Catching Up

   Various summer activities have prevented me from posting in over a month, so this will be kind of a catch-up entry. Further pursuing music and sustainability through sound studies in the natural world, I've turned to a couple of concepts, namely reflection and echo, that seem to hold possibility. I hope to say more about them here and in my public lectures in the fall. Three await: one at the University of Tennessee, another at Northeastern University, and the third at the Ecomusicologies conference in New Orleans.

   An invitation came along to spend nearly a week in early October in Knoxville at the University of Tennessee, giving a talk on music and sustainability, visiting some classes and speaking about my work and theirs, and being available to faculty and graduate students. This short-term visiting professorship is agreeable work and something I've done before, at the University of Alabama, and also at Florida State University. I very much look forward to that, and to an event coming right on its heels, a symposium at Northeastern University with special guests from the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. I was invited to give a presentation in the symposium, and will look forward to seeing some old acquaintances from China including Professor Zhang Boyu, who will be leading the symposium. One of the other presentations is by the Chinese scholar Yu Renhao and is titled "Music of Original Ecology and Original Ecology of Music." I'm not sure what "original ecology" means in this context, but am eager to find out. Finally, I will be presenting at the Ecomusicologies 2012 conference in New Orleans at the end of October, on Thoreau's importance for students of ecology and music. I will have more to say about all this in the coming weeks.