Dial "M" for Musicology

Music History Survey Survey

The Second Summer Session is in full swing here at IU and I'm back in the classroom. I'm teaching a section of the same music history survey I taught in the spring. The class is standard history fare: Death of Bach to "Death of Classical Music as We Know It"™ and entirely too fast.

That much is alright. I guess we are all used to the idea of cramming nearly three centuries into a 15-week semester. What I am not used to, however, is the summer schedule. Teaching the class is now even more of a short ride in a fast machine as our usual fifteen weeks are compressed into eight. Eek.

When one accounts for days lost to test taking, administrative matters, etc., those eight weeks really feel like seven. And seven weeks just doesn't feel like enough. Last week we taught: The New Eighteenth-Century Style, Comic Opera, Opera Reform, the Symphonies of Sammartini, Stamitz and Haydn, and also Haydn's string quartets and what audiences expected out of their chamber music back in the day.

I know that we'll get through it all. I think, with some luck and hard work, my students could walk away with a fairly good sense of what happened in the last 250+ years of music history. But I can't help feel that seven weeks of learning will make long-term retention of most of the details impossible.

This is only my first year contending with teaching "The Survey." It has felt a bit strange, partly because I have never been on the receiving end of such a class. My "survey" class in college was anything but survey. My professor  taught the course in an unusual way. The class had less than ten students and He took advantage of our quasi-seminar size. Instead of pushing through the repertory at breakneck speed, we spent an awful lot of time with a few pieces.

We spent our first few sessions on Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto. That's it. We read articles by Jander and others on the (possible) Orfeo in the Andante Con Moto. We learned about audience expectations and why those first few measures of the first movement would have sounded rather unusual back then.

I really liked the concerto before I took the class. After those first few lectures, however, I was struck with a feeling of never having actually listened to the work before. The piece sounded different once I learned the context. (And so I ended up here in musicology.)

But for all the revelation we did miss a lot. Our prof told us that we would need to make up some work on our own if we intended to go on to graduate school. And make up work I did.

I don't know which is better. I'm sure that my eight-week survey this summer is something many of you out there have all had to teach in the past--which is why I titled this blog post "Music History Survey Survey." I've just rambled about my limited experience with survey teaching and taking, but how about you? I'm interested to hear some of the more unusual stories of survey teaching from our readers.

When It All Goes Wrong

Is this from The Onion? A Dartmouth teacher sues the university over student behavior in her class.

There is a man-bites-dog flavor to this story. Usually people (parents, faculty, right-wing talk show propaganda ministers) harangue their righteous listeners about litigious students, the pervasive sense of entitlement, the breakdown of authority, O Tempus O Mores. In the present case, what is the faculty member, one Priya Venkatesan, unhappy about?

It’s worth reading the article. She was teaching there on a grant, and is now going to Northwestern. She has a wonderfully varied background, which includes both scientific research and literary theory. She alleges a wide variety of personal affronts, both from colleagues (disrespect in the lab, etc.) and students: systematic disruptions of class, patterns of disrespect (one young woman who routinely coughed in a certain way, etc.). Predictably, the comments to be found on the web (a sampling may be found at the bottom of this article from the NY Daily News) reflect the usual hobbyhorses: concerns about left-wing propaganda, right-wing backlash, right-wing anti-intellectualism, cultural insensitivity (more respect for teachers is shown in India…but wait, she was raised in the U.S.!), miserable behavior of the rich kids at Dartmouth (there had to be an anti-elitism component to this—those kids probably eat arugula and Belgian Endive too), etc. etc. So we have a bunch of unhappy, finger-pointing people, and yet another pop-culture guffaw-fest about those wacky college profs. And higher education costs what??

A heavy sigh for all concerned. I do know how a class can go bad; the one Gen-Ed I taught at my institution in Spring 1994, a disastrous mismatch of teacher and course assignment, went down. I had taught similar classes elsewhere with real success, but the combination of my new-faculty-member’s expectations + extant student culture + a bad text + 140 people simply = disaster. There was something close to open rebellion, vicious student evaluations (my favorite, which I’ve probably shared already: “If he thinks he’s so great, he should probably get a job in a school for music”), a tiny minority of furtive supporters (a note slipped under my door: “Dr. Bellman, you don’t know me; I’m in MUS XXX, and am not getting a very good grade, but I know what you’ve been trying to do and I wanted to say thanks”). I do understand how such things can happen, and how the teacher feels when anything resembling teaching or learning is sabotaged by student resentment.

