I was born about an hour from our hotel in Huntington, Maryland. My father was a Navy pilot (fun fact: the US Navy has the biggest air force in the world, and the US Air Force has the second biggest), and as a military family we moved about every three years, beginning with moving to Florida when I was 6 months old. I don’t consider myself to be a native of Maryland or DC, even though I was born here, because I’ve only visited three or four times, and I didn’t grow up with strong connections to the area. When I was talking to my mom about my personal connections to this area, she reminded me that my ancestors had a farm in Montgomery county for many years. She also sent me a link to a historical assessment of the property. Reading through the history of the property I found it interesting and difficult to think about the aspects of my ancestry that made me uncomfortable to be connected to, which were many of the same things we have already problematized about the founding of Washington DC in general.
Having lived all over the east coast of the US and in England, I found my way to the midwest and am now a junior majoring in music with Management Studies and Women’s and Gender studies concentrations. I’m a violinist in the St. Olaf Orchestra, and the assistant student manager of that ensemble. I play viola in a string quartet with three of my best friends, and I also play fiddle music for fun and teach fiddle lessons privately. On campus I work in the Halvorson Music Library, and I’m passionate about libraries in general (I’m super excited to be visiting and getting a behind-the-scenes tour of the Library of Congress!). I enjoy many areas of study that aren’t related to music, including English, philosophy, history, and archaeology. Being in college has definitely reignited a love for learning that I feel was lost during my classes in high school, and so one of the things I am excited to do in this class is to return to the subject of politics with a fresh take.
I believe that understanding how the arts interact with the government will give me a deeper perspective into what the term “the arts” actually means in a practical sense to both artists and people observing art in various mediums. Recently I have been thinking frequently about how I don’t really know what kinds of careers are available to people like me who are musicians or artists who want a career in the arts but don’t want that career to be making art themselves. Despite the fact that I currently have two jobs connected to the arts that aren’t centered around performance, my future career paths still seem uncertain. I find the stories of how people got their current positions to be fascinating, so I am excited to talk to some professionals who have led what are successful, and I’m sure also interesting and varied career paths.
While I feel like I have a fairly strong background in music at this point, I am excited to expand that understanding by connecting it to other arts mediums, and to democracy and politics. However, this excitement is accompanied by apprehension about what I perceive as my own lack of understanding or education of the US government. Another thing I have struggled with when thinking about this course is that I don’t generally consider the arts to be one of my top priorities when it comes to the government. I hope that studying the intersection between democracy and the arts for the next month will help me to understand the importance of the arts in government, or that I will come to an understanding of why they may not be important.