Dial "M" for Musicology

The Four Ways of Practice

[This is written a couple of months after the post below -- I have to add some stuff just to clarify a couple of things. Back when I this blog's last post, Jonathan and I decided to discontinue this blog and I decided to stop paying for the multi-author option in Typepad, since  the number of blog authors was now somewhere around zero. So when my contract ran out the whole site reverted to the free, no-frills format. The good news is that we have a durable archive of roughly 4 years' work and I don't have to pay for it; the bad news is that the site now looks terrible and is hard to navigate. The old category list is gone, as is the month-by-month list of archived stuff. But you can hit "next" at the bottom of the page to navigate backwards, I guess, and you can click on the tags at the bottom of each entry.

Also, for some reason the description of a long-deleted class blog reappeared and attached itself to  Dial M. So for the record, folks, this blog is not, and never has been, the blog of my seminar "Sound, Media,  and Performance." (I only just figured out how to get that wording off.) You'll notice that the site now makes it look as if I, Phil Ford, were the sole author of this blog, but for those who might be happening on it for the first time now, I should make it clear that it was always a collaboration between Jonathan Bellman and myself. If you're confused about who wrote what, Jonathan's posts (as well as the posts by the various guest-bloggers who contributed things over the years) are "signed": there's a little Typepad handle at the bottom of each post. The posts I wrote have no such signature. OK, I'm done.]

Hello everyone -- 

(I write this with the hopeful assumption that there still is an "everyone" to address)

I was on vacation when Jonathan posted his final blog post, and I've been very slow to follow up. Typical. I haven't written anything here since, what, January 4? That's no way to treat poor old Dial M. God, there's something so sad about an abandoned blog, or any abandoned project, really. And there's no way to end a blog without abandoning it. It's not like a book; you can't write the last chapter. At some point, you're just going to stop writing, and whatever the last thing that passed through your bloggy head will be preserved at the top of the page forever (or until you stop paying to keep the site up), something you wrote in the last presidential administration about something now impossibly antique and irrelevant. Or maybe you wrote one of those "I haven't written anything here in a long time, but I'll get back to it soon, I promise" sorts of things, like a New Years resolution to lose 20 pounds and go to the gym three times a week, and your last blog post will preserve the sad shriveled husk of an aborted intention. Or perhaps you wanted to go out with a bang and wrote a Dear John letter to the medium of blogging: things were exciting when we started out together, but my needs are no longer being met, I'm feeling unfulfilled, I need to make some changes . . . 

I don't want to do any of that. Regrets, I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention. I started this blog back in 2006, which is like 20 years ago in blog years. Jonathan and I (and our various guest contributors) have written a lot of stuff in the meantime. I'm proud of it, happy I did it, and now it's time to end it. We're done.

I'm not necessarily done with blog-like activities. I continue to believe that academic communication will continue to be shaped by the commons-based peer production model that the blogosphere models. Whether or not it will be a "blogosphere" I couldn't possibly guess. Whatever it is, I'll probably show up there, and so will you. In the meantime, I have writing projects lined up for, like, actual books, and they need attending to. That's what's been taking up most of my writing headspace since the new year, and that's not likely to change for a long time. 

I would like to thank everyone who wrote in the comments section or sent an email (even though I've been shockingly bad at remembering to check the Dial M gmail account and have probably missed a few -- sorry if that was you*). Thanks to all the people who come up to me at AMS meetings and say hello because they read something I wrote on Dial M (it makes my day). Thanks to all the other musicolobloggers and culture-bloggers and anyone who ever gave us link love. Thanks above all to everyone who read us. I have no delusions about Dial M being very important in the grand scheme of things, but it was important to me, mostly because we had a readership that made it worth doing. 

I'm writing this at home, and my daughter just came home from her last day at "Writing and Illustrating Your Own Books" camp. She handed me a book of poems she made. Here is one poem, inspired by her violin practice:

The Four Ways of Practice:

1. Always believe in yourself.

2. Do whatever you are doing with effort.

3. try!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11

4. Be truthful.

Young musicologists, heed this teaching! I have nothing to add to it.

*My real email is fordp at indiana dot edu. Keep in touch!

Exit (Still) Writing

Really, it’s not for friends’ lack of effort.  Friend Eric has persistently sent me stuff to prime the pump, get something going . . .

