Circus Maximus

Last night I was fortunate enough to attend a performance of John Corigliano's masterpiece Circus Maximus by the USC Wind Ensemble at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The hall was an experience in itself, as this was the first time I had been there since its completion. Unfortunately I forgot to bring my camera so I couldn't take any pictures, but the ushers were adamantly disallowing photography inside the hall anyway. The hall is visually stunning (aside from some tacky flowery carpeting and seats) but its true forte is acoustics. A particularly surreal moment occurred before Circus Maximus' 5th movement, Night Music II, which opens with a jazzy phrase by the antiphonal clarinetist, who was situated on a balcony in the right side of the hall. Before her solo I noticed her taking a drink from a water bottle she had brought with her. After finishing she capped the bottle and I heard it clearly from basically the opposite side of the hall. This is the best way I can think of describing just how stunning these acoustics are.

The concert opened with the CSU Northridge Wind Ensemble playing a modern arrangement of Mendelssohn's Overture for Band. I am not particularly fond of the piece but the band sounded fantastic - perfect intonation and balance, thanks in no small part to the venue. They continued with a work by Grainger (who is growing on me) titled Colonial Song, and concluded with a band transcription of Three Dance Episodes from On the Town, by Leonard Bernstein, which was fantastic.

Between the two short intermissions was a performance by the CalArts New Millennium Brass of Nick Didkovsky's Slim in Beaten Dreamers, which, if I am reading the program notes correctly, was partially written by a computer. This piece was avant-garde in its fullest, and unfortunately not the good kind.

The program ended (and rightfully so) with Circus Maximus, which is easily the most amazing piece of music ever composed. Corigliano appeared on-stage for about 10 minutes prior to the performance explaining the premises of the work and its eight movements. If I haven't already raved to you about this piece I urge you to read the work's program notes and this review of the premiere performance by the UT Wind Ensemble in 2005 (particularly the last three paragraphs). In a nutshell Corigliano creates a metaphor between the Circus Maximus of ancient Rome and the constant sensual bombardment of the modern world (but those links can explain it much better than I can). A few examples of Corigliano's genius:

• Form. Even the simplistic seventh movement, Prayer, is a masterpiece of musical form, starting quietly as I described but over a few minutes building to a full on-stage band tutti, in the most familiar tonality of any section of the work. The piece simply had direction - a huge contrast to the Didkovsky piece earlier in the evening.
  
• Ingenuity. Every instrument was used to its fullest capabilities. Perfectly in-tune minor seconds in the clarinets (must have been extremely difficult to pull off) inthe fourth movement, Night Music I, create a surreal, pad-like sound. Horns convincingly imitate the howl of wolves in the same movement. Percussion instruments I have never even seen before. Clarinets playing with their bells high in the air each time the Introitus music returned. Aleatoric elements that I can't even begin to describe, having not seen the score for myself.
  
• Antiphony. If you're unfamiliar with the term, antiphony is when a piece of music has a spatial component. In the case of Circus Maximus, a sax quartet with a string bass, a clarinet, three percussionists, two horns, and eleven trumpets were scattered around the hall. The first movement, Introitus, opens with trumpet fanfares blasting across the hall from each of the antiphonal trumpets. The third movement, Channel Surfing, consists of music sounding from around the hall in increasingly short, quick spurts.
• Contrast. It constantly shifts from extreme to extreme, from the softest pianissimo of clarinets and low reeds to the volume of the most passionate Mahler times ten. The sixth movement and climax of the piece, simply called Circus Maximus, is a chaos of sound from all angles, which builds increasingly tense as a small marching band parades through the hall. The crescendo builds to the absolute loudest chord you will ever hear, played (as far as I could tell) simultaneously by every single performer in the hall and sustained for a good 30 seconds before dying down. The seventh movement, Prayer, creates about the biggest imaginable contrast with what precedes it: simple, sustained melodies over sustained IV-I cadences. Softly the fanfares begin playing beneath the Prayer music and eventually the opening fanfares return in a flurry of sound in the final movement, Veritas. The piece concludes with trumpets blaring a note in unison for a few seconds, while one percussionist raises a shotgun into the air, the audience knows what is coming next. The trumpets drop a whole step and the work ends with the roar of a gunshot. How can any piece of music even come close to this? There are no more extremes to create, no further upper limits to breach.
  

