A Rather Disorienting August...
Image by Alissa Rupp
My 22-23 academic year is going to be a strange but wonderful experience. Thanks to the Cornish College of the Arts Faculty Senate and the Provost’s Office, I was awarded a Sabbatical for this upcoming year. I have a long list of projects and creative work to fill my time, but it really has been a very disorienting August.
In my life, most especially the last 23 years of my college-teaching life, August has always signified the approaching fall semester, ringing the bell that it is time to get busy reading, prepping, and steadying myself in the knowledge that the summer is coming to an end. The awareness of the approaching semester has always felt familiar and comforting, as I have always thrived on the energy of the fall semester. With the first-year students and their intense and slightly fear-based nervousness, and with the general good vibes from everyone after the summer refresh, we all (like any hopeful team) believe that this could really be OUR year.
The last few weeks I have found myself in unfamiliar territory. I have stepped into a new kind of anticipatory anxiety about an upcoming year without classes, exams, recitals, students, and colleagues. Don’t get me wrong, I am blessed with the opportunity, and grateful for this sabbatical year after 23 years of teaching. It is a chance to immerse myself fully into creative work, while also taking time to reflect and regenerate and renew my teaching self. But I am also anxious about the year ahead, the work to come, the crazy and terrifying world, etc. It is proving, thus far, to be a productive but disorienting state of being.
BLOGGING
So, I am going to try and use this blog to explore this uncertain year, and to mark and track some of my creative projects. I know, dear hypothetical reader, that there might not be many (or any) who ever read this ledger, but it will serve me well to keep an accounting of (hopefully) steady work. I have divided the sabbatical into 5 quarters, and this first summer quarter has proven to be quite productive: a new CD to be released on September 1 of three recent compositions,, performances with TBQ, progress on my book of string quartets (18 of 55 finished), and finding (finally) the double-bar on a long overdue commission for piano+electronics. More on these and other projects in coming posts.
READING
And then there’s the sabbatical reading list. Wow. I now know how my students must feel when they see my reading list for a class. I think I made a nice start in the summer quarter on what I call the “tower of the unread” - see below for the completed summer reading. It’s a good start.
A good start with summer reading…
The biggest problem with the reading list is that as I chip away at the stack of books that have piled up over the past few years, I keep discovering new books to read that are not from the tower of the unread. But it is a decent start.
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So there it is, the first of what I hope will be more regular posts and check-ins. We are planning trips for performances and recordings to NYC, The Netherlands, San Diego, and Scotland this year. I look forward to spending more time with Alissa. And I will be spending as much time as I can walking in rivers and looking for moments of beauty and truth (as well as the occasional trout).
Fishing the Henry’s Fork of the Snake River (p/c Greg Stevens)
COFFEE
And look, dear hypothetical reader. If for some reason you have read this far, and you are interested and available for a coffee in the coming months, let’s make it happen! I could use the company.