What is being left out of the Dartmouth discussion is humanity. Before students are left-wing or right-wing they’re students, almost exclusively young people, and young people (for which God is to be fervently praised) have the most sensitive shit-detectors (if you’ll excuse me; this is a WWII-era term I learned from my father) on the planet. Authority must be earned, and if it is perceived to be undeserved, watch out. If you throw around postmodernist concepts without explaining them (indeed, without even adequately explaining the word), watch out. If you treat students like small children who are to have your wisdom stuffed into them like little sleepingbag-sacks, watch out. If you show no evidence of having even the slightest sense of humor, about yourself or others or even your material, watch out. I don’t mean to trivialize anything or anyone, I mean a simple sense of humor. This is life; it’s a funny business after all, and nothing is funnier than kamikazes who sit in rooms and labs trying to learn stuff, poring over books and so on. Learning and self-improvement are noble and glorious and second to nothing as endeavors…and for all that, the whole education equation is still funny.

My outsider’s take on this is that the disrespect was bi-directional, but that the teacher started with some good, old-fashioned I’m-so-learned, eat-your-spinach-you-little-snots pretentiousness. This was followed by a sense of her victimization, and (ahem—given a certain Critical training) she immediately concluded that it had to do with her Indian background and gender. Nothing will enrage students the way that will (“You’re mistreating me because I’m a girl!”—the female students probably took the lead), and so nature took its course. It seems as if this misguided teacher, who truly is bright and accomplished and apparently maintains a cluelessness of epic proportions, listened to all the praise she got over the years for being bright. It’s like a mama's-pet bright kid who feels entitled to be “special,” favored, a know-it-all, etc.…addicted to praise, in other words. You’re expecting this to be tolerated and enabled by college kids? At Dartmouth?

Watch out for that tree!

Testing

On occasion I've wondered just where on earth Terminal Degree is teaching. Now we know: a Mordecai Richler novel from the 1970s. Just read her story. I've never been at an academic gathering that got that badly out of control. But, as she says, nothing good happens after midnight, and we all know what happens when you mix alcohol and musicians.

We'll just sort of assume that Loud Guy's future in academia doesn't look too good. But still, Terminal is left with a decidedly icky after-the-party vibe that has to do with the fact that she was a woman being hassled in that way that guys always seem to want to hassle women -- shoving a stinky handful of crude up under her nose and seeing what she'll do. Terminal asks a bunch of questions for which I have no good answer, but which I'll throw out there for Dial M's perceptive readership:

Do you laugh to show you're "one of the boys?"

Or do you act disgusted by every crude statement?

Or smile and understand that "boys will be boys"?

Do you risk looking like a prude and leaving when the conversation gets too rough?

Or do you ask a bunch of half-drunk (or, in Loud Guy's case, very drunk) guys to remember that you're in the room?

Or do you wait for one of the guys to be a gentleman and change the topic, rescuing you from the discomfort?

And if you're a feminist, and usually a strong woman, shouldn't you be able to handle it yourself?

And why the hell are they grabbing your leg, anyhow?

Oh, right. Because you're the only female in the room. And since you laughed at the first off-color joke, and since you're willingly hanging out as the lone female in a room of men, your body must not be off limits, right?

Gene Simmons put Terry Gross to the NPR interview version of this; it's interesting how she dealt with it. I heard an interview with her about the notorious Gene Simmons incident, and she said that she couldn't just say "oh my goodness, Mr. Simmons, what a terrible thing to say!," because that would have been to fall into the trap that Simmons had laid for her. I have to say, listening to the show, she's pretty tough, and I suspect that Simmons has tried to suppress this interview not because he feels sorry for what he said but because he got his ass kicked. Like MF Doom says, he picked the wrong thug to test. But of course she didn't have Simmons grabbing her leg in a room full of drunks, so the situation isn't exactly parallel to Terminal's.

My teaching assistant for the undergraduate music history sequence at UT last year used to talk to me about how students would test her in a different way. I've heard this from other graduate students -- if you're a woman, undergrads are constantly testing you to see if you'll push back. My undergrad music history class had about 70 students, and the lecture hall had about three times that many seats, and of course they would always sit at the very back, which I hate, so I made them sit only in the first six rows. After a week they did this without my having to tell them to. But every time I went out of town and my TA would take the class, they'd be sitting at the back again, and she'd have to bring them down to the front all over. Of course, students are always testing their teachers anyway, whether you're a man or a woman or a prof or a grad student, but this little detail stuck in my mind, because nothing quite like it ever happened to me in all the years I was a TA back in graduate school. I'm wondering what your collective experience on this is.

Academic Survivor

Charles Carson sent us an email this week linking to this story from the Occidental College students newspaper: "Music Department Narrows Professor Search to Final Three." And it turns out that the story is exactly that: the music department has been doing a search, and they've got it down to their final three. (A refresher in the process for those of you who are unfamiliar with the ways of academe.) This is kind of like finding a newspaper report headed "Professor Grades Student Papers, Finds Room For Improvement." "Music Department Photocopier Getting Smudgy." I wouldn't have thought that the final round of a faculty search would be newsworthy in itself. "Music Department Narrows Professor Search to Final Three in Shooting Rampage" -- that would make a better story, probably. Although, as Charles points out, the author does at least try to make the whole thing sound dramatic: "like reality TV or something -- 'academic survivor.'"*

So, Charles asks, do we think this is OK? I don't imagine there's anything legally wrong with it, and what with the new (and not always welcome) transparency that the academic jobs wiki has given academic searches, I suppose we should be getting used to it by now. But still. Come on. Some people on job searches** really need to keep a low profile while they're looking for a job, and this sort of thing doesn't help. I'm guessing that most hiring institutions don't really like this kind of attention, either. Once stuff gets in the papers there are all kinds of opportunities for distortion and mischief, intentional or not, and academia is one of those things that attracts political opportunists like flies to potato salad.

I'm doing research on the militant American Left in the 1960s and 1970s and in a couple of weeks am doing a talk at EMP that deals with the violent revolutionary ideology of groups like Weather Underground and the SLA. Reasonable people, I think, would agree that one might do scholarly work on violent revolutionaries without espousing their ideology; indeed, anyone who knows me would tell you that I despise the idea of violent revolution. But imagine that I had once, say, had dinner at Barack Obama's house.*** Imagine what Fox News would do if it were learned that I, someone who had written about the Weather Underground -- practically the same thing as being a member! -- had once chatted with Barack Obama, or had in any other way gotten tangled up in the affairs of some powerful person about whom a narrative of crypto-revolutionist tendencies it would suit them to fashion. "Obama Parties With Radical Academic," etc.

So my feeling is, no, this kind of thing isn't great, but what are you going to do.

Speaking of which, here's the requisite Friday Youtube awesomeness: the nightclub scene from The Sweet Smell of Success, featuring the Chico Hamilton Quintet. That's Fred Katz on cello.

*What would Survivor: Academia be like, anyway? I invite contributions for the development of a future TV pilot.

**I'm not talking about the one at Occidental - I don't know any of the people mentioned in the story -- but about job searches more generally. While academics are often expected to "play the field" a bit -- at some institutions attracting a competitive offer is practically the only way to get a raise -- not all institutions take kindly to professors who interview elsewhere. And anyway, who wants the whole world sticking its nose into one's own business? The choice of where to work is a personal matter, surely?

***Note to Fox News: I have never met Barack Obama, OK? That was just a hypothetical example.

Living Someone Else's Life

Off tomorrow to Logan, Utah—Utah State University is the site of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the American Musicological Society meeting this year, and it is also the site of the Wassermann Piano Festival, where students meet pianists and hear concerts and have master classes and so on. On a once-is-not-punishment-enough basis, I’ve been invited to give a presentation to the piano people on Friday morning, and a keynote talk to the musicologists, music theorists, AND piano people on Friday afternoon. We leave tomorrow.

