One thing I have noticed with regard to this freewriting blog, as I think I have written before, is that the more I write the more I want to write. Just today I had to keep myself from producing a second post until later in the afternoon. The last post I wrote was somewhere between 500-600 words, and I felt like I could keep going. Now that I am back at it, the words are coming pretty quickly.

In a sense, this entire blog is an ethnographic study of how I am seeking to become a better writer. I need to be able to produce text quickly, and I need to be able to discard that text if need be. This is something I found with musical composition - I need to be willing to discard an idea and start over. When I first began to compose the process was so laborious I would keep working at something even if I knew it was crap. The same holds true with writing - I need to be willing to get rid of text that leads nowhere.

That being said, one of the informal rules of this blog is that I don’t discard anything. Freewriting is about putting down ideas as they come, no editing involved. When I do eventually move beyond the freewriting stage (not soon), I will then take the freewritten text and mine it for gold. Until then, I need to just keep pumping out the words.

All of the writing and coding I do is reminding me that I need to reestablish my musical practice. At the very least I need to practice the guitar, but I should also re-start my compositional practice. A while ago I was working my way through Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony, and that seemed to be helpful. But really I need to write music, not exercises. I remember once reading about a guy who blogged a new song every day for a year. I should produce something like that. A future blog project, perhaps. I don’t know about writing a song a day - I’m not a songwriter after all - but it would be cool if I could produce some regular lead sheet compositions, possibly with bare bones recordings and occasional midi renderings. I am a musician, after all, and I have ignored that aspect of my professional skill set for far too long.

One thing I would like to do is record myself playing solo guitar so I can include the audio files in my portfolio site. I already have some sound files of group performances of some of my tunes, but I don’t have anything that highlights my skill as a guitarist…or as a singer, for that matter. I need to be able to highlight the diversity of my skills such that I can justify to potential employers my wide range of professional skills. In essence, I am an academic, a musician, and a budding web developer. All of these skills need to be present in my portfolio, whether they are highlighted on individual pages, or, as is the case with coding, are demonstrated simply by the presentation of a site (I may need to make it clear that I designed and created the site rather than hiring out to someone). The portfolio site is a representation of my entire package of professional skills and accomplishments.

Let me ruminate on this for a while. Musical practice is crucially important to my professional skill set, but I seem to use up a lot of my creative energy learning to code. Let me not ignore the thing that makes me a musical academic rather than just an academic.