Hearing the Whole Choir in Your Classroom

Posted on January 25, 2017January 25, 2017 in Blog Tagged group work, pedagogy, teaching

I’ve recently assumed an administrative position that involves mentoring over 100 graduate teaching assistants. They include new and seasoned instructors. They include MFA and PhD students who teach a range of materials from creative writing and literature to critical theory and media studies. Each week I offer them teaching tips through email. Here’s my latest post, which invokes choral singing to think about classroom dynamics:

Many of us like to use small-group work in our classes for a number of reasons: it helps more introverted students participate, it allows the class to consider multiple questions simultaneously, it conserves some of the teacher’s energy. In this mode, the teacher becomes a facilitator. Yet leading the class is also important: it focuses your students’ collective energies. And your students get to hear more of their peers’ opinions, not just the individual group leaders’. It’s good to be the conductor, too!

Here’s what Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” sounds like when the Alto part gets emphasized:

And here’s what it sounds like with a Full Choir:

https://youtu.be/_i224xsGmv4

Taking on the conductor’s role in the classroom can be daunting sometimes. As you know, a full-class discussion can move in directions you didn’t anticipate. But it’s good to hear the whole choir in our classrooms, even if we don’t conduct it every session. These tips can help:

Mentally count to 10 when you ask a question. It takes longer for a roomful of people to process something than for 3-5 people sitting together.
If you’re still getting blank faces, break down your question. Sometimes we’re not aware of how complicated our discussion questions really are.
If you stacked up more questions than you can cover in conductor mode, try throwing out 2 short ones together, asking students to respond to one or both.
Don’t be afraid to scratch a question and try a new one.
If several students raise their hands at once, queue them All up first. Then call on them one-by-one.

So go ahead and grab your baton in your classroom. Instead of working individual parts, you’ll hear the whole choir. –MB

Dubbing the Page: Teaching Linton Kwesi Johnson

Posted on September 25, 2016September 26, 2016 in Blog Tagged British poetry, Linton Kwesi Johnson, LKJ, pedagogy

This week I taught Linton Kwesi Johnson again in my PostPunk Cultures seminar on the British 1980s. (I also teach him in Modern British Poetry). Each time I return to Johnson, also known as recording artist LKJ, his work reorients my understanding of how a poem can happen on the page. Take, for example, the opening to one of his poems about the 1981 Brixton riots, “Di Great Insohreckshan”:

it woz in april nineteen eighty wan
doun inna di ghetto af Brixtan
dat di babylan dem cauz such a frickshan
an it spread all owevah di naeshan
it woz truly an histarical occayshan

(You can see the whole poem and hear LKJ read it here.) Dubbing the page, Johnson’s language and rhythms enrich the poem’s sound effects by transferring reggae music to the poetic line. In the process, he dubs Jamaican creole over the U.K.’s populist traditions, remixing the broadside ballad with Black British vernacular and Caribbean culture. In 1977 Johnson marked the emergence of what he called Dub-lyricism: “a new form of (oral) music-poetry, wherein the lyricist overdubs rhythmic phrases on the rhythm background of a popular song.”

The language Johnson uses in “Di Great Insohreckshan” usually makes more sense to non-speakers when they hear Johnson performing it (listen to a musical rendition here). Encountered on the page, individual words can confuse many of my students–although in this format a word can suddenly spark into linguistically adventurous meanings. For example, the histarical occasion of “Di Great Insohreckshan” is historical and hysterical at once: weighted with a deep history of violence, yet bubbling with the ludic energy of a reggae bass line. Naeshan widens its vowels, pushing against the restrictive spaces of the Nation as well as the page. Insohreckshan signals that the great event Johnson’s poem recalls requires an even greater reckoning. Such use of diction bamboozles standard distinctions between the vernacular and the avant-garde.

Linton Kwesi Johnson presides over his page like a dexterous DJ. In my seminar, the poems about Brixton seemed to bleed off the page into this week’s front page news about Charlotte, North Carolina. We marveled at how the revalueshanary language of this Tap Natch Poet strikes at the heart of these times. –MB

SOURCE for quotations:
Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mi Revalueshanary Fren: Selected Poems. Introduction by Russell Banks. Ausable Press, 2006.

Which Teaching Persona Are You?

