Late Romanticism) to Music 291 (Advanced Choral Conducting Rehearsal Techniques).  The interesting thing about taking so many classes deeply involved in a single department is that one begins to see how interconnected they are.  In particular, my choral conducting class connects on many levels to my other classes with respect to how those classes are taught.  Analysis of form and harmonic structure are used both before conducting a new piece and when studying theoretical developments in Music 204 (Music Theory IV) ; rules of teaching sight-singing are applied in coachings by the conducting professor and by the professor teaching ear training in Music 202 (Aural Skills).  I have Adelphians Concert Choir every day of the week, but depending on the day of the week, I may have a voice lesson with Dr. Michael Delos, or otherwise have a studio class wherein students practice the performances of personal repertoire in front of one another and give critique (as I did just yesterday in Vocal Performance Class, which you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZNeDPXSUnU&feature=youtu.be)

3) Nibblies – Hopefully, a break in my schedule will allow me to sit down for a real meal in one of the school’s three eating facilities: the SUB (Student Union Building), which is the school’s cafeteria, Diversions, which is the student-run café next door, or Oppenheimer, which is a student run café in the middle of the science building courtyard.  It is also made entirely of glass.  It is very cool.  My favorite meal that the cafeteria serves is definitely the breaded salmon with veggies and mac-n’-cheese, closely followed by any of their scones, which are weirdly amazing.  The white-chocolate-raspberry changed my life a little.  My café drink of choice would definitely have to be the Duke of Celtic Breakfast (a Celtic Breakfast teabag submerged in a vanilla steamer), closely followed by the Mango-Peach Italian soda.  Yum.

4) LoggerRezLyfe – What more adventure can I ask for than being the Director of Sustainability for the Residential Student Association?  Whether it be debating the pros and cons of budget requests from the campus community during ResLife’s General Council Meetings to planning Casino Night with the rest of the executive board, the party never ends (until a new executive board is elected in April).

5) Fundatory Utimes – This refers to “fun-mandatory- Underground Sound” times, or “time in which the members of the a cappella ground Underground Sound are forced to have fun together”.  This entails our evening rehearsal on Sundays and Wednesdays, not to mention the endless hours of blood, sweat and tears from planning rehearsals with my co-director, Lisa Hawkins.  The group convenes in a classroom of the music building and, after some general chatter, cat jokes and warm-ups, the fun begins.  In many ways, I use Usound as my personal conducting lab, testing out all the tips and tricks that my conducting professor has taught the class over the year.  This is not only invaluable for my probable future career as a choral director, but is also extremely enjoyable, probably because I can go on a power trip.  It’s fine; I just need to control everything.  What?

6) Nose to the Grindstone – There comes a point somewhere in the late evening when one realizes the ridiculous amount of homework there is left to be done.  This is when the fact that Diversions is open until midnight becomes of crucial importance to my academic success, as I am strangely incapable of doing homework in my room, but I absolutely MUST be near a source of food to work continuously.  I will sit in the piano lounge just outside the café and will write/compose/weep profusely while slowly but steadily drinking my weight in any combination of delicious beverages.  Sometimes, to spice things up while writing my homework for Counterpoint, I eat a cookie.

7) Hit the Hay – At last, I arrive home to my beloved Rat Skin Thong (please consult my very first blog post if you are confused by this statement).  I shower, I stare absentmindedly out the window, I eat my weight in cereal (preferably Special K with Chocolate or Dark Chocolate Cheerios), and postpone sleep by talking endlessly with my wonderful housemates.  And what conversations we have!  Food, boys, general panic about the future… well, I’m sure that there are more things than that, although nothing comes to mind.  I assemble my bag for the next day, lie in bed, and fall asleep thinking of my dog’s large, fluffy head on my tummy.  Then it starts all over…

But let me emphasize this over everything: although I am exhausted, stressed, sometimes angry, sometimes sad, more than anything I am happy and I am learning – which is exactly what I’m here to do.  My major is, admittedly, harder than one might imagine, but I continually learn more fascinating and useful things about music, communication, leadership and all sorts of other buzzwords that I’m sure you’ve read in pamphlets.

