For most of my life, I’ve considered myself adept at two things: writing and music. Among my earliest earnest career aspirations (well aside from a brief stint in kinder-school when I oscillated between cartoonist and pediatrician) was “poet.” As a wee middle schooler-high schooler-college undergrad, I entered local and state writing contests (and actually won some) and figured I’d live the fabulous fauxhemian life in an important city, with my group of equally fabulous fauxhemian friends who’d paint, write, compose, and do other artsy things. Mattrude Stein. Kind of at the last minute, though, I decided I’d major in music in college. That doesn’t mean I picked up the nearest instrument my senior year of high school and declared myself a musician. I started, of all things, with the trombone in middle school, then piano, and became proficient on both. After all the requisite district, all-state, regional, yadda yadda circuits, I discovered that there was money involved: performance scholarships. So, I put my poetry pen in my back pocket and started college as a piano performance kiddo. Fast forward a few years, and I’m having a near-nervous breakdown as a student of an (in)famous Russian pianist at a large Southern University, sheet music is flying, metronomes crashing into walls, all because of a single note, Middle D I’ll call it, in a Bach Prelude from Book One. So, I graduate, teach middle school, pick up music therapy, and fall face first into musicology and voila! Eureka! Etc. Here I am, midway through a PhD, slicing myself up with doubts about those same two things about which I’ve always felt so secure: music and writing, writing and music, writing about music, writing music.
This is not a complaint, per se. To succeed as a writer of any sort, it is essential to cultivate a certain sensibility that we’ve all learned not to call Objectivity: that sleight of hand through which you peek at your own ink and blood from a cool and critical vantage point. However, I’ve lost that vantage point. All I can see are the piles of things I need to read (third year: comps) and behind those piles, things I should have read earlier in life when my brain was spongier (why did I take intro to ethics instead of intro to philosophy…Platonic, Kantian, Hegelian, what??????), and behind that lurks a Sneaking Suspicion that I may not be cut out for this after all.
So…
I an effort to regain perspective, I’m executing one of the most selfish and egotistical maneuvers of the computer age: blogging. About music. Music that I love, with and without an academic perspective.The music of some pretty powerful and brilliant women and queers.
