Academically, this year is quite different for me from those that have come before. I have no classes, I’m no longer a Teaching Assistant, and I face very few deadlines. The projects that do have deadlines, though, are big ones. I’m a dissertator now, and this, my twenty-third consecutive year of school, will be my last if everything goes according to plan. So, although I have many fewer daily scheduled responsibilities than before, I have plenty to do. I’m preparing for my lecture recital, which involves learning to play three different 19th century bassoons that my professor, Marc Vallon, is kindly letting me borrow. I’m also hard at work on my DMA project (our dissertation equivalent): a history, analysis, and discography of the bassoon in jazz. Plus, I’m playing in the UW Little Big Band, taking the occasional gig, working in the music library, and trying to maintain some semblance of a social life. Oh yeah… and thinking about my final solo recital in the spring.
This is all a long way of saying that I’ve been busy lately, and haven’t managed to get around to blogging. I’m hoping to work that back into my schedule though, perhaps on a once-a-week basis; it’s nice to have a non-academic writing outlet. I’ve had a couple of ideas for series of posts floating around the back of my mind for awhile, and I’m hoping to start on them soon (since my current life of researching, writing, and practicing generally does not lend itself to interesting narrative).
The first of these will be reviews of bizarre albums from my growing record collection. I’ll focus on weird stuff that hasn’t (to my knowledge) been reissued on CD. That way, I can probably get away with providing audio samples. The second series will be about things I use that might be considered old-fashioned or obsolete, yet are to my mind superior to their modern counterparts. I hope to get back to book reviews at some point too, although I’m at this point woefully behind and have to spend time with each book remembering what I thought about it.
