…was deferred by another day, because my external reader forgot it was today. He hasn’t read my thesis yet, and he’s leaving on vacation tomorrow. He’s going to read the entire thing today, and we’ll have it tomorrow. I invited a bunch of family and friends to come and watch, only to send them home without a show.
Not a pit worthy thread, since I’m too tired and bummed out to be angry and sweary, but yeah…I’d like to think I’m in the right (for once) to be a little pissed about my ongoing thesis saga.
What is an external reader? What is your thesis for? I didn’t know you could invite people to watch. That’s cool. Are they going to be able to be there tomorrow (today?)
When you do your thesis, you have typically two people from within your department read the paper and ask you questions, and one from outside the department, for the sake of both networking, and to ensure that it’s not just your department coddling you because they like; it’s supposed to measure the quality of your work on a more objective scale.
Some are coming back, but two or three people I invited took a long drive, time off work, etc. My mom and girlfriend are coming back, though!
This is for an M.A. in musicology. I’m now a world expert on organ music in professional hockey!
Remember that professoricide is still ilegal, even when it happens to be justified.
For my own defense (undergrad thesis), I’d brought drinks and finger food as was customary, as well as invited family and friends. Despite the profs giving me the worst date they could find (well, second worst: Christmas Eve would probably have been even worse than Midsummer, although barely so - Barcelona celebrates Midsummer’s Eve with a gusto not seen at any other point in the year), I had about twenty people there. Being told to “go home and come on Monday” might have gotten the cops called on a disturbance of the peace
Passed with distinction. Nominated for a medal from the university senate; first such nomination in my department’s history. Guy was profusely apologetic. All is forgiven.
This is actually quite interesting to me. What is the title of the thesis? Is it specifically limited to hockey music, or does it overlap with other professional sports with an organ (like baseball)? (I don’t know if I ever noticed a big difference between hockey and baseball music.) Did it deal with exploring the origins of various musical tags, like the “charge!” riff and that sort of thing?
There’s an ongoing lawsuit pending about the ownership of charge, so that’s a work in progress, lol.
I tried first and foremost to answer the why. Without being a sophist, why does one want to sing at an arena, and how did the organ of all instruments help to fill this role in North America? It’s a historiography, that looks at how the instrument got into the league, why it’s popular, and why it’s still there today even as a technological anachronism. But I did look at those “cues,” as I dubbed them, and touched on the intersections between Hockey and other sports. There’s a guy finishing his PhD Dissertation this exact month on music in BASEBALL, so we’re the two world experts on sports organs, apparently.
Awesome. All really cool and interesting questions. I’ve always been fascinated with that charge cue, because it sounds (to me, at any rate) like it comes via a flamenco chord progression, at least the way I usually hear it.
Too bad these sports organs are disappearing more and more from stadiums. I don’t know what it’s like in hockey, but they’re fast becoming extinct in baseball with all the canned music they use now. I’m not a White Sox fan, but I do miss Nancy Faust (the long-time White Sox organist.)
They still have a (decent) following in baseball. 23 out of 30 franchises in the NHL have an organist. It’s not going anywhere anytime soon. Talked to Sue Nelson from the twins on the phone, who sometimes fills in with the North Stars. Gotta chance to talk to Frank Pellico for the Chicago connection to you; I’m told he’s a bit of local celebrity in Chi-Town!
Charge is the most contentious of all. Eddie Layton claimed to have written it (long time organist for the NY Rangers and Yankees, and Knicks), but in reality it was Tommy Hunter, a marching band master from USC. HOWEVER, he was the first to put that four note build-up in front of it, which he in turn borrowed from the march at the beginning of the Mickey Mouse Club march.
But NOW, this guy (Bobby Kent) claims he wrote it while he was music director for the San Diego Chargers back in the 1970s. It’s hilarious, it’s the gift that keeps on giving, and if I hadn’t only seen this during my copy-editing stage, it could have easily have been the focal point of the entire thesis.
Thank you! It’s certainly the goal! Right now me and my supervisor are shopping around for a potential publisher, and the goal is to strip out (some) of the more cerebral content…the illegible “dissertationese,” as I like to call it. Then turn it into a proper book book that people would like to read.
