Dial "M" for Musicology

Classical Pop

Apologies for the lack of blogging.  It was an extremely active year, and the summer is continuing in the same vein—after the wonderful Hawaiian idyll, another trip to California, teaching a class, more book-related stuff, pre-concert lectures, and (to be honest) before too long there is going to be the saddest of return visits to California.  It’s the price we pay for being here.

Not sure about the future of the blog, to be honest.  We’ll let you know.

Last Chanuka, I was given an Ion turntable—a very nice little gadget that converts vinyl tracks to .mp3s.  So I’m starting with the oddities from my record collection: “Gwin” by the Ship (a Champaign, IL band), “Lakeshore Drive” by Aliotta, Haynes, and Jeremiah (Chicagoland stuff—a couple of other tracks too), other weirdness.  This evening, I started on my old Classical Pop archives—the late sixties’ classical-rock, experimental bands, from the pre-ELO, pre-ELP, pre-stadium grandeur era.  So here’s Ars Nova, here’s the Left Banke (“Pretty Ballerina,” Walk Away Renée” plus the lesser-known “Barterers and their Wives” and “Something on my Mind”), and—real obscurity now—here’s Montage (“I Shall Call Her Mary” and “Grand Pianist”), the post-Left Banke project of Michael Brown.  I mean, who except me and ten other people even knows about Montage, for God’s sake?  I was borderline obsessed with this kind of music when I was a junior and senior in high school, some years after it was recorded.  This was the seventies, remember; anything that suggested musical creativity was like water to a parched man.

So I’m listening to this material again.  My first realization is that these things were recorded very crudely, rather like old Beatles records: different instruments and voices in the different stereo channels.  So you initially think you’ve lost hearing in one ear, and then the other half of the texture comes in, you have all the instruments but no depth.  Forget the texture and recording depth, then; what do we have?

Harmonic changes and vocal ensemble writing that did not remain in the pop music vocabulary, for a start; the sorts of meta-Beatles, meta-Association vocal ensemble writing that soon became too interesting for the pop charts.  Clear attempts to capture, even for a couple of moments, soundworlds from the art music repertories: pseudo-Baroque harpsichord clinking, Rachmaninov piano thundering, and so forth.  (The Montage album even has what I think is an attempt at a twelve-tone melody in the song “She’s Alone,” which is less than successful, at least in my opinion.)  Both “Pretty Ballerina” and “Walk Away Renée” have chamber-music interludes, and the first of these even has a Lydian melody. 

This was deep stuff to me at the time.  Not so much, now; it’s far less mysterious.  Blame the music major curriculum for sharpening my aural skills and historical awareness to the point that I could understand what such bands were doing.  Is it any wonder, though, that I basically didn’t want to devote time to anything else, ever?  This is Unveiling the Mystery, a peek behind the curtain. 

Heaven knows what other Mysteries my vinyl collection will yield up.

Only game in town

We interrupt this long blog silence to note with sadness the death of Michael Jackson. The best comment I've read on the subject comes from, no joke, Chris Onstad's Achewood comic. 

Onstad sometimes has his cartoon cats and otters write blog posts, and Ray's post on Michael said something I think we should keep in mind:  

What I think a lotta folks are feelin’ now is a regret. Not regret that a man died; no. They regret that for almost three decades they been mockin’ this guy. This guy who wrote Thriller, and PYT, and Billie Jean. You know who you are, you Michael deniers, listenin’ to your The Cure or Aerosmith. You always considered Michael’s music silly. Not serious. Lame, mainstream. “Popular.” And his life — everyone gets a kick outta’ watchin’ the mighty fall. It sells paper. It makes us feel falsely superior, from our low places. Yet now, now that he’ll never sing another note, you listen to those songs anew —ABC, I Want You Back, Beat It — and you know who he was. . . .   

Michael was our music. The next time you’re out alone in your car, and "Smooth Criminal" comes on, it’s gonna mean somethin’ different to you. You’re not gonna change it this time. You’re gonna hear it and think to yourself, “I missed knowin’ his music in the moment.” I don’t blame The Cure. That was your call. The Cure is just out there, like car horns or people who make noise when they cry. The Cure is a choice. When we hear Michael, it is not a choice to feel the beat. It is not a choice to cock your head and straighten all the fingers on your right hand. 

Aloha 'Oe

Apologies for the lack of blogging.  The semester was a punishing one (papers, performances), and the END of said semester even more punishing, in terms of grading and so on.  Since then, I’ve been doing program notes for a couple of summer concerts, and indexing my book manuscript.  It was my first major indexing project—I used the MS Word indexing function—so there was a learning curve, do-overs etc. involved, and thus a hell of a lot of time.  But when I get the proofs, most of the work will be done.  High time!

