First Post

There's no better time, I suppose, than March of 2020 to finally sit down and create your own website. I've been planning on creating this site for probably two years now, and have had most of the materials I wanted to include at the very least listed out. Unfortunately, I haven't really had the time or access to technology to construct the actual site until this month (my poor, 6-year-old laptop is not suited to such endeavors). But now my site is published! Huzzah and all that yazz. It's still in the works at some level, but I'm satisfied with its skeleton.

So, then, what all can you expect to find here? Certainly, a list of some of the things I'm currently think about/working on. And while the focus in that regard might tend academic, I want this space to reflect other aspects of my life as well. To that end, even though I perform considerably less than I did five years ago, I wanted to include some of my music on the site, both in terms of recordings of my playing, as well as some of my compositions and arrangements. I'm hoping that in posting them, I'm also encouraged to continue practicing these skills, especially since that hasn't really been the case of late.

I'm also going to include some writings that aren't (necessarily) academic. Most obvious among these are my some of my poems. I've been writing poetry since I was a child, though started to more actively engage with it during my undergrad days thanks to the encouragement and mentorship of John Phillip Santos. Now at Northwestern, I try and attend the events put on by the poetry and poetics cluster as often as I can (thanks to Sorrel Dunn and especially Isaac Ginsberg Miller for keeping me in the loop on these); I also participated in a graduate creative writing group for my first 2.33 years here, though that has unfortunately fizzled out.

Other writings might come in the form of blog posts (I'm still trying to figure out how or what exactly I'm going to relegate to the blog), interviews I conduct (I definitely have a backlog I need to transcribe), miniature music analyses (I'm ostensibly a music theorist after all), and longer essays (on topics ranging from Pokémon cards to print collecting). Some of these may even just be posts saying "hey, check out this artist I just found on Instagram!" (currently, actually, that might be CYON, on insta as @cyoooooon [six o's]). Anyways, we shall see.

As a final, potential, possible, maybe (but, above all, certainly not a definitely), I may post some of my personal art as well. I used to be much more free with sharing my art, but have become somewhat reserved with it, I think largely because I have not spent a ton of time dedicated to it of late (which seems to be a recurring trend). I primarily work in acrylics and pastels, and consider my work my influenced by my grandfather (Mel Casas), Yoshitaka Amano, and Alphonse Mucha. Mayhaps I'll write a separate essay or blog post on that topic...

But yeah. This is a first post (una primera publicación), so I'm not intending it to go on forever. I mostly just want to give you, dear reader, a sense of what you might find on my site.

In social distance solidarity,

Stefan