15 January 2009 (Thursday)

The Language Of Music conversation class is back! After December holidays and snowstorms the first class of the 2009 Winter Quarter! Normally the first class of a quarter is overflowing with new students who show up to check out what the class is about. I was surprised that this time only five students showed up! Not only that, but four of the five were students from last quarter; the only new student was a Colombian friend of Diego's.

While such a low turnout was surprising, it was also just fine as it let me catch up with my old students about how their holidays were. For most of the class time we just caught up with each other, telling what we did through December rather than particularly talking about music! Aoi was back in Japan for the holidays and told us about the tradition of watching "Kohaku" (紅白歌合戦) (info). She told us how two teams, one which is women in red and one which is men in white, do a competition. We didn't find any clips from this year's Kohaku on YouTube, but watched this one as an example of the program.

Later, when we did talk about music a bit, Hyeijin mentioned that she is not a big fan of Jason Mraz (bio), an artist she discovered in this class! Her favorite song by him is "If It Kills Me" (video, lyrics).





I don't remember exactly how the next song came up but we watched "So Sick" (video, lyrics) by Ne-Yo (bio). The winter theme of the video fits Winter Quarter!

There is a "female perspective/answer" to Ne-Yo's song (song with lyrics).



It was great to see the familiar faces again, but that's all the music we talked about today. :-)