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Come Away, Death (Shakespeare: Twelfth Night)
My latest original composition for one of Shakespeare’s songs! I hope you enjoy it! The lyrics to this song come from Act II, scene iv, of Twelfth Night (1602). Duke Orsino and Cesario are suffering from unrequited love and ask Feste to sing this song to ease their pain. Shakespeare’s plays include many songs and dances, but these are often excerpted in modern productions (which is something I hope to help change :)). Very few of the original melodies survive, and some of my past work has been to compose music for the lyrics Shakespeare provided, which I really enjoy doing! If you’re planning an upcoming Shakespeare production and are…
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“Home Enough to Me” (Dean & Brush)
Celebrating a very special person in a very special way: it’s my mom’s birthday! I’m so grateful to have her in my life and to be able to be with her in person this year ♥️♥️♥️ We recorded this music video over the weekend: we had planned to go to a pumpkin patch/corn maze, but they were swamped with people. Instead, we ended up making this in the beautiful countryside near those farms (outside of Milton, FL)! It was so much fun and a special memory to do something like this! This video is part of a #10gloChallenge featuring the music of Dean & Brush! This song comes from their musical The…
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Shakespeare Musical Preshow
Today’s #WeeklyWednesday is a throwback to one of the most fun productions I’ve been a part of 😃 I hope you enjoy this excerpt from the musical pre-show I designed for Coronado Playhouse‘s production of Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing”! My talented fellow performers and dear friends are Renee Ulloa-McDonald, Carly Pandza, and Danielle Orner (Gallagher) 👏 🤗 The songs featured here are: 0:06 “Sumer is icumen in,” a mid-13th century round, written in the Wessex dialect of Middle English. 0:49 “Fair Phyllis,” an English madrigal by John Farmer, published in 1599. 2:11 “Now Is the Month of Maying,” an English ballett (similar to a madrigal) by Thomas Morley, published…
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Composing a new Shakespeare song!
For today’s #WeeklyWednesday, I decided to show you a new song I’m working on composing and recording! I hope you enjoy hearing it and a bit about the process of writing music for Shakespeare’s plays, which I really enjoy doing! I play it twice, at 1:03 and 7:12. This is my fourth or fifth version of “Come Away, Death” from Twelfth Night. You can hear bits of two others below – one of them is kind of a fugue-ish embellishment on this melody: The goal for this new version is to come up with a simple melody that would be singable for most people; the other two versions I’ve written…
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Using Linguistics to Scaffold Children for School and Promote Positive and Diverse Representation
Georgetown University, 2020. Linguistics. This assignment comes from my General Linguistics summer course and was a collaboration with Sara Grzywacz. We created a proposal and preliminary mock-up for a preschool storybook that includes strategically designed questions and activities built into the text of the story to help caregivers of all kinds prepare their children for school, in an entertaining and appealing way. Below, I’ve shared our presentation for our design. Though we were only able to touch on this in our presentation, our research is informed by work from Shirley Brice Heath (1982), Frederick Erickson (2004), William Labov (2006), and Rosina Lippi-Green (2012). The story we’ve used is Disney’s Cinderella…
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My Fair Lady: Full Performance
For today’s #WeeklyWednesday, I’ve combined all of the edited clips into the full version of my #NYU Master’s recital character study of Eliza Doolittle from Lerner and Loewe’s “My Fair Lady” 💜🎓 I hope you enjoy watching our 30-minute performance in its entirety! Whether this is your first time viewing it or you’ve already watched my full recital performance – thank you! – I really appreciate your supporting my work! It was so fun to work on this with my incredibly talented colleague-friends! They are: Tyler Dobies as Henry Higgins; Nyla Watson as Col. Pickering; Minque Taylor as Mrs. Higgins and Costermonger; Adelle Blauser as Mrs. Pearce, Mrs. Eynesford-Hill, and Costermonger; and…
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Multimodal Microanalysis: Scattergories! Video Clip
Georgetown University, 2020. Linguistics: Multimodal Interaction Analysis. Professor: Frederick Erickson. It was a great privilege to work in a small group setting with the seminal scholar Frederick Erickson! Our course centered on learning to transcribe and microanalyze video – a complicated task, due to the immense amount of visual and auditory information captured through this medium. If you’ve ever wondered how researchers might represent data from video, keep reading! Here, I’m presenting my final project, which not only shows you my final product, but also walks through my process for developing this multimodal transcription. The video is from a game of “Scattergories,” in which my mom, fiancé, two cats, and…
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“It’s pretty hard”: Stance and Dialogicality
Georgetown University, 2020. Linguistics. [Sharing below a short paper from Discourse Analysis: Conversation, applying Du Bois (2007) to my data. My conversation data recording and transcripts are available here.] According to Du Bois’ (2007) definition, “it’s pretty hard” is an expression of stance, and arriving at its meaning and interactional significance can only be achieved through identification of the participants involved, the object discussed, and the utterances that led to this remark. Du Bois writes, “[i]n taking a stance, the stancetaker (1) evaluates an object, (2) positions a subject (usually the self), and (3) aligns with other subjects” (163). This predicates that stance acts include more than one subject…
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Conversation Shaping: The Impact of Questions on Conversational Direction
Georgetown University, 2020. Linguistics. [Sharing below a short paper from Discourse Analysis: Conversation, applying Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974) to my data. My conversation data recording and transcripts are available here.] In a pioneering article describing the way conversational turn-taking is structured, Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson (1974; referred to as SSJ throughout) detail fourteen “facts” (700) found to occur in natural conversations, which govern the composition and procurement of speech turns. The focus of this paper concerns certain “turn allocation techniques” (716) employed by a current speaker to select the next speaker (SSJ’s twelfth fact). In particular, I will examine the use of question-answer adjacency pairs, the first part of…
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Biscotti/Highlander Transcription
Georgetown University, 2020. Linguistics. Discourse Analysis: Conversation. [The recording and transcriptions below correspond with several short papers shared on my site. I’ve also provided commentary related to the transcription process itself, as I worked with three ways types of formatting: play script, column, and quasi-musical score.] Conversation Excerpt: Play Script Transcription This was my debut transcribing an excerpt of this length, genre (natural speech), and with myself as a participant. Though I could relate to much of what Bucholtz (2007) and Ochs (1979) described, it was primarily from a conceptual standpoint, rather than that of an active practitioner. I found it both fun and challenging; at times, it was…
