I’ve been writing about music all my life - as a teenage blogger, an earnest student journalist, an ambitious postgraduate, and now as a professional copywriter on the UK folk scene. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to start another music blog, but I can’t seem to quieten the intrusive observations that pop up whenever I’m listening to music, or participating in it, or watching others react to it. This blog is really an outlet for those thoughts, and mostly to track the evolution of my own analysis of how we socially interact with music, and with each other, through music.
So, why Burnout Musicology? It’s kind of a bad pun. Separately, they’re two of my most familiar concepts and companions: psychological and physical burnout, born of overwork and (recently diagnosed) ADHD; and musicology, as in, the study of the social, political, economic and aesthetic meta-narratives surrounding the conception, performance and reception of music. But, as I haven’t been in the academic world for seven years since graduating my MA in 2015, I feel like a burnout musicologist, a dropout, idly remarking my semi-formed perceptions to other friends in the live music world and not really carrying anything to its full potential. I’m trying to change that, but I think the change starts here, with a low-pressure Substack newsletter that I can drop into any time, and let some of those observations unspool into something a little more considered.
I hope these articles will provide an invitation for readers to join me in some gentle sociological analysis, and my intention is to be both accessible and thought-provoking. I’m interested in the decolonisation of genre and performance, identifying and critiquing capitalist ideologies within music creation and production, and deconstructing consumer attitudes in music reception. I’m based in the UK, and heavily involved in the festival network here. I’m also a songwriter, producer, multi-instrumentalist and curator active in the alt-folk, folktronica & chamber pop scenes, crossing over occasionally into pockets of contemporary classical, jazz, alt-pop and trad folk. I will probably be unforgivably biased towards things I already like.
If you’re here, welcome. I hope this is useful for you. I encourage respectful and relevant conversation in the comments, but anything intolerant, bigoted or spammy will be removed.