Dial "M" for Musicology

Dial H

Jonathan Bellman

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

Jonathan Bellman

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!

Guidance, or Not

Jonathan Bellman

Phil forwards me a letter from someone who thinks he would like to be a musicologist, and who desires guidance along this rocky road.  Do I want to take a crack at this?  Sure.  For protection of those intimately involved, I will not mention any names.  Here’s the other thing: I apologize if I repeat sentiments offered in previous blog posts, and (contrariwise) I warn you in advance that I’m not going to be offering a bland YOU CAN DO IT message.  So:

Dear Sir,

You write as a dissatisfied 27-year-old, interested in musicology, who (initially) was not accepted for a music degree at Canadian Maritime University I and so opted to attend Canadian Maritime University II in music.  Although you subsequently decided you should have been more persistent at CMU I, you enjoyed your time at CMU II very much, and subsequently finished an English degree back at CMU I.  You are now working on a Music and Culture minor there at CMU I, which you also enjoy, and you tell me that you’ve gotten above 70 in all courses for the minor.  You feel directionless, though; friends tell you to get a government job or something that would use your English degree, but you want to do music somehow somewhen.  Can we help?  What about music librarianship, and do we know any good Canadian universities for that?

What is clear, here, is that you are a young man with regrets.  You left to attend CMU II but should have stuck with, you say, CMU I.  You are not happy with the advice you have gotten from friends—telling you to get a job for which an English major might be qualified, or get a government job.  You inform us that your—ah—love life it not what you’d like it to be.  (However much this is on your mind, you should never volunteer information like this.)  You’re feeling time’s relentless march, but still cling to musical aspirations—you’ve played bass in lots of bands, etc.  And, ultimately, you say: “I am not getting any younger, and without pursuing my dreams, I have found that life isn't much worth living!”  Maybe Music Librarianship, you think, as a middleground between music and writing.  Well, yes, maybe, but what do we know?  And when you mention the musical accomplishments—playing in bands, good grades, etc., a Yank like me really has no frame of reference.  I don’t know what “above 70” means (I’m assuming it doesn’t just mean better than 70%, because that’s not all that wonderful). 

Now look.  It seems me that you have received lots of advice you that you feel has not been helpful, and that you have not been satisfied with a lot of things that have happened thus far.  If I may be so bold: given this impression, who would venture to give you any advice at all, now?  As far as I can tell, you’ve been a student most or all of your life.  Nothing wrong with that, but…sorry, I can’t help but ask: has the government been paying for this?  Even a pro-education liberal such as myself cocks an eyebrow at a government this generous. 

Musicology is something that makes me very happy, as does my job in particular, so I can certainly understand why that would be enviable.  You are 27, have peregrinated from University to University, and are clearly (to paraphrase Shakespeare) out of mirth with yourself.  I don’t know what to tell you about musicology, or music librarianship—the best music librarians command several languages, and I don’t know if you do or not—but it is a fact that if someone gives you advice, and you follow it and it doesn’t lead you to happiness, that becomes another entry on your growing list of regrets.  One thing I am certain about, from your letter, is that it is time to change that pattern.  It seems likely that another course—with its structure of Authorities and Learners, and Assigned-Tasks, Completion-of-Tasks, and Evaluation-Thereof—is (ultimately) well-charted territory, beginning to end, and won’t solve your problem.

My recommendation is to get out in the world—find some kind of job, keep your musical interests up on the side, work steadily on your writing skills and musical knowledge.  What you need right now is to dig deep into your own independence, initiative, ambition, and drive, NOT yet another program.  Perhaps there is a part-time gig available writing program notes, CD reviews for a website, whatever—these are credible things to do when you’re not working.  You mention that you are not getting any younger, and that is true (who is, after all?), but it’s time for some experience Out There, now.  Getting out of the Canadian government-supported education pipeline might, paradoxically, open some doors you are not habituated to looking for, and it might afford you some new tools to use in making yourself happy.

