Avril vs. the textbook

Once again popular culture has proven to be a better teacher than the ones who make it their job to stand in front of classrooms full of students every day.

The typically unintelligible and extra-syllable laden speaking tests delivered to me by the students had a lone girl who stood out with nearly perfect pronunciation, however quite imperfect grammar.  

I was completely astonished.  Was she taking extra classes outside of school?  If so, why wasn’t she delivering the typically rhetorical machine-gun speech like most of the juku students?

We got to the last question on her test: “What do you like to do in your free time?”  She answered: “I often listen to music.  I like Avril.”

I have detested Avril Lavigne since she invaded my aural memory when I was in junior high.  And for the first time since Walmart forced me to listen to her, she has my gratitude.

I Heart Bass

Recently I’ve been spending way too much time on Etsy browsing adorable handmade items and convincing myself that I need them.  Today I decided to look up bass-related items.  I was saddened to see how many more listings there were for bass the fish, but I still found some awesome items.

Pure Music Sterling Bass Clef Pendant from ccj2

I Love the Bass Player T-Shirt from PickChick

Bassist Original Print by Fiddlebones

I Heart Stand Up Bass Earrings from lizardgirl

Bass Player Stained Glass Panel by divafern

The Case of the Mysterious MiniDisc…

Solved!  By Ask Metafilter!  Hurray!  

Take that antiquated Sharp MD-MT90 and Sound Blaster External USB Sound System!  (The secret was in the headphone jack.)

By Alexander Pearl

For the last couple of months I’ve been considering the prospect that, were I to publish compositions, I would do it under a male pseudonym.

Studies like this suggest why.

To support this discussion, I presented to students the results from a study I did a couple years ago involving the Heidi Roizen case. Specifically, with Harvard’s permission, I changed the original materials so that one section of the class received a version of the case called “Howard” Roizen (same case, just different pronouns) and the other section received the original case. Before class, I had the students go online and rate their impressions of “Roizen” on several dimensions. As you might expect, the results show that students were much harsher on Heidi than on Howard across the board. Although they think she’s just as competent and effective as Howard, they don’t like her, they wouldn’t hire her, and they wouldn’t want to work with her. As gender researchers would predict, this seems to be driven by how much they disliked Heidi’s aggressive personality. The more assertive they thought Heidi was, the more harshly they judged her (but the same was not true for those who rated Howard).

Music composition is one of those fields where there simply hasn’t been a woman to make the grade. I hardly believe it is due to lack of talent. Even Clara Schumann, one of the most likely persons for the job in history, didn’t buy into it.

“I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose — there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?”

It reminds me of when I was in college and signed up for a “Women Composers Concert” mailing list. Every email was a desperate-sounding cry for submissions, and when they had enough, no one attended the concert.

An impetus driven by the mere power of observation.

Project Gutenberg

I was happy to discover this website today for Project Gutenberg, an online book catalog of scans of 20,000 free public domain books, with links to 100,000 more books through similar affiliates. I’m surprised I hadn’t heard of it before.

I found it through links about the now defunct International Music Score Library Project, a website which strove to achieve the same goal of free and accessible cultural materials, but was shot down by proponents of post mortem copyright protection laws.

Yay! Now I can quit reading Reader’s Digest (Wiki) and read real books when I pretend to work.

Shuten Douji Festival

This weekend was another taiko drumming performance. This time we climbed up the side of Kugami mountain on the back of a truck and slowly drove back down again while we performed. It was a lot scarier than I remember it being last year.

Most memorable was banging away in the climactic section of a piece just as we reached a side of the moutain with a magestic view of the huge valley where our town lies.

We could see the entire thing; the rice fields, the houses, and nothing below us but a steep plunge down the side of the mountain. Fear and elation mottled my concentration, and it was an incredible experience.

We got down to the bottom and watched this guy portray the festival legend of the sake-drinking demon, Shuten Douji.

Then we performed again, went out drinking, and I fell asleep on a table at the bar.

All in all, a truely taiko day.

The Bristles of Guilt

A while ago, I attended a piano recital presented by one of my students from adult conversation class. She is a piano teacher and has a modest studio of students at a variety of levels.

I attended the recital, but was irritated with myself for my inability to stop analyzing the stumbling of a 10 year old.

Performers don’t stop. And yet here was this girl who stopped no less than three times within her first piece, and proceeded to continue the same blunder in later pieces she performed. I was flabbergasted. How can a performer STOP on stage? I realized I had never seen a performer just stop dead in their tracks and stare at the music dumbfoundedly. But then again I had never seen a child’s piano recital.

I was confused by my inability to differentiate this from my audience participation as a college student, to calm down and remind myself that this was a child. But I couldn’t contain myself, the emotion I felt; how can someone just stop without playing something….anything? It was as if she had never learned the music, she was just reading the page. I can’t recall myself ever being such a musician.

