Welcome!

It occurred to me that this would likely be the perfect class to have an accompanying weblog. Not only can we continue some of our unfinished discussions here (ah, yes, they're always unfinished, aren't they? Schubert would empathize), but we'll also have an outlet for some of our more campy impulses. And this should provide a useful proving grounds for your multi-genre essays. In any event, feel free to respond to postings/threads of your colleagues, or to create new threads.

I'm going to keep this first posting short, but I continue to think about our discussion of R.E.M.'s song "Find the River." The lyrics are of course not nearly as inscrutable as some early R.E.M., and surely we can puzzle out a plausible reading, but nevertheless the song also seems to "mean" something even apart from the lyrical content. You listen to it and when it's over you find yourself trying to narrate an emotion, much as you do sometimes when, after waking, you try to describe a dream. One of the common adjectives used to describe the song in class seemed to have been "melancholy" (someone also used "ruminative"). In the spirit of Nick Hornby's "Top 5" lists in High Fidelity, perhaps we can compile some of the most melancholy songs/pieces of all time (to quote the Smashing Pumpkins, these can be the "Mellon Collie and Infinite Sadness" awards). I would toss out the following examples (and, as usual, I'll be all over the musical map): Sinatra's "It Was a Very Good Year"; The Beatles' "Yesterday"; Joni Mitchell's "River"; Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here"; Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees"; Neil Diamond's "Coldwater Morning"; and maybe I'll throw in the third movement (poco allegretto) of Brahms's Third Symphony, which always moves me deeply. Whaddya think? Any others to offer?