Jason Freeman’s column in the NYT:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/24/compose-your-own-part-2/

Chris Wilson’s piece in *Slate* about David Cope’s latest the-computer-assembles-it-for-you effort:

http://www.slate.com/id/2254232/?wpisrc=eDialog

And I feel like I’ve said it all already: acidly commenting on misguided attempts to make New Music relevant to audiences in the Computer Age (archness intended), or more often registering disgust for the way people write about it.  Both are relevant here, to my mind, but you’re heard it already.  To harp on another too-familiar string, I must have done a dozen or more blogs on the subject of You can do it, you grad students! Every rung just makes you stronger!  And stuff in higher education per se—I’ve always got an opinion on that, and it must be pretty predictable now.

Thing is, this has been a punishing year in some ways.  With the exception of my father’s death last July, it was all good stuff, I hasten to say: I played the “Emperor,” I went to Poland and gave a paper, I’ve been writing lots and lots and lots in my specialty, things are wonderful on the home front and my son is excitedly getting ready for college after a very successful year, etc.  It’s been a Chopin year—bicentennial of his birth—so business continues to be good, so to speak.  I’ve still got a series of projects to do, more piano to play, and so on.

But I, at least (not speaking for Phil here), am keenly aware that if I’m not exactly a One-Trick Pony, readers know this pony’s very few tricks too well.  I live in the mountain west, and am not exposed to the newest/latest/most interesting musical developments at all.  Further, as a certified Homebody, I wouldn’t necessarily experience them even it they were available to me.  (Sounds shameful, but there it is.)  So I’m hardly exposed to the cutting edge.

What this means is that I think I’m probably done as a blogger.  It’s been an adventure, and I want to thank everyone who read and commented and engaged and so on.  I’m not moving or changing jobs, so you know where to find me.  I appreciate all the connections and discussions, and have every confidence that they will continue in other venues.

Accept, then, this bow of farewell.  Thank you all.

Sound Editing Oscar

JWB here:

The New York Times published a nice article by Virginia Heffernan on the nominees for Academy Award in sound editing. The article opens with this evocative bit of writing on The Hurt Locker, which I agree should win the Oscar:

”The Hurt Locker” is a bomb movie that mutes its booms. It derives suspense by withholding the expected “boomala, boomala” . . .

“The Hurt Locker” is not cool. It’s hot and dry, a heaving desert parable with a mounting sandstorm howl at the center. The internal explosions matter more than the fireworks. . . . The top notes in the soundtrack are arid metallic clicks, snips, squeaks and creaks, the chatter of wrenches and wire clippers, as bombs are defused in air so parched as to seem combustible itself. Men can hardly summon the spit or breath to speak.

After running through three other nominees—Up , Star Trek and Inglorious Basterds—rather harshly (and I would say a bit unfairly), Heffernan turns to Avatar, calling its sound "brazenly cartoonish”; this characterization is in fact a positive.

What stands out is the whoosh of muscular—not fluttery—reptile wings as they flap and glide. This has to be the sound of flying in dreams. The dragonlike creatures vie for sonic dominance with the machinery in the film and particularly with the man-machine tanks that have their own distinctive sounds, especially in the fantasyland of Pandora, where a clash of resounding arms takes place in an atmosphere of no oxygen.

Heffernan understands sound as one of the best avenues filmmakers have for opening up to the representation of the other worldly, especially one deprived of oxygen, which must then stage the breath of life.

It’s intriguing that both “Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker” have built otherworldly environments in which humans are intoxicated—in part by being deprived of oxygen. You can hear this danger much better than you can see it, and it falls to sound editors to exploit its dimensions. What a great challenge in moviemaking: the various sounds of breath—gasping, sighing, speaking, expiring—may be film’s first and most consequential sound effect. Here’s to films that revisit and rethink the sounds of breath and breathlessness.

I would caution against valorizing the breath in this way, however, as it couples rather too easily with the naive authenticity of location sound—Heffernan goes out of the way to inform us that the dialogue for The Hurt Locker "was almost all recorded on location in Jordan (and not looped in a studio)." Surely, like the sound of the breath itself, it is the effective representation of the dialogue—the way its difficult mediation through technology and body is rendered—not the location of its recording that matters.

