Blogging, etc.

Now that I know I'm not going to go to UCSD this fall, I figured that it would be a good time to kick-start some of the projects that's been in the back burner for a while. I can't say that I'm not disappointed by the result, but on the bright side it may also be an opportunity to do the things that I want outside of the schooling system. There's a lot of work in the area of scholarship (mostly interdisciplinary) that I've been wanting to do and it might be beneficial to get it all down in writing before I go back to school. I'm pretty confident that I will get into a doctorate program eventually and I'm lucky enough to have managed to stay artistically active where I live. So at least for now, I'm doing fine.

I've been doing a lot of scholarly work nowadays, despite the fact that I've been out of school for some time now. (I kind of took it as a sign that I should probably try to be a professor some day, hence, grad apps.) Although as of the late I've become skeptical about the future of scholarly journals -- at least in the humanities, scholarly journals are very quickly losing their former prestige as the internet gradually becomes more reliable as a primary source of information. This blog may become an outlet for lots of the ideas that's swimming in my head that would otherwise never get published.

Lately I've been pretty interested in musicology and anthropology, and have come to appreciate it a lot more than I did in the past. Musicology plays an especially important role in music as it attempts to contextualize its artistic practices within history, tying it to the social, economic, political, and ideological practices of its day. There is especially a particular need for contemporary classical music to be analyzed in this way, due to the fact that over-specialization has allowed many establishments to escape this type of oversight and perspective for years on end. As of the late there has been a very strong reliance on the idea of "individual subjectivity" and "open interpretation" as a way to legitimize certain works done in certain styles, although in many cases these arguments act as smoke-screens order to preserve existing institutional structures.

Especially in the "New Music" community where there is a strong desire to create something new and groundbreaking, musicians rarely appreciate musicologists' efforts to contextualize their work within a historical context. In tying the arts with the socio-economic and political trends of its time, the medium starts to lose its romantic luster -- the susceptibility of the arts to politics tend to run contrary to the genius or individualist narrative that places the artist at the very top of the social pyramid, and many artists find this prospect somewhat unnerving. The stark divisions between composition, performance, musicology and ethnomusicology programs that exist in most universities today serve as a reminder as to how divided the musical landscape has currently become, and that there is a considerable amount of animosity between the fields especially as they fight for allocations within their institution's budget. Nonetheless, musicology is a necessary field if only to keep composers and performers grounded within the world that they exist in. These trends are very real things that affect us not only as artists, but as citizens of society as well. Without a serious inquiry into how the mechanics of these things work, it may be very difficult for musicians to find a direction in which to move.

Long story short, this is a blog by an armchair musicologist talking about music. Writing has always helped me clarify my thoughts, which usually lead to improvements in my own compositional output. Maybe something interesting might come out of it.