sigh...

I am excited about blogging my reactions of this Victorian Music class. I am not really a blogger per se, although this may have inspired a blog idea for my own personal life, but I do think that it is a nice medium to rant and express my own thoughts about what is going on in class. First thing, I guess I was more clueless about this era then I thought I was. During class I was thinking about all of the things that I associated with the Victorian Era… and sadly couldn’t really come up with anything except all of this “high society” that was associated with the time. I thought to myself “well cool! That means that all of those great Jane Austin books that I love were probably describing the Victorian Era, right?” Sadly, to only find out after checking the copyrights that they were published before this time. Great! Back to the drawing board… Then I thought that maybe the book that I read this summer, Rebecca, was written during this time. Then I quickly remembered the use of cars and looked that book up and again was disappointed to discover it was written in the 1930s. Anyway I don’t really know what to say about all of this except that I guess it means that I am clueless. I hope that within this course we will be able to straighten out this literature crisis that I seem to be having. I think I assumed they were all Victorian books because of the large stress that was placed on the society and how these characters functioned in the society. I always felt that this must have been occurring within the 19^th century. I am very excited to connect the dots in my brain and fill in the category of 19^th century England with true and validated aspects of culture. I especially find this interesting because of the other classes that I have taken during graduate school. I took a literature class on Bel Canto opera my first semester and just recently took a class in German Literature. It will be nice to see what is going on in England around the same time that some of these other aspects of music were developing. I thought it was especially neat in the Wilson article was the connection of other nationalities with the happenings in England. It will be interesting to see how everything connects and music travels through Europe. Overall I am very excited to be learning about this time so maybe one day I can understand a bit more about this now enigmatic (at least for me) part of musical history.