Charles Starrett
That would be me. I'm [no longer] a candidate for the PhD in ethnomusicology from Harvard University, currently conducting fieldwork in the Seattle area for my dissertation on competitive bagpipe bands. I'm also a born-and-bred New Englander with a large assortment of ancestors from Scotland (among other countries) but more than that, I find myself identifying with New England and Scottish views on life more-and-more as I find my way out here in the frontier of the Pacific Northwest...
About this Site
This is a preview of my new, coming-soon, in-development, Tinderbox-based webpage. There's much more in the works, particularly a blog so that I'll finally have a place in which to publicly humiliate myself respond to other bloggers.
I'm aiming to have a fully-operational blog by the end of 2005 2006 2007, but for now, I just wanted to give a hint as to the design of my new site and what kind of content will be here.
Stay tuned!
Old News
The big and [uh, no longer] new news is that we have all moved out West to the Seattle area where my wife, Jung, has a new job working for the evil empire Microsoft and I have access to an old and complex field of pipe bands to study. All summer our time has been consumed by settling in but I look forward to finally getting to work when my girls begin school in the fall. Being a born-and-bred New Englander, moving to the “left coast” wasn’t easy, but I do enjoy the people and the spaces in and around Seattle. It’s a refreshing change from the often stodgy feel of New England. There’s still a spirit of experimentation and adventure to a lot of the area which I enjoy very much. I also like that I can feel the gritty history in parts of Seattle when I tire of manicured lawns and gleaming concrete. This has been a good change for us.
About six months before the move, I transitioned from full-time to part-time stay-at-home Dad and am ramping back up my ethnomusicology studies. I’ll pick up my research again on competitive bagpiping, but my thoughts are quite different now than when I wrote my old proposal. I plan to write a précis before the end of the academic year, but for now, I’m blowing the cobwebs out of my practice chanter. I dabbled with weblogs for a bit, and you can see the results at:
- Fresh Frozen, which covered general topics, and
- Felix the Spoon which addressed ethnomusiology and education.
I think I'm finally ready to get back to blogging. Watch this space for my return in the spring of sometime in 2005 2006 2007.
Immediately preceding my becoming a full-time stay-at-home-dad I was music director (choir director, organist and occasional organ tech.) for North-Prospect Church of Cambridge, MA. In my other capacity of free-lance writer I produced the content for W. W. Norton’s Soundscapes webbook.
