aurora lawrie

already forgot my old handle but i'm now @behavioralbard on here

finally getting around to listening to the new Lady Gaga album, and i'm on my third listen in 6 hours :)

Here & following, Matilda explains in just 3 posts why trying to make a piano sound like a harpsichord is not the key to playing Baroque music well on piano!

*performing* music, yes. but the idea that the best way to become good at your instrument is to lock yourself in a practice room alone for hours on end is quite anti-social

but that is a skill that often needs to be taught, in some cases quite explicitly, and in my experience it's often treated as being something that people pick up by watching others do it rather than something to be taught in its own right

yeah, absolutely. i think the key here is in the *independent* interpretation of a score—sometimes what can look like someone engaging with the written material is simply them parroting what they've heard from teachers, & when asked why they've made a particular choice, they're unable to answer

it's Erika Ishii. and i personally don't get why people think their performance is bad.

of course, there's an impossibly massive amount of things that could be studied & discussed, & education systems must always condense, for the sake of logistics if nothing else. i don't want to blame any individual or any one institution for trying to exist within an inhospitable environment

as for the theoretical, there are performance majors who just want to play the parts & not have to consider the contexts in which those exist—& those people are, in my opinion, limited in the scope of their artistry because of that

that is to say, classical music performance education absolutely does not emphasize ANYWHERE NEAR enough the fact that music is a social activity first & foremost

this encapsulates a lot of my gripes with the ways that we teach music performance & split it from the theoretical & social elements

this despite the seemingly widespread understanding that what makes a performance valuable is its uniqueness & the individual's interpretations of the score. but nooo we can't deviate from the acceptable norm (even though doing so & finding failure points is most of what pushes musical innovation)

you joke, but unfortunately music performance students often aren't being taught to interpret scores independently. there's a very real sense of We Must Stick To The Composer's Indications Only & it stifles critical thought

"i feel, right now, that all i am capable of under these circumstances is not enough. that i have failed myself. that i have failed to be the thing that i have said i want to be. and i wonder if this is all there is to life—if all i will ever do is fail myself over and over."

a drawing of a fist with a purple bracelet around it ALT: a drawing of a fist with a purple bracelet around it

Happy Black History Month, and yeah, we're still doing that.

Our ability to freely use public space rescinded, our bathroom use policed and criminalized, our literal freedom of expression declared legally obscene and our very depiction labeled pornography. Fired en masse from the military. Parents who love us declared collaborators and abusers.

Our healthcare infrastructure has been gutted, criminalized, and threatened. Our scientists have been labeled criminals, our scientific literature destroyed. Medications many need to live banned. Our very physiology is officially decreed "mutilated", legally lesser, or declared not to even exist.

If you cannot call it what it is when all in a week: a government removes every mention of a group of people, destroys information about them en masse, bans their discussion in schools, restricts their ability to travel and starts seizing and refusing their official identification, when will you?

Matt Dumba in a Black History Month Wild jersey

Black History Month is extremely important, especially these days. People who scream DEI are just mad that people of other backgrounds can be equally successful. We gotta look out for each other. We are all Americans with our own stories.
#HockeyIsForEveryone

I read an article only last week where something was completely deleted from the archive because somebody complained...

DO NOT assume this is a safe place to store any information

Given all these critical webpages are being taken down, this might be a good time to familiarize yourself with the Wayback Machine on Internet Archive. It can pull up pages that are no longer active:

web.archive.org

Janelle Monáe said it best, i think.

"Hold on, don't fight your war alone/Halo around you, don't have to face it on your own"

"Don't try to take my country, I will defend my land/I'm not crazy, baby, naw/I'm American"

AMERICANS, from DIRTY COMPUTER (2018)

admittedly, the biggest way i'm able to hold onto that hope right now is by focusing on my own life and the things that i can change within it, and less on the bigger political things. that is selfish of me, and that's okay. it's okay if you need to be selfish, too. do what you need to survive this.

i've been avoiding social media lately (i've been doing quite badly for a variety of reasons and haven't wanted doomscrolling to make that worse) but i just want anyone who cares to know: i'm still here, i still have some hope, and i'm not planning on giving up anytime soon.

Opera flourishing in surprising ways | pura musica There are places in this world that keep pulling you back, no matter how far you roam. For me, one of those places is San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. Known as one of the Pueblos Mágicos – magic towns...

‘Opera has found an unexpected home in San Miguel de Allende—a home that deserves all the applause in the world. Before Operísima, there was no opera studio in this part of Mexico, despite the wealth of talent waiting to be nurtured.’

Well. I did it. I submitted my book on the history of how the US government has removed Indigenous children from their families. From colonization to removal to boarding schools to today. For middle schoolers.

I think it's the first book of its kind. I can't believe I got to do it.

i'll do this when they're back online (apparently they're not a 24/7 service, good to know)

damn, imagine not listening to a Jewish person when they say someone's a Nazi. couldn't be me

I lost a 𝘭𝘰𝘵 of friends in 2016 when I said that he was a Nazi, that he was dangerous, and that he would destroy the country.

A bunch of them did an ‘I told you it wasn’t so bad’ in 2020, but I knew he wasn’t done.

Well.

i believe that everyone deserves the opportunity to be forgiven. but they have to fucking work for it first.