15 October 2007

Disorganised in an organised fashion

CollageThe original version of Murphy's Law states,
If there's more than one possible outcome of a job or task, and one of those outcomes will result in disaster or an undesirable consequence, then somebody will do it that way.
To put it simply,
If anything can go wrong, it will.
Therefore, I believe that the more organised you strive to be or to others you seem, the less likely you can keep every ongoing task shipshape and Bristol fashion.

I'm going to lecture on Japanese music tomorrow, on Mongolian and Tibetan a week tomorrow and on Indian a fortnight tomorrow. I thought I could manage to partition into three sections the temporary memory device in my head reserved for the World Music course and each of them can store respective materials for each of the ensuing three lectures. However, I failed.

No only are music tracks from different areas saved in the wrong section but also passages from different tracks are spliced or fused. A vivid image in my head all the time is a kubuki stage with a group of Tibetan monks on the right side chanting
to the sitar and tabla accompaniment on the left.

I've promised my student that in addition to 'traditional' and 'classical' stuff from each country or area, at the end of each lecture we shall listen to something more 'conemporary' and 'crossover', such as when shamisen meets John Zorn or some latest Bollywood numbers. Therefore, I don't see any problem in presenting them such a collage on the kabuki stage. Nevertheless, this should not happen before I show them the indigenous music from those different places.

In my head audio examples are all mixed up; in reality they are burnt onto different CDs accordingly, and lecture slides and other materials are also stored in correct file folders in my MacBook Pro. Although I'm now a bit disorganised in an organised fashion, since I've prepared the presentation pack, I may be able to play by ear in class, just like those jazzmen who can flesh out a tune with a fake book or lead sheet. We should not ask a jazzman to be too organised, shouldn't we?

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