Most of January was spent catching up with a lot of the community-based commitments that I’ve had to neglect in the last couple of years, despite the best of intentions to keep up. Two major projects are the Heliconian Club, a meeting place for women in the arts, and the Sneak Peek Orchestra, a group that is dedicated to supporting young and emerging musicians, composers and conductors in Canada. Both are groups with a great vision for what they can accomplish, and both are organized around volunteerism. In both, I contribute my hodge-podge mix of skills by writing, designing, organizing, and cheer-leading.
In order to fill up the post-thesis writing void that I seem to find myself in, I took the time to write a few articles for the Sneak Peek Orchestra talking about the musicians and composers in their recent concert. In retrospect, music criticism or journalism was a passion that I had intended to pursue when I wondered what good was a degree in music history. It is both surprising and wonderful to find an opportunity to pursue it while supporting a wonderful group. The Heliconian Club’s new website is also affording me a chance to do more content development, soliciting and editing content that represents the full range of activities and community initiatives that happen at the club, something that the old site did not reflect at all. A colleague who was in town made a flattering comparison of this work as a kind of ethnography—documenting the stories of people that make up a community or an institution—which was certainly an interesting way to think about what I’m doing.
Funny how different paths ended up crossing each other, isn’t it?