So I’ve forced myself not to respond to comments, critical and supportive alike, and I’ve not picked up on other matters that I would in other circumstances have run publicly amok about, like a certain idiotic piece in the New York Times by Mark C. Taylor.  Simply no time.  And we’re off to Hawaii tomorrow (tomorrow being our 25th wedding anniversary, as it happens), to return around the first of June, and I have errands to run…

So I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.  Stay cool, everyone.

More on Churchill

Herewith a letter from a couple of Indian women on the subject of Ward Churchill, with whom they have personal experience.  When I previously posted on this subject, I was asked "Jonathan, what's with the baseless vitriol?"--and that's the nice one.  So, for some context, just put this in the mix.

CHE article on music and torture

The Chronicle has an article on music and torture, focusing on the work of Suzanne Cusick and mentioning something I had written in passing. It's worth a read, since it runs down the work of several scholars (J. Martin Daughtry, Jonathan Pieslak, Phil Bohlman, and others) who have been covering this area, which anyone reading this blog knows I care a good deal about. I mean we have a "music and torture" tag -- go look at it. I defy you to find a single line in which I give the slightest impression of being in any way disturbed by, put off by, disapproving of, etc., this field of scholarship, wanting to change the subject, wanting just to talk about "the music itself."

Oh, wait, the author of the CHE piece, Lara Pellegrinelli, has somehow managed to do this. 

The responses to Cusick's work and the resolutions suggest that musicology remains a discipline in crisis. In one of the few critiques made outside the e-mail lists, Phil Ford, an assistant professor of musicology at Indiana University, responded with logic reminiscent of the detractors of the new musicology from the 90s, who feared the discipline might lose focus on "music itself." On the Dial M for Musicology blog, Ford posted about a "kind of vulgar sociology that insists that cultural objects have a value or meaning only relative to their use in society.

So. In her desire to fashion a narrative of a "discipline in crisis", Pellegrinelli has taken a single line -- from a POST DEFENDING SUZANNE CUSICK -- and somehow tried to make it out that I am disapproving of this entire avenue of scholarly inquiry. No, I'm disapproving of reductive humbug of the sort mediocre ethnomusicologists, sociologists, and cultural studies types routinely churn out. I'm just as disapproving of the just-the-music-itself humbug that mediocre musicologists churn out, but that wasn't relevant to what I was writing in this post. (I have, however, talked about just-the-music-itself humbug here and here, for a start.)  Pellegrinelli, an ethnomusicologist herself, appears to have taken offense at that single line and decided it pretty much said all that needed to be said about my point of view. She then proceeded to ignore every other thing I have ever written on the subject. Needless to say, I never heard from her and was never asked to contribute to this story. (I would have done so gladly.) 

Do I need to point out that this is lazy, dishonest, incompetent reporting? That I am being held up as an example of a point of view that I not only do not hold but that is completely contrary to the one I do hold? And that the point of view ascribed to me is one I am intensely displeased to be associated with? 

If there's anything retro-90s about this, it's Pellegrinelli's desire to manufacture some bogus drama out of what has been a basically normal difference of scholarly opinion and use the whole thing as a platform for a self-serving and pharisaical moralism. "Discipline in crisis" indeed. What a lame tyro journalist cliche. I've written about the perennial temptation of those writing intellectual journalism to manufacture bogus "angles" for their stories, and here the temptation has not been resisted. No, musicology isn't a "discipline in crisis": it's a discipline where people have disagreements, sometimes marked ones. In other words, it's a normal discipline. The irony of this episode is that the Dial M post that Pellegrinelli has used so misleadingly was intended to stake out a position of anti-torture activism limited by a concern that the issue of torture -- so important and so important to get right -- would be used as a way for grandstanding opportunists to stigmatize differences of opinion and thereby to do an injury to freedom of conscience. 

Thinking with the ear

I'm continuing to work on some of the thoughts I started writing about the other day. Thanks to everyone who responded -- the comments are so good it will take me many blog posts to get through all the questions they raise. And there have been a few blog posts in response: look here, here, here, and here. 

Last time I wrote about performance as a series of deliberative acts vs. performance in a "flow state" and thought about what understanding of self and volition these two states entail. It got me thinking about an old friend -- let's call him Chuck -- who was a music undergrad at the same time as me and with whom I played a little chamber music. This guy was one of the smartest people I've ever met in my life, a sponge for languages, ideas, literatures, whole fields of endeavor. His intellectual restlessness manifested itself in his approach to music; he was a seriously deliberative musician. When we played together, he would plan out everything that would happen in every phrase, every little pause and inflection worked out along the axis of a carefully-prepared analysis. And I, being at that time convinced that such an analytical orientation was indispensable for proper interpretation, went right along. I enjoyed the crossword-puzzle aspect of our rehearsals, the satisfying feeling of figuring out and verbalizing what he and I were to do at any given moment of the piece. But Chuck's playing never lost a certain stiffness, a certain lack of organic cohesion—everything he played sounded as if it were made out of Tinkertoys. And it never really grew past a certain point, as Chuck admitted himself, which is why he ended up doing something else with his life (and meeting with a great deal of success). 

