Recent rantings from the Cilvach

reading week - it has become my most favorite week out of the academic semester.  The music department is a department that is on the go nearly 24/7, busy with lectures, concerts, rehearsals, tutorials, seminars, etc. etc. etc. ...

but then, there is reading week. 

I am allowed to be a student all day long again; no teaching, no preparing for study skills and no seminars to attend; I can sit all day and work on my treatise by Odington, trying to figure out what made him decide to add something about Isidore instead of Boethius.  It is hard work, and after an hour or so, I am quite exhausted from the Latin text.  But it is the joy of working through something difficult to find one thing, just one, little thing, which to many may seem largely insignificant - and in all honestly, you would be right to assume so - that makes my work rewarding.  My treatise has been neglected by scholars, although it is one of the only works that was written in Britain at the time, and was admired by the great Charles Burney to be the most significant treatise written and in fact claimed, in his very flowery manner, that if all other music treatises were lost for some reason, nothing would be missed.

The days are getting longer, which makes me very happy.  Wales was beautiful today and the view of the ocean from my desk at work called me out into the golden sunshine.  Daffodils are blooming and there are several purple carpets of crocuses under the trees that I walk by everyday.