I am in full academic panic mode today. After a couple of days where I was already feeling like I had no idea how I was going to finish the cursed dissertation, I got two pieces of e-mail that sent me off the deep end. The first was notification of my time slot for the paper I�m giving in the fall. It�s on the afternoon of the first day. And seeing as it�s going to be at least 7 or 8 hours of total travel time to get there, that means I have to leave a day earlier than I was planning. It also means some (if not most) of my friends won�t be able to attend. I was really hoping for some friendly faces in the audience to help keep me from freaking out! On the plus side, I�ll get it out of the way and should be able to enjoy the rest of the conference. And also, chances are it won�t be too heavily attended due to the early slot, so I shouldn�t be embarrassing myself in front of too many people. I hope.

The second e-mail gave me my time slot for teaching in the spring. The time slot was just about perfect � afternoons just two days a week (you can either be given a 2 or 3 day a week version). The commute shouldn�t be too brutal and the two days a week happen to be days that AJ will be in preschool, so we should avoid any serious childcare issues. The grad advisor who is responsible for organizing the student teachers was kind enough to give me access to her own syllabi and other material from her course this past spring. Back when I was conducting my choir, we used to perform for her sections of this course and she also gave me a truckload of Renaissance and Baroque choral music, many in unpublished editions, which was extremely helpful and interesting, so I actually have some knowledge about how she likes to teach this course. But looking at her syllabus, I started totally panicking about how long it�s been since I�ve looked at some of this stuff. When was the last time I took a good listen to a Schubert lied or a Beethoven symphony?

The other thing that�s going to be tricky is the time commitment. Not only do I need to attend several full days of a teaching workshop in the fall, but I am supposed to sit in on an entire course in fall quarter taught by the most well-known senior faculty member in the department. This course starts at nine, which means that two days a week I�ll be heading out of my house before 6 a.m. to get there on time in the cold, cold Chicago winter. Need I say that this sucketh mightily? But I think I need to do it. It�s been so long. Do I even remember what a college class is like? And I don�t even want to think about the finances of it all. I�m sure I won�t be making enough to cover my train fare and extra childcare needed. But this is supposed to be about future employment, not the present. Right? I�d sure as hell better want an academic job�

The thing that is exciting is that I will get to talk in greater depth about musical materials in this course than I�ve been able to in the past. The intro to ethnomusicology classes I�ve taught set an especially difficult task of introducing students to a dizzying array of musical cultures, an array I try to organize by topic based primarily on how the music is used (e.g., �Music and Drama,� or �Music and Religion�). With each topic I focus on a primary musical culture and genre (e.g. with �Music and Drama� I focused on Beijing Opera) and spun in out in two directions � one into the rest of the culture (Chinese music in general) and the other into instances of the theme in other cultures (Western opera, Japanese Noh, etc.). Through this method I try to provide basic listening skills and cultural information to allow students to gain some understanding of unfamiliar soundscapes but also give them a way to hook it into knowledge they already have. I try to introduce new ways to listen and think about music through the introduction of music cultures that think about things differently. And I hope that some of them will find something new to them that excites them.

Since the Intro to Western Music course focuses on a relatively limited repertoire (still large, but with a common core of history, at least), I�ll be able to talk more about structure and aesthetics. I�ve been thinking a lot about how I plan to tailor the class to my own experiences as a scholar bridging two subfields in my discipline (because, as any good procrastinator knows, when you�re panicking about how much you have to do, it is best to start working on the thing with the deadline the farthest away). Although, this type of bridge is getting less and less unusual � it has become a current trend, of sorts.

The basics of the course are established as introducing students to different styles and historical periods of music and training them to listen critically. The course is organized more or less chronologically, although it is not intended to be an historical survey. The syllabus I�m looking at starts at the baroque era, the first time period where you can really start talking about the harmony and counterpoint that have governed our musical thinking ever since (whether by adoption, adaptation, or conscientious avoidance). It also includes a sub-theme based on Walter Benjamin�s seminal essay, �The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.� This sub-theme hooks into the critical listening component and involves the active comparison of multiple versions of the same piece and the consideration of issues of interpretation.

The issue of reproduction is an interesting question, but do I really want to spend an entire quarter talking about it? There are so many interesting questions. Most of my thinking about music lately has revolved around a quote from the opening of John Mueller�s 1951 work, The American Symphony Orchestra:

A concert performance is never insulated from the milieu in which it has its being. It cannot function without a set of congenial circumstances � a social soil � which permit its existence and determine its content. The sources of its economic support the traditional cultural values, the expectations of the audiences, the pedagogical institutions which propagae the art, the political climate, the technology which produced the instruments, the lure of competitive alternative pleasures, are only a few of the miscellany of factors that mold the concert system into a reflection of themselves. No one can hazard a responsible opinion on trends without adequate consideration of these, and other, determining conditions.

I think I need to spend some time thinking about what criteria I want my students to be able to address when they think about music, both from the standpoint of listening and also historical analysis. A few years ago I gave a couple of pre-performance lectures on a Handel opera being performed by Chicago�s Lyric Opera, the first Baroque opera on their stage in years. In preparing those lectures, I concentrated on what I thought my audience, all Lyric donors and opera subscribers, would need to know in order to understand both how and why the opera was put together. Mostly I talked about the da capo aria, which sounds so repetitive to modern audiences, but actually served particular dramatic and artistic purposes in its historical context. I tried to train them to listen for detail, so they could both hear and think critically about the differences in the iterations. A few weeks later, I got a call from one of the lecture attendees. She had just seen the opera and said my lecture really helped her to enjoy it. �Usually those lectures just tell me about the story and the names of the arias,� she said. �I always thought Baroque opera was boring, but this performance made sense.� That�s about the nicest thing a teacher could hear. Mission accomplished.

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