Judith Schlesinger is a PhD psychologist,
professor, musician and writer who, although she's live in the
new York City area all her life, doesn't really sound like it.
As a child she studied classical piano for 7 years and later
picked up the guitar, drums and flute as well as a large suitcase
of percussion instruments bought on her first trip to Rio. For
the past 15 years she has been teaching at Pace University and
in the summer of 2001 will inaugurate their first course in
The Psychology of Music. Judith has worked in inpatient and
outpatient settings, on a crisis intervention team, as a school
psychologist, college administrator, ad agency consultant and
psychotherapist in private practice, has lectured on improvisation
and the brain at Berklee College in Boston, and was a florist
for six months. She stays near NYC mostly because of its terrific
jazz scene, which she enjoys as often as possible despite the
increasing difficulty of staying up until three in the morning.
About five years ago, after a relatively mainstream, steady-paycheck
kind of life (except for nocturnal escapes into singing and
playing drums in jazz joints), Judith heard the ticking boomer
clock and decided to focus on her childhood dream of being a
writer. Up to the point she had only dabble, publishing in professional
venues like The American Psychologist and The Counseling
Psychologist, as well as the tongue-in-cheek psychology
magazine, "The Journal of Polymorphous Perversity,"
but now she began writing for the popular press. Given her training
and experience, it would've been logical and certainly more
lucrative for her to write "service pieces" for the
glossies, such as "73 Ways to Tell If Your Husband is Gay,"
but with deep-seated obstinacy Judith is concentrating on bringing
her two favorite subjects - psychology and music - together.
For the past three years she's been working on a serious book
which debunks the popular claptrap about the inherent lunacy
of talented people, for which the late, lamented Steve Allen
wrote the foreword. See "Dangerous
Joy: The Myth of the Mad Musician"
Meanwhile, Judith's byline has appeared in magazines and newspapers
like Glamour, the Gannett newspapers, the Jazzletter,
Jazzis, and The Sondheim Review. Since
1995 she's been writing about jazz and reviewing CDs for 52ndstreet.com
and also contributes to The Jazz Institute of Chicago. For three
years she was senior writer and humor columnist for Topia,
a start-up magazine about artists that, like so many other good
ideas, went belly-up, but at least she got to profile some interesting
characters, including Monty Alexander. In 1998 her biography
of Humphrey Bogart was published by Fairfax/Friedman; the year
before, she was invited to contribute the psychology chapter
to Stephen Sondheim: A Casebook (Garland Press, 1997).
So far Judith has written eight book reviews and four extended
diatribes for The Baltimore Sun on such topics as the abuse
of ritalin, kids and violence, the dumbing down of America,
and the creativity/madness link.
A member of the American Psychological Association (and its
Division 10, Psychology and the Arts), The International Association
of Jazz Educators, The Author's Guild, and The American Association
for the Advancement of Science, Judith is in the international
database of academic experts on the overlap between psychology
and music. This is gratifying but can be embarrassing when she
is misquoted by writers for the abovementioned glossies, some
of whom are younger than her shoes.
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