Professional Day

Today was my debut onto the Santiago music scene.  I was invited to do a masterclass at La Escuela Moderna.....

... and then several days after that was arranged I received an invitation to give a talk at the University of Chile--on the same day!  At first I wasn't sure that I'd be able to do both, but it turned out that the lecture was to be 8:30--10:00am and the masterclass was scheduled for 11:00am.  My heroic new friend Orion carted me around all day, bought me lunch, and--in short--was a really wonderful host.

Orion and his girlfriend Paulina picked me up at the apartment at 7:40am and we navigated the Santiago morning traffic over to the U.  My talk at U of C was about American women composers and I used my 2010 CD musesnine to give examples, and talked about the composers that I included in the disc.  I also played the Diemer Toccata, which the students liked a lot, especially at the end of the piece when I crawl in the piano.  :-)  The talk--about an hour--was really well received and there was a 30 minute Q & A after that.  They asked great questions, and thankfully I was able to understand them!!  (I have a hard time understanding Chileans when they talk very fast, but these kids went easy on me....)  The other thing that struck me is that every other time I've given this talk, my audience was primarily women.  This time the group was around 50m/10f.  The attention they gave me, and their genuine interest, truly impressed me.

After a brief coffee with Orion and Mauricio (my host at the U), Orion took me over to La Escuela Moderna in the Las Condes neighborhood.  The masterclass began at 11am and we finally wrapped it up around 2pm!  I listened to and worked with 6 students at various levels.  I enjoyed hearing them although I discovered that there were many very basic words related to music that I had no idea how to say in Spanish.... beat, measure, and rest to name a few.  The students got a kick out of this, I think, because I am able to rattle off relatively fluently in most general contexts, so they thought it was pretty funny that I didn't know those simple words.  The primary teacher at the school is the mother of one of my dear friends from Pittsburgh, who is a violinist in the Pittsburgh symphony--back at home our kids go to the same school.  It was really special to meet her wonderful mother and hear the students, who were well-prepared and fun to work with.

[4/8/15:  The Escuela Moderna also published a little article about my masterclass with some really nice pictures!]

The girls went to work with J today, so after I finished with my commitments I went over to the other University of Chile campus to meet up with them and (finally) get a tour of where J has spent his time here.

The entrance to the Engineering and Sciences complex  (btw, this is a lot fancier than the U of C music department building)

From the courtyard of the complex this stairway leads down to an athletic complex.

The pool

The CS department is in this building

And finally, on the 3rd floor of the building, the CS department!

The students were having several robotics competitions today, so the girls enjoyed seeing them trying out their machines, and even witnessed one of the actual contests mid-afternoon.

The office for visiting professors.... all three of them.  :-)

As part of the department tour, we stopped off in the faculty lounge and Bear presented a CS class on the topic of programming in Blockly.  Here's her class in its entirety.... all 10 minutes of it.

http://youtu.be/st_q2ECZwGA

Here's some girls that Bear and Tulip left on the white board in the faculty lounge earlier in the day.....

And the serious thinking they had done by the afternoon!  :-)

And the tour continues...... onward to the bulletin board!  The department has a cool tradition for graduating seniors--their ties get clipped off and attached to a congratulatory poster on this board.  For folks who don't wear ties (a.k.a usually the women) it's a piece of their hair.  Apparently the two gents at the top of the board here didn't want to sacrifice their ties, so they had their shirt collars chopped off instead.

The robotics classroom

Here's the Parque O'Higgins metro stop where J boards the train to come home each night.  Tonight the train was so packed that we could hardly breathe!  J said it's not usually that crowded--I guess we weren't the only three extra bodies commuting this afternoon.

I've put out a call for papers to all CMU computer science profs on sabbatical at the University of Chile.  The paper should outline accomplishments and projects undertaken during the sabbatical.  Human interest anecdotes are encouraged.  Deadline: Midnight, April 9, 2015.