But really, life here is good.  If you’re thinking of applying, do it, and if you are indeed coming, GET STOKED.  Jump into everything you can reasonably handle with both feet, and commit to what you’re passionate about.  And learn to count from one to eight without mishap ensuing.

In which the Puget Sound Theater Department simultaneously amazes and vaguely traumatizes Daniel.

Originally performed in 2004 as a staged reading in Greenwich Village, Bert V. Royal’s satirical drama Dog Sees God is the story of the characters of Charles M. Schultz’s Peanuts reimagined as teenagers.  Centering around Charlie Brown – dubbed “CB” in this play – the characters are faced with eating disorders, homophobia, drugs, and an assortment of other adolescent troubles, struggling with their fears, doubts and one another.

These issues, and the realm of teenage angst in general, are ones to which I have a fairly strong aversion.  Knowing that Royal’s play contained these themes while deciding whether or not to attend the University’s production of it, as part of the Theater Department’s Senior Theater Festival (a theater festival that acts as part of senior theater majors’ theses), I had great trepidations.  But in the end, I thought that I wasn’t doing anything much better, and every show before this that the theater department had put on had been extremely impressive, so I took a chance.

In many ways, there was much for me to dislike about the show, most of which lay in the script itself.  Given my adamant feelings against alcohol, I was inclined to dislike a play wherein several characters spend a majority of their time on stage consuming it or under its influence, and I am repelled by excessive, strong language.  The script, though originally premiered in 2004, seems reminiscent to me of something from the 1990s, what with its lengthy, meandering monologues and melodramatic adolescent anger.  Its inclusion of some more profound themes of God and existence seem oddly placed and rather forced.

Yet somehow, my experience at this play was, for lack of a better word, stunning.  The wandering speeches and confusing, existential themes, which in another theater’s hands could have come across as nothing more than a pretentious stream-of-consciousness, were given with simultaneous derisive power and delicate sincerity.  The lack of complex costumes – comprised mostly of jeans and T-shirts – or of elaborate set – comprised of several moveable black blocks and a doghouse– left the audience with little but the power of the script and the actors’ deliveries of it.  This meant that, amid the sarcasm of the parody, moments of true anger, fear and tenderness (of which there are more than a few) cut through the show’s sad, drunk stupor like a knife.

Of these, the moment of the climax of the show cut through me the most by far (WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD).  Two of the main characters of the play – Beethoven, the reclusive, geeky, gay pianist incarnation of Schroeder, and Matt, the violent, germaphobic, homophobic incarnation of Pig-Pen – face off after years of Matt’s taunting and bullying of Beethoven, and when Matt threatens Beethoven’s life while he practices piano, Beethoven finally stands up against him.  As Matt’s fury gathers, the stage darkens until all the lights focus solely on the piano at which Beethoven sits and Matt stands.  Beethoven’s short outburst against his bully ends with him spitting the name “Pig-Pen” at Matt, who seizes Beethoven’s hands and smashes them over and over beneath the lid of the piano.  Beethoven screams and screams as the stage goes to black.

In retrospect, I suppose that the force of my immediate reaction and the length of the time that those feelings remained with me were due to the climax being such a violation of my sense of justice.  Fury, panic, fear, nausea, sadness and an amazing sense of having been preemptively defeated by the universe struck me and burned inside of me for the remainder of that week.  These startlingly clear moments of honesty are, in my humble opinion (and let us be clear that I know almost nothing of the technicalities of theater), one of the strengths of the show that the school’s theater exploited to great effect.  This production, then, was a testament to both the script’s heartbreaking, if sometimes awkward and forced, honesty, as well as the focus and clarity in direction of the school’s theater.  It’s hard to come by something that can talk about issues like these so honestly, and while the show is by no means an accurate representation of high school (or college) as I know it, it’s good to know that someone is willing to step up to the plate for it all.