X-Post

Dial H

As in Huntsville and Horrific.  At this moment, details are still unclear about the appalling shooting at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, where one Amy Bishop, to all indications a rising superstar in the Biology Department, was denied tenure.  Much of her stuff (personal webpage, for example) has been yanked off the web and replaced by the university’s emergency alert message, but certain fragmentary details are emerging in the news coverage: Harvard-trained, a truckload of publications, a potentially profitable invention that would cut costs in her area of research, predictably mixed reviews on ratemyprofessors.com (smart students loved her; whiners resented her), and so on.  As is always the case with campus shootings, we all flail about, trying to reckon the cause and, worse (but impossible to deny), the blame.

I’m aware that my irregular blogposts here are tending more and more toward Dial A for Academia than Dial M for Musicology; the job will do that to you, and it is hard for me to post anything worthwhile on practicing (“well, reviewed my fingering on the coda of the third movement of the “Emperor”), my research (“finally through a rough draft of my Poland paper; still have to get going on musical examples while I recast my self-indulgent prose”), or the progress of the search committee I’m chairing (“[censored for reasons of confidentiality]”).  The job will do that to you.  A campus shooting is, however, on a different seismic scale and invariably a horror, and since a professor seems to be responsible for this one I feel a responsibility to offer something beyond mere hand-wringing. 

There is no justification for such an action.  Whether it is a student with personal issues (family pressures, inability to succeed academically, a disastrous love live, or some mental illness beyond all of the above), an angry staff member with a workplace grievance, or (much rarer) a member of the academic faculty, there is no excuse or mitigating circumstance for a massacre. 

We have no dependable knowledge of the motivations of the individual involved; she looks like a star and could very well be one, so it is easy to leap to a conclusion of unfair denial of tenure.  The husband of one of the victims said in a brief phone conversation that his wife, also a faculty member of the biology department, had opined that Bishop “was not as good as she thought she was” and not able to “deal with reality.”  Such observations may or may not be true, but as relevant information for the public at large they amount to nothing, the ubiquitous sotto voce murmurings of academia, contingent on the perspective of the person commenting.  So, what I proclaim to be adherence to my rigorous standards might be righteous and principled, it might be quixotic and questionable, and it might be delusional and destructive, depending on a wide variety of factors (kind of institution, level of student pre-college preparation, and so on).  Such comments as those quoted about Bishop, therefore, might be completely justified, or rankest envy, or (most likely) some mixture of the two.

Those in the media are, predictably and probably rightfully given the job they’re trying to do, grasping at whatever straws of information they can find.  So they go to ratemyprofessors.com for information about Bishop’s teaching.  But by its very nature that site makes Wikipedia look like a repository of Sinaitic Truth; it is an archive of student comments, often complaints written (obviously) in the immediate heat of resentment.  Faculty are used to seeing this kind of thing on teaching evaluations; a trusted and respected colleague just showed me one that simply read “What a bitch!”, saying “I wanted you to see this so you could be proud of me.”  I am not going opine as to whether such a site should exist or not—free-speech issues and all that—I’ll simply say that the variables inherent in the collection of this kind of information (various student personalities, propensity to resentment, heat of the moment etc.) make it entirely suspect and effectively useless for gleaning any worthwhile information. 

The key point to the entire American academic world, or perhaps all of humanity, is that there are always more options than you think there are.  Let’s say Bishop was wrongfully denied tenure and the university was nefariously trying to profit from her and her husband’s invention.  Given her record, she had a demonstrable grievance, a wrongful-termination case, and it seems to me that with the proper legal help she could have given the university a righteous bollocking.  The president, the colleagues, everyone.  (And no, I’m not talking about the AAUP, the American Association of University Professors; I belong, but they most often strike me as self-important blowhards invested in us-and-them models.)  The fact that she came to the meeting armed indicates that the walls were already closing in, psychologically, and that solutions (even longer-term ones) were not being sought.