I'd go so far as to say that those musicians like Chuck, musicians who think of performance as a highly deliberative act, are at a disadvantage. I've written before about my experiences studying piano with Michel Block, the result of which has been (among other things) a conviction that the duality between "form" and "content" (or style/substance, surface/depth, etc.) is an illusion. But he also got me past another conceptual blockage: the notion that piano playing can or should be a largely "intellectual," deliberative practice in which one applies analytical insights to the music one performs. This is a kind of dualism, too, because it entails an extreme concentration on critical consciousness and an associated separation from one's performance. One conceives of one's body as if it were a car and the self were a separate thing driving it. The body is unruly and must be disciplined; you can't just play a piece of music any old way your body might want to -- what would Beethoven say? You have to honor his intentions! And this of course entails having intentions of your own, which you enforce on your playing. But when you do that you are always outside of yourself, unintegrated, not flowing. 

This was the main problem with my own playing before I started working with Block: my playing was "ticky ticky," as Block liked to say. Re-learning to play the piano at about age 20, I had to lose this sense of an imperial ego that was controlling everything and learn to play selflessly. I spent a summer playing very simple things -- the kinds of things that had always given me trouble. Another teacher of mine, James Tocco, once remarked that I played better when the music was complex and worse when it wasn't. I didn't know what to do in a simple lyrical piece. If the form offered no real difficulties (just a typical character-piece ABA shape), if the texture was just uncluttered melody-and-accompaniment, if the point was just to project a singing melody, I was unstrung by the overtness of it all. I wanted to make a statement, send a message, and the simplicity of this kind of music frustrated that desire. My big realization after spending a summer playing such pieces was a variation on Samuel Goldwyn's "if you want to send a message, call Western Union." There's a kind of practice where you don't think about what you're playing, you listen to it -- that's all, just listening. You're making discriminations, but they're different from rational, intentional discriminations. It's sort of like when you hang a picture and step back and look to see if it's straight. You're not thinking in the usual way, and not just zoning out, either (the worst kind of playing, automatic-pilot zombie mode) -- you're thinking with the ear. Another dualism, between the mind and the senses, collapses. 

As a teacher, Block was famously mercurial and eccentric, given to obscurities of speech and action in lessons. I was thrown by this at first. I would come in and play some simple songful piece Bloch had asked me to play and he would say or do something very obscure -- suddenly going on about Barbra Streisand, or saying "ticky ticky" (and nothing else), or playing the left hand of the piece while poking out the right hand melody with a pencil eraser. What he wasn't doing was saying play this part a little faster, or a little quieter, or with a little more pedal, or whatever. His teaching was deictic -- a process of "direct pointing," as those who practice Zen think of it. The reality of sound is not found in verbalized concepts, but only in itself. So if the reality of sound in itself, beyond or prior to all concepts, is what you're after (or what you want your student to grasp), you can't talk about it -- you can only point. 

That "reality of sound in itself" thing is the hard part, isn't it? It's the point where we become aware of the extreme limitations of language. Recent scholarly thinking on "presence" (Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht), "the drastic" (Carolyn Abbate), and "performativity" (you name it) and so on are ways of redescribing the same phenomenon—the simple mute thereness of actuality, what Buddhists call "tathata." It's not for nothing that one of the links to my earlier post connected my ruminations to Buddhism. Indeed, many of these thoughts, though gestating a long time within my work as a humanities scholar, appear to take on a new significance in the light of Buddhist thought, and Zen in particular, which I have been thinking a lot about lately. Music throws a light on Zen, and vice versa. This is perhaps fodder for some future blog post.

The moon had it coming

Jonathan's post yesterday on l'affaire Zimerman contains one surreal detail -- how Zimerman's Steinway was destroyed by American officials after 9/11 because they thought the glue "smelled funny." Which tells us something about the hysteria of the times. As Jonathan wrote in a subsequent comment, "we have a lot of ground to make up, as a nation. I feel good about the start we've made, but my *God* was that a ridiculous, nightmarish period."

True indeed. What's funny to me is how passions that gripped us so strongly such a short time ago (only 6-7 years ago, really not that long a time) seem so distant, so much a historical thing --  funny wrong things we used to think, like believing in witches or trepanning or something. Jonathan's comment reminded me of this Mr. Show clip, which I discovered on a political blog under a heading something like "History of America, 2001-2003." It was a strange time to live here.

