Swotd, Part 11: One year down

Just like the title says: I survived my first year at Harvard! I turned my last two term papers in just now, so I'm free until the end of June, when Latin starts. Time to get something published!

Final word count: 49,951

Final page count: 182 (double-spaced, 12-pt, Microsoft Word, lots of pictures. Which are called 'Figures' when you're a big important music theorist...)

Footnotes: 197

Counting the book review and final project from Suzie's class as one regular sized term paper (which together, they basically are), my average paper is 8,325.166 words or 30.333 pages long, and has 32.888 footnotes. #nerd

The workspace today is my desk at my part time job, where I'm an office assistant in the Molecular and Cell Biology Department. Nobody's here because it's the Center for Brain Science retreat today, so I'm pretty much having a Tom Cruise Risky Business kind of afternoon...

Sentence(s) of the Day is one of the last passages I wrote in my Sound Studies paper:

It is thus hardly surprising that Lloyd Adams Noble believes that the selections in Songs of Harvard belong vividly “to Harvard, to the stadium, to the torch-light progression, and to commencement-day,” because, in a sense, they literally do belong to those locations and events. As “aides-memoires,” as DeNora calls them, the songs in Noble’s book bear traces of memory, for him and for his intended audience. This accounts for the intense popularity of college songs, then as now: they offer a glimpse of our treasured past. 

Swotd the eighth

This is the lovely Spaulding Reading Room in Harvard's Loeb Music Library. I went down here to do some reading this afternoon, thinking that it would be better to focus on reading away from my computer. However, I quickly realized that at this late stage in papering, I needed to be writing based on the things I got out of this book, not simply jotting down notes, so I went back upstairs.

Which raises an issue I've been thinking about a lot--outlining. A graduate colleague of mine posted on Facebook recently that, after he spent a few days reading, thinking, and outlining, he cranked out more than 25 pages in two days. My process is slower than that, and I'm wondering if it would improve my efficiency if I spent a while simply reading and researching and outlining exactly what I'm going to say before I actually attempt to write. My current process is to dive right in--write a few pages when I first start and I'm really excited, then a few more as I read more sources, then lots more as I tie things together. While I always start with the general point I want to make, the form of the argument emerges only in the writing process itself. Maybe next semester, I'll start trying to outline in advance more and see what happens...

The Sentence of the Day, the opening line of my Sound Studies paper, is one of the least-musicological one's I've written:

On any of six or seven crisp autumn Saturdays, the north side of Columbus, Ohio is besieged by over 100,000 scarlet-and-gray clad Ohio State football fans.

Sentence and Workspace of the Day

The workspace: security desk at Paine Hall during an awesomely scary-sounding new music concert

The sentence(s):


The position of college songbooks on the shelves of Harvard’s Loeb Music Library is itself rather suggestive; two shelves of songbooks (Mus 560x) are located directly between the anthems and marches of various national traditions (Mus 540 – 559), and several collections of sea shanties and work songs (Mus 569). This juxtaposition neatly captures the territory occupied by a college song—it incites and focuses the crowd’s fervor in the same way that a work song establishes and regulates the rhythm of rowing or other repetitive group activity; and it signifies and strengthens a communities and traditions.[1]

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[1] Ironically, another tiny themed collection was discovered upon closer inspection during a later library excursion: half a dozen pocket-sized “temperance songbooks,” wedged between the musics of two presumably hard-drinking populations: students and sailors.