Frankly, I would welcome some sunlight regarding the decision process.  Procedures and criteria are prescribed in University codification documents, usually, and so the relevant considerations can be measured against those.  It is a fact that professors have a wide variety of responsibilities: yes good teaching, yes  professional activity and publications, but also being good citizens.  Personalities do rightfully come into play here; reflect on how athletes with divisive, lightning-rod personalities, regardless of the level of talent, often find themselves without any job stability.  (The name of the supremely gifted wide receiver Terrell Owens comes to mind here.)  Tenure can effectively lock in both the positive and negative characteristics of a faculty member on a long-term academic team, and there is no firm rule on which outweigh the other.  Procedural regulations often require strictest confidentiality in tenure cases, not least to minimize the blackballing of the candidate for future employment elsewhere, but some solid information would go a long way toward defusing some of the groundless speculations.  Of those who are using this tragic event to argue for the rights of all students (no student was present, by the way) to bear arms to class, I will not even waste the energy to vent abuse.  One can only imagine the body count had a random Untouchables-type shoot-out transpired.

Meanwhile: nothing but grief for the victims and their families.  I have neither solutions nor a clear view of what led up to this, and therefore no idea about what might profitably be changed.  The one thing I am sure of is that this is not a simple case.

Hope for the Weary

Reprinted, with permission, is an E-Mail I received yesterday from a graduate student:

 --------------------

ATTN: ABIGAIL VAN BUREN



Dear Abby,



The fall semester ended in early December and it has been approximately seven weeks since I was last academically bitch slapped.  Life on the outside is supposed to be normal, but I already miss him—his glares of disapproval, the profanity, the constant questioning of my knowledge base.  Others seem to enjoy their freedom and seem to do fine without being subjected to intellectual thrashings.  However, in my case, I kind of miss it.  Sure the bruises to my ego hurt . . . the fear of Score IDs were at times paralyzing, but you see to me . . . to me that was normal.  I'm not quite sure how to adjust to life on the outside.  How do I move ahead and prepare for comps without the daily beatings?  Should I go back to him?  Are there half-way houses for students like me?  What do I do?



Please Help!—Maladjusted Student

----------------------

 My response is not the central point here: I began with “Dear Concerned—What kind of language is "bitch-slapped" for a pious son of the church?”  but then reminded him that the high standards he maintained in my classes were his choice, his reaction to whatever he thought he was getting in there, therefore the problem was partially that he was allowing the heat he had been turning up on himself to decrease back to “simmer” because of the standards of people around him.  I also pointed out that if he wanted me to do something he should suggest precisely what it might be.  That is neither here nor there; this guy is a favorite of many faculty around here: fine musician, hard working, self-motivated, always willing to participate, good sense of humor—really the whole package, and someone who will have more faculty support and letters of recommendation than he knows what to do with when the process is over. 

My real point is this: I will put the smile and glow I got when I first read this letter up against whatever financial or corporate bonus you’d care to name.

True, I have all necessities (family, friends, health, food, domicile, fulfillment) well covered.  But this kind of echo, this kind of return on labor, is something that I think only teachers really experience and understand.  And in this era of seemingly ever-increasing bad news in higher education, a letter like this is the best tonic there is.  Take note, young’uns: wherever you manage to place yourselves, this awaits.  Bestir yourselves!

By Request

On this palindromic date we begin the news semester, which promises to be an eventful and pressure-filled one for me (trip to Poland, concerto, etc.).  Friend Lisa requests that I put the cover of my Chopin book up and announce its appearance.  So here it is:

 

 

 

And yes, the book has appeared (at the end of September, actually).  Seems like ancient history!  Friends tell me they like it; reviews will take much longer to appear (if they do), meanwhile I’m working on/getting worked on by other projects, needing to practice (as always), etc.  So this particular child is off in the world on its own, and I wish it great success, but no longer have any control over it have to psychologically let go, to a certain extent.  Now, my life will be about exoticism and Beethoven and Chopin’s relationship to programmatic piano fantasies by minor composers and my classes and…

Up and at ’em!

Oswalt on teaching

I spent the end of last semester in a frenzy of activity punctuated by moments of pure unmotivated idleness. While procrastinating one day I discovered the comedian Patton Oswalt, who is smart and funny and whose standup is viewable on bunch of Youtube clips that Mr. Oswalt will never make a dime from and which I am duly propagating.

That's one of the clean ones. Usually there are more swear words, which I like because I think swear words are funny. Of course, they're only funny when they're funny, so you have to be careful.

What else? Christmas book swag:

• Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth, a graphic novel about Bertrand Russell and mathematical logic. 
  