Posted on August 20, 2016August 21, 2016 in Blog Tagged pedagogy, TA training, teaching

Here’s a conversation starter I tried out for new TA Orientation, co-sponsored by UF English and the University Writing Program. Feel free to play along! Whichever teaching persona you are–or most decidedly aren’t–have a great Fall semester.

Mr. Feeny, Boy Meets World. You care deeply about your students, yet you’re convinced that pop culture and technology are ruining education. Bring back Gutenberg’s generation!
Ms. Norbury, Mean Girls. You’re hip and empathetic, and you’re a pusher. You might get too involved in your students’ emotional entanglements. Make sure you have a life, too! But hey, you’re Tina Fey.
Mr. Garvey, Key & Peele. You know that class begins with Roll Call, and you’re not going to make that boring. No way. You do things Your way no matter what, keeping it real. Present!
Ms. Halsey, Bad Teacher. Rules? really? And boundaries? What boundaries? Ratemyprofessors.com doesn’t have enough chili peppers for you. Have you thought about a different career choice?
Professor Sandiford, Art School Confidential. Theory head? High-concept artist? You dazzle with your brain waves, and pique with your critique. Some students will wilt when you deconstruct their work. It’s hard being John Malkovich.
Professor Snape, Harry Potter. You’re a master at your craft, and your first loyalty is to your profession. Students annoy you when they don’t follow your rules. They may hate you, but you’re really doing this for their own good. Your snark tops Sandiford’s.
Professor Sprout, Harry Potter. You think hands-on teaching is best, even if it’s hard to keep your hands on those mandrakes. You really know your stuff, so you can get away with a little mischief in your class.
Professor Trelawney, Harry Potter. You’re a free spirit, and you’re in touch with the spirits. You go your Own way even if others don’t respect what you’re teaching–or wearing. Organizational skills are a challenge.
Mr. Finn, School of Rock. You could have been a rock star, so you tried teaching instead. You live through your students with your students, pushing them in new directions. You’d rather give out gold stars than grades.

–MB

Sonnet Ascent! (a teaching adventure)

Posted on May 29, 2016August 6, 2020 in Blog Tagged Mitchell Stecker, pedagogy, sonnet form, UF Century Tower

StudentsStairs — Students ascend Century Tower

Imagine arranging your students in vertical rather than horizontal space. Imagine them traversing the tower stairs in iambic rhythm, working the meter into muscle memory. Imagine composing a carillon piece from sonnet forms, and parsing sonnet forms through musical notation. Crossing artistic media–and crossing the street from our classroom building to UF’s Century Tower–my Modern British Poetry class recently embarked on a Sonnet Ascent with carillonneur-composer Mitchell Stecker, a graduate student in Musicology. You might say we took poetry from the ivory tower to the bell tower.

Carillon clavier. Photo by Joselliam Urbina

Proposition A: Inviting poetry survey students to become sonneteers expands the experience of reading formal poems. This is an especially effective pedagogy for British poetry because modern British poets tended to stay in form more often than their American counterparts. (The sonneteers on our syllabus are W. B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin, and Carol Ann Duffy.)

Proposition B: Generating a musical composition from traditional sonnet forms expands the possibilities for sequencing 21st century music. The aim is not to set a poem, but to transpose a poetic structure into a musical one. The challenge for this carillon piece is to avoid monotony, as the musical equivalent of rhymed words would be repeated notes. How to rethink sonic repetition in patterned forms?

Proposition C: Hearing a musician talk about the creative process of working with sonnet forms can inspire poetry students with their sonnet-making.

Proposition D: Constraint does not close off creative expression.

Sonneteering and sonatinas. My students had already acquired sonnet-making gear in the form of technical resource sheets. Now they needed to think about form itself in an unexpected way. Why would someone write new music based on old literary forms? Did the constraint present obstacles or limitations?

On Sonnet Ascent day, we warmed up by marching in place as students spoke in impromptu iambic rhythm when I pointed to them. Stecker then discussed his carillon composition in our classroom, focusing on the Shakespearean sonnet movement he would play for us in Century Tower. (The other movements are based on Dantean and Petrarchan sonnet structures.) Here are excerpts from Stecker’s slides. Students asked him questions about his creative process, the layout of the carillon clavier, and how one plays the instrument. We all made an expedition to Century Tower, learning more about UF’s carillon and exploring the soundscapes we made in the 11-flight stairwell. (Later, I recalled the 11-line English stanza form called the roundel.) At the top of the tower, Stecker debuted his composition for my students.

