Day 75 - Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life

Twelve days have passed without me posting.
Twelve eventful days.
During that time, my country has voted to stay within the UK, to my disappointment, and I have been promoted. The term has started properly and we've got through a week of teaching and nothing has gone wrong. Yet.
I may go back and fill in the blanks another time, but I'd much rather just keep on going for the time being.

Half of the problem for a high functioning procrastinator like me is that we have excellent plans for tomorrow. As the days pass us by, our deadlines move steadily into the future, keeping a parallel course. As long as tomorrow is the day we start our new gym regime, research project, rewritten slides, etc., we can feel not too awful about ourselves, enough to carry on with life.

And life doesn't stop happening, especially in academia. The emails keep on coming in that need to be answered today, the students have crises that need to be addressed today, and suddenly you have to teach the class that you were going to prepare tomorrow a week ago. This is all familiar territory for many of us and we make a virtue of our ability to cope with whatever life and our institutions throw at us, all the time entertaining the illusion that we will do better tomorrow.

So how do we stop the treadmill and actually address this? I don't actually know, and I'm in the process of trying to work it out. So far, I'm not doing a great job, but I'm doing better than I have in the past, which has to count for something surely. I suppose part of the problem is that every successful solution to this sort of dilemma is not just one solution, but is a concatenation of a series of coping strategies. It is unrealistic to organise your entire life and expect it to run to plan tomorrow, but better to address it in phases. This requires a bit of analysis of what it is you want to address. What will make a difference to tomorrow? No. What will make a difference to today? Implement one phase. Don't get annoyed that you haven't changed everything. Be patient. Make realistic plans over a series of weeks instead of just trying to change tomorrow. No. Instead of just planning to change tomorrow.

So tomorrow I'd better do something about that.
Or at least try.

Day 53 - Changing Face of Research

Today, I'm not really talking about the actual way that the sector is changing. I don't really think I have enough experience to discuss that. It's more that I want to talk about how the way that my institution is thinking about changing things.

Currently, we have six different centres for research based around English and Creative Writing, Publishing, Design, Media, Music, and Film respectively. Some of these research groups coincide with departmental (and therefore managerial) hierarchies, but not all. Some of these research groups coincide with REF Units of Assessment, but not all. Some of these centres have defined identities that function almost as a brand, others are more amorphous.

For me, looking at these groups, it seems clear that some of these groups are built around areas of excellence, where a clear specialism has been identified, but others are there to support research activity irrespective of any top-down strategic thought. I think that both approaches have their place, but that they shouldn't be confused.

Recently, we discussed the possibility of reshaping research areas into four: Music and Performing Arts, Art and Design, English and Creative Writing, and Media. I think that it's likely that existing 'brands' will remain as centres of activity, but not necessarily centres of support. From my perspective, this is a good move, and it means that it will be easier to develop a narrative around Music, Drama, and Performing Arts for the next REF in 2020. It also addresses the confusion (mentioned above) between areas of excellence/activity, and areas of research support. Although it means that more research areas will not map on to department areas, I don't think that this will lead to more problems, but may well alleviate areas where this is an issue.

This isn't just a matter of achieving consistency, but it's a matter of achieving parity. If there are many areas where the person in charge of the research centre is not necessarily the person managing the staff within the research centre, then there has to be a protocol or shared practice for including research in their workload, rather than the rather piece-meal approach we have at present. At least that's what I'd like to think.

While there are potential drawbacks to this approach (I will have more staff to support but no more time to do it in, for example; I will also have to liaise with at least two line managers rather than one) but I believe that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.

It is somewhat ironic that this is happening as the University decides to reintegrate the two parallel areas of organisation that were established a few years ago: schools and institutes. Now, all research activity will be managed within the school, and teaching and research brought closer together. The parallel path would have been to ensure that all research centres were integrated with departments, but I'm glad that the opposite has happened. I suppose it could be said that the true irony was that although the School and Institute were separate, many of our Centres were identical to our Departments (and therefore the structure did not really change what was happening at 'grass roots' level, but problematised its management and organisation), and that this proposed change could energise rather than restrict research activity.

So, there is change in the air, which is just as well because there's change in the air nationally as well. There may be trouble ahead, but while there's moonlight, and music, etc...

Day 12 - An investment of time

I'm writing this late.
I have in front of my a page of chords, and, open on my computer, a spreadsheet of times that these chords come in a piece.
I am trying to make them marry up.
They are not playing ball.
So I'm going to leave them to it and come back tomorrow.