But no, I won’t give any advice about you and musicology, you and music librarianship, you and this or that Canadian university.  It’s down to you, now, whatever choices you want to make, and you might just take a deep breath and make this decision on your own, and then go all out to make it the right one.  Rear up on your hind legs and get something going.  For decades, the people who have become successful are those who have forced it, with weirdly checkered backgrounds, atypical skills, and (above all) prevailing diehardism, as I called it years ago.  Somehow, we squeezed through a crack, or forced out way in.  If you want to get anywhere even remotely associated with music, you need to adopt this mindset and stop asking for guidance.  What is more, prepare yourself for failures, reverses, and disappointments—if you can’t deal with those, music is not a good place for you.  (I’m not saying you have to like failure; just withstand it and learn from it.)

Other choices tend to fall into place and make more sense when viewed from a perspective of motion and activity as opposed to stasis.

Thus endeth the sermon. 

Jonathan

Happy new year

Phil Ford

You know how different people have different new years days? Like Chinese New Year is a few weeks after the ball drops in Times square? Academics have their own New Years Day -- it's the first day of fall classes. It's different for everyone, but at IU, New Years is today. 

I teach two classes today, a total of 4 1/2 hours in the classroom -- kind of a brutal Monday but basically welcome, since it frees up another day later in the week that I can spend a bit more time working on the current chapter of my book. Anyway, in lieu of anything more substantial, I'm posting the syllabus course description of my doctoral methods seminar, "Current Readings in Cultural Studies." I like doing long, ruminative, blog-post-like course descriptions in my syllabi. A course is a course, of course, of course, but it also represents the unfolding of an idea -- an idea of a topic, an idea for something you can offer that the students might find useful, an idea of how to take a given topic and frame it in some interesting way. In this case, I wanted to create a current-readings course that would give our doctoral students some practice in the border-language of the present-day interdisciplinary humanities, the creole of notions derived from (at times quite distantly) the "hard theory" days of the 1980s and 1990s. One idea that motivated this course is the odd situation of cultural-studies scholars working at this particular historical moment, living after the rampage and ruin of the Bush years and still very much in their shadow, working in a conceptual domain whose best and formative years now feel rather distant, and unsure how to proceed. In some quarters there is a feeling that we are living in a "post-theoretical" age. I'm not sure how much of this mood has seeped into musicology, but even a few years ago when I was working at Stanford it was pretty noticeable across the humanities. A friend of mine, a formidable cultural theorist in the art history dept., told me he found himself defending his syllabi from students who regard the classic theoretical texts he assigned as just another imposition of passé academic dogma. And my friend ended up using the same “you have to walk before you can run” arguments on his students that an earlier generation of teachers used to warn their students away from theory.

So what's going on in journals like Representations and Critical Inquiry these days? I actually think there's a lot of pretty funky stuff going on these days. Uncertainly and free-wheeling eclecticism can be a pretty productive state. Anyway, that's what my course is about. Here's what I wrote in my syllabus:

The mood of the academic humanities is always one of crisis, but the present mood of crisis has its own particular coloration, a tinge of mingled disappointment and indecision. We are not so many years away from the gilded age of the late 1990s, whose economic optimism and reckless plunging investment in barely-understood technology stock was strangely mirrored in the speculative bubble of postmodern cultural theory. The euphoria of the age was marked by a collective sense of living at the brink of a whole new mode of economic production, and it found its echo in cultural theory’s claim to have begun a new mode of scholarship, perhaps even a new mode of consciousness and communication. 

Well, that sure didn’t happen. We have settled into a post-euphoric age, where claims so confidently made a decade ago ring hollow. In the humanities, there is an anxiety that theory has not brought the gains we thought it might, that the paths we followed have led nowhere, and that, in the absence of theory, we have nowhere to else to go. Current scholarship speaks in the canonical idioms of cultural theory and is shaped by theory’s characteristic problematics of race, class, gender, and sexuality, even as the “hard theory” orientation of the 1990s has given way to an uneasy pluralism. 

So this while this course has something of the unexciting aspect of a salad bar—it is a general survey of interdisciplinary music-related scholarship published within the last eight years—it does nevertheless have a point. Our goal is to investigate what interdisciplinary scholarship looks like now, which means how it looks at a historical moment where old and hardened positions have softened but the new ones have yet to shape up. This in turn means thinking about disciplinarity and language. If we begin by asking how music fits into the wider culture, we will soon start asking where musicology fits into cultural studies; if we question what we write about, we will soon start questioning how we write about it.

