Apologies for the abandonment of the blog these past two weeks. Midterm has creeped up, and with it a flood of assignments/grading.

The good news? I fall in love with Musicology every week. The depth and breadth of this discipline constantly astounds me, and I could not be happier with the options this gives me as a scholar and a performer.

The hard part (as there is no bad news when you're in love with what you do)? I am working my ass off. Now I know how all of my professors got their superpowers. It also brings up some of the questions I've asked previously: what do you want to do with your scholarship (ethically, personally, etc) and how do you want to further the discipline? In other words, how am I gonna find my place in this huge discipline? I'm also having problems figuring out what I "buy" in the Music & Gender articles. How far down that rabbit hole am I willing to go, and how will I nuance that?

To the folks at FPU: Thank you. For the tools (or the whole freaking toolbox, as it were) you gave me, but more importantly for showing me what musicology is capable of. I miss you guys, but I'm havin' a BALL!

Peace, Love, and Tunes,

Mac.

Labels: Pages to a PhD, Responses

It seems that while searching for one of the articles to be read this week, one of my classmates found the blog. Hello to my fellow UWC-er, if she's still reading!

This week the speed of the Quarter system finally kicked in--next week we will be halfway through the first term. At this point, I'm only just comfortable with where my classes are, which days they're on, and how I'm supposed to prepare for class. I have topics for the two papers I'm supposed to write this term: one on Music and Phenomenology (which needs to be narrowed down this weekend to something manageble) and one on gender roles in Irish traditional music (something about the gendered role of accompaniment in the Irish folk revival maybe......still needs to be concretized this weekend). I also got my first quizzes to grade--about 150 of them by hand. They're not too bad, ie I can do them in front of the tv, but they still take a bit of time to get through. All in all, miles to go before we sleep.

In other news, I WILL be making beer this weekend. That's my non-grad school project for the weekend.

Responses to the readings? I guess the whole week made me ask myself, what do you want your dissertation to be about? Reading about all of these Pillars of Musicology (Treitler, Taruskin, Burkholder) really makes me want to produce a fabulous document that contributes something profound to the discipline and the body of scholarship. But I guess that's like every American writer wanting to write the "Great American Novel." How do you get there? I mean, if we aspire to the greatness of those who went before us, scholastically, artistically, and pedagogically, how does one accomplish such an abstract goal?

How do you gain confidence in the questions you ask?
For example, I could (and have) argued that my area of specialty is community and music. I like to see how the two interact. So I asked myself, "How do musicians experience community?" Which in turn led to "Do musicians feel a stronger sense of community because the music is amazing or does the community make musicians perform better?" And I have to ask myself, are those good questions to be asking? Or am I one of those musicologists/ethnomusicologists destined to be obsessed with what Beethoven had for dinner the third Thursday of March?

Anyway, it's been a good week, but it's back to work!

Peace, Love, and Tunes,

Mac.

Labels: Pages to a PhD, Responses

As a scholar, you're lucky if you can learn to ask questions that have larger, broader implications. I've never felt particularly good at this, but I guess some of it comes with age. You read all of the articles, and then you take a step a back, and suddenly you're asking yourself questions, big questions, you've never thought about before.

What is the purpose of scholarship?

What are we trying to do? Ellie Hisama espouses a belief in using scholarship as a platform for advocacy, in her case, for the advocacy of ethnic and gender equity. Yet advocacy can be turned both ways. Imperialist/colonialist inspired literature which made up the larger body of Orientalist scholarship until very recently, advocated for a particularly troublesome characterization of the Oriental Other. Does advocacy fit into scholarship? Again, what are we trying to do? Present a factually based interpretation of history? While interpretation implies bias, much as advocacy does, does it shade the scholarship as much as outright advocacy?

And if advocacy does have a place in the purpose of scholarship, how are (or maybe just are) we ethically compelled to use that platform as a means to promote our own personal beliefs (ie, feminism, gay rights, etc.)?

We as scholars, and perhaps more importantly artists and scholars, are given a voice few others have as well as, hopefully, the training to clearly and persuasively use that voice. How do we balance the desire to make a lasting impact upon our world with the need for scholarship that remains as unbiased as possible? How do we use scholarship as a platform for advocacy without being subjected and sometimes limited because of labels (ie, feminist musicologist, in Hisama's case the Asian-American feminist musicologist, the queer theory musicologist) that are accompanied by social stigmas?

And I guess the larger question beyond the purpose of scholarship, is who do I want to be as a scholar and a musician? What do I feel morally compelled to do with my artistic and scholarly voice? And how do we learn to embody that voice that is only authentically ours, without being influenced by how the world perceives us?

These are the questions I've been asking after the first few weeks of readings. Any responses would be greatly appreciated.

Peace, Love, and Tunes,

Mac.

Labels: Pages to a PhD, Responses