So lots of people on these blogs are telling us about how their studies are going. And I am doing a course , a masters in music with the Open University. Although a humble accountant, a bean counter, a book-keeper, I have decided to puruse the path of personal and professional self improvement. But there is a problem. I am undergoing what a former boss described as a ‘motivational crisis’ by which he meant of course that he could not be arsed. But given that he was President of Sales for a satellite corporation and earning over £250k year it was not appropriate for him to express himself using that sort of language. In the office.
Almost exactly half way through a 3 year course in musicology I find myself deep in a miasmatic fog lurching past musical concepts which loom ominous and large before me and then disappear giggling into the murk which surrounds me. Here is the ‘work concept’ described at poetic length by Lydia Goehr in her wonderful book. I manage to understand some of the basic elements but when I pause and turn I find that my understanding has left me and is laughing at me in the fog alongside the ‘work concept’ itself.
This detail illustrates my difficulty. The light which shone on my first early efforts and which I hope will shine when I am up the grassy uplands of the final year does not penetrate to the deep dark region of the middle year.