Critique 2, Semester 2

  Jim was not in class  due to a applicant portfolio review.  In his place was another grad student, Allen.  I used this crit to give everyone a briefing on the structure of the music and its purpose.  I brought a recording of the music as well as copies of the score and my ornamentation manuscript.  This was a very difficult crit because no one in my crit group knew anything at all about music, let alone Sixteenth century renaissance polyphony! On top of that, poor Allen didn't know anything about my project at all!!  I did my absolute best at filling him in what I could while explaining the history and technicality of the piece as well as its connection to the painting. It started out well, but everyone lost their attention span very quickly. Plus we were down in the undergrad studios, so there were lots of noisy people around.  So, everyone stopped listening to me and started talking to everyone else in the other studios. It was a bit frusterating.  Allen didn't have any real feed back for me.  I know that he felt very overwhelmed by it all.  I also don't really think he understood it.  Its not really his fault though because there wasn't nearly enough time to supply him with the necessary information in order to be able to really be constructive.  I'm also going  to go ahead and say that I probably could have done a better job explaining.  My crit ended very abruptly: Allen claped his hands and said "Well, I think it's break time for me."  The next thing I knew everyone was up and out of my studio in a flash.  Needless to say, I came out of the crit not to particularly happy.  I feel like it was a wast of time for all of us and it made me feel insecure.