If there is anything on the internet that I love, it is Ted Talks.  I have imposed strict rules on myself with respect to limiting my use of social media and online entertainment – I do not allow myself to watch television during the school year, I do not permit myself to even download games on my phone or computer, and I will not become friends with anyone on Facebook unless I work with them (examples: members of my a capella group, brothers in my fraternity, etc.).  Yet I can spend hours meandering through the world of Ted Talks, introducing myself to all sorts of ideas I might never have encountered otherwise.  I argue, when the hours pass and I still haven’t done my homework, that I am still learning something new and valuable (which, I’d like to think, I am).  I will spend entire days sitting in a coffee shop with a pile of library books, a cup of Chai and my computer, alternating between reading, listening to musical theater and watching Ted Talks.

Technology is, in this way, about my connection with ideas that interest me and passions I want to pursue, as well as a means with which to organize and communicate with those I work with.  It is not, probably unlike many other students, a primary means with which I connect with others.  Bronwyn Haggerty, a friend I made earlier this year, initially made contact with me when she mentioned to me that she had attempted to stalk me on Facebook, only to realize that I did not, at the time, have an active Facebook account.  I had deactivated it during the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, to my immense relief after several years of awkwardly balancing how much information I wanted to put online.  But Bronwyn’s comment struck me as oddly unsettling.  “Well then,” I told her, “You’ll just have to stalk me in real life, won’t you?”   Had I a Facebook account, she may have perused my profile absently and sent me a friend request, which I would have rejected, thinking “Who is this person?”  But not having one forced her to interact with me one on one, without being able to peruse or edit ourselves.

This issue – of me not being Facebook friends with others, and them expressing dissatisfaction with it – is one that I was surprised to see was widespread, once I joined my fraternity and had to reactivate my Facebook.  Members of my choir, brothers in my fraternity, and classmates all inquired accusatorily “Why aren’t why friends on Facebook?”  The primary reason for most of those people was just that I didn’t know them.  What possible purpose could our Facebook friendship serve?  More likely than not, our online relationship would be little more than a small nod to one another’s mere existence, with neither party having the interest or willpower to connect with the other.  A friendship is not defined by its Facebook status, or the number of posts on one another’s walls.  A “relationship” built off of online connection is silly, immature and absolutely useless.  I cannot see enthusiasm in a friend’s eyes while we text, and I cannot hear the rise and fall of their voice in a status.  I am Facebook friends with almost none of my truly close friends, and none of my family.  I would much rather connect with them directly, and be friends with them in a much better place – real life.

I do not mean to say that technology is bad.  I think that it is neither intrinsically good nor bad; it is a tool that can be used in a great many ways.  I have seen a beautiful Ted Talk about Facebook being used between Israelis and Iranians to directly promote peace (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Lp-NMaU0r8) and another about technological designs made for the visually impaired (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apiScBmE6rA&list=PLOGi5-fAu8bGBdmcaxdD_lUZ1wXZhpccQ&index=2).  Technology has improved the world one hundred times over and one hundred times again, eradicating diseases, allowing us to communicate rapidly and giving us (my personal favorite) indoor plumbing.  Yet when it comes to technology and social interaction, I wonder if there is a limit to their seemingly symbiotic relationship.  So I shall leave you with one last Ted Talk, discussing this very subject, entitled “Connected, But Alone?” by Sherry Turkle (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7Xr3AsBEK4).  The eloquent Mrs. Turkle explains the way that society’s dependence on social media has created a mindset wherein, rather than experiencing emotion and connecting with others for that, we experience a sense of emptiness, and turn to others in search of any emotion at all – encapsulated by her phrase “I share, therefore I am”.  It is ultimately the ability to be alone, to face and know oneself, that will make connecting with others easier and more sincere.  This is not to say that others do not help one find oneself, or that connecting with others will ever truly be easy.  But others cannot, as Turkle says, “be used to prop up our fragile sense of self”, and relationships are meant to be “rich and complicated and messy” – that is what makes them real.