Stecker performs the new composition. Photo by Joselliam Urbina

Claire, MB & Stecker. Photo by Joselliam Urbina — Claire, MB & M. Stecker. Photo by Joselliam Urbina

After making their Sonnet Ascent, my students have gained their rhythmic feet. I look forward to hearing them perform their summer sonnets on our last day of Modern British Poetry.

Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fantastical
Imagination, nor an ear and eye
That more expected the impossible
— W. B. Yeats, “The Tower” (1927)

Sources:
Digitized Polaroid photos by Joselliam Urbina.
Lecture slides by Mitchell Stecker.
W. B. Yeats, Selected Poems and Three Plays.
All recognizable people pictured gave permission for this post.
*The linked YouTube video is Benjamin Britten’s setting of Wilfred Owen’s Shakespearian sonnet “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” from War Requiem (1962).
–MB

Portals, Gates: A Conference Odyssey

Posted on May 8, 2016September 14, 2020 in Blog Tagged Classical Modernisms, McGill University, modernist translation, Portals and Gates conference

I’m back from a mind-expanding conference at McGill University, “Portals, Gates: The Classics in Modernist Translation,” co-organized by Miranda Hickman (English) and Lynn Kozak (History and Classical Studies). The conference title generated from H.D.–the focus of several presentations. A Classically-inspired modernist, H.D. found Euripides’s plays “portals, gates” to new ways of thinking and writing. Ezra Pound was another recurring figure, along with James Joyce, Homer, Euripides, and Sophocles. My frequent collaborator Mary Ann Eaverly (UF Classics) and I presented new work on how modernist translation shapes Ange Mlinko‘s recent volume of poems, Marvelous Things Overheard.

Our conference odyssey took us through layers of myth and history as we explored linguistic topographies with participants from Belgium, Canada, Greece, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Our conversation stretched across academic and creative perspectives because our crew included Classicists, translators, literary critics, philologists, poets, a theater director, a costume designer, and a filmmaker. Over the weekend we saw how Classical reception shuttles between the raw and the refined, innovation and tradition, the stage and the page, lyric intensity and emotional restraint.

We set our course through the Portals and Gates of our collective musings. These keywords transported our thinking across time and space, future and past, interpretation and translation, composition and performance, creative license and lexical accuracy, openings out and gatekeeping.

What transpired became transdisciplinary–and transformative. For me, the prefix trans proved to be the Ur-portal of this conference:

Translation involves textual, geographic, and temporal relocations.

Transcription occurs within a fixed-free spectrum. It aims to reproduce a manuscript. It shifts a musical composition to different instruments.

Transatlantic modernism widened the scope of our inquiries.

Transgender identities move beyond narrow conceptions of sexuality, genres, characters.

Transposition exchanges or dislocates a text to another register, another key, another mode, another dimension.

Transmission dances with omission to create modernist iterations that make it new.

Transnational communities like the one we formed at McGill carry this conversation into the future. –MB

Plath and the Periodic Table

Posted on April 6, 2016December 14, 2020 in Blog Tagged STEM, STEMpunk, Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

PrincetonScienceTeacher53 — Princeton chemistry professor Hubert Alyea in 1953

I’m teaching The Bell Jar this week in my “Desperate Domesticity” class on the American 1950s. And what strikes me this time around is English major Esther Greenwood’s adventures in physics and chemistry (they culminate Chapter 3). Call it Plath’s periodic fable of women and STEM in the era of “rocket girls” and rocket bras.

A straight-A student, Esther found her first day of physics class rather ghastly as soon as her professor went to the blackboard: Then he started talking about let A equal acceleration and let T equal time and suddenly he was scribbling letters and numbers and equals signs all over the blackboard and my mind went dead. Wallace Stevens’s enigmatic line Let be be finale of seem in “The Emperor of Ice Cream” was infinitely easier. And so, apparently, was James Joyce’s notoriously difficult Finnegans Wake, the topic Esther would pursue in her honors thesis. Esther studied the STEM hieroglyphics of scorpion-lettered formulas. She mastered the 400-page textbook her professor had produced to explain physics to college girls–a terrifying tome composed of diagrams and more formulas.

Esther aced that physics class, showing that women had more to offer the atomic age than nuclear families. But she would rather launch a book than join the Space Age rocket girls. And she wants a vibrant life in which she can shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.

