2025 was probably one of my most travelled years: Shanghai and Beijing for student recruitment (though things in Beijing were cancelled in the end, but in Shanghai I had the experience of visiting the Municipal Educational Examinations Authority); Washington D.C. for a research trip, combined with a short visit to Los Angeles to see my sister and her family and attend my Armenian friend’s wedding; Bali for another killer wedding, Hong Kong style;
Grand Rapids for a summer research fellowship at Calvin University, where I met the most awesome people and scholars; Detroit for soul food, Motown Museum, and Detroit Institute of Arts; Taipei at the Graduate Institute of Musicology at NTU for a short visit with our students, where my colleague and I also presented on our research; Minneapolis for the AMS-SMT conference with Guangchen Chen for a well-attended session on Fou Ts’ong, where I met a former HKBU colleague and an old friend, from the same piano studio at USC, who now teaches musicology and piano at BYU, and saw the most impressive Chinese art collection (and Patrick Procktor’s portrait of Jimi Hendrix) at the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Before Christmas, I also spent some time with my parents in Macau (since my dad can’t really travel far these days) and Shantou to see my grandpa again who, earlier this year, was misdiagnosed as dead but revived, thanks to the help of my dad’s friend, to a state of coma and now living healthily again at home, heading to his 100. But perhaps the thing I am most grateful for this year, in addition to seeing my grandpa, was, with my sister bringing my niece who had just finished her leukaemia treatment to Hong Kong, having a family reunion after 7.5 years (though another one is coming in ten days)
2025 was also the year I read a lot and listened to a lot of music; I have again come to appreciate the ability of music to capture wordless sentiments and convey experiences that one may not have the power to articulate or verbalize; in other words, music truly has the ability, when written, performed, and heard by the right people, to eff the ineffable; ineffability is not some sort of failure here.
2025 was also the year I reached the age of 33. I think I have done well in the basics – picking one’s battles, staying in my lane, eliminating distraction, and as a young (am I still considered young?) academic, learning to gain from even the most unexpected rejections and bounce back quickly. But I often wonder if 33 is the age at which a human should arrive at his or her most mature state. In the theological context, Jesus is considered the perfect expression of human maturity (sometimes I would be tempted to hope Irenaeus’ claim that Jesus lived to about 50 was true, if feeling immature). Or consider Schubert, who died at 31, but had then composed over 1000 pieces of music. Or one can think of Simone Weil, described by Albert Camus as “the only great spirit of our time,” who died from voluntary starvation at the age of 34. Some might think Weil’s starvation was an unnecessary self-imposed martyrdom. But she did it from a place of conviction, for the starving French people.
In the last few months, I have created a new G.E. course, called “Music: Culture-Making and Storytelling.” It aims to have students think about how music has the power to shape identities and cultures, serving also as a way for humans to express and interpret everyday experience. My list of readings includes Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. But with the recent controversy about Sacks, I am at the crossroads in considering whether I should drop this one. I have also joined the program committee of the 2027 IMSEA Conference and the editorial board of the Turkish musicology journal, Rast Muzikoloji Dergisi. Next year, I will be in Palos Heights for the annual meeting of the Society for Christian Scholarship in Music as well as London and Berlin for two research trips that need to be completed by the end of year. I am somewhat behind in what I intend to do with many things, but hopefully another semester of teaching relief will help a bit.