A Typical Monday

I love Mondays, even more than I love Fridays. By Sunday evening I've done my laundry, vacuumed my one rug, printed my German essays and decided to postpone my sight-singing homework until the following morning (which I invariably do). I love waking up early Monday morning, packing my bag, and heading out for a day of non-stop classes.

Because I generally forget to practice my singing before class on Monday, I have a small breakfast in the cafeteria and jaywalk across the street to the Humanities Building at 8am to practice before class. I'm often the first to check out a practice room key - and I take a vocal room (which I have access to as a pianist), the kind with big fluffy rugs on the walls to absorb the sound, high ceiling, and a grand piano. Sight-singing has been getting easier this year, but it's nice they assign melodies and let us work out the solfege before we have to sing in front of the class.

My first class of the day is music theory discussion, a combination aural skills class and lecture discussion. This is exactly the same as last year (I'm now in Musica Practica 3, of 4). I love my TA (well, I love all my TAs this year), a mandolin player from Texas, with a primarily folk background, a first year doctoral student. Class generally consists of solo singing with solfege, aural transcriptions (aural transcriptions are the only things I don't ever get A's on), and discussing papers or lecture material.

I have an hour break after theory, and either practice or study until my music history lecture at 11am. None of us quite knew what to expect from Survey of the History of Western Music. It turns out to be a demanding, fascinating course, focusing primarily on listening (eg. being able to recognize pieces of different composers and styles by ear on exams). I did embarassingly well on the first big exam.

Just about everyone in the entire sophomore music class takes history at the same time, about 80 of us. Unlike music theory, which divides the 80 into two lectures, with two TAs per lecture (4 TAs total), history consists of lecture Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, all 80 of us in one class. We have only one TA, a second year doctoral student in Musicology. I have no idea how he manages to keep track of all of us, much less teach four discussion sections back to back on Tuesdays.

After history I walk two doors down the hall to Introduction to Music Technology. Taught by my piano professor, it's a fun intro to MIDI and digital audio. Our current project is making a techno song. Right after that, I walk up one flight of stairs to Morphy Hall, for my World Music lecture. A fascinating overview of world music and ethnomusicology, it's taught by a very young professor (about 30 years old). Our TA is a doctoral student, I'm not sure what year, who is an awesome jazz pianist (and a competitive swimmer).

I then have ten minutes to dash up Bascom Hill for German. I'm taking 203 this semester, and it's getting harder. Most of the work is essay writing, and while I'm a pretty fast writer in English, German is another matter entirely. Still, it's fun, and amazing how much I've learned in one year.

An hour after that, my last class of the day is piano masterclass, which I always enjoy--though I've been missing Dan Myers. I'll write more about piano later - but things have been going well, albeit slowly.

All right, I have a paper about my polyphonic Mass analysis to write, and I'd better get to it.