I just gave my presentation and it was moderately successful. It was kind of cool being the first person to go, but I also only had roughly ten people in the room. Someone wants to add my work to their music theory curriculum. This could be a very meaningful use of a TA (hint, hint). I was spoken to about having my work put in Journal SEAMUS...we'll have to see how it goes however. But for now, I am going to go to the next concert.

SLC International Airport

George's Log: Supplemental.

So far, so good. My flight is on time, I have a beverage in hand, and I am sitting by a really attractive blond (she declined to have her picture taken with me for this blog). With any luck, I will land in Minneapolis, MN this afternoon, and be in St. Cloud for supper. I think that for my next laptop, I will downgrade to a 13 or 15 inch MacBook Pro. It's ridiculous whenever I want to put it on one of the seat trays on the plane. However it is good for looking at large orchestral scores on PDF and Finale.

I went a little bit overboard with the car I rented.

Warp Factor I

Some Preliminaries

Next week, I will go to my very first SEAMUS Conference. Here, some of the leading experts on electronic music will spend several days presenting pieces, papers, and learning some of the new cutting edge techniques being developed. I will be presenting a very unique topic. As far as I know, no one has ever presented on a topic such as mine. I will be presenting a paper on using Max/MSP to supplement a post-tonal theory course.

I'm trying to make several points in my presentation: (1) We should have an aural component to post-tonal music courses, (2) If we can't have an aural skills component, we should at least to make sure students learn to "hear" some of the relationships in atonal music with CAI software, (3) Such a software should be kernelized with a specific methodology, mainly Karpinski's in mind, and (4) Max/MSP is an easy and cost effective means of supplementing post-tonal music theory.

That's enough about me though. SEAMUS is no doubt going to be good this year. However, there is one troubling trend. Many of the composers on the list are not presenting new pieces...new in the sense that they were composed this century, but not new in that they have been performed before.