I love talking with other people.  I love listening to them explain their lives and hopes in all their grand and mundane details.  I love laughing with others, seeing the emotions in their eyes, feeling their comfort when we hug.  None of these things can be found on my phone or through profiles in which we have altered ourselves to be just right.  I’ve learned to be alone to know myself well enough that others are not parts from which I makeshift myself; others are companions, independent and worthy of both respect and interest.  At the end of the day, technology can be an excellent communication and coordination tool for connecting with others, but when used as a primary component of a relationship, it is a pale imitation of all the beautiful mess that is trying to see someone for exactly who they are.

In which Daniel looks back at this year from the three-quarters mark.

If college was marketed to me as anything growing up, it was as a life-changing experience – not necessarily in a way that meant a single moment blatantly and dramatically altered the course of one’s life, but rather in a way that meant that the act of going through this educational system more or less independently would change the way one approaches work and life.  Yet as I consider life thus far, I am debating the validity of that statement.  I don’t think that it’s necessarily true or false across the board, but that it may be true for me only to a degree.

Let us consider the changes in my life since my first blog post that was posted on the twin side of last semester – during the fall break that divides the fall semester in half.  Once again, the time is immediately after midterms (although then the fall semester, and now the spring), and once again, I am sitting in a Starbucks as I write this (although it is now the Starbucks on 6^th Avenue, rather than the one on Proctor).  Once again, I am listening to Katy Perry (although then I was listening to my favorites from her Teenage Dream album, and now I listen to my favorites from Prism), and I am still wondering what on earth I am doing writing about my life (as if it is of interest to anybody).­ I still spend almost all my time in the music building, and am taking almost the exact same classes, just increased in level and subsequent difficulty, and am involved in the same extracurriculars and student activities.

Yet a great many things have also changed.  My house, Rat Sking Thong (see Blog Post #1 if you are confused by this title), lost Isabel Chae as a housemate due to her decision to withdraw from school.  I became a codirector of Underground Sound, my a capella group, alongside my good friend Lisa Hawkins, and became the chorister (director of musical activities) of my fraternity, Beta Theta Pi.  I helped the Residential Student Association change our Director of Sustainability position to that of Director of Publicity. My family moved from one house in Raleigh, North Carolina, to another, larger and more wooded one, and my dog had her 10^th birthday.  And I did not sleep through a single midterm!

It’s funny that people can so easily live in circles.  Maybe they’re just easy to become comfortable in, or maybe it’s easy to forget that you live in a circle at all – not that living in circles is necessarily a bad thing.  But I feel as if I keep coming back to writing about me writing.  Is my life really that uninteresting?  (I’ll give you a hint: The answer is yes.)  Every time I’ve watched a Puget Sound theatrical production, I feel as if I focus on the gender studies related aspects of it.  And I keep listening on other people’s conversations as I write these posts, as I am always in public places, just as I am listening to a woman I don’t know describing her friend’s two-and-a-half-year-old daughter comforting her in times of stress.  Even my mood and temperament seem to repeat across the year, as they have done every year – beginning with confident optimism in summer, increasing desperation in fall, exhaustion and despair in winter, and an almost inexplicably powerful, sentimental hope in spring. Maybe it’s the fact that school years have such a similar format each time, or I am just deeply affected by the weather.

Still, I wonder if things ever really, really change.  Probably.  Who am I asking?  Does anyone even read these blog posts?  I genuinely have no idea.

In our last chapter meeting, the pledges of Beta Theta Pi were discussing one of our core principles, intellectual growth.  We debated and analyzed the statement “Betas are devoted to continually cultivating their minds, including high standards of academic achievement”, considering the parallels between cultivating a garden and cultivating a mind – the necessary work, the continual labor, the necessity of love for that which is being cultivated, and the joy in the fruits of one’s labor.  But what struck me most about the chapter meeting was when the person responsible for education played a video of David Foster Wallace’s 2005 graduation speech to Kenyon College, entitled “This Is Water”, which can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzFNh2_dSBg

Fish, he jokes, go through life ignorant enough to not even consider what water is.  This, he goes on to say, is not so unlike adults that go through the daily, boring, frustrating grind of daily life without considering the attitudes with which they perceive the world.  If we think beyond our automatically selfish attitudes, he says, if we have the imagination to see the world as an expanding place of possibility and the empathy to consider the hardship and kindred spirit we share with others, we are free to choose how to see the world.  We are free to decide whether to say that the world is a good place.  This, he says, is water.