Last day of classes

I've always been a sucker for the ends of things. The finale of a symphony can make it or break it for me. The last few pages of the AP Euro textbook two years ago were worded with such grandiloquence that they eliminated all of my regret for laboring 5 hours a day all year doing stuff for that class. Nothing beats a good sense of culmination and at the end of a quarter like this week you get a lot of it:

UCLA Symphony concert on Wednesday, which went quite well (though whoever decided that there wouldn't be an intermission needs to try playing the string parts to Schubert 9 nonstop themselves). Standing up for applause after the last C major chord of a 60 minute symphony. The choral director and his students thanking us for allowing them to conduct us for the quarter (as if we had a choice...)

The course evaluations we have to fill out. Extremely satisfying, particularly when you're anxious to vent to the University how much you hated professor so-and-so. I had two such professors this quarter and I can't help but feel that through the evaluations I have achieved vengeance. We even had to fill out one for our PIC10a professor, who our new professor told us to evaluate based upon his performance during weeks 1-8, which is decidedly a nice way to say "pre-insanity."

The last day of each class. Other people probably find this trite but I love it when the professor spends the last 5 minutes or so of class for the quarter telling us he enjoyed teaching us or specifying what he hoped we got out of the course, etc; last quarter my professors for Math 32a and Italian 42c did a particularly good job with this. The best part of this is that it gives a perfect opportunity for the students to applaud if they liked the teacher or the course, which is probably one of my favorite things to do ever. This year I applauded for two people: the guy who was responsible for all the demos we watched in Physics (befitting, because this was the only part of lecture I could stay awake for), and Rogawski, who was easily my professor this quarter most deserving of applause, despite the almost comical abundance of typos and errors in the documents he posted online for us. He, however, was still rushing through his last few minutes of lecture after 11:50 when the class was supposed to end. He didn't finish until around 11:55; clearly he would not have time to make a few of the sweeping, class-concluding generalities that I am so fond of, so I was a bit disappointed. But fortunately as people were standing up and filing out of their seats in rows to leave someone started clapping and after only a second or two we all joined in. Needless to say, immense satisfaction followed.


Apparently we have not one, but TWO readers (people hired to just grade homework in large classes) for physics. The first few homework assignments were all clearly graded by the same person. He/she adorned the top of each graded homework with the following (these are actually taken from my homework):

"25/25 Super! :) "
"23/25 :) "
"25/25 Perfect! :) "

Today we received back two homework assignments which this person graded and a third by someone seriously passive-aggressive. My paper read "25/25. WRITE YOUR SECTION #!" As I was thumbing through the stack trying to find mine I saw a row of 10 papers or so with increasingly frustrated marks:

"Section?"
"Section #?"
"Please write your section #!"
"SECTION?"
"SECTION!?!?!?!?!!?"

Yes, the reader started writing in all caps and using multiple punctuation marks to get us to write our sections on our homework. Yes, it was the last day of class and no more homework would be handed in.

In other news the schedule in the previous post is now final, as I am now enrolled in ARCH&UD10b. Very pleasing.

Neglected

Some arguably noteworthy things which were neglected last week due to the PIC10a incident:

My math professor started using colored chalk, which naturally blew my mind, as the majority of my education has been conducted on whiteboards. Today he used a bit of yellow chalk to draw a circle, which refused to be erased completely once he was done with it. I don't think he noticed.

He canceled class last Friday - the fourth Friday he has not been to class. (Though the previous three he found us some Russian math professors who we couldn't understand to fill in for him.) That is 2/5 of all possible Fridays he could not have been in class. Makes me wonder what he likes to do on Fridays.

