Maddalena Casulana

Tonight we took a quiz in research methods. The quiz was on music article databases and on databases for dissertations. Last week we worked on databases for dissertations and articles in class and turned in our classwork. Needless to say, I did awful on the quiz. I didn't know which databases showed the articles in abstract versus which ones showed full text. All I remember is searching databases and coming across the same articles in many of the databases. And that some of the articles had full text and some didn't. And no, I didn't remember the name of the dissertation databases because last week our grad TA told us just to google it. It was rough.

My research methods professor also opened up my bibliography to show the class (she chooses someone's assignment every week to go over) right after the quiz. It was not awesome. While the information I had down was not wrong, I did not cite which series the book and article/chapter title were from. She's letting everyone in the class go back and redo the assignment.

For those of you that know me well, you know that I do not like to do things incorrectly. And it's even worse in front of the class. I don't mind learning from my mistakes, but I get so embarrassed when it is in front of others.

On an up note, she did call me "so smart" because I knew who Maddalena Casulana was. We practiced writing annotations after we wrote a paragraph about her. As she was handing out the sources we were going to use, she said, "I picked a composer nobody will probably know anything about. Has anybody heard of Maddalena Casulana?" I said yes. She asked me what I knew. And I was able to tell her the very little I remembered on the spot: She was a Renaissance composer and I know she wrote at least one book of madrigals. She was also one of the first woman composers who had music printed. Had I been given an extra moment to think about it, I would have remembered the dedication of her first book of madrigals. She stated (I'm paraphrasing) how she was excited to be able to be supported in an art form that men think they are superior in. She was really quite awesome. Anyway, after I told the professor what little I remembered, she said, "Yes, exactly. You're so smart." And then continued on... I didn't think it was sarcastic and at least it made me feel better after the horrendous quiz and sketchy bibliography.