My Barbaric Yawp

I spend like ... 5 hours a day studying Latin. We’ve been reading Catullus’s long poems (62-64) for the last six weeks. From this week we’re studying Cicero’s Pro Marco Caelio until the end of semester.

Next week we have to do a performance of something we've studied this semester. When I heard about this assignment at the start of the semester, I really wanted to do it as a beat poem. Write a piano accompaniment, film a few videos of myself and combine them so I look like my own little jazz band etc. 

But then we studied Catullus 63. I was (am) obsessed. The galliambic meter is incredible. I already have a large chunk of it memorised because the rhythms are so spectacular. Now I want to try to write some sort of accompaniment for that, but the problem is ... it’s in 11/8. Even after spending two years studying Jazz Piano at the Con, I’m not sure how to groove in 11/8. I suppose I could write something atmospheric, or just use one of our drums. I gave a presentation about a month ago on the instruments used in the cults of Cybele and Dionysus, maybe I could fashion a tympanum out of part of our drumkit.

I’m also taking a class in medieval music at the Con which is pretty heavy. I got to write an essay on a chant from medieval manuscript recently. I loved it. I feel like the more I work with manuscripts, the more I’m being called to codicology and palaeography. So I’ve been looking into masters programs and getting very far ahead of myself.