The one thing they never tell you about academic life if that there are times when you don’t have any time to think, much less practice an instrument. This faculty issue, that student issue (urgent phone conversations with several different people), someone’s knickers in a twist (several detailed E-Mails), a faculty search, keeping the seminars going . . . on and on and on. I’ve managed to prepare my talks. Haven’t really practiced my examples as much as I usually like to. Trusting to God on that, as my only alternative.

I love my gig, really, but look hard, you young’uns: there are times when the very last three things anyone is going to allow you to be is A) a scholar, B) a teacher, and C) a competent player. Of anything. You’ll be putting out their fires.

At least we’re both going to Logan; that’ll be nice. Maybe I could actually enjoy it? Back Sunday.

Canonic Curricula

A recent New York Times article by Daniel J. Wakin (February 12, 2008) outlines a semester-long curriculum at Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, one of the top conservatories in the country. The idea is that for an entire term, everyone is going to be playing, studying, and otherwise exposed to Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 11 in F Minor, Op. 95. Large ensemble transcriptions, chamber groups, analytical lectures, academic classes: everyone does Beethoven.

I’m certainly smiling, and probably a lot of others also: nothing better! Beethoven immersion! The Talmudic aspect particularly appeals to me: take a tiny excerpt of the holy wrtitings, say a line or two, and work it over and study it from every angle. In this case, it is a single work from The Repertoire, a work with (obviously) a tremendous amount to teach, and the whole population of Curtis sets about being each other’s study partners for the term and working the piece over. This is the sort of thing that cannot be put in a curricular plan or course cataloge but has the potential to change lives more profoundly than The History Sequence or The Theory Sequence could ever do.

Incidentally, I’m sure that other places do things like this; Curtis isn’t the first. We did something like it, unofficially, in Autumn of 2006. (How could the Times have missed it? Their 24-hour feed from the Front Range must have failed.) That semester, the opera department put on Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, without question one of the greatest operas of all time. So: two casts of singers, plus all the orchestral players involved of course. The understudies each got a concert performance of an aria from the opera with the chamber (second) orchestra, so there was a decent payoff for all their work. I assembled and taught a graduate seminar on the opera, dealing with the original Beaumarchais play and the trilogy of plays it comes from, Paisiello’s earlier Barber of Seville (which Mozart knew and drew upon; that is the first of the trilogy while Figaro is the second), Mozart’s musical language, syntax, dramatic approach, and so on. How better to spend a semester than living the Marriage of Figaro?

At UCSB, in Spring quarter 1980, Prof. Alejandro E. Planchart decided to put on the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610, utilizing probably two-thirds of the department (I got to play harpsichord continuo for the solo numbers and a couple of other pieces). So I rehearsed with those singers all year, oncfe a week: Nigra sum, Pulchra es, Duo seraphim, Audi coelum. Unbearably beautiful. By the time of the concert, the entire department, basically, was at a fever pitch, having lived inside one of Monteverdi’s absolute greatest masterpieces—probably the—for that length of time. Purely and simply, any musician that participated came out different, utterly transformed, with rearranged DNA. This Curtis story gave me a warm feeling because of those memories: I know what students and faculty alike are going to get from that experience, and the fact that they’re sharing it as a large community enriches it exponentially.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I wonder what that anti-canon wing of cultural criticism makes of all this. How much more galling, for people who object to received texts and sacralization and handed-down wisdom and limited perspectives and so on to be confronted with a curriculum of one revered piece by the most revered of composers? I can imagine some difficulties myself, were the piece a Wagner opera or something. Maybe you just can’t abide Beethoven, or Mozart, or Monteverdi. (If that’s the case, God have mercy on you…but I digress.)