What's Polish for *scandale*?

Krystian Zimerman, Polish superpianist, declared—before his final piece at a recital at Disney hall in Los Angeles on Sunday evening, April 26—that he was never coming back to the U.S.  Our military is trying to take over the world, etc. etc.  Some audience members walked out, tossing obscenities at him (he lobbed an insult or two back), more cheered, there was tumultuous applause for his final piece (Szymanowski variations), no encore, finis.  Exeunt Krystian Zimerman and his Steinway.  News item here, full review of the concert here, post-mortem here.

I am of two minds on this.  I was taught that one never, ever, ever insults an audience or makes them uncomfortable, and making this kind of statement is, in a sense, holding them responsible for the policies of the Bush administration.  To then mock those departing—“Yes, some people, when they hear the word military, start marching” is really provocative as hell.  Zimerman is an artist I admire deeply and I, had I been in the audience might well have fired something nasty back at him at that point, perhaps something to do with murderous Polish behaviors in the 1930s and 40s, or Polish disposition to march when the commands are being offered by Hitler or the Soviets.  I can further imagine being torn limb from limb for having done something like that, so the fact that I would have severed all good relations with Polish friends (who have been generous with their time and help) would have meant little to me… bleeding to death as I would have been.  Probably ’twas a far, far better thing that I wasn’t in the audience, but I know myself well enough (I was short of self-control in class even in graduate school) that I might well have shot off my mouth—and, to be honest, throwing ignoble Polish behaviors in the pianist’s face would not have been an inappropriate response to his decision to rub Bush policies in the faces of a bunch of admiring angeleno concertgoers.

In any case, it was odd that he would choose to enact this bit of theater now that Obama is in office and so many things are changing; indeed, he spoke approvingly of Obama in Berkeley, where he had performed shortly before.  There had been some build-up, over the years, chronicled in the Los Angeles Times pieces linked above.  The only real explanation is one offered in the LA Times, via Zimerman’s manager Mary Pat Buerkle, is that this had been some time in coming, that Zimerman had been increasingly unhappy with the circumstances of touring in the U.S.  Here a particular anecdote comes to mind, one of which I was unaware until now. 

Shortly after 9/11, when Zimerman entered the U.S. on tour with his personal Steinway, U.S. officials (Customs? Homeland Security?) thought the glue smelled funny and, suspicious that he might have been smuggling in explosives (!?), destroyed the instrument.

Destroyed the instrument.  Let me explain.  To musicians, instruments are living things.  Even those who would not go so far as to say the sort of thing quoted on Zimerman’s wikipedia entry—“My friendship with the Steinway piano is one of the most important and beautiful things in my life”—we have all had the experience of people coming to us after performances, in tears, transformed, etc. etc.  Yes, it was the music that reached them, and if we have any sense we acknowledge that we personally did not have all that much to do with it.  But to the violinist with his Guarneri or Strad, or the guitarist with his classic Martin or Stratocaster, or Zimerman with his Steinway, that is a living thing, an object miraculously fashioned of star-stuff that can be animated to the point where it communicates directly to listeners’ souls.  I don’t think I exaggerate much; it is akin to how Jews traditionally think about books and scrolls: most certainly not just inanimate objects (hence our reactions to book-burning; that means far more to us even than it looks like).  Rock aficionados should consult John Hiatt’s “Perfectly Good Guitar” if they’re skeptical of my point here; that song is a cri de coeur roughly equal to Clapton’s “Layla,” and it addresses just the subject at hand.  So here’s Zimerman with his beloved Steinway, and the U.S. geniuses—taking a break from renaming pommes frites “freedom fries,” perhaps, or putting up “if you ain’t a patriot you’re a SCUD” posters—destroy his piano.

Since then, Zimerman has chosen to return to the U.S., and now he apparently travels with his piano in pieces, which he reassembles (something I find unimaginable).  I can readily see, though, that such a thuggish act of wanton destruction—needless cruelty, in an artist’s view—would burn away at someone like Zimerman.  Finally, I imagine, he had had enough, though probably the pressures were building up more from within than without: all auguries in the good old U. S. of A. are that we’ve turned back from the moral precipice, governmentally speaking, and are hell-bent on reassuming moral leadership, reestablishing the rule of law, reassuming our responsibilities to our citizens and those of the world, and so on.  It makes no sense for Zimerman to flip us what Bruce Springsteen calls “the New Jersey state bird” now, unless this is a long-term buildup of rage and resentment.

