I’ve been in a funk for the past few days as it truly dawns on me that Berklee is not going to call me back about the job I interviewed for. I had a really good Skype interview, and one of the interviewers began talking to me about multiple sections of the class as well as another class. Based on that alone I thought there had been some serious interest in me as a teacher, but now it is quite late in the month for a call-back. Fuck, I really needed a break here. I am stuck in an adjuncting swamp and I can’t seem to get out of it.

Maybe this is why I am spending as much energy as I have playing music lately. I’ve been imagining myself teaching in my field of expertise again rather than teaching general history. Don’t get me wrong, I love teaching no matter the subject, but I really want to be productive in my own field of expertise. This is why I have been lately practicing music and imagining myself teaching the subject - I want to teach to my trained abilities.

So now I need to work on letting go of the idea of teaching at Berklee while not giving up on my musical practice. It’s the music that keeps me grounded as an academic, so giving up on it would just further alienate me from the subject matter I love the most. I feel like I have greatly given up on my search for a tenure track job in my field, and that’s exactly what I can’t allow to happen.

So I need to keep working on the bottleneck repertoire, get back to practicing my fingerstyle jazz repertoire, and re-start my study of the piano. I don’t need to make a big deal about any of it, but I do need to move forward consistently. In fact, let me write a bit on each of these in turn.

Bottleneck guitar: This repertoire is most dearest to my heart - this is how I really want to play the instrument. I’ve spent other blog posts outlining the repertoire I am working on, so here I am just going to write about this style in general. I really love the Mississippi delta style of playing the most, and this is reflected in my practice repertoire by my heavy reliance on tunes by Son House, Charlie Patton, Muddy Waters, and Robert Johnson. This repertoire would be good for party gigs and for street busking.

Fingerstyle jazz: This is an important part of my performance repertoire as it would be good for restaurant and party gigs as well as for street busking. In fact, I really could play these sorts of gigs even if I am just practicing the tunes. What this means is that I need to refamiliarize myself with the tunes I had already memorized a few months ago. It’s all just sitting there, waiting for me to pick it up again.

Piano: Here I am just hoping to learn enough piano to use it for score reading, classroom teaching examples, and theoretical study. Piano is where I really need to be good at reading music, whereas with guitar I need to work on playing by ear. For the piano I just need to work on exercises by Bartok and Haerle as well as the book I have on functional harmony for the keyboard. In fact, this is really the instrument I should be pursuing in order to re-gain my status as a composer. Ten years ago I was still actively composing music, and I need to get back to that sort of musical practice. Piano is also one of the best places for me to be practicing ear training, which is one of the cornerstones of score reading.