So, would anyone here be interested in:
I am really really not a marketing expert. I would like to get better at this part of freelancing (After The PhD, obviously), and I think that a lot of the courses that are out there are mostly selling bespoke peer support groups, and I don't fit into any of those either so I may as well roll my own group.
Thoughts?
(I might crosspost this to ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
crowdfunding or something)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmith I think). I'm off to Aberdeen -- I forgot, when I booked it, that this was a Bank Holiday weekend. I have a PhD supervision on Tuesday, and it's the one where I turn up with a small forest worth of scores and we decide which ones are dissertation-quality.
After that? I write the dissertation. I have already done some of the work for that -- the three pieces that were in my MPhil upgrade portfolio may as well go into the final, and I gave a presentation on my Stations of the Cross back in March which has a lot of material in it. But those scores by themselves don't add up to the hour I would need, so we'll have to choose some others, and I'll need to write about those too. If we don't have enough that are appropriate for the dissertation, then I get to write some more music before I start writing the dissertation.
I feel as if I'm hideously behind on everything else. I've had some healthcrap issues recently, which are still under investigation; so far we know that I'm deficient in folate, but not, unfortunately, why I'm deficient in folate. And I've been very, very tired.
Things I'd like to get caught up on this month: -Patreon rewards -a certain commission -two other (smaller) commissions -some kind of plan for the summer which balances competitions, other composing projects, and dissertation writing.
I enjoy some of the blog posts from Farnam Street but I was rather disappointed to see a blog post on "active mindset" entitled Yes, It’s All Your Fault: Active vs. Passive Mindsets.
The broader point, I think, stands: a failure to take responsibility for mishaps and circumstances, a failure to examine whether things could have been different, can lead to feeling out of control and helpless. The unspoken instruction is to take responsibility for your part in things, to cultivate an active mindset in the language you use about your day-to-day life, in order to learn from your mistakes, and presumably experience feelings of control and efficacy.
But, well. It really isn't my fault that my parents split up when I was very young, and that has had repercussions throughout my life. It really isn't my fault that the current political situation in the country in which I live is, er, a trashfire. Nor is it, in any sense, my "fault" that I was born into a situation where I received a good primary and secondary education, such that going to university was not thought of as unusual, despite this not being the case for millions of other people; it is not my "fault" that I am white and therefore have many privileges, or that I grew up with shoes that fit.
There are (at least) two ways that assuming bad things are your fault can go wrong, and neither of them are very helpful. One is where we try to take responsibility for things that are simply due to bad circumstances by chance. Taking responsibility for a train being late or missing is reasonable; blaming oneself for being late when a bad storm takes out the entire transport network for an entire day is less so. There are usually efficiency tradeoffs to be made when planning journeys: should I go up to Aberdeen a day early, spend money on an extra night in a hotel, in order to ensure that train problems won't interfere with my studies? This is the option I usually take; but it looks very different if I have to miss some paid work in order to do it. The longer the journey, the more things can go wrong and the more likely I will want some downtime to recover at the other end.
The second failure mode, and I think the more dangerous of the two I discuss here, is assuming the actions of bad actors to be your fault. This is very common with victims of domestic abuse, who may come to believe that their abuser is only lashing out at them because of their own inadequacies or failure to perform certain actions; that if they just try hard enough to be a better spouse or child or partner, the abuse will stop. In fact what will stop the abuse is leaving.
Similarly, believing that all or most the good things that happen to you are your own doing can also cause problems. I live in a major city and I don't get huge amounts of street harassment, despite walking around on my own a lot. Is this because I'm doing something right in the way I walk? Or is it because I'm six feet tall and people think twice about giving me any trouble? The latter seems more likely -- and this is nothing that I have chosen. Similarly, I don't often run up against anti-migrant prejudice, despite being a migrant. This isn't because I have integrated particularly well into British society: rather, it is because I already speak English very fluently (I did not choose my first tongue), and probably also because I am white. Let's be honest, here: the playing field isn't level. That's wrong, and it also isn't entirely my fault, but pretending that I have the same resources as a homeless woman of colour who isn't fluent in English is simply preposterous; such pretense would definitely make me part of the problem.
And just as it is dangerous to discount the actions of bad actors in your own misfortune, it is ungrateful to look at your own success without acknowledging the help you may have received along the way. I am a musician not just because of innate talent (I come from a family with musicians on both sides), and not just because of my own hard work, but also because of the patience of many, many teachers and mentors over the years, not to mention the support of friends and family at various times.
Rather than basking in success as if it's only your own doing, or beating yourself up verbally because a train was late or you made a mistake, I would suggest that a healthy active mindset would mean asking yourself: Is there anything I would do differently next time?
This lets you learn from your mistakes, get better at navigating random things that just go wrong, and increase your skill at dealing with bad actors. And it doesn't leave you thinking you're doing something right when you just chanced to be in the right place at the right time, or judging people less fortunate than yourself for not attaining the success that you have.
Long time no post. I've been meaning to post here more, and not quite managing.
I'm back in London this week, after nearly three weeks in Aberdeen during which I heard the Chapel Choir sing my Stations of the Cross, and visited with my parents who had come over to hear it, and then stayed on to give a presentation.
Now I'm pretty tired, and my next PhD-related thing is in early May: the meeting where I'll sit down with my supervisor and a pile of scores and we'll decide which ones belong in the portfolio and which ones don't. After that, I'll know whether I get to spend this summer frantically writing more music, or frantically writing a dissertation -- or maybe both...
In the meantime, I am trying to step back a bit, and spend some time sorting out various things at home: the garden has had the lion's share of attention this week, and there is some tidying to do inside.
I don't post to the Book of Face much, but I'm very aware that "it's where people are" these days. As far as I'm concerned that's part of the problem: the more you use it, the more money Facebook gets from their advertisers, and that means that you, the user, are the product. I've never much liked that. But what with not spending much time on Twitter these days (having largely moved to Mastodon, where I am artsyhonker@mastodon.art and also artsyhonker@smusi.ch) I am missing a lot of the people I used to share a running daily commentary with.
I think I might try posting here, and then linking to the posts from there.
"A text in Latin shall be used", I read, of a choral composition competition.
It turns out they are a bit more picky than that:
Only texts by the following Latin Authors will be accepted: Ovidio (Publius Ovidius Naso), Orazio (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), Virgilio (Publius Vergilius Maro), Catullo (Gaius Valerius Catullus), Marziale (Marcus Valerius Martialis), Lucrezio (Titus Lucretius Carus).
Being more a Christian sacred composer than anything else, and lacking a Classics background, I'm utterly unfamiliar with most of these. I understand Catullus is rather rude.
I suspect the pronunciation varies considerably from church Latin, too, though probably not so much that I can't set it well.
I feel a bit like this is a veiled attempt to filter out people who aren't posh enough, or haven't had the "right" educational background. I dislike those kinds of barriers to participation.
So: does anyone have any suggestions for me from those authors? Any passages you'd particularly like to hear me set to music?
