I'm giving a talk today at our colloquium series. It's about the roles of complex rhythm in secular music around 1400. Lest you believe that all early music had simple rhythms and was easy to read and perform, here is the opening of a ballade by Anthonello da Caserta, both in original notation and in a modern transcription:




At times, this is a fun and interesting project to work on, but other times I feel like I'm splitting hairs, making stronger claims than are really warranted, and saying things that are pretty obvious anyway.

This is a possible dissertation topic, so I asked to be put on the colloquium series so that I'd have a motivation to work on it in the near term. (I'm also working on my qualifying exams, so it's hard to look past those.) I'm still pretty torn, though. I feel like I have some expertise in this subject, and I also feel like it's all lined up and ready to go: I have a lot of original research already, I know other places I want to look, I even know many of the kinds of chapters I'd want to write. On the other hand, as I mentioned, sometimes I get really tired of this topic (and even the repertoire). I'm assuming that's just the nature of such an all-consuming project as a dissertation.

I've been invited to give this paper at Med-Ren 2010 in England (sounds impressive, but I've heard they accept every submitted paper). On the other hand, I'll be giving another paper--this one on much more familiar, much more well-researched 16th-century music, that seems to me a bit more fun. On the other hand, I have very little expertise in its approach ("transformational analysis"), I haven't worked on it very long (so maybe I'm just not at the point of exhaustion yet), and I don't even really know if it has wide applicability.

Then there's my favorite repertoire, early 20th century music, which I have basically no expertise in at all, and have never written a paper on. On the one hand, I tell myself, for a large, year-or-more-long project, I should be working on music that I won't get tired of--but on the other, I really do enjoy much of the translation and research I've been doing in early music, and maybe extended study would exhaust me on even my favorites.

Dissertations are hard to pin down!

For the purposes of comparison, here's what Oliver and Nadia think of all my hard work: