Waxing Verbosity

I thoroughly enjoyed the readings! My whole life I’ve been accused of being verbose. I’m extremely interested to read Elements of Style and to work on writing with brevity and purpose. All three articles emphasized being, in the words of Barzun, true, reliable, and complete while being clear, orderly, and easy to grasp and remember. I completely agree that being bold and being succinct are two sides of the same coin. One of my greatest struggles while writing papers in undergrad was eliminating the, “I think,” “I believe,” and “The fact of the matter is.” I usually had to do this out of necessity because I always seemed to exceed word limits, but I began to see its importance.

As much as I believe to have drank the Kool-Aid, I’m obviously still guilty, as this blog post is growing in length and I haven’t yet introduced my subject(s)! One principal challenge to these articles, and in particular E.B. White’s introduction, is that the written english language can be a beautiful thing to read; taking a weed-whacker to it doesn’t always make it more powerful. I have read letters and emails from those I admire greatly that would be considered verbose, and made quite a powerful point. Sometimes, the words deemed unnecessary by White, allow us to hear the voice of the author and connect with his or her struggles and joys. These extraneous words become a vehicle for the very emotion that makes us human. Writing devoid of extra descriptors isn’t automatically more powerful simply due to its brevity. Even after reading those articles, I continue to write with my unique voice, knowing that it allows the reader to hear my biases and values as they digest my text. To me, that’s pretty powerful.

As far as choosing a subject goes, at this point in my career I’m extremely interested in two areas. The first involves the challenges and joys of teaching in a small-school setting. For me, I teach in a p-k-8 Catholic school where enrollment is under 200. If you so desire, you can read some of the older posts in my blog to get a better idea of the challenges I faced in my first year; it wasn’t pretty. Out of much collaboration, love, and despair came some of the most gratifying rewards of my life. The program blossomed and began to receive generous funding. We performed more and more, and received high ratings at a large-ensemble adjudication. Finally, my wonderful principal saw just how much time, love, energy, and preparation went into creating this machine. She rewarded my efforts with a part-time assistant. It sounds like a success story, but that’s really just because I left out the parts that induced blood, sweat, and tears. Really - actual blood, drawn from several items around the room. The sweat was found on my professional dress that didn’t look so professional by the end of a twelve-hour day, and the tears that I often cried in the closet between classes after another colleague chided me for doing something differently than my predecessor did. It wasn’t easy, to say the least.

Despite that, all of this came to be somehow, and I’d love to explore how it happened, and how we - a collective of small-school music educators - can synthesize our experiences to share the most valuable pieces of wisdom with the ones who follow closely behind us.
Obviously, small-school education is a broad topic that could take any number of twists and turns. I will have to use the wisdom in the readings to narrow my subject, making the research manageable and useful.

I’m also extremely interested in better understanding how music educators use music as a vehicle for bringing joy to their students. I left Ithaca College inspired to bring joy to the next generation of young musicians. The large cohort of old-school male directors in my area seemed to emphasize the importance of scales, marching band, standard repertoire, basics, and other nuts and bolts. I felt so far behind and that I had missed something truly important. The next year, I lost sight of why I chose music education. Now, I must be careful - I do not wish to alienate a group of people who have been so wonderful to me. I also don’t wish to devalue the importance of standards and fundamentals - they exist for a reason and are important! Rather, I seek to marry the two; the fundamentals exist so that we may have the facility to express joy through music. I look forward to recapturing the joy of music-making for both myself and my students. Perhaps there is a collection of resources that could point me in the right direction. Finding a concise way to capture that would undoubtedly be challenging, but I hope to discover that there is more information on this subject than I have encountered.