The boys had a manly day with one of my husband�s friends and his son. They went to a minor league ball game and had a grand time and ate lots of sugary treats until AJ was careening off the walls and apparently spent the entire hour-long drive home from the ballpark banging a thunderstick on my husband�s head as he drove. Oh my.

I, on the other hand, was left blissfully alone. Although I would have loved to go for a run or play in the garden or take a long, uninterrupted bubble bath, instead I locked myself up with my books, CDs and my computer and worked on my lectures. I was hoping to have gotten more of my final exam written this weekend, but alas, I didn�t have as much work time as I would have liked. I�ll have to be vigilant this week.

This week includes my favorite music of the quarter � the early 20th century. Debussy, Ravel, Les Six, Ives, Copland, Stravinsky, Bartok. Part of it�s that I really love to listen to this stuff. But I also love the intellectual issues � the problem of developing music for the post-industrial age, of finding ways around tonality. Next week I do the Second Viennese School, Ligeti, Cage, and Crumb and then we�re done.

I�ve been starting to reflect back on the quarter of teaching � only two more weeks of classes before the final. It�s been interesting to try to create a coherent trajectory out of the material. I feel like I�ve clarified my own ideas and the assumptions that I make about the history and about how I hear my way through it. At the end of it all, I�ll have more than 200 pages written on the subject (not counting the blog entries devoted to various aspects of it). I can see why people who do this for a while want to write textbooks. And I hope I get to do this again soon. But for now, I will be glad to put the focus of my writing energy back on finishing the diss.

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