Questions for our trip to Carnegie Hall: 

1. What was Chinese classical music like prior to the cultural revolution and how did it change thereafter? 

2. In rejecting the, "international style," how is there no distinct point of origin in the class of 78's music? 

3. Is Chinese composition determined by education, personal experiences or both? 

4. In seeking to bring music back to China, is this a collective or more individual effort? 

This past Thursday I had three hours to kill before class. It was such a beautiful day that I decided to go to Madison Square Park and get some work done. As I walked over to the park from my bus stop I saw all of these little tiny booths set up along the street. As I got closer I saw that a little marketplace was set up around the park. Different people set up booths and were selling all of this really cool merchandise. A lot of the stuff for sale were things these people created. I walked around and saw a bunch of cool things. One woman had handbags made from candy wrappers.

     Joan Acocella states in an essay about music and its importance to Mark Morris, “Structure gives us freedom,” (166). Structure and freedom, however, appear to be in opposition of one another. Acocella contents that it is with knowing and understanding structure that we can learn to break it. In Mark Morris’ choreography, he loves the clarity of structure that is afforded by working with a composition of music. Moreover, his work is a, “physical act of musical understanding,” (162).

        Prior to the Joseph O’ Connor’s literary reading, I had never heard an author read his or her work. When I was in elementary school, I met Frank McCourt among others, but I never had the chance to listen to them read their own work. Did they have specific voices for each character? What tempo did they read at? Mostly, I was interested in how my readings differed from theirs. Joseph O’Connor gave me the opportunity to analyze this.