The Times article is a puff piece, not a resistant reading of the pedagogical concept, so certain questions didn’t get asked. The fact is that the experience of intense, extended, serious study of anything in this kind of detail will change the students forever, whether they’re string players or not. Studying anything with the combination of exaltation, reverence, and doggedness to work the Truth out of it will change the student, whether the revelations remain or not, or even if the commitment to the piece remains. Anyone who has played a memorized piano recital knows this experience; a tremendous amount ot time is spent making the works a part of one’s brain tissue, and some are kept and some…are not. Though it will always feel like it is about the music, about the Monteverdi Verspers or Beethoven Op. 95, it is about the study itself, the commitment, the…damn it, the love of the Law. The students will emerge knowing how to study anything in this kind of depth, to reflect on it, to think deeply about it without constantly being hampered by an approaching performance date, the necessity of covering more ground, making compromises because of real-world practicalities and so on. That is the most important lesson of all: they’re not just learning the fingerings and bowings; they will be doing higher learning for an entire year—a rare enough opportunity, I would guess, for hotshot performers of the Curtis stripe who are always gigging, always in demand.

Fortune smiles upon all of them. That is what a School of Music is for: that kind of aggregate of students and faculty who can simply make extraordinary things happen in a collaborative way. It can be done many other places, of course. We do that here, as I said; indeed, plans are currently afoot for the forthcoming Haydn year—string quartets, symphonies, piano sonatas. Can’t wait!

Dad

We've been talking lately about what it takes to make it in academia -- what kind of attitude you should carry with you as your go through the baffling rounds of job applications and interview. Somewhere I said that pessimism and bitterness—a kind of bitterness peculiar to academics, I should have added—will kill you. Maybe literally: in summer 1998, my Dad died at age 61 of a heart attack, the consequence of a lifetime of drinking too much, smoking too much, and being pissed off too much. He was pissed off basically all the time, believing himself a failure, or that everyone else had failed him. He felt that life had passed him by, that his youthful promise had been dissipated by a lifetime of teaching at a poky backwater university in Northern Ontario, and that the final meaning of his life was the sad (but dramatically satisfying) spectacle of a brilliant philosophical mind sunk in drunken obscurity and saddled with a family he never wanted and couldn't control.

His image of himself veered between self-loathing and a certain romantic grandiosity. When I read Martin Amis's memoir Experience I recognized the literary sources of my Dad's self-pitying romanticism: it was the Angry Young Man persona that Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin exemplified for intellectual young men of my Dad's generation, and especially those, like my Dad, who identified with the English rather than American intellectual world. It was a literary-intellectual cousin to the hipster or beat persona, different in the details but similar in outline: drink rather than weed, Wittgenstein rather than Sartre, Dixieland rather than bebop, and tending to reactionary politics, but still exalting the Thinker as the critical outsider whose mind and morality is on a plane higher than that of the dull squares around him. The Angry Young Man pose was self-consciously, theatrically misogynistic, and it enacted the drama of the misunderstood hipster as a spectacle of domestic misery, with the wife and squalling brood of kiddies standing in for the oppression and witless incomprehension of the square world at large. Of the Thinker's once-rich inner life there remains only a slow burning rage, doused liberally in liquor and eased, at times, by books. Thus, at any rate, is the literary self-portrait of a middle-aged academic in the sticks.

My father was, as they say (and as one of his old friends from graduate school said at his funeral), a "complicated man," which is another way of saying that he could be mean and miserable, given to colossal rages, three-day-long benders of anger, followed by sloppy-sentimental hangovers of contrition. As a child, I didn't understand him at all, but I understand him a little better now, I think. I know better about the corrosive effects of intellectual persona taken too much to heart -- what happens when an aesthetic conception of self bursts its bounds and overwhelms a human life. This is something the children of hippies and beatniks know about. I suppose it says something embarrassingly obvious about me that I have spend a most of my academic life thinking about that slippage between life as represented and life as lived, though my own life has been full of hipsters whose mysterious inner/outer life demanded explanation. (I got the idea for writing my dissertation of hipness when I was working in a museum running a self-consciously "cutting edge" music series.) The modern aestheticized life is one of the great riddles of the age.

