Miles Runs The Voodoo Down

Registration for spring classes starts next week, and as I was perusing this Polcolonial Musicology course and other related tutorials, I came across the fascinating Dr Henkjan Honing.  Daniel Levitin mentions Honing’s research in his book, but Honing himself articulates the subject much better:

Watch this video.

I may try to sneak into a few lectures for Honing’s Music Cognition course next semester!

D.A.N.C.E.

I just found out this morning I was accepted to the Cultural Analysis research master’s program at the Universiteit van Amsterdam!  It’s been two years since I was last in Amsterdam, and I’ve been trying to get back there ever since; now I’ll be living there for the next two years!

So what is Cultural Analysis and why the heck am I going to the Netherlands for grad school?  Well the program is an incredibly interdisciplinary adventure that studies and creates inquiries into several phenomena surrounding the production and circulation of contemporary culture using objects and artifacts (in the broadest sense) as a point of departure.  More specifically, the faculty encourages students to

analyze cultural phenomena – such as social systems of belief and value, works of art and literature, film and the new media – and their conceptual underpinnings as well as their aesthetic and social-material structures. We emphasize textual, visual and historical details and also the implied normativity and the ways in which identity, difference and otherness are negotiated across the various media.