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Hello and welcome to Song Acts: my new research newsletter.

I had always planned to establish a blog and newsletter to publish some of the results of my research as they emerged. My PhD project — titled 'Song Act Theory: Musical Performance as Performance' — was rather sprawling and amorphous, but I hoped this would encourage me to formulate my ideas in an accessible and concise way. Nevertheless, it has taken me a long time to figure out what I am actually writing about, and thus what kind of ideas would be worth developing and sharing. Two years into the project, I finally know what I'm doing (even if I still find it difficult to articulate), and hence how to use this platform to represent the spirit of the project in the best way possible.

I aim to post something either weekly or fortnightly, depending on what else is going on, and I will try to make these relatively short and relatively accessible for a general readership. Readers can expect some analysis and criticism of popular and 'everyday' music, introductions to some of the key ideas and approaches developed in my work, probably a lot of freestyle philosophising, and maybe some more personal/autobiographical reflections.

And in this spirit of personal reflection, I want to start by sharing a few goals for this newsletter as a parallel writing practice to complement my thesis:

1. I want to experiment with expressing myself succinctly, producing work quickly, and publishing thoughts or ideas that are still somewhat 'rough' or 'unfinished'. I hope this might allow readers to gain a familiarity with my approach and share their responses while this approach is still developing. The topic of my research is not some area of specialist knowledge. It is something that should by its nature be equally available to everyone for contemplation: our experience of the thing we call 'music' and its relation to our shared everyday reality. Thus, every conversation I have with friends and colleagues about the project provides useful data for the project itself, not only where I find my theories confirmed in the experiences of others, but also where some unexpected discrepancy in our respective experiences emerges. This has proven to be the best thing about the PhD so far.
   
   
2. I want to resuscitate my former (amateur) practice as a critic and theorist, from back in the blogger days, if only because the roots of this current project can be traced back to that earlier work. Ultimately, I am interested in what it means to write about music — what it means to be able to use the word 'music' to refer to certain phenomena in the world — and I believe that critical discourse is one of several 'theatres' in which music has historically been remade, reborn, renewed, etc. I also believe that the death of music criticism has accompanied a broader crisis in our ability to talk about music: a crisis, indeed, of music's 'objective' reality as something 'out there' in the social world, rather than a kind of epiphenomenon of the self that resides within our own personal streaming algorithms. And I have come to view this crisis as a very serious one indeed, obstructing the revitalisation of a social practice that is itself fundamental to our reimagining forms of conviviality.
   
   [[ I have come to the conclusion that writing about music is impossible. Or, I should say, it is literally impossible, in the literal sense that there is no 'literal' music. Nevertheless, to act as if such a thing were possible — to 'take music literally', by persevering in the challenge of writing (and speaking) about it — is to reinvent the kind of musical fictions that form the basis for music's extra-ordinary effects in the world. (And if this doesn't make any sense yet then please subscribe to the newsletter and hopefully I can break it down...) ]]
   
   
3. Honestly, I just want my head to feel a bit lighter. My experience of the past few months, as I commit each chapter draft to paper, has been one of physical relief. Perhaps even more so than most PhDs, the topic of my project is really just myself: I'm trying to rationalise, summarise, generalise and externalise a particular way that I have come to think about music, and its relation to theatre, over the course of my life. This is a way of thinking about music that, as far as I can see, hasn't yet been adequately captured by anyone else in (English-language) academia, in a way that would make me feel a sense of recognition. The wager of my project is that I'm not a complete freak, and that this personal way of thinking about music may be shared (however unconsciously) by at least a few other people, enough to produce that feeling of recognition and thus of illumination in those others, and perhaps a more general appreciation of the variety of musical experiences that coexist within a single place, time, community, or even within a particular individual.
   
   To a certain extent, the 'myself' who appears on the page when I write is just as much a mystery to the 'I' who writes as the 'myself' whose experience of music I'm trying to understand. "I don't know what I think until I write it down": a thought that has itself been written down many times, most famously by Joan Didion. Perhaps it is true for most people; it is certainly true for me, to the extent that I often experience my own brain — when speaking back to me in written text — as an independent person, albeit someone to whom 'I' have privileged access. As with the practice of diary-writing I suppose, the 'self' that I encounter on these pages can appear to have a stronger sense of continuity than the various selves I find myself inhabiting out in the world. In this way, I'm really writing all of this for myself. But this very fact also seems to say something more general about the purpose and value of talking/writing about music, and about 'music' as something to be talked/written about.
   
   Some of the ideas that are only being fully expressed now have been lurking in the dark recesses of my brain since I was 21 years old. Others were triggered by books that I read last week. But now they've started coming, I can't stop them; I want all these thoughts out! Maybe I'll never write another word about music after 2028. But until then...

...subscribe to Song Acts!