I really have no great conclusion.  Krystian Zimerman is entitled to do what he likes; I continue to admire his artistry, which is equaled by very, very few other musicians.  I hope he decides to return here at some point.  (Since he has returned since the post-9/11 debacle I have to conclude that he decided that return trips would be commercially adavantageous to him.)  All that said, I also think that he was very wrong to allow his feelings to boil over at a bunch of people who had come to be mended and improved by his music, who had paid premium for the privilege, and who had little or nothing to do with Cheney/Rove/Bush (in order of importance) policies.  I have never found artists (or humanities scholars, even) to be deep thinkers, politically—Zimerman or the Dixie Chicks or plenty of other historical examples, so their principled stands can sometimes end up looking a bit…well, simpleminded.  So, while acknowledging his heartfelt feelings, I—proudly American, despite whatever criticisms I choose to level at my government and fellow citizens—would probably been among those bellowing insults back at him. Yet he who[se country] is sinless cast the first stone; it is intellectually so lazy so say something like “your military is trying to take over the world,” now, that however heartfelt this seems like a petty, theatrical display.  Whether Mr. Zimerman returns or not, I’m sure there will still be interest in his playing, but given his choice to make that kind of exit—cape billowing, nose in the air—if this was the final chapter there may not be a lot of mourning here, even among pianists.

Like Flowers in the Spring

I don’t know if a regular schedule has ever been established for such things, but journalists love to write the-sky-is-falling stories about higher education.  Perennial favorites include Those Silly Professors and Their Wacky Research ON YOUR TAX MONEY, Ain’t No Academic Standards No Mo’, Who Do These Elites Think They Are, and Jobs Done Been And Gone.  It is in this last category that So You Want to be a Professor?, from the Wall Street Journal of 23 April 2009, falls.

The author is Naomi Schaeffer Riley, that paper’s “deputy Taste Editor.”  I know, I know; obviously a deputy taste editor from a conservative paper has unimpeachable higher education credentials and a tracker’s profound knowledge of the lay of the academic land, so I’d probably better remember my place.  Remembering one’s place is something that doesn’t come naturally to people from the west coast, however.

This article is the same old hysteria: schools are cutting down on graduate admissions, she says, observing that it’s far more expensive to train graduate students—small classes with senior faculty, lots of individual attention and so on.  Given what are presumed to be diminishing professional prospects, the question is (as one administrator put it), “Is it fair to bring them in?”  Riley also observes, in contrast to the costs of providing graduate education and the slim job prospects on the other end of it, that graduate students save institutions money by providing cheap labor: they teach (so the theory runs) huge sections of undergraduates in lower-division and non-major classes, thus providing the service of a battalion of professors at a fraction of the cost.  Yet because more and more universities are forced to rely on contingent faculty (part-time, non-tenure track etc.), the Real Jobs so sought by graduate students are evaporating.  Do you want devote your prime career-building, childbearing and family-establishing years to indentured servitude, idealistic young’uns?  Throw off your chains!  Do something else!  Perhaps you can ascend to the stratospheric glories of being a Deputy Taste Editor!

Why the bile, you ask?  Deputy Taste Editor Riley is not on her own, here; she is parroting the thoughts of one Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank at Stanford.  (I’m annoyed by much of what comes out of there, but there are GREAT archives that graduate students are allowed to use, so I’m forever grateful for that.)  Now, a quick dance over to the Hoover website tells me that Berkowitz lists, among his specialties, “Classical and Contemporary Liberalism,” so when Riley tosses off this closer:

Higher education has gone so far off the rails in recent years that parents and students hardly know what they are supposed to have learned in a freshman composition course or in Sociology 101. And as long as there is a degree waiting at the other end, they hardly care.

…I now better understand the context.  Universities are bastions of Liberal thought, ergo they are in a perpetual state of moral and intellectual decay!  A Hoover specialist in Liberalism is, let’s face it, like a Nazi doctor specializing in Jewish or Romani physiognamy: fatally hostile and biased from the outset.  One might as well get Dick Cheney’s opinion on firearms safety. 

Still unexplained, of course, is precisely which golden age of higher education Riley and Berkowitz and the other toga-clad philosopher kings and queens would have us remember.  There were always mickey mouse courses, there was always discrimination and academic caprice (though there are greater protections now), and there were never any guarantees.  I suspect that the growing postwar market meant that far more mediocrities got jobs and tenure—survive a doctoral program and you’re in, somewhere—not, to me, necessarily a good thing.  Similarly, such past realities of academic life as sexual harassment of students with few consequences and systematic exclusion of women and minorities from the professoriate will also have to be weighed in the balance, because those were also realities of the Lost Golden Age. 

