Ryan's Very Musicological Day

Do you ever have one of those musicological days that is really exciting to you, but don’t have anyone to share it with? Let’s be honest, sometimes (most times) what we have to say is only meaningful or helpful or amusing to other musicologists. Well, I recently had a day like that and it prompted this blog.

9:00am

Breakfast with Jeffrey Magee from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Professor Magee, was on campus to give a talk on Irving Berlin’s This Is The Army (Broadway: 1942; Hollywood: 1943), and he took the time to sit and talk with me and two of my graduate-student colleagues about our current work.

10:30am

Saw/heard a performance of Bach’s Cantata BWV 33, "Allein zu dir," conducted by Professor Christoph Wolff. To top it off, a majority of the graduate students from my department were up on stage playing and singing!

12:00pm

Lunch with Professors Carol Oja, Kay Kaufman Shelemay. They gave a brief talk about the Bernstein in Boston research project that they started in spring 2006 to a group of Boston-based Jewish scholars. After they were done, I was given the opportunity to briefly share my current research on “Bernstein’s Complicated Relationship with Rhapsody in Blue,” a paper I recently delivered at the Society for American Music conference.

2:15pm

A mini-conference called “Cultural Impacts of Modern War.” In addition to Magee’s previously mentioned paper, John Bodnar spoke on war memorials and Linda Gordon spoke on Dorothea Lange's photographs of Japanese Internment Camps.

5:15pm

Opening reception for the Harvard Graduate Music Forum’s conference. Met our invited speakers and had some nice conversations about their work and what they’d be presenting on the following day.

6:45pm

Dinner with Carol Oja, Jeff Magee, and Beth Levy. There were three other students at the table too, but none of them were musicologists, so I don’t think they grasped how musicologically interesting/rare this was. Three American-music specialists all gathered at one table. We talked about course work, dissertations, getting hired, getting published, and getting tenure. Wow.

8:00pm

Drinks with Drew. A Blog is Born.

Sunday, March 11, 2007  | Permalink |  Comments (1)