Joe's Odyssey

My Odyssey is an incredibly effective vehicle for an examination and appreciation of the most human of instruments, the voice. 

I previously wrote about the Glenn Hansard quote “The voice just shows up” and the sentiment I expressed in that…

After three days in Texas and four in Hawaii, I awoke as my plane landed in… Denver, Colorado. 

Talk about Odyssean travel routing. 

I checked my phone and noted that it read 80 degrees colder than the last time…

The influential philosopher Φέρις βυέλληρ once said: “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.” 

Doing my Odyssey performance as much as I do, traveling a much as I do…

My first Odyssey performance took place in my parents’ living room on March 17, 2002. 

My 300th Odyssey performance took place in Arlington, Texas, in a lovely parlor-style room in the University of Texas-Arlington library, on February 14, 2020. 

In…

It's a brisk rainy fall Monday morning as I pull onto the campus of Pomfret School, a small (mostly) boarding high school in eastern Connecticut. 

I spent the previous night in Providence, Rhode Island, exploring a city I'd only briefly…

For my first semester of college at UW-Madison, prior to succumbing to the Siren song of Classics, I was an intending psychology major. 

The sum total of this dalliance was two classes: Intro to Psych and The Psychology of Human…

"The journey is the people you meet along the way," said the septuagenarian gentlemen wearing leather driving gloves as he drove me in a black Lincoln from the airport to my hotel in the Pittsburgh University district on an unseasonably…

This year I've been obsessed with a book called Effortless Mastery by a pianist named Kenny Werner, in which the author writes about applying simple mediative principles in musical practice and performance as typified by this quote: "The effort it…

To read Homer is to be humbled again and again by its unique brilliance.

No matter how many times you've encountered the lines "Sing, Goddess, of the anger of Achilles" or "Sing, Muse, of a man of many turns," you…

Looking back at my writing book for the post on my performance at Union College was, to use a formal academic phrase, fucking weird.

I often talk and have written some about how the generative phase of my Odyssey is…

Sometimes I wish I had been a little more diligent in formally documenting my odyssey of performing my Odyssey.

I have the journal in which I wrote the piece... here's the first ink I committed to the idea on October…

"Do you ever regret not going on to study Classics in graduate school?"

Students, man: they can bring it.

And the Waverly High School students who filled the intimate Robin Theatre in Lansing, Michigan, on a May Thursday morning sure…