more Monteverdi

Last week's Monteverdi classes went OK. I should have planned this week's sessions already but of course I haven't. Last week we ended up talking about “suit and tie” music and dealing with some of the less welcoming beliefs some students bring to class. We were able to look at the kinds of language used to describe Monteverdi and the 1610 publication and see how the authors were trying to bring Monteverdi into the Western canon. (Quotes will follow.) I think all in all it was a reasonably successful session, although next time I need to remember to define canon earlier in the class.

My other lecture course was utterly dreadful. I'm gonna scrap that lecture on laude and devotional music because I never seem to have time to work out what I'm talking about and it's just boring.

My seminar group started their presentations last week. Got off to a great start, and the new format is working a treat. I've had students pair up so that a student introduces the student speaker, thanks them and chairs the question session at the end. And I also assigned a pair of students each week the responsibility of getting the question session going. I said I'm happy for them to read the papers in advance, or to practice with each other, or even for the speakers to plant questions, but I wanted the students to pay each other the courtesy of discussing the ideas in some detail after the paper. And it worked better than I could have imagined: I didn't ask questions at all, but stayed off to the side acting as camera operator and the students did a fantastic job.