I will say this about living in circles: I have done it for what seems like every year since middle school began, and it, in and of itself, is not what I am unhappy about.  I am unhappy that it is not my choice.

Maybe that’s what being an adult is supposed to be about.  Maybe I’m supposed to choose what circles I live in, and how expansive my world is, and how I connect with others.  But I’m just a college student three quarters of the way through his sophomore year of college.  What would I know, anyway?

In which Daniel attends the Society of Composer’s Conference and feels simultaneously terrified and relieved.

From March 7th to March 8th, amid the faltering late-winter weather of the Pacific Northwest, the Society of Composers – a professional society dedicated to the promotion, performance, understanding and dissemination of new and contemporary music – held their 2014 Region VIII Conference on the University of Puget Sound, featuring guest composers Steven Bryant and Joan Szymko.  While perhaps I should have prepared for this with bated breath, launching myself into any possible opportunity to assist with the conference, I most certainly did not, completely forgetting about the upcoming conference and being taken completely by surprise when it arrived.  Yet, magically, somehow, I stumbled into this weekend and managed to speak with both guest composers, Joan Szkymko and Steven Bryant, with the hope of stealing away just a smidge of their knowledge and wisdom.

Joan Szkymko was a tiny, silver haired woman of late middle age that wore brightly colored scarf and held a firm belief in the need for mature choral repertoire for all female chorus and enough energy to power the university alone.  Steven Bryant was a tall man in his 40s, with a somewhat sardonic sense of humor and a great deal of acclaim for his band and partially electronic works.  They were, of course, fascinating – and hilariously different – characters with a great deal to teach to the school ensembles performing their works, what with Joan Szymko teaching Adelphians and Dorians choirs how to approach her pieces and Steven Bryant doing Lord knows what to the bands performing his works (I wouldn’t know – I’m just a vocalist).

Regardless of my lack of knowledge concerning the university’s instrumental ensembles, I ended up at a Q+A held by my composition teacher, the brilliant and slightly unnerving Dr. Robert Hutchinson, as well as a little mingling shindig wherein all the composers and people that helped with the conference stood around near catered goodies.  Here is what I’ve learned:

-Have irons in many fires (money won’t come from composing; it may come from conducting or performing primarily)

-Self publishing is time consuming and is equivalent in many ways to a real job

-Use PDF-Pen-Pro to brand every page of a PDF document with your logo

-Writing for the educational market is one of the largest sources of income

-Earnings are primarily through commission, not through royalties

-Community performances of one’s work pay much better than university performance

–Face-to-face contact and travelling to gigs are the greatest forms of publicity

-Morten Lauridson got his start at a Chorus of America Conference, just handing out his music

-The most important thing Joan Skyzmo learned about composing is asking “What if?”, and comes to music from an intuitive view, acting as a vehicle of the text and its expression, listening for what’s next

-Steven Bryant writes because he wants to recreate and capture the enthralling feeling of being wrapped inside a piece of music, and feels that composition is like a drug wherein, once the pieces fit together and the piece turns out as it needs to, the euphoria erases all the memories of struggle and disappointment

-WRITE ON THE CRAFT UNTIL YOU HIT INSPIRATION

Although, let’s be real, I was mostly there for the free food.

