What a start to the year it has been. It’s been a year of deadlines from the get-go, so here I want to share some of things I’ve been up to in the last three (coming up on four) months. I suppose many of these things have only recently started to become actualized, even if I was submitting proposals or recordings or the like for them prior.
This is a year of anniversaries for some of my favorite franchises. It is Final Fantasy’s 35th anniversary, Pokémon and FFVII’s 25th anniversary, and Kingdom Hearts 20th anniversary. As such, the festivities have been going none-stop. Last year, after my presentation on the arrangement of music for Kingdom Hearts and the arrangement of Kingdom Hearts’ own music, I was invited by David Russell (AKA Green Requiem) to join his Kingdom Hearts (Music) Discord. In that Discord, I met Kinode, another Kingdom Hearts researcher and arranger who was one of the organizers for the March Caprice fan celebration of Kingdom Hearts’ 20th anniversary. As one of his musical contributions to the event, he reconstructed the Twilight Town Melodies arrangement from the Kingdom Hearts World Tour Orchestra (see below). This piece was regrettably not featured on the CD recording of the concert, so Kinode’s reconstruction is especially important from a documentary perspective. Anyways, the long and short of it is that I volunteered to perform the horn parts! Unfortunately I didn’t have the space/time to send in a video recording of me performing the parts (and so I’m not visually featured in the video), you can still hear me tooting my horn. Ha.
I think many of my close friends know I have a quiet love for poetry, both in terms of reading and writing (...and sometimes analyzing). I’m not sure what quite possessed me to do this (perhaps Calliope?), but a month ago I was procrastinating writing my dissertation and decided it was finally time to start a project I’ve had on the backburner for quite a while: a short collection of my poetry from across the years. Well. It was intended to be short. I ended up with two versions of the collection. The first, which was essentially all I intended, is a 20-page collection of poems I’ve written across the past 10 years (simply entitled Poems: 2012-2022). The second version ended up being quite a bit more ambitious. It is fully formatted as a book and is broken into three parts (of which the first version is only the first part), along with a preface and an afterword. For various reasons this 90-page collection is entitled Pale Death. This was more a passion project than anything and it came to life (ha) surprisingly quickly. While it’s not something I will freely distribute at this point, I’m thinking about making it available for a small fee (feel free to reach out to me if you’re interested in a copy–I do mean small). With that being said, I wrote my first sonnet the other day and will share it here.
A few other things of relative note outside of ~academia~ before I move into that bit. First, I finally finished playing through NieR Replicant (...5x; gotta love Yoko Taro’s meditations on replay value). I’m still trying to figure out if I like Replicant or Automata better, but I can say with certainty that I have a special love for Kainé. The soundtrack itself is, of course, phenomenal, but the story was… tough. I often had to take a week or two (...or a few months) between my play sessions. Like Automata it’s a heavy game; but a poignant one as well. The second media I watched recently was a film about Lily Yuen (AKA Ruan Lingyu) entitled Center Stage. I came across Yuen’s name a year ago and was quite intrigued by her story. I looked into her only very cursorily at the time, but a few weeks ago my friend randomly posted about her and Center Stage on her instagram story. I actually renewed my library card just so I could rent the film and, a year later to the week, I finally followed up on Yuen and her legacy. The film itself was interesting, a kind of hybrid biopic/documentary. But if you’re unfamiliar with Yuen and her place in film history, I highly encourage you to look into her tragic story.
I suppose that brings me to academia. As with my last post, I want to highlight both successes as well as failures. On the success front, I’m presenting at four different conferences this year, including at a sound studies conference in Korea! (Well… the conference is being hosted by the Music Research Center of Hanyang University, but is taking place virtually.) I wish I could attend and present in person, but the state of the world still discourages that. Anyways, I will be presenting some version of that paper at the North American Conference on Video Game Music, the Differentiating Sound Studies: Politics of Sound and Listening conference, and at Music and the Moving Image XVIII (again, virtually–I desperately miss my trips to NY to present at MaMI). I also presented a poster version of that presentation at UNT last weekend for the Press Start: A Video Game Music Symposium. In terms of failures, I found out a week or two ago that, even though I was a finalist for the award, I did not receive the SMT-40 dissertation award. And even though I am, of course, bummed by this, it’s still a huge honor to have made it as a finalist and for Big Music Theory to have acknowledged me and my work.
Some other things have come up within the last week as well, but we’ll see what the future has to offer. I’m hoping to return to writing some more informal analyses and essays in the near future! But much of my time of late has been taken up juggling the dissertation and other projects. ‘Til then, enjoy this beautiful, hyperdetailed art print by Rain Szeto (AKA @rainfsh) entitled “Cantaloop” I recently framed from her solo show at Giant Robot!
