interstices of the interim
fragments of where my brain has been lately
Even though I've not had time to sit down and write over the past weeks, there has (of course) been no shortage of things on my mind. For one, turning 30 has triggered a lot of “what do I want to do this decade?” kinds of personal musings. But also, as I finish what has been an insanely busy second year at FSU, I have been pondering:
Navigating academia during some major institutional and culture changes in higher ed writ large. It has been eye-opening to be thrown in the fray immediately, and as a very young junior faculty member, I appreciate that my administration and colleagues have placed their trust in me. However, six committees later, it is also work that quickly breaks down one's morale, and there have been many times this year that I've been tempted to sheath myself in a layer of cynicism to protect my well-being.
Trying to build a career as a young-ish musician in an unforgiving industry. I waffle between deciding whether to (and tell my students to) slog through "the system” and all its toxicity or to forge ahead in one's own way, knowing full well that recognition for independent work will come slowly or not at all. On good days, I feel optimistic about the latter. On more vulnerable days, I still wonder whether I was overly naïve about refusing to audition for Juilliard and am now paying the price for my idealism (that network tho…).
Being a person. It's hard to explain to other people what it's like to essentially start your profession at age 4. You literally go through all the formative years of your life dedicated to work, and it's exponentially worse if you have Asian parents who drilled a terrifying work ethic into you from the time you learned how to write your name. The feeling of being untethered can be uncomfortable for those of us who have always had a goal to latch onto.
For people who follow the academic calendar or the typical concert season calendar, summer is often an interim period. Most of us need to supplement our 9-month income, so we find contract work in the form of festival gigs, summer teaching, or any random concerts that come our way. However, that work can feel like a kind of transitory suspension while we wait for the real stuff to happen in the fall. So, I titled this post “interstices of the interim” (essentially, in between the between) because there's also something beautiful about the feeling of exploring the secret pockets of something in transition. Those pockets are the fleeting details of a flux—like the fresh texture, the curling motion of a molting exoskeleton before it is exuviae.
So, here's what you can expect from me during my ecdysis (figuratively, though harpists are known to go through molting season with their calluses 😉):
Reading more
…which really translates as working on being less burned out so I can sustain a less dysfunctional, less online lifestyle. Slow reading, i.e., super challenging books, mitigates my tendency to feel disillusioned and depressed when my brain is in only survival/response mode. However, like chip dinner, consuming internet content is so easy to fall back on that after a long day at work. At least for me, the act of reading is powerful and intervene on two broader phenomena—intellectual disengagement and neoliberal alienation—that I'm convinced impoverish our social fabric. There's a good reason Byung-chul Han is so popular with the youths right now; I remember reading Psychopolitics for the first time in 2019 and thinking, whoa.
People subjugate themselves to domination by consuming and communicating – and they click Like all the while. […] The capitalism of Like should come with a warning label: Protect me from what I want.
(Psychopolitics, 2014)
Going through some difficult topics
Namely, these four: 1) thoughts about the truly awful Cara Kizer/NY Phil situation, but focusing on the teacher-student power dynamic in academia and what post-#metoo mentorship looks like; 2) inter-community collaboration vis-à-vis my ongoing attempt to establish better relationships with the Black community in Tallahassee; 3) the corporatization of the university and maintaining independence and autonomy whilst navigating administrative reforms, all without falling back on self-siloing. (Disclaimer: from the specific perspective of an untenured R1 faculty member who is basically solely in charge of their own program and happens to be a raging idealistic anarchist); lastly, 4) in response to very specific conversation, the black-white morality of boycott activism in music and why neither work when systemic issues aren't addressed
Experimenting with new musical ideas
I am at the point in my tenure timeline where I'm thinking of an album concept, but I'm not really compelled to make a solo harp one (which I've already done). That doesn't preclude my recording singles of some of my favorite solo harp pieces for those of you who are interested in that, but I'd like to do something that feels more personally creative and will broaden my audience base. It majorly sucks to feel like you're constantly competing for the same small pool of gigs and/or having to sell yourself in very specific ways to convince presenters to give the harp a chance. Because creative autonomy is something I know I need to stay in this profession long-term, I feel acutely that I should figure out how to diversify my options to avoid being overly reliant on one sector of the industry.
being stuck sometimes forces doors to open Over the past year, I've been bugging Patrick about starting a band, so my current plan is for us to sit down together and write over the summer. This is something scary and new to both of us, and I have no idea what will come out of it. But, I'm convinced this is a direction I'd like to take my work, so I told him, we need to just fucking do it.
Finally, I'm working out details for some really interesting tentative projects for 2024-2025. Will share here once they're confirmed!!
As always, hugs and kisses,
Noël
This week's Corner of Wondrous and Powerful:
Listening: I've been digging back into Aaliyah's catalogue—nothing quite like One in a Million.
Reading: "Resisting Usefulness” by Marianna Ritchey, author of Composing Capital: Classical Music in the Neoliberal Era. I read this over spring break, courtesy of my friend Geoff, and it really makes you reconsider the sticky capitalism underlying the rhetoric of access, especially in the arts. It also made me think back on the article about ChatGPT that I really struggled to write last summer because I kept wrestling with the underlying “so what?” Now, I think I'd frame that whole article as a criticism of art/technology under capitalism, grounding it with Ritchey's paradigm of uselessness.
Watching: Drift (2023) with Cynthia Erivo and Alia Shawkat. While it was not my favorite movie (Patrick prefaced with “It's very Sundance”), I enjoyed the contrast between the scenes with tourist sand beaches and the one at the end when Erivo's character goes to an isolated, rocky edge of the Aegean Sea. She dives in, and all we see is endless watery nothingness. Because most of us live in such highly bureaucratic environments that regulate our behavior, it's easy to forget that there are still pockets—interstitial spaces!—in the world in which one can experience this unfettered, existential drifting.