Starting This Blog

I've wanted to start a blog for a while. At the moment, as I happen to have a bit of time on my hands, I do quite a bit of reading (and movie watching, but that's a different story). Twice in the last few days I took the time to type out a paragraph of a book I was reading and to email it to a friend whom I though would be interested in that particular paragraph. It occurred to me that I might as well post the information as a blog so that I don't have to keep telling all my other friends about the same interesting thing (although hopefully I still can if I want to).

Before I came to America (more than ten years ago), I used to write regularly for a very nice local newspaper in my home country, The Netherlands. Though the subject of my writing was usually totally unambiguous--almost always something to do with music--I had quite a bit of freedom in what I wrote and how I wrote it. I really liked that I could, as it were, chat about something that interested me with a whole lot of readers at once. I'm curious to see if this blog can give me a similar kind of springboard idea: to simply talk about things I've hit on and that I'd like to tell others about.

I am a musician by training, have performed internationally, and taught music at the college and university level for almost ten years. In recent years--thanks to fate, my wife, and others--I have gotten into teaching languages (so far Latin, Ancient Greek, and Italian) in addition to music. Since the language teaching is becoming a bigger and more important part of my life, but since I could never not be a musician, I called this blog what I called it. My intention is to write about whatever I want to write about--but most likely it will fall in one of those two categories.