Thesis Season

It's been a long and painful trip through the realm of Picking a Thesis Topic. I'm just getting started in the ethnomusicology world (am actually finishing up my performance masters this year), and I have so many things I want to learn more about. My experience with large, musicology-related papers has been that, as I eke out the final few pages, I come across something that could probably turn the paper into a dissertation, and would probably keep me interested until the dissertation was done. That having been said, I was having a tough time committing to a thesis topic; it felt a little like marriage.

I did some work last year on "minimalism" (the catch-all name for the work of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley) and its relationship with techno. I ended up digging more on the minimalism side, as I'm a little bit of a Steve Reich freak. While I've heard (and vastly enjoyed, and danced to) a lot of techno in my day, I didn't know much about it when I started the project. I felt like I didn't know much when I finished the project, either. I wanted to dig up more. So when I found a passing remark in an article on the religious nature of the rave culture about the number of women DJs being comparatively small, I got sucked in.

I'm very much looking forward to this year. Hopefully I will learn a lot about an area of techno that is rarely discussed.