Being in the academic biz has helped me understand my father in another way. When I graduated in 2003 I went out to lunch one last time with Joel Weinsheimer, who was one of my mentors at the University of Minnesota, and he had one parting thought for me. Many professors in later life feel themselves to be overlooked and unappreciated, he told me; no matter how high they have risen in the academic profession, no matter how many books they have written, or how many honors they have been granted, they resent their colleagues for failing to understand them. They resent the successes of others, feeling they are rightly theirs, and they are full of envy and contempt for the work of younger scholars coming up in the profession. Everybody knows professors like this, but each of these people was once someone just like you, a basically normal nice person motivated in his work by a love of knowledge. So what happened? At some point, Joel said, they reached a point where they had experienced some disappointment or setback, and there the found, dangling before them, the fruit of bitter self-consolation: no-one understands you, so screw them. And it's a low-hanging fruit: it's right there, just waiting to be picked, and you can reach out and take it without any trouble, and though it's bitter it tastes like wisdom. But its bitter knowledge is false, and the fruit is poisoned. It's a long slow poison, and it kills.

Which is why, in those times when you're at the mercy of powers you can't control or understand -- like when you're on the job market -- you have to stay positive. Don't pick the bitter fruit; don't give in to pride and anger; don't go over to the Dark Side. This is something I've had to wrestle with myself many times. Finishing my Ph.D. was, for me, not just an intellectual trial but a spiritual one too. At one low point, when I had decided to drop out of my Ph.D. program, I was talking to my old friend DD Jackson and trying to explain why I was dropping out. I went off on a rant about my stupid students, uncaring professors, an idiotic academic profession, etc., and he said, "Phil, you are one dark motherfucker." I took it as a compliment and laughed. It's cool to be a dark motherfucker! Not like all those candy-ass losers out there still beavering away on their useless dissertations and sucking up for jobs from their sclerotic fachidiot professors. It flattered my own developing sense of romantic grandeur. But if nothing else, my Dad's early death brought me up short. I found that what feels like cynical wisdom is a deep, destructive kind of foolishness. It's a trap, easy to get into and hard to get out of.

My Dad had no business having children; he was extraordinarily unsuited for it. But for all this I loved him, and it took me a while to recover from his death, even though it was hardly unexpected. Dad was my first and best teacher. For one thing, he taught me to write, being himself a sensitive writer and a ruthless critic of prose. Maybe too ruthless: he published hardly anything in his 30-year academic career, which was one of the causes of his disappointment. Moreover, he offered me a model of intellectual as opposed to academic life. Though he published nothing and had a tortured relationship to the business of academia, he had a pure love for philosophy itself. He would sit up and read philosophy from the time everyone else went to bed until an hour or two before everyone got up and then sleep through the morning. I remember him spending several days making and throwing loaded dice in order to study the way they warped patterns of probability. He was an enthusiast; one the things he didn't like about academia was how it professionalizes curiosity, how the ideas he enjoyed for their own sake become instrumentalized -- we end up only wanting to consider ideas we feel we can turn into some kind of methodology, something we can use to bestow some spurious appearance of novelty on our writings. He was only ever really happy when he was reading, taking pictures, or working in his darkroom. And while his negative example has taught me to take pleasure in as many things as I can, his oddly pure notion of the thinking life has at least given me something positive to strive for.

While we're thinking about the legacies our parents leave us, you should read Lester Hunt's beautiful and moving posts about his father's passing.

(The second part of this post is here. The third is here.)

The Other Side of the Mailbox

I enjoyed Phil’s recent post about being on the academic job market, and the comments it engendered. My own experience is different, and I have never missed job-hunting or being in that liminal state or cogitating on the myriad possibilities of the future: I loathed being buffeted and disrespected by a process that seemed stacked against me at all times. Now that I am on the other side of the mailbox—the gaping maw possibility, so to speak—and have chaired searches, it seems a good time to reflect on the very different perspective it provides.

Reading files is always a sobering process. Any large pool of applicants cannot fail to have some real wrong numbers in it, people who decide “Oh, well, why not apply anyway, who knows what they want, or (worse) people who are explicitly counseled this way. Call me old school, analog in a digital world or whatever, but it really helps if the applicant is a good match for the position. It goes without saying that in a wide variety of situations, palpable desperation is not a desirable characteristic. It follows that a newly minted Master of Music in Percussion might well wonder how his or her application to a doctorate-only musicology position will look. Similarly, a probably-retired person with a long record of musical accomplishment on the school and community performance levels should reflect on how beneficial a chatty four-page single-spaced application letter for a heavy-duty academic-type position will actually be. (Satirical, but not by much, example: “Why should you hire someone like me? True, accordion and Turkish shawm are not high on the list of your august institution’s needs, or so you might assume. Allow me to explain. My philosophy of music, ever since my youthful experiences in Grandfather’s chant choir in Kziixlwwstan, has always been…”)

