It has been a big week for me! When I was at work on Monday, I slipped while riding my bike and broke my ankle in 3 places. This has reduced me to being unable to walk unassisted for 6 weeks, and not being able to run for 3 months. I’m a very active person who likes to do some sort of physical activity every day, so this has been a hard adjustment to make!
In 2023, I wrote down everything that I read, watched, or played to completion. I’ve tracked books on Goodreads since 2017, and it’s nice to see my progress over time. Tracking books helped me to read more, because I was aware of how much I was reading and it gave me a little thrill to add them to my Goodreads account. Last year, though, I got a Hobonichi diary, which is a fancy Japanese brand of diary. The diary helped with my productivity and mental health immensely (more on that another time), but it also has a two page spread at the back entitled “My 100”. Upon seeing this, I thought it would be the perfect place to write down everything I finished in 2023, books and all (I ended up spilling into other pages, for a total of 108 things finished in 2023). In this post, I’ll go through my favourite media that I finished. Not all of these are from this year, so instead it’s more just my personal list from things I finished this year.
Recently, ANU announced it was closing the Art and Music library branch. Of course, they have been very tight-lipped on the details, so we don’t know exactly what that entails. What we know is: that the physical location of the library will be repurposed into study spaces for students; some materials will be moved into ANU’s main Chifley Library, and the rest will be stored in a repository and can be borrowed by request online. I was very disheartened by this news, so I went on a big borrowing spree last week before the doors closed and borrowed about 30 books. Anything that looked remotely relevant to my research, I borrowed. Yes, I probably should have done this earlier anyway – I have typically done most of my research online, which I suspect is a reason for this decision. But as I’ll go on to explain, I think this is a short-sighted reason to close a library.
Last week, I was able to attend the 46th Musicological Society of Australia (MSA) conference in Adelaide. This is one of Australia’s two largest music conferences, the other being the Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). This is, then, the place to be to see what current topics are being researched in Australian music studies.
In this post, I discuss musicology in Australia and the sorts of research currently being done in this area.