Ms. Riley’s own background sheds some light on this.  Here she is, and from her own page we learn that she graduated from Harvard in 1998 and also writes for (wait for it) the National Review.  How is it that someone who is closer to thirty than forty writes as if things have gone downhill since she and the other fourteenth-century Clerkes of Oxenforde were singing bawdy songs and awaiting their Church benefices or royal appointments?  The simultaneously hand-wringing yet snarky tone is the familiar product of the Harvard and Yale conservative—a peculiarly pseudo-populist hyper-elitist who makes money and scores points by decrying the real and imagined excesses of these same elites to the perpetually enraged hoi-polloi.  As a scribbler-caste, such people are often neocon camp-followers, purveying supercilious, reactionary bile with an air of dismayed confusion, as if they were so preoccupied twirling their canes that they took the wrong exit from The Club.  She’s Harvard, Berkowitz is Harvard and Yale (according to her; his page lists only Yale), and their worldview is based on the idea that whatever holds true for those august institutions must also hold true—somehow—you know, down there.  This is where she is most uninformed and ridiculous.

For example, she observes that “universities in lower tiers might not have to do as much because they can get away with having a higher percentage of classes taught by graduate students.”  Except for the fact that faculty at many universities know that since they don’t have the money to attract the Harvard and Yale types, their graduate students aren’t quite ready to accept the responsibility of lecture halls teeming with undergraduates.  At such places, those courses remain faculty assignments and TAs (for which resources a shrinking) do other kinds of work.  This distinction between kinds of institutions is completely lost on someone who has never set metaphorical foot outside an Ivy League institution.  It’s a privileged position to be in, certainly; God bless the child who’s got his own and all that, but the greater cluelessness is breathtaking.  She also describes those who hold doctoral fellowships this way: “They pay no tuition and receive a school-year stipend between $10,000 and $20,000.”  There is far more variation in the real world than she is aware of, both in terms of money and in terms of tuition waivers, and even those who hold fellowships often make profound sacrifices to pursue doctoral degrees.

The greater message of Riley’s idiotic column is this: What in the world would you want with the higher education enterprise—it’ll eat you up and you still won’t get a good job and anyway it sucks.  This from someone who wears her Harvard degree like gang colors?!  One would hope that the Wall Street Journal would know better than to run this kind of professional snarkerei.  Or not?  Is now my cue to start shedding bitter tears that people find newspapers to be irrelevant?

OK, young’uns, step back from the ledge.  Certainly, placing graduate students in full-time academic positions is always a crapshoot—for the student, the advisor, the graduating institution, and the hiring institution. ’Twas ever thus, and to act like the this is a new situation is simply wrong.  It is also not the case that glistening Ph.D products from the Ivies are considered to be the best fit for all institutions.  Louis Menand has written (in the Chronicle of Higher Education and elsewhere) about the limited utility of the standard research Ph.D; it may be that certain institutions have not adjusted as readily as they might, and thus produce a trailing-edge product, so to speak.  As I’ve said before, there are no statistics that are relevant: each job is unique, and you’re unique, and you’ve got to acquire the skills in your program and outside it that are going to make you The Right Hire.  You’re also going to have to persistent and resourceful in managing your doctoral career and your life and your career aspirations.  It will forever be better to shoot the moon, even if you fail, than to wonder for the rest of your life if you wouldn’t have been happier following your dream than growing old doing something, you know, “sensible”—like peddling a particularly poisonous kind of glib, supercilious cynicism for the Wall Street Journal and National Review.  

No Diplomacy; No Regrets

I am taken to task for my harsh assessments of the jury in the Ward Churchill trial (my April 4 blog is here, and the comments follow). 

I would change nothing of what I wrote.  I have never served on a jury, but am married to and related to and friends with people who have, and their testimony is consistent that very often there are people of average intelligence—“average” perhaps being a euphemism—sitting on juries.  Attorneys like to have them there because (they assume) such people can be easily led.  “The world is run by C students,” goes the old saw; what must that mean for the great numbers of people who serve on juries?  Not all of them, certainly, but some of them?  If in the course of living on earth one has not observed even reasonably intelligent people getting browbeaten, bullied, confused, panicked, and ultimately worn down by others around them, perhaps strong personalities disposed to glibness or the persistent mau-mau, then one is simply not paying attention.   Thus my lack of confidence in the jury.  It is true that I phrased my response in somewhat disrespectful terms.  This is not the first time I have been found guilty of disrespect.