The very first class I ever took as a graduate student in musicology was a version of this course that James Hepokoski did in the fall of 1993 -- a long time ago, at the beginning of the disciplinary realignment that the New Musicology precipitated, and it was a "hard theory" class indeed. This book was one of the main texts, and even looking at the cover at Amazon still gives me pain. My god, that was a rough introduction to academia. On any given page I was given to read, half the words were words I didn't know and the other half were familiar words being used to means things I could only guess at. I hated, absolutely hated, the whole cult-studs enterprise, which (insofar as I could understand it) seemed to be some kind of empty mockery of everything I actually liked. One of life's more enjoyable ironies is to see how some of your most passionately-held convictions will eventually turn inside-out. 

Yes But No But

Jonathan Bellman

A variety of interesting issues were raised by Phil’s “Come-to-Jesus Talk” blog, which addressed the risks of entering doctoral programs for the wrong reasons (or even for the right ones), and by points raised in the comments section.  Certainly, the quest for prestige and avoidance of economic responsibility are both disastrous reasons for entering a doctoral program.  As bad or worse is the common pattern of following the path of least resistance and marginal competence and ending up in a doctoral program as the next predictable step.  True; all true.  I don’t buy, however, the false opposition of teaching and research that emerged in the comments, especially given the old saw about liberal arts institutions’ not requiring as much unnecessary research from profs, and being more student-focused, or something. 

Herewith, first, a brief rebuttal.

 

The Come-To-Jesus Talk

Phil Ford

It's just a little more than week away from the beginning of classes here at IU, and moving vans are disgorging futons and M.C. Escher posters everywhere in the streets of my neighborhood, out-of-towners are driving the wrong way down one-way-streets, and new graduate students are getting braced up for the exciting, arduous course of study they'll be engaged in for the next few years. You've arrived! Congratulations. And for those for whom graduate school (or at least post-graduate life of some sort) is a small fluffy cloud way off on the horizon, it's too early to think about grad school applications for next year. But it's not too early to start worrying about the major life decision that those applications represent. Should I go to graduate school?* It's time for the Come-To-Jesus talk.** 

Please understand that I don't know you, so nothing I'm going to say should be taken personally. You might be America's Next Top Musicologist for all I know. It doesn't matter. I give the Come-To-Jesus talk to everyone, because some in the biz are like those salmon you see jumping up waterfalls on nature shows, blindly seeking only to reproduce themselves. We all have an interest in putting behinds in seminar chairs, and it's easy to lose sight of where our grad students are going once we're done with them. I think we owe it to prospective graduate students to be blunt with them about the enterprise for which they might choose to consecrate their time, money, energy, youth, health, and happiness. 

OK, so here's the quick answer to Should I go to graduate school?, which I'm cribbing off of the Credo of Leonard Bernstein's Mass. Possibly yes, probably no. 

I am by no means the first person to say this. Read this.

Still here?

Ward Churchill Again

Jonathan Bellman

Associated Press, April 2, 2009:  A jury ruled Thursday that the University of Colorado wrongly fired Ward Churchill, the professor who described some Sept. 11 victims as “little Eichmanns,” a verdict that awards him $1—one greenback dollar—and a chance to get his job back. “What was asked for and what was delivered was justice,” Ward Churchill said outside the courtroom.  Here’s the Churchill Wikipedia article, for those new to the story, and here’s the UPI story on the recent verdict. 

 

OK, so we might cackle gleefully at the $1 settlement.  Har har, he only got a buck.  I’m not laughing, because I tend to be an Old School guy with regard to a lot of educational issues; the settlement is, to me, entirely beside the point.  On what basis, may I ask, does Churchill—Masters only, no doctorate, a demonstrated plagiarist, a nakedly self-serving political ambulance chaser, a mannerist satire of the worst of hard-Left so-called thought, a non-Indian who made a career trumpeting the resentments of an imagined American Indian heritage—on what basis does a jury decide that the University of Colorado’s attorney did not sufficiently demonstrate that such a manifestly unprofessional, inappropriate character would have lost his academic appointment irrespective of his political beliefs? 

