Go on 2022!
So, here we are a month into 2022 and slowly breaking out of the state of quiet disarray that 2021 left us in. I will not comment much on the state of the world in this new blog post, I think everyone is sick of the state of the world so I will kindly tip my hat to it and end my comments about it here. Instead I'm going to focus on all of the genuinely nice things that happened in 2021 and maybe speculate a bit about the future.
2021 saw me pass a major milestone, in September I was awarded my Doctor of Music Performance at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. It took roughly 5 long years but 2021 saw the completion, submission and defense of my doctoral thesis titled 'Implicit Curriculum: Improvisation Pedagogy in Guitar Methods 1760 - 1860'. I am proud of this work and after a concerted effort to rid my mind of it am revisiting it's ideas. I am looking forward to taking this document which as become a compendium of my ideas for the past 5 years and developing them further into articles, pedagogical works and more.
In September I presented more of my research at a virtual conference titled 'The Figured Bass Accompaniment in Europe' hosted by Centro Studi Opera Omnia Luigi Boccherini, Lucca PALMA CHORALIS Research Group & Early Music Ensemble Dipartimento di Musica Antica ‘Città di Brescia. It was an honor to attend this conference. The presentations were all excellent and the above organizations have shown themselves to consistently produce work of the highest standard. I look forward to working together in the future.
2022 feels genuinely exciting. I am slated to speak in the near future at a virtual conference at the University of Oregon titled 'Musicking: Culturally Informed Performance Practices' in April 2022. And will also be speaking and performing at the 'PERFORM_LIVE Festival-Conference' in Dublin, March 2022.
In addition to this I am also working on a few new social media revamps including the launch of a Patreon page, a new YouTube series and a few essays that will be published later in the year. All of this will coincide in stages with a revamp of my practice streams on Twitch so I'm super excited to get back into content creation. 2021 was a period of extreme instability for me in terms of living and financial situations. As so often happens during periods that feature dramatic events there was a lot of prosaic periods that were filled with feelings of inadequacy and paralysis. But 2022 looks genuinely bright and I can't wait to make it so.
Thank you to all my students, supporters and subscribers during this period of instability, see you all soon!
