Friday Night Lights

So I'm walking to work (it's a Friday night) and I take a detour through the math building.  I look around to see the goings-on.  While I'm walking past the math tutor room, I see several people.  All of them are guys.  And most of them look like this guy:

So what's funny about this?  Well, the fact that there are no girls around leaves no secret: sausage party in the Talmage Building.

But who am I to judge?  I work every Friday night until midnight!  Only difference is that I was scheduled to work by someone else.  This was definitely NOT a personal choice.  And what makes it worse is that those that populate the math building also occupy the library.  At least send some interesting people to keep me company!

This also doesn't help since I woke up at 6 AM because I couldn't sleep.  Burning the midnight oil sucks when you're exhausted. . .  But tomorrow is Saturday!  You know what that means! . . . well neither do I, but now I'll bet you're curious as to what I was going to say.

Oh, and the pre-recital hearing is only 5 days away.  It's cram time!

Barry Green

This week was really cool!  Barry Green came and did a master class on Thursday and gave a recital on Friday night.  One of his favorite things to do is to get people to move with the music, since that's what music should do.  So for that reason, the recital was quite entertaining.

But I think that the best thing about Barry being here was being able to play in a bass quintet with him.  We played Jamba Mon, written by the one and only Eric Hansen.  I was intimidated at first, just because playing with two bassists of that caliber doesn't happen all that often.  But just sitting in and listening to Barry play, then getting some feedback from him after I played in master class, opened my eyes even more to what I can do with the bass.  It was cool!

HFAC Practice Tombs. Errr.... Practice Rooms

So I'm doing a research project on the availability and reservation of practice rooms and have come up with a few ideas.  I talked to Kory Katseanes the other day and he chuckled when I told him that students were having trouble finding practice rooms, stating that "every time I go down the practice room hallway, I always see rooms that are open."  But that led me to think about some other things.  For example, students can practice until 11 PM, when the HFAC closes.  But is that realistic?  Some people actually go to bed at decent hours (I may not be one of them, but it happens).  Others can't be there at 6 AM when the HFAC opens.  When students are on campus during the day, they want to practice.  But the rooms are all being bombarded with people trying to steal rooms; waiting for those who have reserved them, who are not using them, to miss their 15-minute window to claim that room.  SO.  Here are some ideas that I have come up with in my research:


Practice rooms that are available for reservation: 42
Practice rooms specifically for Organ/harpsichord: 6
# Upright/electric Piano: 18
# Grand Piano: 18


Students in SoM: ~700 (incl. graduate students)


Bigger practice rooms should be reserved for larger instruments (i.e. basses/cellos). Set aside
specific rooms for specific instruments. Less mobile instruments have reserved rooms in the E
Wing of 2nd floor practice hallway. Smaller instruments have some of those, but do not have
priority on those rooms, since they are more mobile and can be taken to C Wing practice rooms.


Model practice room availability after organ, harp and percussion studios?


Keep the 15-minute rule.


Sine the reservation system stores the students' class information (level and instrument), this can still be done online.  Rooms can be set aside proportionally to accommodate each studio.  Once each student has an opportunity to sign up for his/her studio's assigned practice rooms, reservation opens to all other students.


I'm curious to know what people think about my research so far.  If you have any suggestions, let me know!  I'm going in to talk to Mark Ammons on Monday afternoon to talk to him about these ideas.  Any feedback would be welcome!