Florida in January

I realized last fall that it was the first time in almost 25 years that I was not preparing for school in some capacity or another.

As a Kindergartener, I was excited to get on that yellow bus but also intimidated by the big kids that surrounded me. Ooh, bus rides can be cruel. Throughout the years I had grown out of being excited and became more bored, wishing for the day I could drive myself. College was different. One fall I packed my things in the evening, expecting to leave first thing in the morning, but since I was so eager to go, I decided to drive through the night. After college I went straight into teaching elementary and middle school band. I loved the job and working with the little ones, but I must admit, I experienced a little bit of dread when the calendar broke into August or when I would glimpse a yellow bus on its way to the shop. Grad school followed that and the thousands of things that needed to be done in an impossibly small amount of time consumed all of my energy.

And so, I took a deep breath last fall. I watched the hectic parents and students grabbing school supplies. I smiled at the sight of teenagers slouching at bus stops. I waved at the bus as it passed. It was like golfing during a business day, or enjoying a Florida beach in January. Oh what a feeling of freedom and peace.

Now it appears that I'll be heading off to Case (Western Reserve) in Cleveland this August to work in the Music Department as the Music Tech specialist. I'll be running the lab, the Mac server, and the multimedia classrooms, and I'll get some teaching in as well.
Ooh, I need to go get some school supplies.

Fives

When I was an undergrad freshman, I stumbled into the campus chapel to hear the Messiah College Concert Choir directed by Linda Tedford. This was before I was a music major, I was by myself on my way to the library or something and decided on the spur of the moment to listen. When I sat and heard the tone of the choir I was immediately impressed. There was just something that I had never experienced before in that sound. The next year I auditioned and joined the choir (and the music department officially) and had some of the best times of my life there.

Looking back, the thing I heard was beautiful intonation. The perfect fifths and fourths were rock solid, but I don't think that would have made the impression. It must have been the major and minor thirds that were performed unlike anything I had previously heard. You see, as a piano player, I would have been used to hearing a close approximation to perfect fifths (the triple ratio), but the quintuple relationship would have been foreign to my equally-tempered ears.

Well tuned thirds are the primary difference between equal temperament and what is called Just Intonation. As I've explained earlier, equal temperament is a crude and artificial slicing of the octave(2:1) into twelve equal parts. Just Intonation however takes into account the ratios of 5:3, 5:4, 6:5, and 8:5 otherwise known as the minor third, major third, minor sixth, and Major sixth respectively. In a choir, string ensemble, and wind ensemble, performers can and should adjust each tone of the chromatic scale to accommodate different keys and tonalities. In other words, Just Intonation is fluid and flexible, which is highly inconvenient for fixed pitch instruments such as the piano and marimba but for these types of ensembles, it can be dramatic and... life-changing.

My kind of humor

My wife evidently knows how to make me laugh out loud. In an email from her:

There are 10 types of people in the world, those that understand binary and those that don't.