Inspiring Excitement and Passion about History and the Humanities
Last week when I was interviewing Suzi Digby for my podcast episode on her Los Angeles based project The Golden Bridge, which pairs choral music of the English Renaissance with that of contemporary composers, she mentioned a madrigal by Thomas Weelkes called The Andalusian Merchant. Since I live in Andalusia, I looked it up immediately,…
I’ve started working through the Jeff Goins TribeWriters and Intentional Blogging course in the past month. I’m about midway through TribeWriters, which is why you’re seeing some nifty changes around this blog – like a move towards being self-hosted, the newsletter sign up box, a more consistent blogging schedule (which I’m still trying to work out),…
In 2011 I met Suzi Digby via Twitter. Having found out that she is a choral goddess and was in Los Angeles for a visiting professorship in choral conducting and arts leadership, I immediately asked if I could take her to coffee and meet her. I visited her in Queen’s College, Cambridge, and we talked…
When I first arrived in Spain back in June, I wanted to go exploring – Seville, Granada (the Alhambra) – there were very few cities in Andalusia through which I didn’t want to wander. But it was summer. And Europe was in the midst of this awful heatwave. So we planned all of our explorations based on…
One of the great debates in classical music right now is whether video game music should be included in the genre of classical, even when a symphony is playing it. I’ve long been a fan of the Oblivion soundtrack, and downloaded it before these kinds of scores were available all over youtube. ClassicFM’s website…
Yesterday I was talking with a friend about how I’m excited to go to the Spanish Archives in Simancas, north of Madrid, where all of the letters from Eustace Chapuys are displayed. He was the Spanish Ambassador to England when Henry VIII was giving the middle finger to the Pope in order to marry Anne Boleyn,…
I’ve been working on a podcast about Mary Queen of Scots, which I’ll be recording this week, and as part of that I’ve been reading John Guy’s book, Queen of Scots (available to read on Oyster, too). Most people who know Elizabethan history are familiar with the story of the tragic Catholic queen, but you don’t really ever…
I’ve posted before about my experiment with my own memoir, Fragile, and Perfectly Cracked, my story of giving birth to a stillborn son as well as dealing with subsequent infertility problems. It was a labor of love for me to get this out there. I’m currently working on my first novel, which involves time travel (because…
When I lived in London, I worked at 76 Brewer Street, on the end of Soho near Golden Square, on the eastern end, tucked away from the tourists of Piccadilly, Leicester Square, and Oxford Street on all sides, a neighborhood of its own. What used to be a hunting ground where Henry VIII would ride…