Back to School (Jason)...

It's been five years since I last attended class. After such a long time off, I feel like it's the first day of kindergarten. I'm so excited but really nervous too: Can I keep up the 3-books-a-week pace? Am I going to be as smart as everyone else? Can I really subsist on grilled cheese sandwiches for the next 5-6 years? Will I ever get a real job?

I guess I just have to say I'm very glad that to have an extremely understanding and patient wife. Heck, this would all be near impossible without her!!!

So my schedule is as follows: I'll be T.A.-ing for both a World Music Cultures class and a Popular Music in America class (which meets three days a week at 8 a.m...crap). I'll mainly just be grading, but with nearly 300 students in the two classes combined, it's going to be a load of work. As far as my classes, I'm taking World Music Seminar, Introduction to Ethnomusicology, and African Soundscapes--pretty cool stuff! I'll also be playing in the Balinese Gamelan Ensemble.

We had a department meeting last Thursday where they gave us the typical "this is really hard and you won't make any money so if you can think of anything else you'd rather do, you should do it!" speech. I always think this is a really dumb speech, because--honestly--I'd rather be the starting power forward for the Los Angeles Lakers, but that's really hard too. And seriously, what do expect me to do: "yeah, you're right, grad school is kinda hard, so even though I've already moved out here to Nowhere, Florida (which Tallahassee basically is), registered for all my classes, and paid my tuition, I think I'll just pack up, move back to Fort Worth and work at Blockbuster for the rest of my life."

We were also told that we already need to be thinking about our thesis (umm, okay, I haven't even taken a class yet) so that we can start gearing our coursework towards our area of research. That sorta took me by surprise. I mean I have a vague idea of what I want to focus on--something to do with Africa and music and spirituality (I think)--but I was hoping to take a few classes in various areas first and see what interests me. Anyway, after thinking about it for a few days, I'm thinking about studying the effects of the American missionary movement on indigenous music and how new churches in various cultures have or have not adapted Western hymnody in ways which stylistically integrate their own music (see, I'm already talking like a grad student, heehee). I think it would be interesting to get into both the pros and and the cons of the issue as well. It's easy for some of us more left-leaning types to get all high and mighty when we see cultures replacing their own traditions with Western religious practices, but you have to realize that there are also great positives to the spread of Christianity, and I mean on a very tangible sociological level (as opposed to evangelical notions of eternal salvation). For example, in Africa, the tribes that aren't at war with each other are often the tribes that go to church together. Of course, that gets away from just the musical aspect of the issue, but that's a big part of what this whole field is about: studying larger cultural and social issues through music.

Anyway, it's a complex issue, and it should provoke a lot of debate. We'll see how the profs like it.