Math Sciences 5200 is sloped at an angle that enables me to put my feet below the seats in the row ahead of me, but with a little bit of difficulty absent from other lecture halls that just makes it that much more satisfying to do. About 15 minutes into Monday's lecture I was doing this as usual when I tried to pull my foot back out and my right flip flop fell off onto the floor. Now the slope was my enemy and I could not pull it back to my row. I struggled with this for around 15 minutes during the lecture; luckily nobody was sitting in that seat, and the rest of the class was far too asleep to notice my plight. The flip flop seemed too wide to pull out from between the seat and the floor without a bit of force, which my foot could unfortunately not provide. I acquiesced for a few minutes, deciding to just endure the remaining 45 minutes of shoeless lecture, until a bout of inspiration struck. I grabbed it with my toes and turned it completely sideways which allowed me to pull it back up with my foot. Success. And yes, this is the most exciting thing that has ever happened during a calc lecture.

Wednesday after French a pickup truck was driving up the hill. Some resourceful skateboarder (I know, I didn't think it was possible) grabbed on to the back of the truck at such an angle that its driver was unable to see him, and let it pull him up the hill. At the top I gave him a nod of approval.

Tentative spring quarter schedue:
MATH 33a: Linear Algebra and Applications
FRNCH 3: Elementary French
PIC10b: Intermediate Programming
ARCH&UD 10b: History of Architecture and Urban Design: Baroque to Contemporary Moment

I am first on the waiting list for discussion 1E of ARCH&UD 10b; all I can say is they had better let me in even if nobody drops. Not too happy about the 8 AM math again either, but at least I can just eat lunch at 11.

Aftermath

Today we had discussion for PIC10a:

The TA walked in and stood in the front of the room, looked down at the floor for a few seconds, then started laughing. "I was about to ask you if you had any questions from lecture."

"Any explanation?"

"None. They'll tell me what is going on eventually. For now let's just assume that there will still be a final exam and this homework is actually due."


So now I don't know if I'm supposed to go to lecture tomorrow or not. I guess I won't because Rogawski has cancelled Calc tomorrow. And I don't want to be alone in 4216 W. G. Young with that other guy...


UPDATE: An email I just received:

Dear PIC 10A student,

Professor Chris Anderson will be assuming the role of instructor for all
sections of PIC 10A for the remainder of the quarter. In lecture this
Friday, March 7, he'll give details about the course plan for the rest
of the quarter.

The most surreal experience ever

This is without exaggeration the strangest thing that has ever happened to me. I tried to write down as much as I could; obviously much was omitted and the exact wording was slightly different, but the transcript should still speak for itself.

-

[W. G. Young Hall, room 4216, 10:00 AM]

[The usual fifth of the class that actually shows up arrives one by one, slowly]

[10:10 AM]

Some guy: [walks in] No shifty Ifti?

[10:20 AM]

Professor: [walks in] Still here?

[Awkward silence. The professor takes a seat in the back row, puts his arms behind his head, and starts to sleep. 5 minutes pass.]

Professor: [with eyes closed] It's a long walk to wisdom.

[The students chuckle and exchange confused glances. 5 more minutes pass]

Some girl: Professor, are we having class today?
Professor: I'm tired.

[Awkward silence]

The same girl: Can you explain the homework more?
Professor: Next time.

[Awkward silence]

The same girl: Should we not plan on coming to class in the future?
Professor: Let me think about it.

[Awkward silence. Then the girl gets up and leaves. A few minutes pass, then the professor gets up and starts pacing around the room, staring at the floor. He pauses in the front of the class, grinning creepily]

Professor: Any questions?

[Awkward silence]

Some guy: Are you okay?
Professor: [grinning creepily] Si bon.

[Awkward silence]

Some other girl: Pourquoi tu parles français?
Professor: J'aime la laingue [sic].
The same girl: [correcting] Le langue.

[Awkward silence]

The same guy: What's the matter?
Professor: What makes you ask that?
The same guy: If this were just a normal day you'd come here and teach C++.
Professor: What is C++?
The same guy: It's a method of communication.
Professor: What is communication?
The same guy: It's how we affect other entities in reality.
Professor: What is reality?
The same guy: Whatever we perceive it to be.
Professor: What is perception?
The same guy: It's reality.

[Laughs and a long pause]

The same guy: Something catalyzes change in your life. What is it?
Professor: [pause] Je ne sais pas. [long pause]

Professor: It's the dualism of everything.