So Esther devised a plan to just audit the chemistry class. The same professor used the periodic table of elements in which all the perfectly good words like gold and silver and cobalt and aluminum were shortened to ugly abbreviations with different decimal numbers after them. The materiality of these elements was, for her, the materiality of language.

She wrote villanelles and sonnets during her chemistry lectures, foregoing milliliters and milligrams for the metrical and rhythmic formulas of poetry–mirroring Plath’s own apprenticeship to poetic form. If Esther Greenwood felt STEMrolled by the physical sciences, Plath knew that poetry also had essential elements.

I’ll close with a periodic table of poetry that Plath used in some of her college publications: Shakespearean sonnet structure. Here’s the first quatrain of her 1954 poem “Doom of Exiles,” which demonstrates how the strictures of poetic form offered Plath a looser confinement than scientific tables. (I’ve italicized the stressed syllables.) Each unit is a poetic foot, and each line conforms to the 5-foot pattern. But individual words can stretch across these units, and all lines need not have 5 beats. Even formal poets are free to break the rules:

If nuclear physics splits the atom, formal poetry fits individual words to patterns. See if you can re-join the words I’ve split here.

–MB

SOURCES:
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar. 1963. New York: HarperPerennial, 2006.
Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems. New York: 1981. HarperPerennial, 1992.
Photograph of Hubert Alyea from LIFE.com

Lady Edith and Dame Edith

Posted on March 13, 2016August 6, 2020 in Blog Tagged Downton Abbey, Edith Sitwell, Lady Edith Crawley

Now that Downton Abbey has aired its final episode in the U.S., I can finally air a pet theory of mine: Lady Edith was surely inspired by the legendary Dame Edith Sitwell.

True, the Downton character takes on some domestic traits toward the end, like other outlier women on television. But these manor misfits bear striking similarities. I’ll make my case, and you can judge for yourself.

(1) The Look. We can start with how stunning each Edith looked in a sage green gown! The color complemented their bared shoulders and pale complexions. And while we’re on the subject of the women’s youthful elegance, note their distinctive noses.

(2) The Big House. Lady Edith Crawley’s ancestral home is Downton Abbey, Yorkshire. Her father was the 7th Earl of Grantham. Dame Edith Sitwell’s ancestral home is Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire. Her father was the fourth Baronet of Renishaw. Lady Edith had a sister named Sybil, and Dame Edith had an Aunt Sybil.

Portrait of Edith Sitwell by Roger Fry, 1915. © Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust, UK English, out of copyright — Portrait of Edith Sitwell by Roger Fry, 1915. © Sheffield Galleries and Museums Trust, UK

(3) Manor Misfits. Neither Lady Edith nor Dame Edith fits her family’s manor mandates. As young women, both disappointed their parents by resisting protocols of ladyship, including the rule to accrue many suitors and marry early. At one point an exasperated Lord Grantham considers Edith’s future to be “a ghastly prospect.” Dame Edith disappointed her father by not pursuing lawn tennis, a more ladylike occupation for the daughter of Sir George Sitwell and Lady Ida.

(4) The Literary Life. Lady Edith and Dame Edith started off as socially awkward young women with strong literary inclinations. Lady Edith began her literary career with an editorial column, and became the owner-manager of The Sketch magazine. Dame Edith appeared in The Sketch. Lady Edith fired an editor, and Dame Edith wrote fiery letters to editors. In addition to publishing poems and criticism, Dame Edith edited the Wheels series of poetry anthologies. In London each writer-editor could escape the confines of Big House life. Modern women for modern times, Lady Edith and Dame Edith felt more at home in the Big City.

(5) The Zinger. When it’s time to face their enemies, neither Edith minces her words. Dame Edith’s withering witticisms are too numerous to recount here. So let me offer the immortal zinger “God comfort thy capacity” she bestowed on her critics. Dame Edith could always step up to slap down. Lady Edith blasted her biggest critic–her sister Lady Mary–with this pent-up put-down: “I know you to be a nasty, jealous, scheming bitch!”

Are all these parallels a matter of mere coincidence? I don’t think so! –MB

Ad Encounters with Houston A. Baker, Jr.

Posted on February 20, 2016August 18, 2016 in Blog Tagged 1950s advertising, Black History Month 2016, Houston A. Baker Jr.

