Criticism: It Sucks! (part 1)

As someone who has spent an embarrassingly long time as a graduate student, I’ve made a lot of jokes and, let’s be honest, talked a lot of trash about the whole enterprise. One of my standard lines is that if you stay in school long enough, you actually start to become dumber, rather than smarter. So imagine how gratified I was to find someone else express a similar thought! In Does Grad School Make You a Bad Reader?, musicologist Drew Massey explores how graduate education hampers one’s ability to read for pleasure, not to mention basic reading comprehension. That’s pretty ironic, since grad school is all about deepening one’s knowledge in the field one is passionate about, right?

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The Ecstasy and the Criticism (Wherein my Bubble is Burst)

I didn’t expect that committing myself to a month of daily blogging would send me off on a nostalgia trip (for one thing, I’m uncomfortable with the notion that I’m old enough to be capable of nostalgia 😥 ). But the discussion of my Bartók String Quartet Watershed Moment brought up the memory of what has to be one of my top ten classical concert-going experiences of all time.

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My Musical Conversion, Part 2

NaBloPoMo Day 7! Yesterday I recounted the story of a defining moment in my musical education, when I learned that classical composition didn’t end with …

My Musical Conversion, Part 1

NaBloPoMo Day 6! In yesterday’s post, I mentioned a few of the seminal composers and musical movements that developed during the 20th century, and that, …