[Some guy behind me suppresses laughter]

Professor: What do you want me to do? Write a book, paint, write music? How do you want me to express myself?
The same guy: We want you to talk.
Professor: That will take a while.
The same guy: Well, we have [checks clock] 15 minutes.

[Laughs. Professor smiles creepily]

The same girl as before: I'd prefer if you actually taught material for the course. We're paying to be here.
Professor: I'm sorry?
The same girl: You are paid to teach. Why are you here if you aren't going to teach material for PIC10a?
Professor: What is PIC10a?

[Tense pause]

The same girl: I find this offensive. That you aren't going to teach the class.

[She leaves angrily]

Professor: C'est la vie.
The same guy: They're just not dedicated. True students would understand that professors are people just like us. When we're not feeling well we just don't come to class. Professors can have bad days too.
Professor: Rephrase?
The same guy: We just shouldn't have expectations for others that are higher than expectations for ourselves.
Professor: Nicely put.

[Awkward silence]

A different girl: Professor, is there any reason for us to still be here?
Professor: I'll let you decide that.
The same girl: Are you going to test us on material we don't know?

[Awkward silence]

Professor: No more exams.
The same girl: What about the final?
Professor: No more final.

[Awkward silence]

The same girl: What will our grades be based on?
Professor: All As.

[Awkward silence]

The same girl: What do you mean by that? You're going to give us all As?

[Awkward silence]

Professor: I'll have to learn from you. [creepy grin]

[long pause]

The same girl: Professor, are you going to teach class on Friday?
Professor: What is teaching?
The same girl: [tense pause] I'm sorry.

[She gets up and leaves angrily]

Professor: I'll have to speak to people. Seek higher learning.

[He begins pacing again, pausing in the corner of the room]

Professor: For millions of years, mankind walked the earth. Then, he learned... [pauses as if waiting for an answer]... to speak.

[Pause]

Professor: Stephen Hawking used the lyrics to... [pauses as if waiting for an answer]
The same guy: I don't know. I'm not an audiophile.
Professor: Do you know Stephen Hawking?
The same guy: Yes.
Professor: Who is Stephen Hawking?
The same guy: A physicist. A philosopher, in some sense.
Professor: Where's he from?
The same guy: I don't know.
Professor: Where are you from?
The same guy: Up north.
Professor: I'm sorry?
The same guy: Cupertino. The Apple headquarters is like right down the street.

[Long pause]

Professor: Why are you all still here?
The same guy: Next year this is going to be the only class I remember [smiling].

[Pause]

Professor: Mualim. Felicia?
Felicia: [corrects his pronunciation of her last name]

[The professor begins going through those of us left in the classroom one by one. He first goes to the people whose names he knows, says their names, and waits for confirmation. For those of us whose names he doesn't know, he waves his hand back and forth in front of his face as if casting a spell. He turns to me. I tell him my name]

Professor: R-u-d-e?

[I correct him.]

Professor: The quiet one.

[He continues going through the rest of the class. It is now 10:50 AM, when class is supposed to end. The rest of us begin leaving. As I stand up, he gestures for my name again.]

Me: Didn't you already get mine?

[I leave the room to go to Calc]

-

So needless to say I have no idea what will happen to this class now. All I must say is someone needs to finish teaching the class; I've put 8.5 weeks of effort (okay, at least marginal effort) into it.

Leap Day

Writing in your blog on Leap Day is obligatory so here is my attempt.

Wednesday was my first pass for signing up for classes for Spring quarter. The original plan was this:

10:00-10:50 PIC10b
12:00-12:50 French 3
1:00-1:50 Math 33A
2:00-3:50 Linguistics 20

As predicted this plan has miserably failed, this time because 33A with Laub and Linguistics 20 were both filled by the time my pass started. Now it looks like it will be the following:

8:00-8:50 Math 33A
9:00-9:50 French 3
10:00-10:50 PIC 10b

and I will have to wait and see what is left for my fourth class.

Yesterday we entered the stairwell on the way to dinner and saw a bunch of inspiring post-it notes stuck to the walls of multiple floors. I photographed as many as possible but there were 2-3 that I missed:
Whoever is responsible is my new hero, though I suppose this goes without saying.