• R. Crumb's illustrated Book of Genesis
• The Wind in the Willows in a wonderful critical edition by my friend and Stanford sensei Seth Lerer.
• R. Crumb's Heroes of Blues, Jazz, and Country 

If I've got comix to read, it must be Christmas break. Whee!

Anyway, back to Patton Oswalt. He put up a blog post in which he welcomes the new year by listing four things people say that, in an ideal version of 2010, they won't. Read the whole thing, but in particular read his takedown of the phrase "those who can, do. Those who can't, teach."

Bullshit.

Yes, there are shitty teachers. There are unimaginative, by-rote educators who take no joy in their profession. Maybe they went in full of idealism and energy and got beaten down. Maybe they never had it. Yes, they exist.

But the bulk of teachers -- at least, the ones I've encountered in my life -- teach because they are truly passionate about a subject, concept or discipline. They don't take any pleasure in the amassing of property or finance. I know that must sound like low-grade insanity, especially these days. They want to keep kicking open new rooms and dusting off windows in their minds and souls. They get a truly endorph-ic lift from delving deeper and deeper into something -- an author, an epoch, a science -- within which they perceive a teasing glimmer of the infinite.

And since there's only so much someone can read about a subject or person or book or piece of music, they create new strategies for revelation. One of the surest is to see the thing they love through untrained, un-biased eyes. In other words, students. Semester after semester, year after year, sometimes generation after generation, they watch how the changing world warps, diminishes, or builds up this thing they've become obsessed with.

People who toss this phrase off were probably shitty students, and were too dull to spot the passion in the eyes of their quality teachers. These were the assholes I encountered at college, who "studied for the test", and bragged about how, "I'm never gonna read another fucking book or listen to this faggy-ass music ever again..." and became lawyers who can't spell and who nod their heads to the same five Bon Jovi songs over their buffalo wings at Bennigan's.

Seems like a good thing to think about at the beginning of a new semester. Teachers, take heart. 

In Praise of Musical Obsessions

Perhaps I have mentioned this before, but among what I consider to be Universal Musical Experiences is the obsession.  The obsession can be a single piece, often a short one, or perhaps a popular song, that simply takes over your very being.  I remember several from my student and early professional years: Chopin’s Ballade No. 1, the Bach-Busoni Chaconne, Brahms’s songs “Sonntag” and “Von Ewiger Liebe,” the F Major Pastorale Sonata of Domenico Scarlatti (“Allegrissimo”).  You listen to them so much that you don’t need to listen any more; they are in your head, and you can play them over and over.  For a larger-scale work, it is life changing: once you are intimately familiar with something like Monteverdi’s Vespers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of 1610, part of you will forever be in Wonderland; there is no way to walk back through the door to where everything is gray and sepia and people don’t really smile.  You know better, now;  you know the Vespers.  Bliss!

My most recent book appeared in October, and it was devoted primarily to one work: Chopin’s Ballade No. 2.  Of course, it has been an obsession of mine for a long time (and also of certain others in the Chopin community), but really any of the four Ballades will be that way; they are all that extraordinary.  Bach’s Chaconne for violin is another such utterly transformative piece: to venture inside that one is to be, in key ways, mended.  One of the things I really appreciated about Maria Thöne’s work (I’ve probably mentioned this, too) is that, right or wrong, she put forth a really extraordinary explanation for that extraordinary piece—that is was really a tombeau for Bach’s first wife, Maria Barbara, that it quoted lots of chorales (clearer to some than to others), etc.  Even if she’s wrong, I give her points for aiming long: the Chaconne is, if I’m not mistaken, longer than all the movements of the D Minor Partita combined.  Surely that requires a better explanation than, well, the Chaconne was an optional dance of the time, and including one would not have been impossible, so…no more explanation needed, right?

This all is by way of preamble.  At the recent AMS meeting in Philadelphia, I bought a book I’d been hoping for, then waiting for, for two decades: a sort of life’s-work book by Owen Jander titled Beethoven’s “Orpheus” Concerto: The Fourth Piano Concerto in its Cultural Context.  I read it every evening, almost finishing it before the meeting was over.  Now, Beethoven Four is out-of-this-world extraordinary, and not just because of the solo piano opening.  Donald Francis Tovey simply said, to close his analysis of the work, “The music dies away in the upper ether, which it has never left,” and there is truth to it: this work is probably the biggest pianists’ obsession in the entire concerto repertoire.  It feels ethereal, otherworldly, holy, wholly different from mere piano concertos.  Why?

