I left the house at 6 a.m. again to head to campus. It�s the first week of classes and where last week the place was beginning to show signs of life, today it was bustling with students desperately trying to find where they are supposed to go.

I had arrived nearly an hour early to run some errands, but enjoyed having a little time to take it all in before heading to class. I sat in on the first day of the class I�ll be teaching this spring as taught by the most senior member of our department and a legend in the field, Dr. G.

Dr. G. was one of the few legends of the field that I�d actually heard of before attending graduate school. He works in the same time period as my equally esteemed undergraduate advisor, so she�d made a point of telling me to introduce myself when I arrived. But Dr. G. beat me too it, making a beeline for me at a first-year student departmental meet and greet and utterly terrifying me not by discussing academic subjects far over my head, but by plunging into personal stories of how he�d met his wife (who, incidentally was one of my husband�s college English professors), who received her bachelor�s degree from my undergraduate institution. He claimed that for their first date he took her to see Wagner�s Parsifal at the Met. Standing room only. And she was wearing heels. [for those unfamiliar with the repertoire, Parsifal is known for, among other things, being the longest opera in standard repertory. It�s long enough that interpretive differences in tempo can cause as much as an hour difference in running time, but usually clocks in somewhere between 5 and 6 hours.] �She didn�t complain once,� joked Dr. G. �That�s when I knew I should marry her.�

Dr. G., like any good legend, is surrounded by many stories, most of which are probably embellished half-truths, but which nevertheless support the image we all wish to uphold. There�s the story about how he yells at undergraduate non-majors for not knowing an answer, reducing them to tears. There�s the story of how he failed one of his advisees on her dissertation defense [this one�s true � I was there]. And then there�s the story about how his mistress, acquired during several summers of European research, showed up unexpectedly on his Chicago doorstep screaming at his wife in Italian. I brought all these stories with me to class this morning, along with the less salacious stories of why he is a legend in the first place: he is a brilliant scholar and a brilliant teacher.

Dr. G is not a particularly imposing presence standing at the front of the classroom as students shuffle in looking vaguely lost. But as soon as he begins to talk, his charisma is evident. He launches into a compelling spiel on his vision for the class and goes through the syllabus. The class is an introductory course for non-majors, one of three or four courses that fulfills an arts requirement for all humanities majors. Students who had been looking nervous for being in a room with staff lines all over the blackboards, out of their comfort zone, are looking at Dr. G. with a mixture of excitement alarm while he explains that two of their term assignments involve composing music.

After dispensing with the preliminaries, Dr. G. jumps into the fray and starts introducing the class to Ernst Toch�s �Geographical Fugue.� The Geographical fugue is a perfect example of a Bach-style fugue form, but it is entirely rhythm based. The rhythmic motives are drawn from the natural speaking rhythms of the text, all names of various geographical locations. It opens:

Trinidad!
And the big Mississippi
And the town Honolulu
And the lake Titicaca

Gradually he lets the students tease out the things he�s looking for � structural elements. He has them perform the opening while he demonstrates and gives names to fugal elements like augmentation (when the theme is slowed down), diminution (when it is sped up) and stretta (when iterations of the theme or theme fragments enter on top of each other at an increasing rate before the fugue�s end. He introduces basic notation too, as well as words like �beat� �rhythm,� and �meter.� Pretty soon the students are using the terms too. Along the way he throws in some historical background on the piece.

He moves on to overall structure, a discussion he enters by performing John Cage�s legendary �silent� piece, �4�33.� The students are definitely awake now, and very uncomfortable at sitting in silence. One student makes a bid for a solo by drumming on the desk with his ball point pen. At the conclusion of the performance, we all clap and Dr. G. bows. �Now,� he says, �what�s happening in this piece?�

�What piece?� the drum soloist challenges. Another student responds, �This piece is genius. He turns all our expectations inside out. He presents structure to ambient sound so we get the message that everything is music.� It was one of those moments you hope for in class where students exhibit passion and where they figure it out for themselves.

The last segment of the class found Dr. G. at the piano (while 4�33� is about as virtuosic as I get at the piano, Dr. G. has a concert pianist�s facility at the keyboard) playing Mozart and Bartok while the class clapped to the beat and tried to determine meter. All in all, the class was easy and fun and had a natural flow, but they covered a phenomenal amount of ground without even realizing it.

I�m still not sure how I�m going to approach this course. The only real requirement is that I teach close listening. The college curriculum here is based around the close reading of primary texts. The idea is that for music, that means using musical pieces as primary text. Dr. G. takes this so to heart that he doesn�t use any kind of textbook, something I find rather tempting, although in my experience the students get nervous without some kind of reference in hand. Others use a textbook I don�t like very much and link the listening with some kind of theme � one course, for example, read Walter Benjamin�s �Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction� and discussed issues of recording vs. live performance.

Given the sociological spin of my own work, I may put more of an emphasis on performance context as I put together the repertoire for the class. Or I may discuss music criticism. In any case, it is totally possible for me to put together an effective course that I could pretty much teach off the top of my head, with minimal research needed. After the experience of teaching intro to ethnomusicology, where I was largely unfamiliar with huge swaths of the repertoire I was teaching, this will be a nice change and should allow me to think more about how to teach effectively rather than how to stay afloat.

Following the class I attended [click back for detail] I managed to land a meeting with my thesis advisor which was productive! And exciting! Apparently, I am on the job market. There are no words save two: holy shit. At what point exactly are you supposed to feel like you know enough to be teaching instead of learning? I think I am one of those people for whom the answer is �At no point.� I will never know enough to feel completely qualified. And yet, apparently I am. And some pretty smart people at a pretty good university say that I am. Time to buy an interview suit. And shoes. Think about the shoes. Much less scary than thinking about the C.V.

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