Not writing "drafts" doesn't mean that whatever you write down the first time is sacrosanct. Did you ever ask a student to revise a paper and you get only a few changes, the exact ones you have suggested? That is not what I mean at all. Every time I look at something I've written, before it is published, I make some changes to improve it.
Rather, that the prose you write is basically fine the first time around. It doesn't aim for shittiness or roughness but for smoothness.
Wednesday, February 28, 2018
Monday, February 26, 2018
March Goals
I didn't do badly with February goals; I never got into the key of E that much, but that's ok. I thought I would do as much as that as in B, in January, but it didn't work out. I didn't get far with the Shostakovich fugue, but learned other pieces instead, like learning to sing "Tres morillas de Jaén."
I rocked research in February, turning a very vague project into something real and doable.
March:
Write a substantial part of the methodological / theoretical introduction to the musicology book.
Revise the NEH proposal until it really rocks, to be submitted on April 11. Complete bibliography.
Learn enough of the Mompou "Música callada" to play at talent show on March 30.
Key of the Month: A maj.
Continue to average 11,000 steps a day, as I have in February.
I've paid off credit card now. I have to figure out plan for paying off the car to be completely debt-free (again).
I rocked research in February, turning a very vague project into something real and doable.
March:
Write a substantial part of the methodological / theoretical introduction to the musicology book.
Revise the NEH proposal until it really rocks, to be submitted on April 11. Complete bibliography.
Learn enough of the Mompou "Música callada" to play at talent show on March 30.
Key of the Month: A maj.
Continue to average 11,000 steps a day, as I have in February.
I've paid off credit card now. I have to figure out plan for paying off the car to be completely debt-free (again).
When I am working well
When I am working well I can finish at 9 a.m. I have written a good page and I am done for the day.
Sunday, February 25, 2018
No more "drafts"
I've decided not to write "drafts" any more. (I did away with "rough drafts" and "shitty first drafts" a while ago.). What I mean is not that I will never revise anything, or rewrite it if it isn't good enough, but that I will write it the first time in a more or less acceptable form (better than most people's final drafts, in some cases).
When I gave our local humanities grant-writing person my first version of my NEH application, she commented that my "rough drafts" were often better than the final versions other people were sending out. Yes. Once again, that is not because they cannot get any better, but because they are not "rough" at all.
This method will help me not to have to have all these half-baked fragments every where, that take more time to sort out later. Of course, when one goes back to work on the document, one fixes things that are wrong in other paragraphs. But once the document is complete it is a shareable document. Then you can revise according to what suggestions you get.
I believe you shouldn't share something unless it is already in a presentable form. That way, you aren't wasting their time by asking them to correct things that you could have easily corrected. If you want comments, they should be on something that has been worked on enough so that the only comments needed will be substantive. This does not imply stylistic perfection, which you'll never reach anyway, but adequacy.
If you want to bounce ideas off of somebody, then you can do it conversationally, or in a conversational mode like email.
*
I started to write something and stopped myself at the word posit. That's a fine academic word, but it marks itself as academic in the first sentence. What if we could write using two or three of those words a page?
These are advanced tips. I would never tell a junior colleague to avoid posit. I would say not to use subtend. As a full professor I have the luxury of choosing my words carefully.
When I gave our local humanities grant-writing person my first version of my NEH application, she commented that my "rough drafts" were often better than the final versions other people were sending out. Yes. Once again, that is not because they cannot get any better, but because they are not "rough" at all.
This method will help me not to have to have all these half-baked fragments every where, that take more time to sort out later. Of course, when one goes back to work on the document, one fixes things that are wrong in other paragraphs. But once the document is complete it is a shareable document. Then you can revise according to what suggestions you get.
I believe you shouldn't share something unless it is already in a presentable form. That way, you aren't wasting their time by asking them to correct things that you could have easily corrected. If you want comments, they should be on something that has been worked on enough so that the only comments needed will be substantive. This does not imply stylistic perfection, which you'll never reach anyway, but adequacy.
If you want to bounce ideas off of somebody, then you can do it conversationally, or in a conversational mode like email.
*
I started to write something and stopped myself at the word posit. That's a fine academic word, but it marks itself as academic in the first sentence. What if we could write using two or three of those words a page?
These are advanced tips. I would never tell a junior colleague to avoid posit. I would say not to use subtend. As a full professor I have the luxury of choosing my words carefully.
and
I remember when I was a young academic and I thought it would be good to talk about William Carlos Williams at the MLA at some point, but every year the WCW Society would have a panel on "Williams and Medicine" or "Williams and Baseball." It never turned out to be a topic I wanted to talk about. I began to hate that and.
So I would never write a book on "Lorca and Music." My aim is to destroy the and--if that doesn't sound too pretentious. You can look at music through Lorca, or Lorca through music, but the and is odious. It implies that this is an extraneous topic, like baseball to Williams or insurance to Stevens. I have the same objections to the "words and music" movement. That is why I prefer my own discipline, song studies. In song studies we don't see words and music as separate entities to be brought together through abstruse comparisons or spurious contrasts. I guess you might object to the "studies" part. You should just say you are in song.
You could say that song is the performance of poetry by other means. Song, then, is an extension of poetics, not an arbitrary linking between two separate arts. It would be a little bit like trying to separate dance from music. I'm sure there are dances that don't involve music at all, but they would be a bit unusual. It would be a bit unusual to have a discipline called "dance and music" in which the idea is to bring the two together. We see the pairing as natural. The analogy doesn't hold up totally, but I'm going to hold to that for the time being. I'm going to contend that dance is a musical form, like song. That vocal music is the original kind of music, and that song is the origin of poetry too. These are hardly original ideas.
***
I remember making a new year's resolution once to take voice lessons. It didn't happen the year that I resolved to do it, but it is happening now. I am on my second teacher and third year, and the voice is better. (The first year not much improved.) I am in my third semester of choir, my second year of piano lessons, have been composing since 2015.
So I would never write a book on "Lorca and Music." My aim is to destroy the and--if that doesn't sound too pretentious. You can look at music through Lorca, or Lorca through music, but the and is odious. It implies that this is an extraneous topic, like baseball to Williams or insurance to Stevens. I have the same objections to the "words and music" movement. That is why I prefer my own discipline, song studies. In song studies we don't see words and music as separate entities to be brought together through abstruse comparisons or spurious contrasts. I guess you might object to the "studies" part. You should just say you are in song.
You could say that song is the performance of poetry by other means. Song, then, is an extension of poetics, not an arbitrary linking between two separate arts. It would be a little bit like trying to separate dance from music. I'm sure there are dances that don't involve music at all, but they would be a bit unusual. It would be a bit unusual to have a discipline called "dance and music" in which the idea is to bring the two together. We see the pairing as natural. The analogy doesn't hold up totally, but I'm going to hold to that for the time being. I'm going to contend that dance is a musical form, like song. That vocal music is the original kind of music, and that song is the origin of poetry too. These are hardly original ideas.
***
I remember making a new year's resolution once to take voice lessons. It didn't happen the year that I resolved to do it, but it is happening now. I am on my second teacher and third year, and the voice is better. (The first year not much improved.) I am in my third semester of choir, my second year of piano lessons, have been composing since 2015.
Saturday, February 24, 2018
Friday, February 23, 2018
A Process
Step 1: I am not a musicologist; I cannot write this book.
Step 2: I know more about music than I knew I did. It will be ok if I am very cautious.
Step 3: I can write this book in a better way than the hypothetical musicologist I had in my head as being better at writing this book, because I know how to write for people who don't know about music in technical terms. (And I know how to write.) A musicologist might be writing for other musicologists, but that is not what I want to do. I don't have to include fragments of scores in the book, because that would be intimidating to my readers, and a technical analysis of music, in the way that I would attempt it, would also be criticized by anyone with more technical knowledge than I have. So that would be a way of alienating all my readers at one fell swoop.
I can also see that musicologists borrowing from literary theory often don't know what they are doing. For example, they borrow from postmodernism and poststructuralism, but without realizing that that makes musical meanings more indeterminate. Thus they cannot really be as confident as they want to be about their conclusions.
I realize what I have been calling impostor syndrome in my own case is not really that at all. It is not that I think I am an impostor and everyone else knows what they are talking about. It is that we are all pretty much impostors. Some are the real deal, and I am still aspiring to that. Maybe I've hit that a few times in my career. But I see younger people in my field and think, no, you don't have impostor syndrome, you are an impostor. You are so far from being the real deal that you don't even know it yet.
Step 2: I know more about music than I knew I did. It will be ok if I am very cautious.
Step 3: I can write this book in a better way than the hypothetical musicologist I had in my head as being better at writing this book, because I know how to write for people who don't know about music in technical terms. (And I know how to write.) A musicologist might be writing for other musicologists, but that is not what I want to do. I don't have to include fragments of scores in the book, because that would be intimidating to my readers, and a technical analysis of music, in the way that I would attempt it, would also be criticized by anyone with more technical knowledge than I have. So that would be a way of alienating all my readers at one fell swoop.
I can also see that musicologists borrowing from literary theory often don't know what they are doing. For example, they borrow from postmodernism and poststructuralism, but without realizing that that makes musical meanings more indeterminate. Thus they cannot really be as confident as they want to be about their conclusions.
I realize what I have been calling impostor syndrome in my own case is not really that at all. It is not that I think I am an impostor and everyone else knows what they are talking about. It is that we are all pretty much impostors. Some are the real deal, and I am still aspiring to that. Maybe I've hit that a few times in my career. But I see younger people in my field and think, no, you don't have impostor syndrome, you are an impostor. You are so far from being the real deal that you don't even know it yet.
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