Jander’s idea, developed in a series of articles (I only read the first couple and wasn’t aware that more followed), is that the concerto is Beethoven’s fairly literal take on the Orpheus myth, especially alive in the culture of the time via opera and other vehicles.  The Orpheus character, for obvious reasons, captivated readers and opera composers alike—a musician of gifts so supreme that nature herself looked on in wonder, a musician so in love that he journeyed to the Underworld to win back his beloved Eurydice from Death, and succeeded (until he disobeyed instructions and looked at her), and who subsequently denied his love to other womankind and was torn to shreds for it.  There are a variety of historical indications that Beethoven saw himself (musically at least) as an Orpheus figure, and Jander goes into very deep context to demonstrate how the concerto can be heard to reflect the Orphic legend.  He addresses various kinds of symbolism operative at the time (iconographic and musical), he goes into a variety of arcane aspects of Beethoven’s biography (such as the composer’s attachment to a particular biographical portrait, rife with personal symbolism, of his grandfather), and provides a very close reading of the concerto’s three movements which, triptych-fashion, he holds to depict three different episodes from Orpheus’s life: Orpheus charming nature with the beauty of this music, Orpheus taming the Furies and winning Eurydice back from Erebus, and the aloof Orpheus being torn apart by the resentful Bacchantes. 

The book does not wholly convince me, I have to admit—Jander waited just slightly too long to put it together and is now, apparently, not in good health, which means that certain tasks were finished by others.  For a start, the proof-reading is pretty shabby: a dropped line here, a random word or punctuation mark there.  I always liked Jander’s work on the second movement, but some of the readings of the third movement seem forced to me, particularly given the homoerotic subtext Jander feels it necessary to posit and stress.  I also tend to be unconvinced by “what could this be but a depiction of” kinds of arguments when the primary reason is that that is what should happen next in his program rather than a compelling musical reason.  In at least one case, Jander draws a variety of conclusions from a cloak slipping off his grandfather’s shoulder in his portrait…but to my eye the cloak does not seem to be going anywhere.  And so on.

For me, however, it is unquestionable that Beethoven’s Fourth is one of those works which require an extraordinary explanation.  Unexceptional explanations—“Well, he wanted to write another concerto, OK?  There are some formal anomalies but other aspects that are true to concerto form, so…what more do you want?  Mozart K. 271 has a piano at the very opening of the first tutti, so now Beethoven is going him one better.  Next week, Berlioz, and remember to study for the midterm!”—simply do not answer the call.  So I am not convinced by every last point, but I am very sympathetic to Jander’s ideas (some very much so), and above all I appreciate that he wrote the book more or less honoring what was clearly a life-long obsession with a superb, utterly bewitching musical work.  Nothing conventional about his discussion of the work; it’s all way out there, and if he overshoots sometimes I will gladly float him the difference.  What to me is the bold step is that he ventured something risky and provocative to explain (to rise to the level of explaining, really) a unique musical work and virtually universally recognized sui generis masterpiece. 

Hats off, even though I’m not with him on his whole journey!  I would love to see more such studies of individual pieces.  Musical works are written one at a time, after all, not as generic groups, ripe for generic oversimplifications.  This is one of the most magical of musical works—I say that without an iota of exaggeration—and I’m grateful to see a treatment this risky.  

Boy, Drummer, Little

Friend Eric sends a link to this Lewis W. Thompson article about “The Little Drummer Boy,” originally from the Los Angeles Times and reprinted on Christmas Eve by the New York Times.  Thompson characterizes the little tune as one of the most loathed songs in history; its incessant Yoda-like syntax and pa-rum-pa-pum-pums apparently symbolize all that is awful about the holidays.  To him, or to other people, or something.  Anyway, the point of the article is that more than one principal involved (the composer, a foundational arranger) have willed their substantial royalties to music schools, so that generations of music students can pursue performance study on the most serious level, at Wellesley and at Yale, all paid for by the Little Drummer Boy.  So, presumably, shut up for once and stop complaining about it!