For Churchill himself, my feelings about CU’s hiring, tenuring, and tolerance of him up to that point likewise remain unchanged.  I will say, AM, that the word “inane” (defined by my American Heritage Dictionary as “lacking sense or substance”) is in no way sufficient to describe Churchill’s characterization of those incinerated on 9/11 as “little Eichmanns.”  For comparison’s sake, here’s Jerry Falwell famous take on the backstory to 9/11, courtesy of truthorfiction.com:

Falwell said, “The ACLU has got to take a lot of blame for this. And I know I'll hear from them for this, but throwing God...successfully with the help of the federal court system...throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad...I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America...I point the thing in their face and say you helped this happen.”

I see a clear parallel between Churchillian and Falwellian perspectives, here.  Like Churchill, Falwell ascribes blame (“helped make this happen”) for the events to a relatively small number of people who were NOT responsible, but whom he would like to blame because of his political views.  (One difference, of course, is that those Falwell blames weren’t incinerated.)  So, does this poison merely rate the civilized word “inane”?

Bluntness is not everyone’s cup of mead, I know.  Falwell is a preacher—a law unto himself—but Churchill was a professor, upon whom ethical and humanistic responsibilities ought to weigh heavier than on a power-mongering, thuggish loon of the Falwell or Robertson stripe.  Nonetheless, the jury was not, apparently, convinced that in addition to the varieties of academic malfeasance (misrepresentation of various kinds) and bona fide hate speech—forbidden on many campuses, and you know better than I if CU is one of them or not—is not just cause for getting tossed. 

A strident response in the face of this kind of land-of-upside-down amorality is justified.  I mean: really.

Where is the self that performs?

A while ago I started writing a series of posts about sound and technology studies. I stopped after doing two of them, partly because I've been getting blog fatigue anyway, and partly because it seemed like an impossibly large problem (actually, a complex of interrelated problems) to tackle in the blog medium. It feels like trying to bail out a lake with a china cup. But whatever, anyway, OK, so here's something I've been thinking about in the same line. 

In my earlier posts I had argued that the concept of the musical work not only regulates and guides our formal study of Western art music, but also ends up ignoring a good deal of our actual musical experience. Then why study only musical works? Why just study compositions? Why not study performances of compositions? And of course a lot of scholars have started doing just that. 

I'm listening to a recorded musical performance -- the Vladimir De Pachmann 1907 recording of the Chopin Barcarolle. At 1:06 De Pachmann starts playing a new theme (those of you who know the piece will notice a big cut). The melody starts on scale degree 5, slides down (by way of a chromatic passing note) to 4, then skips down to 2 and curls back around, landing on 3 and moving upward through an arpeggiation of the A major triad. The apex of this arrival is the tonic pitch (1). When De Pachmann gets there, he gives a little pause. It's a nice little pause, an apt way of marking a short-range melodic and harmonic destination, and De Pachmann makes the pause in a very characteristic way, articulating the highest note of the chord a little after the accompaniment, so that the hands go slightly out of phase for a moment. One might be able to map this moment, perhaps on a temporal graph. (There are problems with this approach, but it's certainly practicable -- tempo graphing is common in musical performance studies, if only because tempo is more quantifiable than other parameters of performance.) If we gathered enough information about similar moments of rubato, we might be able to start talking about De Pachmann's general approach to rubato. We might use this general understanding of De Pachmannesque rubato to understand certain exemplary moments of interpretation, moments where De Pachmann makes some interesting decision -- for example, when he does something especially noticeable to mark the boundary between sections or the end of a piece. 

And when we do that, we will be talking about De Pachmann's interpretation as if it were like a work, but just a different kind of work. Instead of being a notated composition, this kind of work is a creation of sounds, gelled into some kind of permanence by recording technology. It's the special ability of recorded sound to allow us to repeat a moment of time endlessly, to take what is evanescent (music played on a piano more than 100 years ago) and make it permanent, so we can review and analyze the minutest details of a performance in the same way that we can go through the score of a piece of music and look at long-range connections between different themes separated by hundreds of measures. To analyze music in this way you have to be able to freeze and reverse time -- otherwise it doesn't hold still long enough for us to nail it down. Recordings and scores freeze time in different ways, but in either case they are technological contrivances that give us an object for analysis. 

Now if performances are works, performers are their authors, so we naturally will start interpreting particular moments within a performance (like that little hitch at the beginning of the new melody) as authorial utterances. Notice I used the phrase "interesting decisions" in a previous paragraph to describe the sorts of things we might want to go looking for in an analysis of a performance. But to what extent are performative gestures decisions? Are performances the result of conscious choices that performers make? We don't ever really ask this question when we're thinking about things like the Chopin Barcarolle that De Pachmann plays. We speak of the composer's intentions, which performers are enjoined to realize; we speak of tonal structures, phrase lengths, motivic relationships (etc.), everything in a composition we might be inclined to analyze, as the result of a conscious application of mind. Chopin chose these things, they didn't just happen. This is not usually something we argue, but rather something we assume, and this assumption enables us to write sentences like "Beethoven shortens the lengths of his phrases as he approaches the modulation to G major" (or whatever). It feels natural to assume the same thing of the distinctive features of a performance. ("Serkin slows down as he approaches Beethoven's modulation to G major.") On this account, a performance takes the form of a virtual conversation between conscious subjectivities. And indeed I have assumed just this sort of thing before. 

