The new year brings a whole new slate of projects and ideas, and a lot of freedom to do things that I may have had to say “no” to because of a packed schedule. To start, I am joining a reading group on critical pedagogy, organized by Michael MacDonald at the University of Alberta Centre for Teaching and Learning. I met him at ICTM this summer, and I really wanted to learn more about his research. The intimate connection between teaching and learning is extremely important to address in any form of online education, but especially music education, broadly speaking. Our first book is Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, and my copy just arrived in the mail. It will be interesting to see what participating in a reading group via skype will be like.

This month I will be working on research proposals and grant applications, and as a result, lots of reading and writing. It is always difficult to anticipate what the future will bring, but you won’t know until you try.

So here’s to diving right in!

There were many first on this trip: plants, animals, landscapes, waters. Even the skies were different. My brain got a total reset, and my mental space was freed up by a total disconnection with any kind of digital media. It’s definitely motivation to draw better boundaries between work and life, in order to enjoy both to the fullest. Engaging in one while worry that the other is being neglected is completely counter-productive, and all it takes to shift the energy is a little mental adjustments. Admittedly, relaxing is not exactly my forté, but you know what they say, practice makes perfect. I better enjoy this before I suddenly find 2012 magically filled up with things to do!

Here’s wishing you and yours a wonderful holiday (whatever it is that you may be celebrating). I hope 2012 will be good to you. See you in the new year!

We had a packed Heliconian Hall, and received overwhelmingly positive response for this format. It showcased all the best that the Sneak Peek Orchestra strives to be in an intimate setting: great musicianship, great music by the masters and our contemporaries, and charming MCs, all of which translate to great fun for our audience.

Below is a video of Kevin and Victor premiering Kevin’s arrange of themes from Harry Potter for 4 hands. A well deserved standing ovation guys, now let’s start prepping for our next orchestral concert on February 4th!

I promptly fell ill once my conference obligations at MobilityShifts wrapped up, which makes me extremely grateful for the fact that all the panels were audio-recorded. They promise that everything will be up about a month after the conference, so I look forward to listening to all the sessions I missed!

Both the panel with my fellow critical making colleagues and the workshop with Kiku Day were instructive as well as inspiring. Questions from the audience during the panel reaffirmed my desire to pursue work in the area of music knowledge transmission and preservation, while the workshop solidified for me a research trajectory to pursue outside of a university setting, as well as connecting researchers with similar interests to share their experiences and pool their resources. Sincerely thanks to everyone that came out, asked good questions, and even bought a PVC shakuhachi by the end of the workshop!

I also contribute a lot of the inspiration to one of the few sessions I did catch, which was Matt Gold’s session on “Open Education: The University and The Commons”. The talking points in his jam packed talk with excellent and practical advice on building an infrastructure for humanities research were invaluable, but what struck me the most was how much of what he was talking about was learned through the process of making it happen in the first place. Yes, there’s theory, such as the immensely useful reference for Ostrom’s work on knowledge as commons, but it was the wisdom from doing or making that he had amassed that made his talk so engaging.

With that, I am curbing the desire to respond to more calls for proposals or papers, and get into a new headspace that recognize that I have to set new priorities and objectives, even though the things that seem familiar to me now were quite new to me just a few years ago. A new kind of self-discipline is required in this transition period as I seek out new institutions and networks within which to situate my work, as well as new media (aside from words) to explore ideas and thoughts.

Nothing is fully worked out yet, but I don’t feel that they need to be. A couple of months of simmering ideas is just what  I need before I start tending to the loose threads and finding out where they will lead me next.

We’re going to have more questions than answers, it’ll be the first time we’ve all spoken about our research since defending, and we are all going to bring something different to the discussion. Learning happens anywhere and at anytime, and the three contexts that we look at will give some interest contexts to discuss questions and concerns that the conference participants will surely have.

I’ve staked out a place to get my coffee and croissant before it all starts, and the summer-like weather will certainly help with getting me out of bed early. Not looking forward to rush-hour subway.

I’ve never thought of myself as a particular good writer, but I realize I love the process of research and writing. Am I a writer? Researcher? Librarian? I don’t know. I like connecting people with each other, and introducing hidden gems of ideas to a wider audience. I have benefited from such interactions, and the trajectory I’d like to embark on is shaped by a desire to help people make those connections. Part of that, I have a feeling, is going to involve writing that is directed to more than just me and a handful of immediate collaborators and colleagues.

Since early August, I have been quietly wrapping up many loose ends related to my degree, such as thesis revisions and conference proposals, as well as a book design project that I have been involved in on and off for the last few years. Having weekends and weeknights back as me-time has been a bit of a shock, my system is slowly recalibrating to realize that it can think and plan beyond the next deadline and one singular long-term goal like a thesis defence. It also feels very strange to sleep in on weekends without guilt, or not planning for every block of time imaginable.