 

Of course, jury trials always have a wild-card element to them, and perhaps the attorney did not, in fact, adequately demonstrate this.  Or perhaps he did but the jury got confused, threatened, and resentful because he used words of more than two syllables.  Or maybe CU, for all the current faculty resentment of this clown’s slovenly so-called scholarship, really would not, after all, have had the moxie to can him.  It is quite plausible, sadly, that they instead would have continued to pretend that Churchill was a forward-thinking intellectual jewel in their crown, and continued to pay him an inflated salary on his tenured-after-one-year position.  In which case, shame on them, but it is the faculty and students who pay the cultural price for this kind of thing—not to mention the Colorado taxpayers who pay this guy’s salary.  Oh, yeah, did I mention CU’s reputation?  I used to hear the morning guys on my rock radio station (from Boulder, where the CU is) savaging the university for its role in this…and CU is generally an object of pride in this state.

 

Unfortunately, it is the rare University administration that not only admits an error but accepts responsibility for it and for cleaning up the mess.  Administrators change, the department chairs who agitated most loudly for stupid decisions to be made (say, hires and “programs”) accept jobs elsewhere or leave in disgrace or “change their focus of interest.”  In music, say, they might go from hard-core Victim Studies (to the “concerned”: we disagree, and you know that already) to “Music and Healing.”  Those left holding the bag are always left with a bad choice.  On the one hand, there is the unfortunate business of owning someone else’s error and the painful process of rectifying it, and on the other is the PR damage that results from making a public acknowledgment that will imply that the University—any university, I’m not just talking about CU—has once again shown the same arrogance, foolishness, and infantile defensiveness shared by the rest of humanity.  Often, and especially when skittish administrators and Trustees and so on are involved, the decision is to keep shut, circle the wagons, and try to act like nothing’s wrong.  The wages of dissembling are bitter, but it’s a lesson almost never learned.

 

Perhaps that is not a surprise, but we wanly continue to hope that we are different, that wise, sober judgment has a permanent home here, and that we are not as susceptible as others to the randomly twirling weathervane of intellectual fashion and fad.  Instead, it seems that we are constantly confronted with the fruits of our own intellectual insecurity, vulnerability to bad decisions—in other words, our own posturing equivalent of what is really a lemming mentality.  I have mentioned before, I think, how much I love the phrase “the herd of independent minds” (Lawrence Summers?) to describe the professoriate, because it is so cruelly true.

 

The Ward Churchill fiasco is a seemingly endless story that makes no one look good at all.  There are myriad lessons to be learned here, and I have every glum confidence that—as with the oil crisis of the 1970s—we will instead forget it as soon as possible, sweep it under the rug somehow, and continue to make similar misjudgments.

 

As Ian Shoals of the Duck’s Breath Mystery Theater used to say, “I gotta go.”

The Silliest Degree on Earth

Jonathan Bellman

Liverpool Hope University  is now offering a Master of Arts degree in The Beatles, Popular Music and Society.  (No Oxford Comma [a.k.a. Harvard Comma or Serial Comma]; this is England.)  In fact, let me just quote from the newsy website, though adjusting it for American usage:

 

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Liverpool Hope University has launched a brand new MA in The Beatles, Popular Music, and Society, the first of its kind in the world.

 

The new course, which can be studied both full and part time, covers four modules with specific issues relating to The Beatles and Popular Music, consisting of four 12-week taught modules, plus a dissertation.

 

Mike Brocken, Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at Hope, said, “There have been over 8,000 books about The Beatles but there has never been serious academic study and that is what we are going to address.

 

“Forty years on from their break-up, now is the right time and Liverpool is the right place to study The Beatles. This MA is expected to attract a great deal of attention, not just locally but nationally and we have already had enquiries from abroad, particularly the United States.

 

'”The Beatles, Popular Music and Society’ marks a seminal advance in popular music studies. For the first time in the UK and possibly the world, a postgraduate taught course is offered to research into The Beatles, the city from which they emerged, the contexts of the 1960s, technology, sound and songwriting and the industries that have set up in their wake to capitalize on tourism in the city of Liverpool.”

