In the last two weeks, some goings-on that speak to the heart of where I am right now:

In early July I attended a one-week intensive in Dalcroze Training  at Carnegie Mellon, which uses movement and the body as the medium through which to teach music theory and practice. It was a sometimes bewildering experience in terms of music theory. I have a lot to work on in that department – my guitar study with Paul Asbell and my bit of preparatory work on piano did serve me very well – but it is exciting to be dunked head-first, inundated, in the music theory world. And it is great to have the connection with movement explicitly explored. And, the piano is quite a siren: she is luring me these days. I tell my guitar not to worry.

This coming week, Paul Besaw and Chong Ho Kim’s international (and experimental) dance musical Good Dirt is playing in barns across Vermont. I contributed song material to the project; really loved working “on assignment” – initial genesis and songwriting task, then hand the songs over to be used, however necessary, in this multi-media project. It brings me back to the knowledge that for me, the songs are primary – not my own performance of them. The songs, I believe in them.  It’s like, I conceive them, watch over their development like a mother with a nest of eggs, and then they fledge. Fly away. I sometimes don’t even quite know them after a while.

But last –  of course I’m very happy to back singing my songs. I will sing them –  familiar and strange  – this Friday July 17th 7:30pm at the Bees Knees in Morrisville, Vermont.