Last year, I found myself gripping the edge of my seat eagerly following the cadences of a fellow Yalie’s poem. Although I had never been so utterly entranced by nouns and delighted by verbs, I now found myself drawing an imaginative storyline in my mind’s eye. I stumbled on the delightful hypnotic capabilities of spoken word poetry.

And like any adoring fan, I tried many times to mimic these poetic masters’ natural style.

In high school, my sculpture teacher used to always tell me that pottery is built from the inside to the outside: “From the inside out,” she would declare. As a ceramic potter, I had mastered the pottery wheel. When I was bored of chemistry or calculus, I would turn to ceramics and feel rejuvenated. During my senior year, I spent hours on the pottery wheel: centering, opening the form, thinning the walls, and creating distinct works of art. However, I never truly believed that my pottery was built from the inside out.

Thomas C. Duffy, Yale director of bands and professor in the School of Music, premiered the orchestral version of his piece Corpus Callosum at a Yale Symphony Orchestra concert this fall.  One of the quirks about this piece―nobody but he can conduct it.

The score has constantly competing time signatures, whether its five against four, four against three, or something as outlandish as 15/8 time.  The name itself, Corpus Callosum, refers to the bundle of neural fibers that communicate signals between the two hemispheres of the brain, because the conductor is required to behave as if this connection is severed.  Mr. Duffy refers to the piece, a mix of militaristic rhythms and classic American tunes commissioned for the US Army Field Band in 1999, as his attempt to "out-Ives" Charles Ives, a great American composer known for modern and experimental music.  Each hand conducts a different meter, and the outfit he wears for the piece is a representation of splitting the halves of the brain.