Per usual, I am not in harmony with prevailing opinion.  First, anything that supports music departments in institutions of higher education better than their usual last-stop-on-the-resource-delivering-line level is fine with me.  Second, I’m  grateful to Thompson for clearing up such matters as the composer (one Katherine K. Davis), the fact that it was written long before a Christmas TV special with which it is often associated, the fact that the composer’s “Czech Carol, freely transcribed” notation was puckish humor (this is the age of Kreisler’s “arrangements” of nonexistent works, remember) and that it was nothing of the sort, and so on.  So there is some solid information here, which I appreciate.

Now: I have always liked “The Little Drummer Boy.”

Save the superciliously raised eyebrows.  If you can stand “White Christmas,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” Frosty the Snowman, “Rudolf” etc. you have a far greater tolerance for abject crap than I.  “Frosty” sounds like a Eurovision Song Contest contestant (minus the risk and raw power, of course) and the movie songs give lounge-lizard wimp-chords (a technical musical term, for those keeping score at home) a worse name than they already have.  At least the Drummer Boy has good honest amurrican triads (not major sevenths and twee Jazz 6ths and other devices that adulterate what I at least think of as a Christmas sound).  Moreover, it’s got a beat, which the aforementioned don’t have.  Plus, I’ve heard the Platonic ideal of the “Little Drummer Boy”—a muzak arrangement that seeks to evoke the Robert John version of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” as closely as possible.  Now, that is wit!

Brother Joel once played me a bootleg recording of Jimi Hendrix playing around with it (going into Scotland the Brave and God knows what else, if I recall; my single listening was more than a quarter of a century ago).  But I hear it with that wailing guitar, and I’d love to hear a creative, patient resourceful rock drummer underneath, keeping the grooves, with just rum-pa-pums to keep the thread, but with all kinds syncopations and fills and crazy stuff over it—maybe with brushes.  Some fifth-doubled, bluesy, by-third root movement in the guitar, maybe, and…

Of course, what I’m hearing in my head is completely out of step with the text—hard to imagine the infant Jesus smiling benignly at a locked-in-the-groove guitarist and drummer, because I’m not exactly conceiving a lullaby, here.  As far as the ox and lamb keeping time, well, I’ll leave that to your imaginations, because mine isn’t up to it.

I’ll trade all future hearings of “White Christmas” for it, though, in a hot second 

Those who celebrate Christmas: have a merry remainder of this one, and stay safe!

Holiday Music: Jump-Off-A-Bridge Edition

Friend Eric (I initially typed “Fiend Eric” by accident and, in fact, almost left it that way) passes along the following: a Chanuka song written by Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, someone whose politics, behavior, and self-righteousness I absolutely detest.  Apropos of a conversation he had with Jeffrey Goldberg, a columnist for the Atlantic, he wrote a song for our odd little eight-days-of-light-and-cholesterol holiday.  Goldberg’s—um—heartwarming article is here; or you can cut directly to the song and video. 

The remarks that follow the article provide find a microcosm of Jewish interior life (including the non-Jews weighing in).  They love the song; they hate the song.  Hatch Is A Friend Of The Jews; With Friends Like This Who Needs Enemies.  If He’s Such A Friend Of The Jews Why Doesn’t He Vote With Jewish Values In Mind Like For Health Care; How Dare You Try To Define Jewish Political Values.  And on and on.  I was raised by old-school, provide-for-everyone-but-YOU-work-harder-in-school-and-WHY-AREN’T-YOU-PRACTICING-MORE Jewish liberals, and I’m squarely within that tradition myself, so to my ear the mealy-mouthing about the great respect Hatch has for us is pretty annoying—for a variety of reasons, some of which are best left unstated.  But never mind; that’s neither here nor there. 

What is relevant is the song itself, and anxiety over the dearth and or plentitude and or quality of Chanuka songs.  In the early-to-mid 1960s, at San Jose School in Pomona, CA, we all sang Christmas carols, and the teachers would try to be inclusive (for the six Jewish kids in the school, two of which had my last name and three of which shared another one) and also sing the dreydl song.  Now, Adam Sandler aside, this is a kiddie-song piece of crap, and every musical sense I had would just wither when all my classmates would look inquiringly at me when, after “Lo, How A Rose Ere Blooming” and “Hark!  The Herald Angels Sing” and so on, the teacher would bravely start that damned thing and Jon-with-the-piano-lessons would more or less have to join in.  The sense of “you guys sing…that?” was unmistakable.  Not anti-Semitism, not contempt, not judgment, just honest-to-God little-kid bafflement.  I never blamed them.

