This week seems to have flown by – more so than usual. A funny week too, which has shown me yet again the wild variations that writing for ArtsHub proivdes.
Starting this week I was talking to Dr Kim Walker from the Sydney Conservatorium. She spent the week before at the 70th Anniversary Celebrations of the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. It would seem from her description that like just about every other field of endeavour China has decided to make sure they’re the best in the world. They’ve invested in training classical musicians as well as musicians in traditional Chinese instruments and providing them with the best infrastructure they can.
We were talking about the way musicians, orchestras and academics are transposed around the world to build their careers, and how that breeds cultural understanding. As we talked however, I learnt far more about how Conservatoria around the world are trying to coordinate their degrees and courses to catchup with the way musicians are now working. There were a lot of things I had to look up afterwards, like the Bologna Accord. And to think about, Walker talked about how students today have to learn the theory and music of every age that has been, classical, baroque, new classicism, and presumably contemporary as well, but fit learning it into less time.
Then, the next day I got to have coffee with Lindy Cameron, the crime writer. She’s starting her own publishing company, Clan Destine Press. I’d missed the launch on Saturday night, so she was filling me in. She’d spent six years working for Lonely Planet when it was a much smaller company, and so she’d asked Tony Wheeler to launch Clan Destine for her, which he had. Being someone who’d started small, stapling his books and carrying them round himself basically, she figured he was sympathetic to the enterprise. It was fun to talk about genre writing and how we enjoy sci-fi and fantasy.
Lindy was getting so enthusiastic someone from the table behind us chipped in and started a conversation about the romance and metaphor of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Battlestar Gallactica’s social relevance. Not something that often comes up in interviews, but the danger of cafe venues, I suppose. Most exciting Lindy invited me along to a writing group session. This is very cool, and hopefully will getting me scribbling my own fiction more vigourously, as my NaNo month has not been going well.
Next week, I’ll be writing about the Queenscliff Music Festival, a Hip Hop Street Art ‘festival’ and considering the various political parties arts policies for the Victoria election.