All.

The share feature on the HTML code is malfunctioning regularly. I need to fix that. 

I'm in a Starbucks in Somerville, Massachusetts, people watching. Contemplating the upcoming trip to Iceland. I've had multiple requests from friends of mine to keep posted on my blog, since I apparently have been lazy about imposing myself on people's lives. So, here is yet another attempt at killing time and keeping up to date. 

Today I'm singing in a recording session of James Piorkowski's "The Greatest of These," a work for chamber choir and guitar. Gerald is conducting and I will be singing with some of Boston's finest musicians. It is hard to believe that a year ago from today I was on a couch in the middle of Upstate New York, begging for someone to give me answers and willing to throw away everything I worked toward. Persistence and resilience are an artist's best attributes. To be able to bounce back from failure is a skill-set its own as extending techniques on an instrument or having a great agent. 2012 was all about that, as I regularly find myself trying to 'bounce back.' 

So 2013 I pick up where I left off at the end of 2010. The quest for international exploration and the revelry of 'close-your-eyes-and-pick-a-place' travel. A startling late night vision came to me last year: I want to visit Reykjavík, Iceland. For some reason I remember hearing about this place from the "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego" television show when I was a child (who knew I was planting the seeds of an aspiring global traveller as a youngster? Blame my parents). I did not know much about this mystical place except for its hot springs and geysers. To this day I'm not really sure what a geyser actually does. Nonetheless I promised myself if I could pick up my life a bit and move forward, get a little more financially secure, and pay off some debts, I was going to spend the rest of my 20s travelling the world, you know, "while I'm still young." Iceland was to be my first trip. 

I started listening to the music of Sigur Ros and Of Monsters and Men, but ventured into the choral music of Sveinbjörn Sveinbjörnsson and the orchestral works of Jon Leifs. Apparently there was a burst of music during the baroque period but somewhere in the centuries to follow a sequence of volcanic eruptions drove many of the citizens to mainland Europe, thus dissipating its national culture. In the late 19th to early 20th century as people started to trickle back, Icelandic composers who took other Nordic and Germanic musical influences brought music back to the life of the island. I am so curious about this...are there any Icelandic composers we don't know about who were just living in mainland Europe and in the shadows of the great composers we herald today? 

There are tons more to investigate and not much of it is performed in the US. I am going to scour the libraries of Reykjavík to obtain as many scores and resources as I can get my hands on. I want to dig into the language and, if any luck, master at least one hundred words. Most importantly I'm looking to get my start on a year of big travel plans in 2013. My goal is to visit all six travel-able continents and learn about a specific region's musical culture across multiple genres. Europe, Australia, North America, and possibly Asia are on the docket. Just two more brief trips, right? One at a time. 

If I like it so much, I may move there! Return flights from Boston are cheap.

Puffin. I hope it's tasty. I am the newest addition to Eric Ericssons in this world.