But when I was speaking to these composers, just as when I first began studying composing under Dr. Hutchinson, the question that continually resurfaced was that of “Why do you want to be a composer?”  This, they and countless others have told me, is the most important question to ask myself at this stage in my life, as if I do not believe that composing is my ultimate calling, then it is not worth the struggle.  In all honesty, I cannot fully put into words why I want to be a composer.  It has something to do with some simultaneously compassionate and pretentious idea of giving others hope in the same way that other composer’s music has given me hope, and something to do with the joy of fitting together the elements of music into a piece like the parts of a puzzle, and something to do with bringing order and clarity to a chaotic world, but all together in a ridiculous jumble.  I can say this, however, despite how ridiculous and self-entitled it may seem: I was born to compose.  This is my purpose.  There is no choice.

And so, on this delightful and possibly misfortunate path down the road to Composerland, I have begun taking another step by applying for composition programs held over the summer, and in applying, I wrote and recorded what I consider my first two real pieces – awkward, fumblingly written, but undeniably there.  Here for your listening pleasure, you will find the following tracks:

1) “Remembered Music” – An art song for high voice and piano, here performed by sophomore soprano Lexa Hospenthal and junior pianist Brenda Miller, which was a setting of my favorite poem by 13^th century Sufi poet Rumi:

Daniel Wolfert’s “Remembered Music”

2) “Fantasia for Two Flutes and Two Cellos” – A fantasia performed by freshman flautist Megan Reich, junior Whitney Reveyrand, sophomore cellist Anna Schierbeek, and junior cellist Bronwyn Hagerty, inspired by Arvo Part’s Silouan’s Song and the film scores of Alexandre Desplat:

Daniel Wolfert’s “Fantasia for Two Flutes and Two Cellos”

So, what’s the moral of the story?  If I’ve learned anything from this conference, it can be summed up in these three statements:

Follow your passions.

Play nice with others.

EAT ALL THE FREE FOOD.

Is there anything else to life?  I don’t think so.  I know these things; I’m a composer.

In which the universe, in its eternally convoluted and cryptic way, speaks to Daniel.

The Guild of Book Workers’ Horizon Book Arts Exhibition sits in front of the reference desk of Collins Memorial Library, and it had been sitting there for two weeks before I even took real notice of it last week.  My sophomore spring semester had begun rather poorly, just as my freshman spring semester had, and for almost exactly the same reasons – I was restless for change in my academics, I was worn out from the previous semester, and more than anything, I was fretting over the upcoming applications I would be turning in for opportunities in my junior year.  I fear the future, the unknown.  I fear instability and I fear being unprepared for challenges ahead, and I fear disappointing others, or worst of all, myself.  Applying for future opportunities is, therefore, an act that I find terrifying.  It was with these fears and worries, then, that I entered the library to print a paper last week and, for reasons that I could not identify, decided that I had to take a closer look at the exhibit.

Each piece of artwork in the exhibit was either fashioned from or in reference to a book, and dealt with the literal and figurative idea of horizons.  This was the first thing that struck me as a remarkable coincidence, because I have long been deeply fascinated by the many meanings of the word and idea “horizon” – fascinated by the fact that a vanishing point in a painting contains an infinite section of the universe, by myths stating that the gods sewed the heaven and the earth to keep the world together, by the idea that, no matter our mistakes and shortcomings, the world is so much larger and more beautiful than we could possibly imagine.

Playing upon the delightfully whimsical and clever plot of one of my favorite books, Edwin Abbot’s 1884 satirical novel Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, there was an edition of the book from whose flat cover a part of a sphere literally stuck out, in reference to its story wherein a denizen of a two-dimensional world encounters, to his complete chock and bemusement, a sphere.  There stood a beautiful edition of Dexter Palmer’s tragicomic steampunk novel A Dream of Perpetual Motion, with a beautiful illustration of a floating airship and a man peeking behind the curtain of the sky to see the spinning sapphire gears of the universe beyond.  This I loved not only due to its beauty, but also because I later found out that the novel is a literary variation on my favorite Shakespeare play, The Tempest.  Strangest of all, however, were the multiple art pieces that mentioned the San Francisco Bay Area – where I spent most of my adolescence – and North Carolina – where my family moved several weeks after I left for my freshman year of college.