In the wake of Mad Men, mid-century American advertising seems to open portals to a domestic past that stands still. Nuclear families gather round Carousel slide projectors that never advance. Aproned Moms hold out Popsicles that stay on their sticks. Yet sometimes ads can unfreeze time, offering us flashbacks to the future. I’ve had this experience with a 1952 ad that projects childhood images of Houston A. Baker, Jr., a future pioneer in the field of African American Studies.

Pet Milk Ad from Ebony Magazine, 1952 (MB research files) — Pet Milk Ad from 1952 with the Baker family

I found this Pet Milk ad in Ebony magazine while researching the postwar career of Gwendolyn Brooks. Twenty years after Houston A. Baker, Jr. appeared in these photographs, he would publish an essay on Brooks. I showed this ad to Professor Baker when he visited UF. He has graciously agreed to share his story about the ad, so he gets the last word.

First, a few points from a postwar studies perspective:

As Kimberley Mangun and Lisa M. Parcell note, the Pet Milk Company’s Happy Family campaign was innovative in targeting and featuring African American consumers. It was the brainchild of W. Leonard Evans, Jr.–a pathbreaking Black advertising man who opened his own agency in 1951. The Happy Family campaign ran in the Black press from 1949-1958. The Baker family ad first appeared in newspapers, including Baltimore Afro-American and Los Angeles Sentinel. (1)
This ad expands the postwar ideal of togetherness I’m discussing with students in my American 1950s classes. Nestling the nuclear family within the comforts of home leisure, the era’s images of togetherness tended to show a small family circle. TV sitcoms such as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver focused on white suburban families.
In this Baker family photo album, three generations gather in the living room and at the dinner table. The ad copy opens its family circle to a larger urban community of jobs and civic activities. Leading “a happy, busy life,” such Pet Milk families rarely stood still. (Houston A. Baker, Jr. appears in the center photo wearing boxing gloves.)
The Happy Family campaign portrays a modern domesticity for African Americans. Here Viola Baker manages the home by bringing the convenience and cost-effectiveness of canned milk into her meal planning. All three sons were “Pet Milk Babies.” The ad projects the Baker family’s domestic life in wide scope, combining household, community, corporate, and national identities.

Finally, Professor Baker’s response to seeing the ad again:

I now see the Pet Milk advertising campaign in a whole new light. What took my breath away was the enormous accomplishment of my parents. Where did they find motivation, time, and commitment to engage so many important, foundational tasks? They were builders and sustainers of black community. The visuals of the Baker home interior are captivating. They stage and capture “black domesticity” at its apex: smartly wardrobed, generationally strong, and productive of fit generations to emulate the genealogy of their parents. Who would not buy Pet Milk?

I grew up in a warm, stable home. Our residence was located in a racially-segregated Louisville, Kentucky. Home, togetherness, and resources garnered from our parents’ labors were both “togetherness” and safe-haven. They were refuge from racially-charged violence that might assault one at any “outside” moment.

As I consider the disproportional African American poverty of the U.S.A. today and reflect on the relentless inside-and-outside assaults on Black America at the present time, I know I was blessed with an exceptional family. When there is a segregated and endangered public sphere of violence against the black body, it is fortunate indeed to share a black instructive togetherness within. Certainly the Baker household’s scenes of instruction were paramount in my journey toward scholarship and the professoriate that is my place of work today.

–MB and Houston A. Baker, Jr.

Sources:
(1) Kimberley Mangun and Lisa M. Parcell, “The Pet Milk Company ‘Happy Family’ Campaign.” Journalism History 40.2 (Summer 2014): 70-84.
(2) Pet Milk ad from MB research files

Cake Baking with John Cheever

Posted on January 22, 2016January 22, 2016 in Blog Tagged American 1950s, Betty Crocker's Picture Cook Book, John Cheever

I’m teaching my “Desperate Domesticity” course on the American 1950s, nicknamed “From Cheever to Beaver” by a former student. And I find myself thinking about cookbooks and gender performance as I return to John Cheever’s stories of postwar suburban life. As with fiction-making, artful baking is no piece of cake. And neither was forsaking the era’s recipes for manliness and womanliness.