So, such crossovers as Mendelssohn’s music in “Hark!” and Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” aside, there is a much anxiety about Jews and Holiday Music.  Should the kids sing it or not, is it participating in society or losing our heritage, how shrilly should we act like “Don’t Let the Lights Go Out” (don’t ask) is as good as the classic Christmas tunes, etc.  The fact is, of course, that Christmas and Chanuka are by no means equivalent holidays (despite the way my incompletely educated grandfather used to speak of them), so it is no surprise at all that a huge majority of those in the western world would evolve a large repertoire of lovely music inspired by one of their two most important holidays while a tiny minority there—to wit, my tribe—would not be as successful doing the same for a minor and, as Goldberg points out, odd and problematic holiday.  Some of the remarks after the article speak to this, and I don’t need to get into the history and theology of it here; suffice to say that the origins and subsequent interpretations (appropriations, really) of Chanuka are complicated and much argued over.   Shall we talk about the music?

From composer Madeline Stone we get poppy minor-key Ashkenaziana (it opens with a  sort of tip ’o the yarmulke to the Yiddish classic, “Khanike, oh Khanike”) produced according to the School of the Eurovision Song Contest—the bouncy beats and paleosynths of the early eighties, it sounds like.  From the uncomfortable-looking Sen. Hatch, we get a couple of verses of the explanatory doggerel typical of Chanuka songs, feloniously compounded with such rhymes as place with days, believe with history etc.  I’m sure Sen. Hatch did this as a gesture of friendship (the bygone Mormon practice of baptizing deceased Jews aside, a lot of Mormons feel close to Jewish religion and culture and so on), and certainly there are let-there-be-peace-on-earth-and-let-it-begin-with-me points to be granted to Syrian-American Rasheeda Azar (of Terre Haute), who does a creditable job singing it.  All that said, the thing still just makes me writhe and wince. 

It is, um, a gesture of something.  It’s no classic; it’s not anything I want to hear again, even.  Why must every Chanuka song lecture, or retell the story?  Christmas songs aren’t Cliff Notes, are they?  Why the neo-shtetl music, for heaven’s sake—how is that relevant in 2009?!  WHY ARE YOU ROLLING YOUR EYES AND RETREATING?  TURN THOSE LIGHTS BACK ON

I gotta grade.

All I Want For Chanuka

Ever heard of Geoff Smith and his “fluid piano”? Dig this article and video.  Now, forget all the experimenting-with-eastern-scales-a-genuinely-new-world-awaits claptrap.  That’s as may be; I’ll leave that to the—um—visionaries.  I’ve got my bona fides, after all; I published an article on Raga Rock once, so I’m, y’know, all cross-cultural and about breaking down barriers and like that.

Not!, but never mind.  What this instrument would be for me is the ideal workshop instrument for experimenting with unequal temperaments and the music of Chopin, which has been an ongoing research project of mine.  So forget (until later) the tuning hammer, the SAT III electronic measuring device, forget all of it.  Just me and Chopin and my ears and his music, and tuning slides that would enable me to change things as subtly as I can, almost instantly, to get his music into focus with what I conceive the exact right tuning to be.  My methodology has been, more than anything else, to tune the temperament to the music (if that makes any sense at all), and though I’ve published a short and very obscure piece on the subject I’ve yet to write it up in more readily available form.  Some of the effects are truly astounding, though.

I don’t, frankly, see the fluid piano as a concert instrument, at least as a classical concert instrument; I can’t tell but I don’t think it has 88 (or even 85) keys, and that lets it out for much of the Romantic repertoire, really.  I don’t know what one of these things would cost, but I’d sure love one. 

Let me finish with the incomparable chutzpah of quoting Wagner: “But will such a prince be found?”

Wishing everyone a happy Thanksgiving!

Philly AMS breakdown

So I'm back from the annual American Musicological Society meeting. As usual I feel like I lived about 3 weeks in 4 days, so where to begin? Maybe with a song.