March 12 is my second concert as part of UCLA Symphony. This quarter's program is as follows:

Glinka - Overture to Russlan and Ludmilla
Lots of nostalgia of Sophomore year marching band with this one. It sounds quite good at the moment; the only problem is that we're not playing at the hilariously fast tempo that makes this piece worthwhile. Even more disappointing because one of the two recordings we were provided with by our director was selected exclusively for its tempo ("They barely hang on, it's remarkable.")

Debussy - Nuages and Fêtes from Nocturnes for Orchestra
The biggest disappointment on the program is that we are not playing the third movement, Sirèns, presumably because it requires 8 sporanos and 8 mezzo-sopranos. The irony in this is that this quarter we are being conducted by graduate conducting students of the choral director here. You would think that it would be easy enough for him to find some singers. The second movement is a bit worrisome at the moment, particularly the middle section which features the trumpets, who were still struggling with the part last I heard them (two weeks ago). But I don't have any doubts that they will have it ready by the performance, they are excellent players. I would have preferred to play Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune but playing any Debussy is an exhilarating experience.

Schubert - Symphony no. 9 in C major - "The Great"
At 2000+ measures and 55 minutes in duration, performing this piece probably burns more calories than most people's daily workout routines. We have not actually played it start to finish yet. The final movement has some very awkward arpeggios in the string parts which some of us still need to work on. I am consistently impressed by Schubert, whose music is far more romantic than his contemporaries: a larger emphasis on melody, with hints of chromaticism in multiple places, and to top it all off, trombone parts that are actually significant. It should be a fantastic performance overall (we have been promised pizza), though it will likely be difficult for our audience, which struggled through Shostakovich's 5th, to sit through. But it's definitely a very rewarding piece to perform.


Today in Calc we had another substitute; apparently Rogawski doesn't like to come on Fridays. At least this time she was somewhat comprehensible, though I was unfortunately half asleep for the entire lecture and couldn't take advantage of this.

Tonight we paid $2 to see No Country for Old Men in Ackerman. Though a little too intense for my tastes, it was quite good. It also has the creepiest villain ever.

I have also discovered my new favorite question from Who Wants to be a Millionaire?:

February

Maybe I remember things incorrectly but it has rained much more this winter than in previous winters. It was supposed to rain on Friday but it seemed to arrive a day earlier than predicted. A highly appropriate quote was Quote of the Day sometime last week:

"The trouble with weather forecasting is that it's right too often for us to ignore it and wrong too often for us to rely on it."
- Patrick Young

On Thursday amidst my usual afternoon boredom I looked to the right and saw that it was raining like mad, which improved my day to an extent. But the best moment was around 2:45 PM when suddenly the clouds disappeared all at once and all that remained was the largest rainbow I have ever seen (this photo doesn't really do it justice but I like it anyway):
Yes, this is the view from our dorm room window. I know, I didn't think this kind of thing existed in Los Angeles either.


Orthographically awesome French words:

• créée - Feminine past participle of créer, to create.
• mangaient - Third person imperfect plural form of manger, to eat.
  

Phonologically awesome French words:

• semblable - Because "blab" sounds like "blob."

My computer struggles have finally been resolved, after more than a month, and I got a nice 45nm processor out of it too. The old, presumably defective E6600 is currently being sent to Intel; hopefully they will replace it.

The rest of February was mostly spent failing midterms. PIC10a: 60%. Math 32B: 61%. PIC10a's was four questions, one of which revolved around information he taught THE DAY BEFORE THE EXAM. So we hadn't gotten a chance to try it out in homework or anything so of course I had no idea how it worked. I could have gotten like 75-80% otherwise. Calc was disappointing because I knew the material well enough, but I made a bunch of stupid mistakes, like wasting 30 minutes getting angry that my integral was so messy because something possessed me into thinking that the derivative of 1/u was ln|u| (I guess I confused it with the antiderivative). Fortunately I fixed this one by the end of the exam, but similar errors were made on nearly every other problem. Round 2 of the midterms for these two classes are this week - both on Wednesday, actually.

College is too hard. I'm transferring to NASCAR Technical Institute: