Music theory

When I was in seminary, I was required to take a couple of courses from another institution. I chose UC Berkeley which was a pretty easy 45-minute train ride away. One class was about the biblical book of First Samuel. The teacher, Robert Alter, is a well known scholar of Hebrew literature, one whose books I had read with great interest. The first couple of meetings intimidated me. Here I was with a couple of years of biblical Hebrew under my belt and I was in a class with Hebrew majors. In fact a couple of the students were Israelis; they seriously had no problem reading the Hebrew text. I almost dropped the class, but the professor talked me out of it, and I am glad he did. The paper I did for that class turned out to be the center of my dissertation. Anyway, I can remember the day that I made a comment in class and one of the Israelis looked over at me with appreciation for the insight. Wow, what a rush! From then on, I resolved to find out what I was good at in every class and then share my knowledge in that area.

This morning in music theory class, the teacher was introducing the distinction between the range of a musical piece and its tessitura. Both have to do with the extent of pitches occuring in a song. She said that the technical name for the lowest note in a range is "nadir" and asked what the highest note might be called. I said "zenith" and the teacher agreed. A girl behind me asked "Where did you get that?" I just shrugged and the teacher said, "He knows a lot about languages." I am beginning to feel slightly less stupid in this class.