Of all the areas I have studied, probably the furthest removed from the consensual reality (i.e. “normal culture”) of North America is that of Magic. Were many of my colleagues studied Eastern religions, such as Buddhism, in order to get a handle on how cultures conceptualized and formalized technologies of the mind, I was [...]

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Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
“The Scottish Play”, Act 5, Scene 5
To pleasant songs my work was erstwhile given, and bright were all my labours then; but [...]

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A couple of days ago, Max Forte put up an excellent post on Trinidadian music taking an in-depth look at one particular performance piece and, if you haven’t read it yet, you really should. One line in particular has been rattling around in my brain every since I read it:
Shadow and Sonia do [...]

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A friend of mine of at the SWC just posted a link through to a YouTube video of a song that used to be a favorite of mine back when I was singing in bars.

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One of the more interesting things I’ve done in the past few years is to look at how “myths” influence corporations and other organizations. In February, my friend and colleague at Insignia (I’m the Anthropologist in Residence there) Lydia Zorn and I presented some of this at the MRIA QRD conference in Toronto. [...]

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This quote, from Wm. Congreve, conceals a series of truths have been on my mind for the past few days.  Last Thursday, I traveled to Sackville New Brunswick with the Ottawa Bach Choir to attend Podium 2008 at Mount Alison University,  All in all, a varied and quite interesting trip.
Podium is an interesting “conference” - [...]

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Things have been somewhat hectic for the past month or so what with preparing to head off to Europe for a choir tour. And, given the fact that you have to pay for wireless access over here, I haven’t been able to get online until late last night.
We started this tour on Wednesday after [...]

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On Friday November 24th, the Ottawa Bach Choir performed a concert based on Ventian Polychoral music: Gabrielli, Monteverdi, Bach, Handel, etc. This is my fourth season singing in the group and it just gets better. For me, this concert marked the end of a really busy period of work with Insignia: over 30 days [...]

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