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I’m all for seminal advances, of course.  Still, I can’t get over the idea that this is a Liverpool cash-in on the Beatles for people who actually can’t qualify to study popular music and society at another English University, such as the Open University.  Studying popular music is not unheard-of in Great Britain, for heaven’s sake.  A graduate degree in the Beatles?  To what purpose?  I have a nightmare-vision of the applicant pool, or the new-student mixer:  slightly batty senior citizens and people my age—middle-age, we’ll say—who dress oddly, still occasionally wear their Beatle-wigs and Ringo-boots and whose eyes gleam just a little weirdly. 

 

The Beatles, bless them, weren’t and aren’t a discipline.  Sure, study Musicology and do a dissertation on them, or study Cultural Studies and do a dissertation on them, or Psychology or whatever else.  But a degree in the Beatles per se?  How would that make you anything but a laughingstock?  “Well, I’ve really spent most of my time with the verses of “In My Life”; I’ll have to go review George Martin’s double-speed piano solo and get back to you before answering your question definitively.  This really isn’t my area; I’m an Earlyist, and my dissertation was on pitch bending and blues inflections in the Tony Sheridan sessions, so this is well outside my sub-specialty…”

 

The global economy is in free-fall and Liverpool Hope University launches a Beatles degree.  Sheesh.  I’m sure there are Beatles fans all over the world who should be given the degree on the spot for work already accomplished.  

Reactions to the Record II

Jonathan Bellman

So I’m back from Stanford; this meeting was absolutely superb (the first one in April 2007, which I reported here, was also superb).  I have to love the sort of meeting where someone  (Denis Hall, actually) can come up to me at a reception and say, “I need your address, so I can send you that Hungarian Rhapsody I played.”  Now, I don’t believe I even asked for it; he knew I’d want it, probably by noting my reaction when he played it—but these are people who know enough about each other to know what we’re interested in.  A couple of people who liked my musical examples asked me for copies, and I was able to give them copies on the spot.  I heard ancient recordings, originally on Edison cylinders, by the likes of August Wilhelmj (1845–1908), Anton Arensky (1801–1906), and Sergei Taneyev (1856–1915), who studied theory with Tchaikovsky and piano with Nikolai Rubinstein, and was Skrjabin’s teacher. 

 

Not bad, eh?

 

Questioning performance practices orthodoxies—especially ones you yourself held—was a red thread running through several of the papers.  Taking sacralization of the Urtext head-on, George Barth ruminated about what can be learned from the heavily-edited editions of Beethoven piano sonatas—von Bülow, Schnabel—that are still habitually reviled by, well, performance practices types like us.  David Milsom not only talked about Joseph Joachim as an interpreter, he put on his Joachimian hat and interpreted Brahms’s Second Violin Sonata in that mode.  Will Crutchfield and Rebecca Plack did wonderful things with the song repertoire, remind us all how it really ought to work: rhythms and tempo deriving from the poetry and the projection of it.  Jonathan Summers talked about the extent to which students reflect their teachers, and can pass on Great Traditions—variable, of course, which is what makes it interesting.  Sandra Rosenblum talked about a specific case of this, where grand-student Raoul Koczalski was considered to have inherited Chopin’s manner of playing from Karol Mikuli.  I agree with her, but one can easily misapply that information.  I am an inheritor of the J. S. Bach tradition, as follows: I studied at UCSB with Peter Yazbeck (upon whom be praise), he studied with Lubka Kolessa at the Toronto Conservatory, she studied with Nikolai Rubinstein and Franz Liszt, Liszt studied with Carl Czerny, Czerny studied with Beethoven, Beethoven studied with Haydn and Mozart (well, only a lesson or two), Mozart played and studied with Johann Christian Bach, who studied (of course) with his father Johann Sebastian.  Which means that anything I say about Bach is Sinaitic truth. 

 

Or not.  But the extent to which one student can pass on a teacher’s “tradition” is a worthwhile question to ask, in any given case, and particularly when the case is being made with great shrillness.

