#gradblrchallenge2019

[oystertongue]

After casting the first week of August into the void with a profoundly unproductive (read: tipsy) vacation, it’s feeling like a relief to be back at home flexing the academic muscles. Here are my goals for the remainder of the month, which is also my first #gradblrchallenge :

- Finish a draft of the second section of The Big Paper and have it on my advisor’s desk before the start of the semester (8/26 for us). I’m 3k into what I anticipate will end up in the neighborhood of 10k words, and they are rough!! I’m still very self-conscious about showing early stage writing to other people, but this paper is an opportunity to hard override that and embrace the Shit Rough Draft. Rough words are better than no words! Gotta start somewhere!

- Outline the third section of the The Big Paper. So far, I have a bibliography sorted into three sections, but it still feels unwieldy. Like tying off a hundred tiny threads into a big enough knot. 

- Get My (Digital) House In Order, Oh My God. My writing and planning is spread between four different apps/programs and after a minor meltdown during which I thought that I actually fully Lost a whole ass paper in my digital trash pile, I have realized that this is, uh, no longer sustainable.

- (last/(not)least) Feel some feelings! I started seeing a counselor this summer for reasons both related and unrelated to academic life. It’s been a great experience so far, but who knew it took so much conscious effort to Feel An (1) Feeling? 

Happy August, fellow grads. We got this. 🖖🏽

[joychords]

gradblr challenge: sunday 11th august

this weekend has been exceptionally hectic, focused around tonight’s big family event that required a lot of preparation and attention, so I haven’t had much time for research. this tuesday I’m meeting with my supervisor, and I’ll be able to share some updates from that & hopefully also from tomorrow’s research work. 

this week I’ve been reorganising my google drive, taking advantage of the hundred gigs of storage I keep forgetting I’ve got on there now. even though I’m not a huge fan of gdrive’s tendency to turn every text file into a gdoc if I accidentally click on it in the wrong context, it feels good to be backing up laptop stuff that’s important to me. 

hope everyone’s had a good first week of the challenge! I am going to head off to sleep ASAP because today has been gigantic and I haven’t slept nearly enough this week.

[oystertongue]

[8.15.2019] Staring down the barrel of a busy as hell day to today. We gotta

- Meet L at my office at 11 to interview a new person to join our volunteer group

- Run a couple errands and hopefully smash out another 1k words of The Big Paper before

- TA meeting at 2

- Then run home, drop off bag, change clothes, pick up bike and

- Set up for and run the volunteer group launch party incl. coordinating food and media, try not to die,

- and as soon as that's over, zoom to the gas station to pick up beer for ghost ride and

- meet D and E and the rest of the ghost ride crew before kickoff at 8.

This week hasn't been what I hoped it would be in terms of work, but I've reconnected with my best friends after not seeing them for two months due to our travel schedules and! after spontaneously going to a drop-in figure drawing session at one of my favorite bars, I'm remembering how good it feels to cultivate somatic skills after spending so much time on esoteric cerebral pursuits.

I'm stressed as heck about my calendar for the next two weeks, but there is also a part of me that enjoys living with a sense of urgency after the twilight languor of an academic summer 📚

[joychords]

#gradblrchallenge day 4: 📖my research interests (so far) 📚

I’m interested in a few different topics when it comes to popular music research. My honours thesis was originally going to be on classical string instruments (like violins and cellos) in various genres such as baroque pop, disco, hip-hop and girl group music, which I thought would be a suitable topic given my background as a violin major. I was pretty keen to explore all these different styles, but my supervisor recommended that a more specific topic would better suit the limit of 4500-6000 words. 

Honing in on 1960s girl group music wasn’t always my intention, but in my first semester of honours I had a coursework unit that coincidentally featured a reading all about it: ‘Why The Shirelles Mattered’ from Susan J. Douglas’ Where The Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media. Douglas - as well as Jacqueline Warwick, whose book Girl Groups, Girl Culture became the subject of a book review assignment in my other coursework unit - wrote about girl groups in a way that was new and intriguing to me. This happened around the time I was stressing about specifying my thesis topic to suit the word limit, which was great timing. I decided to focus on girl group music, and ended up writing specifically about the Shirelles’ song ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow’ and four cover versions in the same kind of style. 

