Inspiring Excitement and Passion about History and the Humanities
Fair warning – I am sitting in an airport in Berlin as I write this. It’s 9am local time and I’ve been here for almost two hours on a layover waiting to go back to Spain after an overnight flight during which time I didn’t sleep, but I did watch Tammy with Melissa McCarthy, which…
One of the things I love about Spotify is that when you ‘follow’ an artist (ie click ‘follow’ on their artist page), you get a notification whenever a new album from that artist is added to the database of music. I adore that. I don’t have the time to keep up with the releases of…
This won’t surprise anyone who knows me, but I was a history geek in school. Somewhere around sixth grade I realized that I loved history. In high school I was introduced to early choral music, the great English anthems of Byrd and Tallis, and suddenly my passion for history became more specific. I had met…
About a month ago I was in the UK for a girls’ weekend (by myself), and as I’ve been trying to do more with my Renaissance English History Podcast lately (like my Tudor Minutes on youtube), I decided to find an interesting person to interview for the show. At the top of my wish list…
A few weeks ago I had the privilege of going to Sidney Sussex College, in Cambridge, and interviewing Dr. David Skinner, the choral director there, and a brilliant musicologist. In addition to being incredibly charming, he is also bursting with information which he relays in an approachable way. I taped our conversation for a podcast,…
I’ve started doing something fun on youtube this week. I run the Renaissance English History Podcast, which currently gets about 120k listeners each month, and I’ve been trying to figure out ways that I can make more of a community out of it. Do more episodes, lead tours of England, write books; ways to get…
So let me tell you about my trip to the UK last week. It was full of excitement (ie meeting with one of my idols, the early music expert David Skinner, to interview him for my podcast), and peace (long train journeys criss crossing the country, listening to my music in my headphones, drinking a…
I’m going to Iceland next week. I first went there in 2012, just for a few days, at the suggestion of several friends who had visited and loved it. We were on an extended visit to the UK, and decided to take a few days to make the short flight to Reykjavik, and rented a…
In a few months I’m going to be moving to Spain. Specifically Ronda, in Andalucia. An area loaded with history dating to the pre-Roman times. I’m super stoked for this move. So in advance, and because I speak no Spanish other than the words I pick up living in Southern California, I am listening to more…
Yep, I’ve had a little break from blogging recently, mostly doing a lot of writing and working and other fun creative things. But let’s get back to business, shall we? Everyone who has studied even a smidgen of music has heard about the Bach clan. Johann Sebastian and his son Carl Philipp Emanuel (known as…