I—first up, after the welcomes—talked about improvised ornamentation in Chopin’s Nocturnes and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, noting that notated score excerpts and examples from the dawn of the recording era by prominent pianists indicate that it could be either profoundly style-literate or just running fingers—the sort of stuff we look down on.  The problem is that some of the running-fingers stuff was, well, by Chopin himself, and Liszt students.  What do we do about that?  I suggest that we in the performance practices discipline have been guilty of a rather large oversight; “how Liszt played” is never modified by his audience, as if he’d play the exact same way for yokels and cognoscenti.   So how do we factor that in?  My conclusions were that we should become more style-literate—practicing musical style more than individual pieces, in certain cases.  Moreover, practice of pure technique (a long discredited part of piano pedagogy) actually provided people with tools they could use in improvising, so we might consider that, too.  It was very well received; people told me it was the most on-the-edge thing there, they think it should be published, etc.

Imagine a subdiscipline where the holders of orthodoxies are the same ones who are dismantling those orthodoxies and questioning their own recent statements, all the while gleefully listening to new recorded discoveries.  Imagine a field where, at least with a certain number of us, the sheer “isn’t this cool!” aspect trumps most ego considerations, and we’re too happy running forward—pell-mell, falling all over each other—to protect turf, cling to unworkable ideas, etc.  We’re simply figuring it all out as we go.  One could, you know, live like this.

No shortage of really interesting new information, in other words, and great conversation, and performances.  (And I haven’t even mentioned the pianola performances.)  Now it’s back to reality, and other forthcoming events.  Oh, yes, and toasting the Inauguration!

 

Interdisciplinarity

Phil Ford

Geez, I should write self-hating blog posts more often. People always say the nicest things! Thanks for all the supportive comments; at least no-one wrote to say "yeah, you really do suck. Pack it in." 

Since Jonathan has apparently left for holidays after posting a response to my blog fail post the other day, it would be churlish of me to escalate this into a full-on blog fight. And in any event I appreciate the intention of the title ( all-caps COURAGE), which I take to be a kind of "buck up, soldier" kind of thing. Actually I ended up getting some kind of flu-ey bug over the weekend, which might explain some of my crankiness on Friday, though only some. In truth, these are things I've been thinking about for a while. Which isn't the same thing as saying I'm throwing in the towel, though god knows I've been tempted to, and maybe will anyway. But I'm not going to right now, because it's Christmas, and Christmas is all about giving. Self-loathing: this is my gift to you.

So I appreciate what Jonathan wrote and (as usual) don't actually disagree all that much, but I want to follow up with a few more thoughts of my own on that much-abused notion, interdisciplinarity. I don't think we should be "looking over our shoulder" at other humanities disciplines just for its own sake, like they're the cool kids and we're the geeky bespectacled plaid-clad orthodontia-sporting outcasts who desperately want to be like them. (The internalized voice of Mom: So what if the MLA likes to smoke out by the dumpsters, you think that's a reason to start smoking too? If the MLA went and jumped off a cliff, would you follow them?) And in the 1990s, when musicologists started trying to incorporate various lit crit approaches in their work, it did sometimes seem forced, a manifestation of lit-crit envy. Some, like my own advisor Michael Cherlin, who had been reading Harold Bloom for years and working Bloomian insights deep into his own way of thinking, did it for real. For others (self included), the appropriations were more superficial ("Lee press-on theory," as I like to call it). Still, if talking to other disciplines is not a sovereign good in itself, neither is complacent isolation. Maybe "they" should read us, but they don't, and we all know it. Everyone* knows musicology exists in a state of disciplinary isolation, including and especially our own parent organization, the American Musicological Society, which has publicly called for new ways to address that isolation. This blog was started for the usual reasons (narcissism) but also in response to that call. And my point in my last post was that this call still goes mostly unheeded. 