I could have probably sat down at a desk and done all of this manually, with a series of durations (worked out on the spreadsheet and then printed out), and a series of chords, written out manually. Instead, I have chosen to use OpenMusic.
If I had done this manually, I would have probably finished the piece about six months ago.
But then again, I don't think I would. It's a rather boring task, and not a very fulfilling one, and by working with this software, I'm trying to find ways of working that are more efficient, and that keep me interested. A long time ago (2005?), Richard Barrett advised me to be much more pragmatic about how I work, and although, at the time, I didn't know what he was talking about really, it's become more evident to me, now that my composition time is packaged into small chunks when I'm trying to avoid the housework, how relevant and urgent this advice has become.

So I come back to this fact that I'm slaving away spending so much time messing around with the software trying to make it do what I want it to do, and, in effect, I'm not at all being pragmatic with my time.
But here's the thing.
I intend to use OpenMusic a lot in the future, and to use MIDI to input a lot more raw pitch material, and an investment of time now should make things easier in the future.

This is true, I think, of a lot of things.
Sometimes we just have to bite the bullet and get down to really getting under the skin of a new strand of research or teaching, a new piece of software or technology, or whatever, despite the fact that it seems to be a waste of time.
At our recent Faculty Research Conference, one of the nuggets of advice I offered up to soon-to-be-graduating PhD students was that you have to be willing to invest some of your own time and energy (and sometimes money) into your research in order to make the headway that will convince anyone else to believe in it.
This is quite important I think.
I've said before that this is not a job like most others, and the research angle is certainly not.

Day 10: Tapdancing on Shifting Sands

What is my research field? What do I teach?
I get asked these questions by other academics occasionally, and I'm not quite sure what to answer.

During my time teaching in my current post, I've been required to fill in a number of gaps that have needed filling due to staff illness or staff moving to new posts. I have taught on nearly every single module on the programme, and teach a reasonably significant number of students from the Popular Music programme as well. When a module looked like it might be shut down, I have stepped in. Where a replacement lecturer hadn't been found, I have stepped in.

Now this may sound like I'm bragging, and I don't want it to sound like that. I've invited these challenges and I have refused to let myself get pinned down to one job description. While it has been a challenge, I enjoy the challenge and I feel it has expanded my awareness of what it means to be a musician, and to listen to music, and to write music, and to think about music. There have been times where I've felt frustrated that, because of my versatility, I was being moved out of one area to cover another because I could, not to match my own strengths, but, if I'm honest with myself, I always found something to get excited about in the new area.

If I had come into the job and refused to teach anything other than composition or 20th century history or analysis, I wouldn't have been much use. Those subjects, the subjects that I was trained in, and experienced at teaching, were already being covered by other staff. In order to thrive, I learned new skills, and through that, I've grown.

When I started teaching, I was a composer, but I was a composer in crisis (more on that another day) and I'm still trying to find my way back towards seeing myself as a composer again. What has happened in the meantime, is that I have discovered that I have potential as a musicologist. At least, that's maybe what you'd call me. I don't really like the term. My conference papers that I have given, and the articles (and book(s)) I want to write have grown out of my teaching, combined with my knowledge of 20th/21st century music, aesthetics, music psychology, etc. Today, I have been reading about Music & Consciousness to see if my thoughts and plans can fit into this field. I think that most people pick a field and stick to it rather than thrashing around like me. I think that I'm still looking for where I fit, because I suspect that I fit between a lot of these categories.

I suppose my advice to a new lecturer would be to not stand still, and to not be afraid of investigating new fields. But at the same time, keep some stability. Constantly throwing yourself into new areas is disorienting and, to an extent, I'm only just recovering from that instability now. Don't feel like you necessarily have to fit into the structures that have been allotted you. Your line manager may tell you that is the lot of the academic, but I refuse to believe this. This job is not like any other (as I'll bang on about again and again) and we have the power, and (dare I say it) the responsibility to forge our own areas of teaching and research (within a team structure - again, not enough space or time to talk about that today...). As Elton John sings, 'change is gonna do me good'.

Looking back now, I can see that, to some extent, the seeds of my current practice were there in my PhD commentary - the post-structural critical theory, the pseudo-psychology - although I was blind to it at the time. This is what I want to be teaching in the future, and I'm finally happy with this area. At least I think so... Ask me again in a couple of years.