My doctoral defense starts in a half hour. On the menu: tomatoes stuffed with Blue Jacket chevre and chives from my earthbox, grapes with Maytag blue cheese, and mango wrapped in prosciutto di Parma.
My doctoral defense starts in a half hour. On the menu: tomatoes stuffed with Blue Jacket chevre and chives from my earthbox, grapes with Maytag blue cheese, and mango wrapped in prosciutto di Parma.
Events seem to be accelerating toward the end of the school year. Today I ordered my tam, hood, and gown for graduation (June 10!). My defense is one week from tomorrow, and all the undergraduates have their recitals in the next couple of weeks. It's going to be a busy push to the finish, but I welcome that after two months of seemingly motionless work on my document.
I've started to get back into playing the trombone a bit more. I had to severely cut back on that for the past couple months while I was pushing out that paper, and I even started playing on my old horn on campus to minimize carrying an instrument on the bus. Yesterday I took my good horn back to school, and I've been reacquainting myself with it. Compared with the other activities I'm doing to expand my horizons (classroom teaching, ensemble conducting, musicological research, etc), it feels so good and natural to be able to spend time working in my primary vocation.
Since we got back from Costa Rica, I have been working nearly nonstop on my dissertation, which they officially call a DMA Document. It's been a big project, but it was important to me to do it right. When I was an undergrad, I put together (at Jay's suggestion) a set of intonation exercises for trombone section. It's valuable to me as my first publication, but I've always been a little bit dissatisfied with it. The book is a great resource for people who already understand the theory and can fit it into an existing pedagogical framework. However, my book does not provide any of that foundation, and for that reason, I think it has limited applicability. My DMA Document provides the structure and organization that my undergraduate work does not. It can be used by one through four musicians of any instrument, and the exercises themselves are far more focused and effective.
I've been sending drafts to my committee for the past month, but my final draft, formatted, printed, and bound, is due to the graduate school administration on Monday.This is the kind of project, of course, that could go on forever; I could keep writing exercises, refining the audio stimuli, etc. But, there comes a point in any development cycle where you have to shoot the engineers and ship the product; I think I've reached that point. My defense is scheduled for Friday, May 18.
Despite my preoccupation with this document, other major events have occurred in the past month. Katy turned 30. We announced to our family and friends that we are expecting our first child. Our son is due October 26 of this year. Life is very, very different from what it was 3 years ago when we moved to Columbus. We don't know exactly what's in store for us, but we know it's going to be unlike anything we've experienced before. We're very excited to see where life takes our family (all three of us).
Two of my students at Ohio State gave a joint junior recital. These students have studied almost exclusively with me since they started as freshmen; they are my first ever college students, and it was a real milestone moment for me to watch them perform. I'm exceedingly proud to say their junior recital went far better than mine did. I think I was able to help them avoid some of the dangers associated with undergraduate performance, and that makes me very happy as a teacher. Being a teaching associate means I get a lot of the grunt work without a lot of the payoff of a real professorship, but that moment made a lot of the investment worth it.
Last weekend, I finished my first season with the Springfield Symphony, and it's been absolutely wonderful to work with them. There's no thrill quite like professional performing arts, and I am lucky to be a part of that industry. I'm looking forward to our performance in Veteran's Park at the Summer Arts Festival on June 17. I'm also excited that next season, the symphony will feature Carol Jantsch in the Vaughan Williams Tuba Concerto on the first concert.
Over Thanksgiving weekend, I received an email from Doug Yeo suggesting I create another volume of my Bach Chorales: Deconstructed. I did the bulk of that work on the plane ride back from Costa Rica, and that has finally moved through all the various steps of publication, and I now have a proof from Kagarice Brass Editions sitting on my desk with a contract. So, if you like volume 1, look for volume 2 on tenorposaune.com and kagarice.com in the very near future!
