I have a job again! Yay! I filled out the paperwork at the library this afternoon, and I also had to go to the police station and get finger-printed. Apparently the city of Menlo Park cares about that sort of thing with their part-time library assistants. And I have to watch a 2-hour video on sexual harrassment, but the good news about that is they let me take it home to watch, plus I get paid for that time. So that's kind of cool. I'm going to start tomorrow, and I'll put in a couple extra hours then and on Thursday, so I'll still have most of my hours for the week, even though I'm starting late. In general, my hours are going to be T,W,TH from 2pm to 8 or 9. Maybe after I get back from Portland I'll see about getting other temp jobs for Mondays and Fridays, I don't know how easy that would be. Or maybe I'll wait a bit on that. I certainly have enough other stuff to do in free time.

So that CD I got yesterday I mostly got because it had Nuvoletta on it, but I've been listening to the rest of it to see what other sort of songs Barber wrote. There are some others on it that I like, but it's also got me thinking about why it is that I usually don't care for the "art song" sort of music (I think that's what to call it) like this or like the recital the other day. I think it mostly just has to do with the human voice and the way it's used. It doesn't matter if I understand the language or not. The sound of the voice just has a couple decades worth of non-musical meaning already built up in my brain, so I'm much more accutely conscious of enunciation, vibrato, register, volume and dissonance that I am with instruments. Or maybe "conscious" isn't the right word, but I have different associations with all those qualities in a voice and they distract me from the music. Also, they tend to sound very affected to me, whereas with folk or pop music or something singers are more likely to sound more natural. So in that sense it's sort of related to my feelings about fiddle vs. violin music, though that's not as severe a disparity, since it doesn't have the non-musical aspect to it so much. Anyway, I can hardly fault the composers for writing such vocal pieces, since they're just trying to make the most of the instrument to express the text, which is exactly what they should do. It's more an issue in my own brain. Oh well. Maybe I should just listen to some more of this stuff and learn more about it.

I went up to Berkeley to visit Mom today and we spent a while on Telegraph Avenue, wandering through various wonderful used-book and -music stores. I ended up with a recording of the Barber songs I mentioned yesterday and a book called A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, which looks like it might be quite interesting, in a music-geeky sort of way. It's actually quite a Symbolic-Systems-y book, since it works from the perspective of linguistics and cognitive science. I'm also hoping it will help me think about some vague ideas I have about composing. I'll write more about that later, maybe.

Mom also taught me a Yiddish word which she learned recently and which I quite liked: verplotchket. It refers to something that has been broken as a result of an attempt to fix it. Quite a useful word, I think.

I went to a student vocal recital tonight. Not the sort of thing I usually go to, but it was fun. I especially liked the two Samuel Barber songs, on excerpts from Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. I had heard the one called Nuvoletta a couple of years ago in a music class, but it was neat to hear it again after having actually read some Joyce. That's a great song. The last song of the program was Frühlingsstimmen, which was interesting because I'm so used to dancing to the orchestral version of it.

Friday Night Waltz was much fun. Joan taught a one-step class beforehand and included a double-time grapevine move, Fred & Ginger style. Wow that was good! That's going to be my favorite trick for a while. I managed to follow 2.5 of my 3 swing dances, thanks to Kim, Kari and George. Annaka and I kept up our tradition of waltzing in time to the finale of the super fast Strauss waltz. Bob and I made a cha-cha into a polka, which sort of worked. Oh, and I even had a good tango, with Jennifer. I was surprised at myself -- I don't often do tango and it is generally rather difficult for me. I was also watching my partner-picking habits, in light of my last post. I did dance a lot with the friends I usually dance with, so no surprise there. I also managed a few dances with people I know but somehow don't end up dancing with very often (there are always people like that -- I don't know how it happens). And I even danced with a few people I didn't know very well or at all, though not as many as maybe I should have. It occurs to me that when you're finding new people to dance with, it's kind of nice to actually do a few dances with them over the course of an evening, if possible. You can only get a sense of a person so much from just one dance. I think only one stranger asked me to dance. Anyway, it was all a very fun evening, though I am a bit sore and it's bed time now.