Forward Planning

What a difference a week makes!!

I had a most informative and enjoyable conversation with Professor Stephen Clift on Friday afternoon. He sent me links to many things that they are doing from, and in, the Sidney de Haan Centre. He has agreed to be my mentor, and so my publication record is going to grow greatly in the next two years, since I can now have feedback from someone working in the same field, before I submit for publication.

Stephen put me onto the AIRS project (Advancing Interdisciplinary Research in Singing) and I have applied to join. This is an international consortium of people, who are all working on the same area. As I have said to friends, I have not be so excited in a long time.

The AIRS project

What became clear in talking to Stephen is that we are working on the same things, and that I am potentially at the 'cutting edge' of this big corpus of work. With the Hilda Ross Glee Club working with the Rotokaura Tuis (a choir of 50 girls from Rotokauri School aged 6 - 12) for a concert at the Hamilton Summer Gardens Festive in February 2010, I have an intergenerational prorgamme starting in about two months. The consortium will allow me to ask questions of anyone else who has done such programmes, and how I can collect usefual data on this, to contribute to the field.

The main and overwhelming feeling and sense I have is that I am no longer working alone, that what I am doing is becoming more and more important and valued in a global sense, and that I can be a significant part of that.