But here's the problem. If you have ever performed music professionally you have probably had this experience where you're playing and everything is going really well: the music is just flowing out of you without anything to block it. You're not thinking, "I am am playing this thing," you're just playing it. And in such states -- "flow states" -- you aren't exactly making conscious decisions. In a really good performance, you're just kind of going with it; your subjectivity merges with "it", the thing you're playing, or whatever it is that lies behind what you're playing. And time has a different meaning; you begin a piece, you end it, you begin another one, and so on to the end of the program, playing as if in a dream where time is mysteriously dilated. Your concert is over in like five minutes (or so it seems) and you can't really remember what you were playing. The worst thing that can happen is that you're kind of flowing along and then suddenly your conscious mind, your ego, the thing that makes conceptual statements, suddenly interrupts and says "oh shit, we're in the recapitulation! how did we get here?!" And at this point, as you well know if you've ever played Western art music from memory, you are most in danger of having a memory slip. In these moments you become aware that there are at least two kinds of consciousness that come into play when you perform -- the state in which you stand apart from what you're playing and can make little comments about it (oh god, here comes that leap, don't fuck it up now; well, you fucked it up, didn't you? hope it goes better in the exposition repeat) and flow state, where you are fully integrated to what you're playing. And it's in the boundary between the two -- coming out of flow and into critical consciousness with a jolt and possibly a memory slip -- that the distinction becomes clear.

My point is this: the kind of interpretation of performances that I've described here, where we treat the recorded performance as if it were a new kind of work, treats everything in a performance as if it were the result of a critical consciousness. We tacitly assume that when (for ex.) De Pachmann makes that little hitch of rubato that I described he is actually thinking something like "OK, here I am, coming to the apex of a melody -- I'm going to take some time." But anyone who's ever played music in flow state knows that you don't necessarily think any such thing. In a flow state, it's almost as if someone else is playing the music. This explains why musicians are often surprised (sometimes pleasantly) by what they hear when they hear a playback of their performance. Ornette Coleman's liner notes for Change of the Century mentions this experience:

When our group plays, before we start out to play, we do not have any idea what the end result will be. Each player is free to contribute what he feels in the music at any given moment. We do not begin with a preconceived notion as to what kind of effect we will achieve. When we record, sometimes I can hardly believe that what I hear when the tape is played back to me is the playing of my group. I am so busy and absorbed when I play that I am not aware of what I'm doing at the time I'm doing it.

So in a situation like this, where is the self that performs? Where is the subjectivity to which we can ascribe intention, and whose intentions form the basis of our interpretations? It suddenly seems to me that the problem of consciousness is a great and unexamined problem of performance studies. And perhaps it is also a problem of musicology in general. Where is the self that composes? Not being a composer myself I have nothing to say about the degree to which compositional decisions belong to intentional states, but perhaps someone out there has something to say about this question.

A Conversation from 1975

Spring 1975.

Dramatis personæ: 

DR. SANDRA EAGLETON, my Advanced Placement English Teacher, my senior year at Claremont High School, who had also taught English part time at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, in my father’s department.

JON, a long-haired, mouthy legend in his own mind.

 

SE:  Jon, would you like to be an English professor like your Dad?

JB:  God, no.  Anything but.

SE [consternation]:  Why not?

JB: I know what it’s like when I write papers for you—beating my brains out the night before it’s due.  I do NOT want to spend college like that, trying to think of something to say.

SE [smiling knowingly]:  You’d be surprised how many English majors are like that.

JB:  I know, but…

*            *            *            *            *            *            *            *

Dear Dr. Eagleton,

I know you’re no longer among us, having lost a long battle to cancer some years ago, and I regret that we never reconnected after I found my way to a somewhat different career choice, but an academic one that involved writing papers.  Perhaps you saw something I didn’t yet know was there.  What I can say is that in most cases I’m done with my papers much further in advance than I seem to be right now.  OK, so it’s two nights before, not the night before, but still.  I do find myself smiling and thinking of you tonight, though, and of our conversation so many years ago.  Thanks for everything you provided us, not least the challenge and attention and modeling of what teaching really could and should be.

And yeah, I’d better get back to my impending local AMS paper now.  Wishing you and all with you in the Empyrean every eternal Joy.

All Best,

Jon (Bellman; Sam’s son)