Dissertation Camp Goals Blog
I am a 5th year PhD candidate in music education with a speciality in the nexus of culturally relevance, creativity, and the skills that are required for a lifetime of music making. I am using this summer's writing camp to edit and submit a proposal for my dissertation. I have worked on the proposal and literature review but my area us quite specialized. Here is a rationale for the work I do... I had the good fortune to sit in on Bela Fleck’s keynote speech at the IBMA convention in Raleigh recently. In it, he reflected on his own journey from playing “by the rules” to breaking the rules, to coming back again. He quoted Miles Davis as saying, “Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself." This spirit of spontaneous individualism is what we find in fiddling that many of us might not have found or been able to express in violin playing. And nowhere does a player find themselves faster than in the art of improvisation. Improvisation…...