The first half of spring semester got away from me as a result of my extracurricular activities at the beginning of the term, and then my losing a week from illness. The second half of spring semester got away from me because of the remainder of Lent, Holy Week, Pascha, getting the Orthodox Hoosiers website up and running, presenting a paper as well as singing some Byzantine chant for IU’s Medieval Studies Symposium, and then finishing all of my regular schoolwork for the term. It now being the last 30+ hours of the Paschal season or so, I suppose I should say this one last time: Ortanne Laivino! Anwa ortanne Laivino!
Which reminds me: I’m about twenty pages or so away from finally finishing The Silmarillion. I’ve started it any number of times, and gotten a little farther each time, but I finally made a point to keep forging on ahead, come what may. It’s been a rewarding read; it’s not necessarily Tolkien’s most transparent prose and it is a bit challenging to keep track of who is who the whole way through, but that’s probably just because I’m not terribly bright and it is nonetheless very much worth it. I’ll have more to say on it later.
As the end of the semester was coming into view, a couple of interesting things happened. First, I wound up, somewhat unexpectedly, with a choice as to what I could do this summer. I was offered a summer FLAS again to go back to Greece if I wanted, but the truth is, as much as I want to go back, this summer just didn’t seem like the right time. For one thing, Megan is going to Germany for the next academic year, from the end of September ’10 to the beginning of August ’11, and it’s been six years since we’ve both been home during the summer. For another thing, the logistics of being in Greece this summer would be significantly more complicated than last summer was, and with airfare having jumped since last year, most of my stipend would be spoken for before I ever set foot in the country, and that mostly for “redundant” expenses (i. e., having to pay for two places to live for the summer, one in the States and one in Athens). For yet another thing, I have a mammoth Greek and Latin exam to take in about a year, as well as my qualifying exams in Fall ’11, and my advisor and I agreed that with those events on the schedule, eight weeks in Athens doing Modern Greek would probably not be the best use of my time this summer.
While I was contemplating some of these issues a few months ago, I mused to a colleague that it was too bad History didn’t seem to do any sort of summer support if you didn’t have an instructor position. “Oh, no, that’s not true,” he said. “The e-mail just went out — you can apply for pre-dissertation fellowships.”
“Really? I thought I wasn’t far enough along for one of those.”
“Are you writing your dissertation yet?”
“No.”
“Then you’re pre-dissertation. Apply.”
So, I went ahead and wrote up a research proposal for the summer. My advisor said that people either traveling somewhere or who have taken their exams tend to be more competitive, but that it would be worth a shot.
As it happened, a couple of weeks ago I was notified that I am the Hill and Lilly Pre-Dissertation Fellow for History. On a practical level, it is a much better deal financially than the FLAS was going to be, and it means that both Megan and I can be in the same place for the summer. On an academic level, the project that I proposed will do a lot to prepare me for my impending exams, so hopefully I’ll end the summer feeling reasonably ahead of the game. I will look at trying to go back to Greece next summer; it would probably be good for me to look at the American School of Classical Studies’ Byzantine Greek program, and the nice thing about that is that there are a few different possible avenues of funding which aren’t mutually exclusive. That’s sort of an issue with the FLAS — if you have it, you can’t have anything else. I think the idea is sort of that they want you to have enough money to get where you need to go and do what you need to do, but they don’t want you to have enough money to be distracted by other possibilities.
In any event, I have to blink a bit at the realization that not only has History opened their doors to me, but they also seem interested enough in what I’m doing to want to facilitate it during the summer, too. It’s a nice turn of events to have happened.
The other interesting thing that happened was that, a couple of weeks after Pascha, I got an e-mail from John Boyer asking if I might be available to sing in a concert he was putting on with the Josquin Singers in the Bay Area over Pentecost weekend. Long story short, I flew out to Sacramento this last Saturday, the day after finals week was over, and I’ll be here until Sunday, 23 May. I’ll give the details of the concert in a different post, but it’s a neat project in which to be able to participate, and I’m really glad it’s worked out. To be honest, it’s been a little strange how it’s all come together; I haven’t really actively sought out professional singing opportunities for about five years, and it isn’t exactly like I spent hours talking myself up to John while he was in Bloomington. The trip has already worked musician muscles I haven’t had to work in half a decade; as soon as I got off the plane, John asked, “How are your dictation skills?” Turns out there is this three-part Russian setting of the First Ode of the Paschal Canon for which the score has not yet been published, but John wanted to do it in the concert anyway, so I was given the task of transcribing it. It was reasonably easy until the last repeat of the troparion; that’s 40 seconds of polytonal madness, and it took me about two days to get anything that seemed even reasonably close. I will be very curious to look at the published score and see just how many laughs are warranted. (Many thanks, incidentally, to Ivan Plis at Georgetown University, aka “SlavicPolymath,” for giving it a listen and confirming that much of what I had come up with was about as close as we were gonna get.)
That’s the long and the short of it for now. More a bit later. One last time for this year, probably: Christ is risen! Truly he is risen!
Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist 