Professor of Music History Julie McQuinn breathed mid-lecture recently for the first time in her Lawrence career.
The milestone happened yesterday during a lecture on Debussy’s “La Mer.” After analyzing the piece as part of an 8-minute continuous schplee-ah incorporating the Fibonacci series, the sociopolitical inheritance of Wagnerian tonality upon Debussy’s compositional aesthetics, her St. Bernard Mika, a movie McQuinn almost rented at Blockbuster last week that her husband would have loved, the effect of the Prix du Rome upon composers, extended dominants/whole-tone pitch collections, syphilis, Mika again, Baudelaire, Mika, German techno, and that strangely sad glint that Mika gets in her eyes the instant a recording conducted by Fritz Reiner begins to sound, McQuinn’s eyes grew large and she cut off a student’s comment about vertical sonority by saying “Stop! Listen! Isn’t it pretty? But do you hear how it’s… beautiful?”
The brief breath, inserted during an abnormally long pause between “Listen!” and “Isn’t it pretty?” caused the class to gasp. Typically, according to Joe Connie ********– who, according to McQuinn’s sign-in sheet, **never** misses an episode of “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” ********– “anytime there’s a silence, she will just jump up and down when she’s not talking, or convulse about the available space until a whiteboard marker or something that makes her think of her dog or Paris seems to magically appear.”
McQuinn was reached for comment via e-mail, but ***The Lawrentian*** maintains a strict no-emoticon policy. McQuinn subsequently called back, saying ********– politely but with passion *********– “Don’t you understand you are enforcing this false dichotomy of high and low typesetting that is just like the cruel specter came to haunt tonal composers during the twentieth century (and that great popular music can be just that: great music!) and film music and … and … OK, *****so***** much I want to say, but there’s just not time. But don’t you see how it’s completely the same? Just nod. And if you need to … yes, totally the kind of thing to talk about more outside of class … oh, no … we just can’t go there. I **so** wish we could, you guys! Agggh! OK! Voicemail over. Bye!”
Last year, when McQuinn was still a visiting professor, students thought that she was merely trying to get it all into one year. But this year, some believe that the schplee-ah still present a dangerous to McQuinn’s health.
“I don’t really know how she can survive, but really I can’t talk right now,” said David Helvering, a music theory professor whose office is near McQuinn’s, “Julie’s made six cups of coffee, and if I don’t go over and drink a couple she’s going to finish them all herself. She always does.
McQuinn allegedly breathes -dlh
