SWOTD 6: Frantic Finishing

Today I'm in that rushed phase when a paper is almost done, but when tiny little flaws and unfinished bits seem to proliferate like magic brooms in the Mickey Mouse part of Fantasia - deal with one and two more show up. I'm working at our kitchen table this morning, looking out over our scenic street, because I've got to grind the end of this term paper out before I go to department obligations starting at 1.

SOTD = the last sentence of the paper, which is perhaps unsurprisingly written already:

The connection between neumes and transformational actions has been sufficiently belabored already, but it is possible that deeper investigation will help to clarify some aspects of Lewin’s enigmatic descriptions of an anti-Cartesian music theory, and will contribute to the continuing exploration and exposition of his richly textured ideas.

Swotd V: Closing in

Another day on the world's most boring blog. Today was mostly consumed with trying to finish up my notation paper for Jane Alden's class. I was pretty restless--work in the morning, then papering in my carrel for late morning, upper level of Buckminsters for the mid afternoon, and then a few hours at the kitchen table at home.

Bucky's is the photo-the white haze is the shades drawn over the window. And that's an open, loft-like overlook just beyond the computer. The iPhone camera couldn't handle the difference between the gloriously dim corner and the bright outside...

Sentence of the Day is from the last few pages of the notation paper. If only that meant I was almost done with it...

"Yet simply concluding, after 25 pages, that plainsong already is a transformational system and that nothing need be done differently in order to regard it as such would be severely anticlimactic. Where, then, has this investigation gotten us?"

S&W OTD III: May Day 2k12

Today's workspace is my carrel in Loeb Music Library. Every music grad student gets one (first years generally have to share, like I do). It's a nice quiet, secluded, and relatively distraction-free place to get work done!

SentenceOfTheDay:

While the bulk of the above passage relates the purported origin of the sequence, my principal concern is the advice Notker receives from his teacher at the end of the anecdote: “the individual motions of the melody [motus cantilenae] should receive separate syllables [singulas syllabus, perhaps more accurately “individual syllables”].


Yep, still on the chant term paper.