Such personal academic writing

I think a personal touch to an academic essay is magical. The author writes with her heart, and it connects me.
Allow me to quote at length the beginning of the preface of Jann Pasler's Composing the Citizens.

"Growing up in a post-Sputnik generation that valued scientific pursuits along with the American dream of economic prosperity, I understood the role of music in life as marginal. Music could entertain, distract, engross, and elevate, but it was not socially useful. Its proper place in society was secondary to other, more obviously serious or practical pursuits. Living in France changed my mind. At the age of nineteen, when I got lost in Paris and stopped a woman on the street for help, she gave me a glimpse of another perspective. Learning that I was a musician, she went out of her way to accompany me to my destination. It wasn't just her generosity that impressed me. There was a twinkle in her eye, a suggestion of some deeper knowledge about the meaning of her gesture. When I asked her why she'd gone to such lengths to help me, she explained that, when all is said and done, it is the arts that survive from out past. The arts ensure the continuity of civilization. This woman had known the way. She'd experienced the annihilation of much that she valued and loved. It wasn't that I represented the future, although my father, at my age, had been among those who had fought to liberate her people. It was the music. Seeing an opportunity to support someone involved with the continued creation of music, she smiled broadly."

Pasler is frank and is speaking the simple truth about music nowadays. "Music is not socially useful, or secondary to other pursuits" can be rebutted, but not without painstaking efforts and, for me at least, hard self-persuasion and determination. Then, it's the undergrad experience of traveling abroad. I can imagine Pasler (I just met her today), a college girl some 30 or 40 years ago, wandering in Paris. (Kind of occidental, or romantic, maybe?) The point is, the verbal expression seems to genuine to me and I am touch by her experience! I want to listen to her story.

This triggered a couple of thoughts of mine. The thought of my what-if decision to go to Palestine instead of UCSD has been back and  haunting me these days. I seem to have lost some possibility of genuine experience. Another thing is the whole musicology enterprise I'm taking on. Pasler's words makes musicology live for herself as well as for the reader (for posterity!) She is living up to the unique experience she has had. (And I hope I will live up to the unique exp I have had.) And musicology becomes a living discipline because it is about life stories. (I don't claim this is the only way, but this is an amazing way, isn' it?) It is a personal encounter, rather than exhaustible, exhaustive and exhausting analyses.

I look forward to reading this book, and writing in a similar manner some day.

Here is a short article/ interview on the book.