For my masters research, I’m required to stick to a similar research topic and expand on it. It took me a long time to decide on how exactly I was gonna do that; earlier ideas of topics to branch out into included pop music’s obsession with purity in the 2000s, soundtracks to teenage love stories in TV & film, instrumentation in riot grrl, and themes of romance & sex in Taylor Swift’s music. The topic I’ve decided to stick with is another song that Warwick considers part of 60s girl group music, even though it’s by a solo artist: ‘You Don’t Own Me’ by Lesley Gore. I’ve listened to over 100 cover versions (more on that in a later post!) and selected a few to discuss in my thesis. 

I’ve grown to love girl group music through the research I’ve done, but there’s another topic that I’ve been itching to get into; once my masters is done, I’d really like to research mixed barbershop. I’ve always loved choral singing, and a few years ago I joined a mixed-gender barbershop choir. Barbershop Harmony Australia (originally a men’s organisation) opened its membership to all singers in 2015, and Australia’s mixed barbershop scene has grown ever since.  I’m so interested in the arrangements (rarely as straightforward as transposing men’s or women’s charts), the history (in Australia and around the world), the experience for singers (BHA’s non-men members aren’t yet allowed to vote 😠) and so many other aspects. Maybe by the time I submit my thesis, I’ll be longing for a totally different topic. Who knows!

What are your research interests? Feel free to share them in a reblog, a reply or an ask, and thank you for reading about mine! 💐

[joychords]

#gradblrchallenge day 1

Today’s been pretty good! I started off with my first ever yoga class, and boy was it intense. Yoga’s been recommended to me a lot for a variety of reasons—mostly posture and mental health—and I’d given it a go on Wii Fit, but never in a group setting. I’d love to go again next week, especially if T can come along, and I hope I don’t fall over so much. 

We had an interesting discussion at research group about AI and autotune and embodiment (bouncing off the article in the photo, which I took in the uni café before I started the reading prep), and the seminar this afternoon was really cool. I don’t often think about the para-musical elements of a performance, stuff like gesture and gaze, so it was great to learn about them in more detail (in the context of Schubert’s Winterreise, which I also don’t know that much about). 

I’m teaching a new violin student tomorrow, so I’ve got some prep to do, and since I’ve got some family stuff to help with tonight I might have to push some of today’s goals to tomorrow. I’ll see how I go. Getting a good night’s sleep is pretty crucial, so I’ll try not to be on my laptop later than 10. Tomorrow’s gonna be a big study day!

[joychords]

#gradblrchallenge intro post!

Hello! I’m pretty keen to take part in the August #gradblrchallenge - I’ve been less and less active on Tumblr in the last few years, and I’ve kind of missed this format. Finding out about this challenge and the community surrounding it was really exciting. Since I’m relatively new in town, here’s a bit more about me.

name or nickname : Jules

location : Perth, Australia (fun fact: down here it’s winter, and we call it postgrad rather than grad school)

area of study : musicology

level of study : doing the fourth and final semester of my masters

a word on your thesis/dissertation : My masters program requires me to write something that follows on from my honours thesis, which jumped topic a lot but ended up being on instrumentation + performance style in 1960s girl group music, focusing especially on classical string instruments like violins. This time around, I’m expanding on that, examining a bunch of cover versions from various eras, and discussing it all in relation to a bunch of things (but mostly feminism).

what has been your experience with graduate school/university thus far : I really enjoyed my undergrad studies, but I had a rough first year of postgrad (that was supposed to be my only year) and I ended up extending it into this year. I might not have found out about my ADHD - or started treating it - so soon if I hadn’t gone straight into my masters after finishing honours, though, so I’m very grateful for the extra time I’ve been given to get it right.

is this your first #gradblrchallenge : yes it is!

what do you hope to accomplish with this challenge : I hope it helps me stay on track with the work I want to get done, and I hope I’m feeling less isolated and more inspired by my fellow participants by the end of the month.

where do you see you self in five years : Honestly no clue. Ideally collaborating in various ways and doing some combination of composing, arranging, singing, playing and writing about music. I’m interested in the PhD program at UCLA, but it’d be a big move so I’d want to give it a few years at least.

meaning behind your url : harmonies make me really happy!

a random fact about you : throughout my time at university, my hair has been dyed red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, blue, purple, magenta, and (more often than not) pink!

If you’d like to follow me elsewhere, I’m @joychords​ on instagram too.