I had promised myself I would stay for the whole 2.5 hours. Then I decided 1 hour would be OK perhaps.

In the end, I left after 30 minutes. I told a girl in the lobby, one of her students, that I had some errands to run. I felt awful.

This was two weeks ago. Yesterday at english conversation class, the student who invited me came up to me with a gift and said “thanks so much for coming to my recital!” The waves of guilt washed over me yet again. Perhaps it was this guilt that led me to forget the gift in my car that night.

This morning, I found the gift in my car and opened it. Inside were a package of chocolates and a toothbrush.

A toothbrush??

I am Media

Sometimes when I’m teaching, it becomes very clear to me how much power I hold over the kids just by standing in front of them.

They stare at me, they are curious, and they listen to me even though they don’t understand what I am saying. I often wonder what kind of human I am presenting to them, and just what are they learning from me.

Sometimes I have taught at elementary schools and shared lunchtime with the students. At some elementary schools, they play videos during lunch, usually some sort of animation series with animals or children playing or discovering things. The children sit riveted to the television, the same way they are riveted to me when I stand in front of them; they are curious and inanimate like sponges.

This often reminds me of when I was in junior high and they broadcast a student-aimed television program during our lunch hour, 50% of which was commercials for Mountain Dew. We sat riveted then as well.

I appreciate any kind of long overdue creator concern for the kind of culture they are constructing and its influence on humanity.

As a creator of culture I am very aware of this; I create music, I can create an accompanying image with that music. I hold people curious and inanimate like sponges while they listen to me. I can manipulate people’s emotions without their conscious decision.

I was surprised to see this article about the “Ethical Dilemmas” of computer games in which designer Jason Hill described Warcraft as unethical.

I was surprised because so rarely does a creator of a mass media form finally admit what media really is: Education.

Earth Celebration

Here is an interesting idea from the staff at Earth Celebration, the festival I went to on Sado Island hosted by Kodo. It had the most hippies and foreigners I’ve ever seen in one place in Japan.

I thought this was a brilliant technique for waste management. This man is peeling a thin plastic lining from the inside of this food dish; the lining will be discarded and the dish can be used again. The stacks of dishes behind him are for wash and reuse the next day.

All of the food stands at the festival used these reusable dishes, which prevented alot of waste considering there were thousands who attended this event. The bins in front of him are all of the garbage sorted into burnable, plastic, tin, glass, etc. More on garbage in Japan here.

和太鼓/ Taiko

Because I’m white, I get a column in a slick, citywide publication that is delivered to everyone’s mailbox every month.

The other English teachers and I rotate this column every few months. My next deadline is this Monday, so I’m preparing an article for that, but I thought I would post my debut article, published last June.

That’s me in one of my hand-knits! On the left is what I wrote and on the right is the Japanese translation from a woman in the city office.

The Spirit of Taiko

Before coming to Japan to teach English, I had experience as a teacher, but rather as a teacher of music. My degree is in Double Bass music performance, and after 4 years of studying classical western music, I became very inspired by Japanese music and dance. One of the performance forms I am interested in is taiko drumming.

I first saw the internationally reknowned “Kodo” 3 years ago as a student at the University of Michigan. The strength and spirit of the performers coupled with the drums’ powerful sound left me awestruck. I wanted to play taiko so badly after that performance, but according to the performance notes Kodo lives and practices on a mysterious, secluded island on the other side of the world, so while I was left with this striking impression of taiko drumming, I had to put my dream of becoming a participant to rest.

Since coming to Niigata, not only do I live right next door to that mysterious, secluded island, Sado, but I could join my town’s group, Bunsui Taiko. The spirit of taiko and of music is so strong in their hearts, that I feel continuous refreshing inspiration as a musician. I feel lucky to live in Niigata, and honored to be a member of Bunsui Taiko.

FIN

I joined this group of crazy, rowdy, old and young men and women a year ago and have since played in three festivals and gone to several drinking parties with them. Here are some pictures from our outings.

Me in full festival regalia, a little bit softer (pre-Shangri-La Diet).

This drum is bigger than it looks; it’s made from an old whiskey barrel. I’ve never actually performed on it. This picture was taken minutes after the completion of the rack it is suspended on.

Believe it or not, the picture below was taken at 7 a.m. To say they like drinking would be an understatement; I like to say it’s not a taiko party if I’m not being scraped off the floor by the end of it.

This was taken on a rented bus on the way to an overnight hot spring trip. In Japan, edamame is for beer, not for hippies.

While buckets of chicken wings, french fries, and heart attacks are the usual accomaniment to alcohol in the States, over here it’s fish, shellfish, and vegetables.

This food was SO GOOD!! >_<

And tomorrow, I’m preparing to be scraped off the floor by my fellow taiko players yet again, this time at an old house near a shrine! W00T!!

FIN?