Readers of this blog might not know that one of my hobbies is music. I’ve played piano all of my life and (mis)spent a portion of my high school and college days bashing around in a series of bands which ranged from cow-punk to Grateful Dead covers. I still play a bit, though as with all things when in graduate school, the amount of time one can devote to outside avocation suffers.
Nevertheless, it’s a subject in which I remain intensely interested and so it was my great pleasure to learn of a new blog that combines both my vocation and avocation together: An Imperfect Pen. It’s only the first month, but he blows me away with the quality, focus, and regularity of his posts. It helps that the site fulfills one of my basic rules for online writing: Good blogs are about SOMETHING and use that theme as a foundation to then explore other ideas and subjects.
The author, Peter Micic, describes his mission thus:
I am a specialist in Chinese music history interested in a vast range of topics, ranging from exploring the complexity of gender relations among music-makers in late imperial China, the revival of musical styles from China’s musical past, the transliteration of foreign musical terms into the Chinese language (including loan words and neologisms), and from the way that globalization affects music cultures around the world. I am fascinated by problematizing history rather than accepting our often cozy assumptions of it, and am committed to finding ways to reach and engage both specialists and the general public.
I highly recommend checking it out.
This goes great with James Millward’s new blog on the history of stringed instruments:
http://worldonastringblog.blogspot.com/