I really don't know what to say to people who acknowledge this state of affairs only to dismiss it by blaming everyone but themselves. There is this stupid habit (NOT a habit of Jonathan's, I hasten to add -- I speak more generally) of dismissing concern about our place at the outer edges of humanities discourse by saying "well, we're not TRENDY or anything, just good humble music-analyzing musikwissenschaftlers." As if the only reason people are reading other stuff -- cultural criticism or social history or whatever -- is that they're "trendy." And as if we're keepin' it real by embracing our isolation. I hate that entire way of thinking. It is the mentality of a defeated people, of people who stop liking their favorite band when it gets too popular, people who cherish resentment against those big city folk who think they're better than us, people who burnish a tribal memory of historic defeats to keep the edge of their resentments honed . . . I just hate that whole psychology. 

Actually, I take back what I wrote earlier: talking to those outside our tent IS a sovereign good, if only because we're in the ideas business, which means the business of communicating ideas, freely and without prior restraint. The more people you talk to, the better it is for business. Perhaps outsiders will have a hard time understanding what we write about? Figure it out how to explain it to them -- it'll do you good.

What interdisciplinarity means, if it means anything, is not the forced kloodging-together of unrelated notions, but the investigation of things that cannot properly be investigated within the boundaries of a single established discipline. Right now I'm reading Peter Gay's study of Victorian sexuality, Education of the Senses. Here the entity to come to terms with is Victorian sexuality, which is a big, rather shapeless thing that can be carved up lots of ways. Although Gay is one of those genius people who can survey the whole field, you don't have to: you could write a book on music and Victorian sexuality, or Victorian sexuality and the visual arts, or Victorian sexuality and literature (etc.). But the point is of the exercise, the thing to be investigated and understood, is still Victorian sexuality. What's the right way to proceed? It seems to me that even if you want to remain rooted in a single discipline (and for practical as well as intellectual reasons I think you generally have to) you still have to map the whole shapeless terrain, read as widely as you can from all across it, accept that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in RILM. You hold in mind the tension between your own area of specialty and the wider area of your relative ignorance, so that when you write about your specialty it takes on the shape of the whole. What we shouldn't do, I think, is start off by asking "but is this really musicology?" Because then you amputate your subject from the get-go, limiting yourself to only those aspects of (say) Victorian sexuality that pertain to music, policing what things are "really" musical (works, genres, composers) and what things seem too distant (diaries, paintings, advertisements). The tension between the part (music) and the whole (Victorian sexuality) collapses, and what you are left with is chunk of an idea crudely cut out from the whole, its limits arbitrarily set by the fear of not talking enough about music. This is one way to write bad interdisciplinary scholarship, but it is easier just to stay with the "purely musical" and not even try. 

Now, you might ask, what if I don't want to write about Victorian sexuality? Or anything else remotely like it? What if I'm interested in tuning and temperament in 1540s Zurich? Hey, different strokes and all that. We all have our things we're into, and I wouldn't presume to lowrate anyone else's particular enthusiasm. Even if I don't want to write about tuning and temperament in 1540s Zurich, I'm glad you do. Where it matters is in those zero-sum places -- in academic journals, job searches, AMS paper sessions, and the like -- where one man's meat may be another man's poison, but someone has to choose: chicken or steak? Victorian sexuality or tuning and temperament? I've said before that this was always one of the best reasons for academic blogs: the blogosphere is never zero-sum. But then no-one seems to be starting any musicology blogs, so oh well.

Camille Paglia may be kind of crazy, but she made some good points back in the day, and this is one of them:

The humanities are dismembered and scattered, with music, art, and literature residing far afield. Literature is chopped into national fiefdoms. English departments are split by recruitment "slots," a triumph of the minim, producing such atrocities as ads for "Opening in nondramatic literature, 1660-1740." What kind of scholar, what kind of teacher could satisfy this sad little mouse-view of culture? American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old nineteenth-century German style of universal scholarship is gone.**

This passage has a hint of Paglia's usual crackpot messianism (19th-century universal scholarship is gone . . . but its time will come again! The sixties people will return, bearing with them calfskin-bound folio volumes of Walter Pater and the Marquis de Sade! And I shall lead them!), but it's worth thinking about.

*This even came up in casual conversation at my kids' bus stop the other day. And yes, I live in the kind of neighborhood where this kind of thing actually does come up in casual conversation. 

**Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture, 120.