Inception.

I really need to be writing a paper on Lermontov right now, but instead I will give a short introduction.

Having spent the majority of my undergraduate career as a voice performance major, I did not have the time to take many intellectually stimulating courses. That is not to say that one does not need a critical brain to be a musician (notice how I did not say a 'singer or a musician' thereby implying that singers are not musicians, because they are!), but it is an entirely different type of critical thinking. As a consequence of following a curriculum saturated with music classes and dessicated of courses in the humanities, I lost a bit of my ability to express myself eloquently and coherently, using sound arguments and a varied vocabulary. It is my desire that this blog will help me in honing my thought process and my writing ability, both in word choice, variety of vocabulary, and grammar.

What will I tell you lovely people about? My thoughts on the current state of opera, mostly, with youtube videos or suggested recordings that examine and display the changes, mostly for the worse, that were engendered by the digital age. I will also discuss my favorite composer, Vincenzo Bellini, who is wildly misunderstood, underestimated, and wrongly lumped into that catch-all category of bel canto. I also really enjoy Renaissance and Baroque sculpture and their parellels in music, so we'll have a visual portion in addition to aural!

Finally, I myself would like to investigate how classical music (once again, especially opera and the vocal medium) has evolved alongside cultural and political trends, concentrating on the question "How is it relevant today?"

Also, I will provide some sassy commentary on my life.

My personality heritage? A combination of Dorothy's caustic wit and Blanche's proclivity for men (if you are Golden Girls fans) alongside a very traditional outlook on life and society (I am often accused of trying to maintain propriety even in the most inappropriate of situations), while always striving to understand every side of an argument and never allowing myself to fall into the terrible trap of everything being either black or white.

- S. Jude