There have been rare few times in my life when I have ever really truly felt as if everything fell into place, that for a brief moment, something truly mysterious had happened to me.  But how strange and wonderful it was, seeing those pieces of art that I’m sure hundreds of students have passed without second thought.  How strange and wonderful, to feel such hope.

One of my greatest fears is that I will struggle and fight to get by, only to look back on my often meaningless, trivial hardships and realize that it all meant nothing, that it was a foolish dream that I should have thrown away long ago.  Perhaps it is true, and sometimes I have the sudden and violent realization that, more likely than not, nothing that occurs in my life will really affect the world.  But the words of an art piece upon which was written the Sanskrit proverb Salutation to the Dawn still ring in my head, like music from something glorious I do not yet understand, as if to say that the people and things that make my short little life happy are all that matters:

“…For yesterday is but a dream,

And tomorrow is only a vision;

But today, well lived,

Makes every yesterday

A dream of happiness

And every tomorrow

A vision of hope…”

In which Daniel attends the opera and leaves dissatisfied, yet inspired. 

It was the first Friday of the second semester of my sophomore year, and after nearly two hours filled with soprano arias, baritone laments and the rhythm of early classical orchestrations, I sat alongside the other members of Dr. Geoffrey Block’s music history class, watching the final moments of Giuseppe Verdi’s renowned opera Rigoletto at an opera house in Seattle.  It is a famous tale of a deformed court jester – here set in Mussolini’s Italy – that, after insulting a father seeking to redeem his disgraced daughter, is placed under a curse that ultimately causes him to lose the only thing in life he truly loves – his own daughter.  There is something Shakespearean about the plot, what with the star-crossed lovers meeting once and pledging eternal devotion, the enraged fathers declaring vengeance, and the ironic twists of fate guiding the protagonist’s tragic life, but something cold and hard felt – to me, at the very least – to be hiding beneath the glimmering veil of warm, beautiful voices and lush orchestration.

It is not a tale of a deranged lunatic, but a man that has repeatedly been rebuffed by a world that finds him repulsive, and had his heart undoubtedly broken countless times – broken over his deformity, over his beloved late wife, over the cruel courtiers that he works for, and so many other things I’m sure.  After his daughter is kidnapped and raped, therefore, his anger is terrible to behold, and he swears bloody vengeance upon the Duke of Mantua, the man he incorrectly believes is responsible for his daughter’s rape, and incidentally the man with whom his daughter is in love.

Yet, if one were listening to the music alone, and not looking at the translation of the words the actors were singing, it would sound happy, almost chipper, despite the dark and appalling nature of the meaning, and this was to me something of a problem.  As the daughter flits around – but never quite touches – the subject of her rape, the music dances along in sweet bassline arpeggios, as if a waltz were about to begin, rather than a traumatized scream, and as the father declares vengeance, his cries are heralded by happy strings and woodwinds that float and soar most merrily, and to me, this is not what I wanted to hear.  The subject of rape is not a joke, or an interesting plot device or a character flaw.  It is a terrible atrocity committed upon another human being, and should be treated in art as such.  Had I written this, perhaps the daughter’s traumatized fragility would be shown through delicate minor chords, like tiny flowers, and the father’s anger through crashing dissonance, his melody cutting through the texture like a knife, but either way, I would not have portrayed the subject as Giussepe Verdi did.

I am not, of course, saying that he was wrong to musically handle the text the way he did.  His culture’s musical vocabulary was, of course, far different from ours, and what was considered worth dissonance then is not the same now, but all the same, the musical illustration of these dark themes – isolation, vengeance, rape – did not satisfy me personally.  I did not feel that moments of clarity came into focus through the story, nor that a truly honest moment arose between any two characters, and this absence did not compel me to feel for the characters in any moment.  My music history professor described the father’s character as evil due to his vengeful nature, and the daughter’s character as tragic due to her willingness to sacrifice her life for that of her love, but I did not see it as such.  The daughter was sad, yes, because of the injustice of the sexual abuse committed upon her, but not because of her ridiculous and completely illogical notion that she should sacrifice herself to save the irritating and sexist Duke of Mantua.  The father was vengeful, yes, but so too would I be if I had lived a life that was so full of bitter disappointment and cruel people that hurt me without me being able to hurt them.  If I had a daughter and she was raped, I would not say I was evil because I wanted to murder those responsible.  I would say that it was long overdue justice.

