I'm excited to announce that I am wrapping up my MA in Humanities and Social Thought at NYU's Draper Program and have accepted a fellowship to pursue doctoral studies in UCLA's Systematic Musicology Specializaion within their Ethnomusicology Department. I'll be working with the wonderful Dr. Roger Savage (author of Hermeneutics and Music Criticism) on problems of music's affective vehemence and my interests with regard to the ontolological underpinnings of musical phenomena. This is big news for me as I've been trying to get into this program for five years - ever since Dr. Pantelis Vassilakis hipped me to the field and the UCLA program back when I was living in Chicago. Big thanks to all of you brilliant and patient people who've supported me in my studies and musical endeavors thus far. Go Bruins? Cheers!

Had a fantastic time last night playing in the Manderely Bar inside Sleep No More's McKittrick Hotel. Working with a quartet featuring Scott Bradlee on piano, Bennet Miller Huxley on bass, Django Carranza on drums, and the fantastic Karen Marie Richardson (as the feisty Ms. Stella Sinclair) singing her ass off is a wonderful pleasure. It's so rare to play small-group jazz for such a rapt audience these days and I count myself very lucky indeed. If you haven't been out to Sleep No More yet you are missing out. Here's Stella schooling Pink on "Summertime" when Pink wandered on stage a while back.

What, then, is truth?  A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation, and decoration, and which, after they have been in use for a long time, strike a people as firmly established, canonical, and binding; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour, coins which, having lost their stamp, are now regarded as metal and no longer coins.  - Freidrich Nietzsche from On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense

It sometimes feels adolescent to refer to Nietzsche in the constellation of thinkers who've stated the same thing (Kuhn, Derrida, Yeats, nearly all of 20th Century thought) with different language. He's just so damned poetic about it. I get more out of On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense every time I read it. Check it out.

Here's what I'll be working on this winter as I attempt to finish up my MA degree program at NYU.

I HAVE ALL THE EXCITE!

   The greatest tool of Western civilization since the Enlightenment has been the scalpel of reason, paring away mysticism and laying open the workings of the world. Regardless of the usefulness of reason, our lives are not lived as perfectly logical propositions but rather are filled with emotions, affects, and irrationality. Therefore, any epistemology which attempts to describe and delimit the reality of lived experience must recognize the limits of logic, language, and discursive thought because, as Susanne Langer stated so well, “...the limits of language are not the last limits of experience” (Langer 265). Due to their somatic resonance, the temporal nature of their poetic development, and their ability to simultaneously express opposites, musical phenomena have a special situatedness in Western culture as being associated with emotion, irrationality, and the ineffable while also being understood as very real.
    This special space musical phenomena inhabits can be described by its resonance with theories of the state of radical flux of the world as described by Nietzsche, Heraclitus, and others as well as musical phenomena’s association with intuition rather than positivism as suggested by Husserl and other Phenomenological thinkers. In this paper I will discuss the multiple layers of relevance of musical phenomena and show that despite the systems of reference by which we approach musical meaning (e.g., cultural situatedness, psychological theory, somatic entrainment, systems of spirituality, proportions, logic, and numbers), it is music’s character as a space for intuition and chiasmic unity that has maintained it’s importance in a world otherwise delimited by positivist theory.

I'll have four months or so to get this together. Wish me luck!