In October, I will be going to be in New York City for the Mobility Shifts conference. It was quite serendipitous to find a whole conference dedicated to alternative forms of learning with a focus on projects that are based outside of North America, and I am very much looking forward to it. I’ll be there to speak about my thesis along with my masters buddies ginger coons and Bob Ree, and hopefully doing another interactive workshop with Kiku Day with regards to the transmission of Shakuhachi over skype.

Convocation will be in mid-November. A trip to visit a friend in New Zealand will occur some time before the end of the year. I look forward to some time to contemplate, reflect, and travel for the first time in three years for the sake of travelling, not for professional development, and definitely no allowing myself to work on the road.

It’s going to feel weird.

Since then, however, all I seem to want to do is sleep, stay cool, and let my mind go blank as I pay attention to all the small things that give such great pleasure: the sound of leaves rustling, the feeling of walking on grass, driving aimlessly into the country side and watching the rolling hills and crop fields go on forever and ever.

The days of being sustained by expresso is over, replaced by days of the comfortably mundane. Thoughts of papers and projects are replaced by thoughts of people I know affected by forest fires in Northwestern Ontario, the Oslo bombing and youth camp shooting in Norway, the famine in Somalia. My focus is shifting away from meeting deadlines and towards some much needed reflection and imagination.

Years from now, I won’t remember the long days and long nights of reading and writing, but I will remember all the people I met along the way, the things I learned from the experiences they shared with me, and the lives that they live. I really am very grateful for the brief but meaningful connections I’ve made. Each and every one of them will be my inspiration as I daydream about the future.

Thanks guys.

The presentation yesterday went pretty well. It was a small but engaged crowd, with many familiar faces and some great new colleagues. As always, putting ideas out there was a great way to strike up conversations with others, and learning about other people’s work. Experiencing a gathering of people from all corners of the globe has been both enlightening and humbling. I am especially excited about some of the new canadian colleagues I have met. I am forever indebted to Prof. Beverley Diamond (co-chair of local arrangements with Prof. Kati Szego and the inspirations behind Memorial University’s Research Centre for Music, Media and Place) for recommending that I submit a proposal when we met last year at BFE 2010. It’s funny how unplanned connections draw you down a path you never dreamed of walking down. I won’t promise anything, but I will do my best to write up some of my thoughts and some of the most interesting sessions that I have sat in.

I have to note once again that this was an extremely well organized conference. Maybe Newfoundlanders are just used to organizing music-related gatherings of this size, but what a team and what a city to be Canadian hosts to the world. Heck, they made me feel so welcomed, I want to come back and explore the rest of the province!

I am going to take the “excursion day” tomorrow to soak in more of the wonderful people at this place, and do my own job as Canadian host by showing people around. And if I am lucky, I will get to see the sun rise over Cape Spear before I leave, like I wanted to when I was here almost ten years ago exactly.

May there be a clear sky on Sunday morning.

Greetings from St. John’s, Newfoundland, the eastern-most city in Canada. I’ve been here since Sunday, but I haven’t had a chance to write a post at all. The trip has already been full of interests: had fun conversations with an urban planner on my way in and we ended up splitting a cab downtown, met an aspiring-ethnomusicologist who was working the booth of a boat tour, briefly met a librarian working in Ottawa over breakfast at my B&B, and walked until I had no more legs. While here I also had a call with my second reader who gave me her feedback on my thesis, and I should be receiving a written report from my external any time this week now.

Today was the official start of the conference, and there are some very colourful people around in all sense of the word. It’s fascinating to me to see the way scholars from different parts of the world present their work, and their approaches to music research from a variety of perspectives. The folks at MUN have also done a great job organizing everything. Aside from things they can’t control like last minute cancellations of paper presentations and the drizzly weather, they seem to taking care of the 500 attendees (from 55 countries!) very well.

I’ll write up more thoughts later. Time to put those last minute touches on my presentation tomorrow. Wish me luck!

The process of trying to write sometimes feel like a process of constantly distracting myself: re-reading papers, reviewing notes, making notes on notes, changing the work flow. At times I feel like I am not writing enough, and at other times, it all seems like a necessary part of the process. Throw the nervous feelings of actually having your name attached to a thesis for all eternity, and you wonder why the scheduled defense seems to be creeping up so quickly.

Flipping the calendar over in a new page, a few things seem more like a reality than they have ever been. One of the hardest things for me to do is to ask for time for myself, but with two months to go before my defence and lots of ideas to organize and finesse, everything that can take a back seat is tucked nicely out of the way. Of course, it seems like as soon as there’s room, new things find their way to capture my attention. Some of it has to do with the process of reading and writing, other has to do with panel, presentation and paper proposals, all of it pointing to directions that I’d like to explore once my thesis is wrapped up. I couldn’t tune them out because of their relevance to the things I’m thinking and writing about, and perhaps more importantly, things that I’m not addressing within the scope of my thesis work, but definitely things I’d like to find ways to keep doing, especially with regards to knowledge preservation and transmission.

Next post will likely be from The International Council of Traditional Music in St. John’s Newfoundland. In the mean time, I’ll be spending lots of time in the parks, on my balcony, hammering the rest of this thesis out, because it’s finally warm in Toronto!