Tuesday, January 22, 2008

I did some work today!

Just to update those who care, I worked on an expansion of a musical analysis that is in my dissertation. Being away from musical transcription for a long time meant that writing out a simple melody seemed to take forever. I can only assume that the next bit of the melody line will be easier since I'm now "in the zone" (of course, I'll be "out of the zone" tomorrow when I continue to do this work).

I'm going to now read a bit of a book that I'm to review for Popular Music, so that I can get a review out to them sometime soon. I just need to get back into it; I need to read to the end of the chapter I was on.

I'm also continuing Pullman's The Golden Compass. There's something that bothers me about the title, though. It has been published here as The Golden Compass, although the original title is Northern Lights. There isn't a compass in the book, although the althiometer is compass-like, and I can only suppose it's golden. But why do the publishers (or whoever) think that they need to change the name of the book for the American (or North American) audience? The same thing happened with the American version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (called ...and the Sorcerer's Stone in the U.S.).

I'd also like to start to read Nadine Hubbs' The Queer Composition of America's Sound: Gay Modernists, American Music, and National Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). First step is to take it off the shelf.

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