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METHENY & SCHUBERT & ABSALOM VOLSTEAD Alright. A typical day in doctoral school? So Pat Metheny comes to school today. The acclaimed jazz guitarist, that one. The famous one. He talks to us for like an hour, about making music and records and about being full human beings and telling stories and engaging our culture through music. Inspiring stuff. Then I answer phones. Emails. Talk to prospective students, their moms. More phones calls. Coordinate some upcoming studio date with the faculty. Photocopy something. Run out of the building and buy dirty Halal food across the street for the low, everyday price of $5. Five dollars? Hooray for Islam! Then to big band. Working on new literature, new charts I mean, for the upcoming Blue Note performance we have with Wayne Krantz in May. Wayne Krantz! Fuck yeah. And playing lead soprano in the big band. This is my soprano saxophone. God, this is fun. I am a lead player. Lead soprano and lead alto saxophone. ROAR! Two bigwig record producers are here today. From Verve and Half Note Records. They're announcing the winners of the Costa Rica competition. It's the competition where first place wins a weeklong tour of Costa Rica, all expenses paid, that sort of thing. I win second place. ok. The band that wins first place is a group of motherfuckers—friends of mine, five young guys who can really play. Personnel-wise, it's more or less the group I was in, minus me. Just saying. I'm late for class. I run to class. I'm asked to critique a dissertation proposal, some old guy's proposal, a proposal that, alright, I don't want to do this, please don't make me do this, do I have to do this, on the style and analysis of ok I know the drill, here I go again... Afterward my student is waiting for me. My student, this guy. He's a nice guy. He asks me to teach him classical theory and also classical ear training and music history. So we workshop intervals for like an hour. Check it out. A major third descending. It sounds like a doorbell. DING DONG, major third! And then what's this triad? You say augmented triad? No, it's diminished. Listen. Diminished. And if I say Eroica Symphony, what does that mean to you? Who composed the Eroica Symphony? No. Definitely not. It's Beethoven. Dude. Suddenly it's 8 p.m. I realize that I haven't practiced my saxophone all day. So I grab an empty room; I play "The Song Is You," at 280 bpm, for an hour. Wow this tune is hard. But why? Making melodies in C-major, why should that be hard? I think of that quote from Pierre Boulez, the one that goes: "You don't need C-major to find eternity." The Song Is Me? Not yet, it's not. On my way home I want vodka. Badly. But then I notice a 7-Eleven, beside a liquor store, beside a Taco Bell, beside a bank machine, just a block away from my place. So I take out some money and I buy a Coke Slurpee and some vodka and then a taco, too. This Slurpee is amazing. I'm home. I add vodka to this amazing Coke Slurpee. You don't need C-major to find eternity, said Boulez, but you might need Absalom Volstead. I think I read that somewhere. About heaven and eternity. You know. Cherubim, seraphim, fluffy white clouds parted by the finger of the Almighty, streets paved with vodka, etc. It's in one of those forbidden books, one of those books that was expurgated from the canon at the Seventeenth Council of Nicaea in 1411. The Infancy Gospel of Slurpee 3:16. God this beverage is divine. My Slurpee is empty. Volstead is empty. This taco is disgusting. It's past midnight and Absalom has tricked me and wait—what?!? Damnit I forgot. Gee! I have a three-page paper to write. About Franz Schubert and German lieder. Paper's due in class tomorrow. Ugh. Let's go. In an hour I'll be in bed, fast asleep, like a Catholic schoolchild, of mostly sober mind, which is to say, unmolested. This is life for Murray James in doctoral school. And tomorrow I'll wake up and do it all over again.... -murrayjames 02/26/09 |