New Year

Christmas has come (though it isn't gone yet -- not until Epiphany), the various services at church have gone well, my students are still on break, and so I am going away for a few days.

I'm really, really looking forward to it. When I come back the "new" year must begin in earnest, nose back to the grindstone with teaching and rehearsals and practising and oh, some forms to fill out and send off for HMRC, apparently I might need to give them some tacks, but I probably haven't earned enough.

I'm not much of one for resolutions. I already tend toward excessive tweaking, chronic attempts to re-think, re-arrange, improve strategy, and I know that I'm also prone to a feeling of dismal failure if I don't live up to some arbitrary expectation I set for myself. So I'm not going to make any promises of one post per day, or per week, or anything like that.

That said, I would like to write here more. I've struggled to find a voice for this blog for a while now -- since near the end of my degree, really -- and I feel like it would be really good to get something going again.

I'm thinking about what to write. I need to be quite careful in writing about my work teaching, and my work at St Andrew's, because of course there are confidentiality issues in both cases, but are there aspects of it that I should be documenting? I'm not sure which of my other work is interesting; composing is something I tend to post about when I have actually written something, I do try to flag events I'm involved in but often fail to get around to it in time (with very low readership it doesn't seem to be very worthwhile). My recent spate of political or social commentary is not likely to be sustainable, though I don't guarantee I won't rant sometimes. I could write at some length about practice methods, but I don't know that I'd be contributing much; some of my thoughts on music in liturgy may be interesting but I suspect they echo work done by others. I am still keen on doing some more in-depth research into various forms of sung psalmody, but I don't seem to know where to start there either.

What would you like to see me write about here? If you could ask me anything about my work in music what would it be? I'd love some open-ended questions with which to get started.