One of my favorite Cheever stories, “The Wrysons,” first appeared in The New Yorker in 1958. Donald Wryson bakes by night while his unsuspecting wife has atomic dreams. He does not whip up a Betty Crocker cake mix. He creates richly elegant Lady Baltimore cakes that require meticulous labor: beating egg whites for both batter and frosting, chopping fruit and nuts for the filling. Donald began this secret life before his marriage, baking his way out of depression and anxiety:

“Searching desperately for some way to take himself out of this misery, he hit on the idea of baking a Lady Baltimore cake. He went out and bought the ingredients–deeply ashamed of himself–and sifted the flour and chopped the nuts and citron in the kitchen…”

After eating a slice, Donald would hide the remains in the garage, crossing over from feminine to masculine domestic space. He destroys the evidence of his culinary prowess. Unlike the feminized father in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Donald Wryson kept his aproned identity a secret. Presumably, a baking breadwinner might explode the normative nuclear family.

Or would it? My copy of Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book (1950) crosses gender and professional boundaries in the Cakes section, offering women “blueprints” for being “a good ar-cake-techt.” A baking housewife needs proper tools “just as an architect has his slide rule.” She must measure ingredients “as exactly as a carpenter measures lumber for the house” because “cakes are delicately balanced chemical formulas.” If Donald Wryson and Jim Backus literally wore aprons, the postwar housewife figuratively donned a tool belt and lab coat every time she set out to bake that perfect cake. She mixed femme with STEM. But she could bake out in the open.

John Cheever in 1979. Photo by Paul Hosefros

Karal Ann Marling reminds us that in the 1950s, cakes were “the ultimate in aesthetic fare” as well as expected expressions of womanly love, nurture, and hospitality (As Seen on TV). A fraught endeavor, baking the perfect cake placed tremendous pressures on gender performance–just as it graced the domestic arts. Writing from the closet about the suburban nuclear family, John Cheever distills all these tensions in his artful tale of desperate domesticity. –MB

Alma Maters & Varsity Verse

Posted on December 19, 2015August 6, 2020 in Blog Tagged Alma Mater songs, Mitchell Stecker, UF Alma Mater, UFPrez

MB at PhD Commencement, 1989. U. of Illinois

If you could make a cocktail from the lyrics to American university Alma Mater songs, you’d shake one part praise hymn with one part lofty love poem–and one part Mother’s Day Card. Elevated and everyday, varsity verse sounds from freshman convocation to football chorus, from inauguration to graduation. Wherever a university may be, its Alma Mater song likely has glorious walls or halls bathed in more light than a Thomas Kinkade painting. Its sons and daughters are valiant, and its great name is ever victorious. However generic or dislocated, varsity verse binds generations of college graduates with a timeless past and a beckoning future.

“A Florida Suite,” by Mitchell Stecker (2015). Debut performance score posted by permission.

On this Fall Commencement weekend here at UF, I’m thinking about my three Alma Maters and the dynamics of varsity verse. The University of Tennessee’s Alma Mater grounds its opening line in “a hallowed hill,” a fitting site for a campus in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. My second Alma Mater song, from the University of Illinois, bears no trace of the surrounding prairie in “Hail to the Orange. Hail to the Blue.” Here at UF, the Alma Mater locates our campus in the vibrant subtropics:

Where palm and pine are blowing,
Where southern seas are flowing.

Perpetually grounded in a state of flux, UF’s Alma Mater is especially fitting for commencements and other ceremonies that mark new beginnings. Composer Mitchell Stecker, a UF graduate student in Musicology, captures this dynamic in his new carillon composition “A Florida Suite,” commissioned for UF’s recent Presidential Inauguration.

Stecker’s four-part composition is not a setting of UF’s Alma Mater. Rather, the Alma Mater becomes a starting point for generating musical motifs from key phrases: Thy glorious name we praise (I); thy noble Gothic walls (III); A joyous song (IV); and the subtropical lines quoted above (II). Stecker thinks of his composition as “impressions” on these phrases. He weaves in allusions to the Alma Mater melody and other UF campus music (including Budd Udell’s “Florida Chime” and the “F-L-O-R-I-D-A” from “We Are the Boys”). Unmooring the Alma Mater, “A Florida Suite” reinvents its varsity verse into new soundscapes that are in turn regal, evocative, and boisterously joyful. Stecker has designed a carillon suite that carries traces of our campus life and landscape while remaining transportable–one could perform it anywhere. What sounding of our Alma Mater could be a better sendoff for our new graduates? -MB

Mitchell Stecker and the first movement of “A Florida Suite” in Century Tower. 12/4/15

Marsha Bryant

Department of English

Blog