A. Grade inflation is a fact of academic life these days, exacerbated by a generation of students who have been raised to think that they are unfailingly extraordinary. Everybody wins, and even when they don’t it’s spun into a good try. As a result, most of us routinely hand out As and Bs, with the occasional lower grade chucked at the occasional oh-so-deserving student, and the F reserved mostly for those who are conspicuous in their absence. The alternative is to spend half one’s life in the assistant dean’s office, sprinkling water on adolescent meltdowns. I fail students primarily for attendance issues and for not turning stuff in. And I’m considered to be a somewhat tough grader. Egad. But the worm will turn, and parents won’t always stumble around in a fog of New Age-y pop-psych. I’m good for another three decades in the classroom. I’ll see change.
Abel. Carl Friedrich Abel was an 18th-century composer whose work I admire. He was a student of Sebastian Bach’s who wound up in London, partners in a concert series with Johann Christian Bach, Sebastian’s youngest son. Abel was a ranking gamba player and composer of undeniable lyric charms. He is one of my poster boys for sonata-form construction, given that he preferred rechniques that at one time were considered a bit below the salt and popped up only rarely in the works of Haydn and Mozart, and never in Beethoven. But broader familiarity with 18th century practices has made it clear that Abel was writing within structural norms for his time. He was an exponent of the style galant, not everybody’s cup of tea these days. But if the lightness and charm of galanterie are not anathemata to you, Abel could well prove a delightful discovery.
Adams. The music of American composer John Adams has played a significant role in my life and career. John was one of my teachers and so I have always followed his career with special interest. But more to the point, composers like John Adams convinced me that 20th century music was not altogether a lost cause. They were writing music that was enjoyable, comprehensible, and with a broad appeal instead of being confined to the academy and its cloistered academics. Among my favorite lectures at the SF Symphony last season was my talk on John’s Harmonielehre, in my opinion a grand symphony for our times, as much a reflection of modern American culture as Beethoven’s Eroica was for Napoleonic Europe.
Apple. My computational life started back in the late 1980s with a Mac SE, a snazzy one-piece job with a 9″ monochrome monitor, a one-button mouse, and the magnificent Apple Extended Keyboard. I moved on from Mac model to model, but in the mid-1990s I jumped ship and joined the Windows camp. However, I returned to the Apple fold in the early 2000s after an impulse buy of an iMac. Before long I was moving all of my operations over to that iMac, and within a year or so I had graduated on to a shiny aluminum G5 PowerMac and a lovely G4 PowerBook. Then came more laptops…a MacBook Pro followed by another MacBook Pro, a recent MacBook Air, a lovely MacMini for the living room, and my glorious Mac Pro “Herbie” with 8 processor cores and gobs of hard drive space. I also have an array of iPods; I’m on my second iPhone; I use my iPad daily. I’m an Apple guy again, with a vengeance.
April. My kitty cat from April 1, 1995 to July 1, 2011. I adopted her at the SPCA after a yearlong period of mourning for my lovely cameo Persian. April’s name at the SPCA was “Madame Bovary” — obviously given to her by the shelter. I named her April after the day I adopted her—and thereafter considered April 1 to be her birthday as well. At age 8, she was a bit old for adoption, painfully shy. Her personality type was listed as a “2” on a scale of 1 to 5 in which “1” indicated throw-pillow and “5” meant feral; most cats rated 3s. I would classify myself as a “2”, so April and I made a great match.
Audio. I was born with an audiophile gene but fortunately a successful career in music has protected me from falling prey to audiophilia nervosa, that tragic state of affairs in which middle-aged men begin mumbling about cartridge tracking and gold-plated fuses and Lithuanian vs. Japanese tubes and hock themselves into near-destitution to buy a Dan D’Agostino amplifier that they use to play Diana Krall records. I enjoy fine audio. My ear is discerning. But I’m free from undue fanaticism (at least I hope so!) and my interests are staunchly musical and not technical. I know, I know: that’s what they all say, as they run their hands lasciviously over the svelte frame of a Magico Q5.
Aversion. Buddhist teaching divides unenlightened folk into three broad personality types: those dominated by fear, those by greed, and those by aversion. I’m hands-down an aversive, a person who tends to make decisions as much by what he doesn’t want as much by what he does. I’ve noted of the last five years or so that I’ve been less aversive, less inclined to shrink away from things just because I think I won’t like them. But that’s small potatoes compared to the vastness and intensity of my aversiveness. Like Henry Higgins, I prefer to spend the evenings in the quiet of my room, within an atmosphere as restful as an undiscovered tomb.