Bah humbug, said the tired and unwilling class piano teacher.

We now come to that most breathlessly anticipated time of year:  exam and jury week.

As a grad student and class piano teacher, I get the distinct privilege of being a student and a teacher.  On Monday, I took a symphonic lit final.  Tuesday through Thursday I am observing and grading class piano individual exams; more on that in a minute.  And Thursday ends with my own piano jury.  Laissez les bons temps rouler!

Grading piano exams is jury-like.  I sit with my irritatingly-Rachel-Ray-like supervisor and one of the other class piano teachers, and we watch, notate, and when the student's finished, briefly confer to decide on a grade for each portion.

Let me explain my irritation with my supervisor.  It is of a most peculiar variety, and important to accurately describe. 

Ravel's "Boléro": Sex? Why Yes, Thank You.

“Boléro” was written by Maurice Ravel in 1928.  Everyone’s heard the stories:  he wrote it to annoy his wife; he wrote it to annoy his cat; he wrote two melodies and decided he was done; etc.  Whether or not any of these are true, it is a fact that the piece is repetitive.  It’s essentially 17 runs of the same (-ish) melody or its answering countermelody.  It’s mainly in C, though near the end there’s a passage in E that kind of jumps out at you before returning to C for the finale.

 It’s also remarkably sexual.  I’m sure there have been many scholarly interpretations of this, but I haven’t bothered reading them, so fuck them all.  This is my show. 

A Tuxedo Life Philosophy

Tuxedos are like frosting.  The surface is deliciously tempting.  And the cake underneath is even better.

You're welcome.

Tux Bomb

The time has come to attack a weighty issue, one with gravitas and import.  One familiar to women everywhere.  It’s a universal situation, and one with which most of us can identify:  attractiveness which stems from tuxedos.

Marriage of Figaro, Volume III: It Finally Ends. And We Survive. Mostly.

Le Nozze di Figaro was a scathing reproof of the hypocritical, hedonistic nobility that ran Europe in Mozart’s day.  It was meant to shock the audience and make them uncomfortable, as it was written to entertain the very people it sought to criticize.  It was based, of course, on the revolutionary plays by Beaumarchais.  It’s a very political story, one that fired up the revolutionaries in the late 18th century.
 

In a small Midwestern town, this drama is somewhat lost on us today.  But The Nose Of Figaro is pretty epic.  The music is LURVE.  The overture is badass.  Happily, since I played for act 1, I was sitting onstage draped in cheap blue cotton and moldy lace when it started, I could watch the orchestra sex through the entire thing.  SO DAMN GOOD.

(The overture is famous.  Yes, you've heard it.  It goes noodle-oodle-oo, noodle-oodle-oodle-oodle-oodle noodle-oodle-oo, noodle-oodle-oodle-oodle-oodle, noodle-oodle-oodle-oodle-oodle-oodle-oodle-oodle-oo (wagga-wagga-wagga) doooooo, doo doo-doo-doo-doo dooooooo, doo doo-doo-doo-doo BAHHHHHHHHHHHH, DAHHHHHHHHHHH, DAH-DAH, BAH DAHHHH DAH-DAH, BAH DAHHHH DAH-DAH, DAH, DAH, DAH, DAH.  And so on.)

Shirtless Opera Singers & Barihunks: I Support These.

Two places to check for musical mancandy.

Shirtless Opera Singers:  Exactly what it sounds like.  Pretty, non-shirt-wearing men to look at.  And at least one instance of (gasp!) nudity.

Barihunks:  Hot baritones.  Also includes their info and sometimes where/when you can see them be sexy perform.

Marriage of Figaro, Volume II: Oh God, It Continues

This entire opera was a study in just how poorly something could be run and still somehow work.  Dr. Jerome’s a wonderful singer, and I’m sure he’s had a wonderful career.  But dear God in holy heaven, the man is incompetent.  He almost never ran the music in rehearsal.  He dragged endlessly, inefficiently through staging rehearsals till I wanted to scream.  And I am Irish and German, so imagine how much patience is encoded into my genes to begin with.

In a more problematic sense, he let musical stuff slide.  Singers were making up recitative lines and he wasn’t catching it.  Rhythms were sloppy and he didn’t catch them.  I had to correct some of them myself.  And the biggest problem here is that he wasn’t the musical director.  Dr. Beauregard was.  Dr. Jerome was the stage director.  So letting Dr. J. run the music in his sloppy way was not a good segue into Dr. B, the paragon of precision and accuracy.  Not good bedfellows (obviously, because Dr. B and I are bedfellows.  Duh).

Big rehearsals together were fascinating.  Dr. Jerome acted like he was in charge sometimes…again, false; the Maestro is completely in charge in opera…and one night, it actually almost exploded.