This is not, of course, to say that the opera was not beautiful and wondrous to behold – it truly was, with gorgeous costumes, masterful voices and wonderful melodies – but it was this sense of dissatisfaction that clung to me as my classmates and I left the opera house to return to the school.  I cannot help but wonder why so much great art feels this way to me – beautifully constructed, but with little sense of honesty and empathy toward unhappy people, and with too much idealization of them.  Women are not made of melody and metaphor; men are not made of vengeance and lament.  But I must give due thanks to Dr. Geoffrey Block, Professor of Music History, for giving my class the opportunity to see this opera, for without it, I would not have been given this reminder of how much I prize sincerity in art, how little I see it, and how much I need to put more of it in the world.

In which Daniel rambles, and looks to the glorious horizon.

            How fitting it is that, as I write this, my last blog post of this semester, I once again sit in a Starbucks, the sky overcast above me and my mug filled with green tea latte.  Yet this time, I am not in Tacoma, Washington, but Raleigh, North Carolina, where my family now lives, and it is to my family’s house, not Rat Skin Thong, that I return tonight.  And how things have changed!  I’ve wildly fumbled my way through what I’ve been told is the first half of the hardest year of college for music majors, my family is moving from one house to another in the North Carolina Triangle Area, Katy Perry came out with a new album, and I realized that I will always, if given the opportunity, lay on the floor.

Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing with my life.  Why, for example, am I writing this blog?  Purely for the fiscal compensation?  For the chance to assertively force my viewpoints on others over the internet?  To give myself a reason to sit in Starbucks for hours on end?   I have no desperate necessity for the money, no viewpoints I feel legitimately deserve to be forced upon others through blogging, and I’m willing to sit in Starbucks for hours for absolutely no reason, so none of these answers are correct.  I suppose I write this blog partially for the fiscal compensation, and mostly for the opportunity to have my writing published, and partially because I simply love writing, and looking at myself objectively, I believe that these are all good reasons.  But I’ll admit that with this, and all sorts of other things that I do often without second thought – going to college, finding any form of employment, making myself vaguely presentable – I will sometimes stop and suddenly be struck by the slight absurdity of what I’m doing.

I’m not trying to say that any of the things I listed above are absurd, per se, so much as that I will do them without thinking of why I’m doing them, so that when I do question them, I will be momentarily and forcibly faced with some sort of glimpse of what I suppose adulthood, or maybe life, is.  I will never be able to reclaim my childhood in Palo Alto, never be able to have another walk down the street to the park with my dog as a puppy; never be able to peruse the Mitchell Park Library in search of the poetry of Rumi; never be able to have another tickling-wrestle match with my friends on the trampoline in my backyard.  And I don’t necessarily want to reclaim it, for there are far too many things to which I look forward for me to spend so much time looking back, but the small revelations informing me that I am stumbling ever closer to being some form of an adult are just a little saddening, as well as a very exciting.

There is no moral to the story here.  I am caught in this strange between-sort-of time in a between-sort of place, between semesters of college and houses and phases of personhood.  It’s as if I am finishing the prologue in the book of my life and will soon turn the page to begin the first chapter, although I also cannot say when that will begin. But even as things change so much, they remain the same and I am still continually wondering what I am doing and why I am doing it, as I have been wondering for so long and as I will continue to wonder.  So, dear reader, assuming you have stayed with me thus far, I hope you have, to some extent, enjoyed my past semester of ramblings, and I look forward to one more semester of adventures that I may share with you.

Onward, dear reader, for the horizon is ours!