Singing in Arlington

Yesterday I went to my first Sacred Harp singing since moving to DC. J and D came with me, and we drove out to Arlington. It was fairly small (3-4 on a part most of the time) and I think they were really glad to have us. It had some weak moments, and some strong moments, but I enjoyed myself thoroughly. I even got up the courage to lead a few songs by myself! We did a few songs from the Christian Harmony book (7 shapes) that were very nice also, but different sounding harmonies from Sacred Harp. It sure felt good to sing again.

This coming Saturday is the Folklore Society of Greater Washington annual mini-festival, and the same group will be singing at that in the afternoon. I'm looking forward to the festival a lot! Especially the sessions on Balkan and Bulgarian singing and some of the fiddling sessions.

Today I finally got some feature writing assignments for SGS, which is very exciting to me. So far I've got 5 features on my list of assignments, and I'll be sure to post when they are published! It looks like they want a couple on Canadian contributions to Folkways to be published in the fall, but I'll be doing the writing and collecting of images and whatnot for those too.

Also on my horizon is to prepare my thesis to submit it for publication. The Smithsonian has an academic press for publishing the research of employees and fellows, and I qualify for that. I don't know if my thesis will pass the peer review process here because they publish short books in series rather than a journal, but I'm going to try anyways.