[Those of you gearing up to get offended: save it. This is not lordly disdain of the less-fortunate people who need employment. There was very real discrimination on my (early 1990s) job market and the scars from that circumstance are, for me, psychologically permanent. I was told openly, “Well, maybe if you had a different last name…” which I took not to be anti-Semitic but rather indicative of Affirmative Action, because the search chair continued apologetically, “we’re hearing a lot about that nowadays…” I was once told that I didn’t make a short list for a musicology position because I had too much piano on my CV—“No, your publications were great, but our piano department is weak and we didn’t want to have to share you, so…” My doctoral institution probably scared off some—“Look where he’s from; he’ll never want to stay here”—and my DMA degree damned me with others—“Never mind where he’s from; he’s a DMA! That’s the wrong degree!” And this is excluding my previous life as a ballet pianist, where straight males were really persona non grata oddities and that counted against me. So I do know a little about discrimination and the harsh realities of the job search, and am entitled to a bit of frustration with people who either cannot actually read job listings or assume that the committee will not have read them themselves.]

The sense of responsibility in reading application files is tremendous. Because one is judging human beings (hopes, aspirations, etc.) on the basis of their paperwork, the necessity of reading between the lines—always an inexact science—is pressing. It is every bit as pressing as your necessity of making the right decision in presenting yourself to me: is it worth risking a little joke, or ironic remark? Are all your accomplishments so important that you should allow your application letter to be more than a page? No right answer on this one; maybe they are, particularly if the position lists a wide variety of responsibilities. What is the correct balance between putting your best foot forward and sounding just a tad too shrill and insistent? Search committee members have to read with a cold, analytical, but also humane eye, but we’ve never been trained to so.

Is the applicant really interested in coming here or is s/he interested in negotiating a better salary, or just landing a “first job”? My belief is that you should never apply to an institution where you’re unwilling to live for any length of time, for the simple reason that you have no way of knowing if you’ll ever get another interview, if you’ll meet someone and decide to settle, if the professional opportunities a school provides might make it disadvantageous to return to where you really thought “home” was, etc. You are also cheating the institution of good-faith long-range planning if you’re looking to move up as soon as you arrive. If you take the gig and the salary, be a grown-up and contribute rather than constantly jockeying. Searches are not time- and expense-neutral processes; the people involved make a major commitment to them, all for the betterment of their institution, and so deserve not to be jerked around.

It is a high-stakes business, and for the institutional Body looking for a new Vital Organ it is no less high-stakes than for the Organ looking for blood flow and sustenance. These are the things I always tell myself as I wearily pick up another file: best game on, Bellman, mind sharp, brain focused. This may be The One!

So understand: there is trepidation on this side of the mailbox too. You seal your application with a “here goes nothing” sigh and prayer; I open each new file with a sense of risk, and real gravity. I’m quite happy where I am, and need to help find people who will be happy here also. Unfortunately, that’s not a measurable question.

Strength and clear judgment to all of us!

Expectancy

Throughout the thrice-excellent seafaring novels of Patrick O'Brian, there is an expression the main protagonists, Aubrey and Maturin, commonly use to express their curiosity: "I am with child to know." And we sometimes say that pregnant women are "expecting." There is something about the state of carrying life (potential life, at any rate) within one that lends itself as a metaphor for intense curiosity about, and eager anticipation of, the future.

There is no anticipation more eager than a young academic waiting to hear back from the academic departments to which they have applied for jobs. Those of you who are unfamiliar with the ins and outs of academic job searches should know that the fall is the usual time for departments to publish notices of job vacancies, usually specifying some sort of academic specialty (18th century music, American music, etc.). Those who are on the job market find out what they can about the departments that are hiring in their specialty, prepare c.v.'s and letters of application, hit up their elders for letters of recommendation, and so on. At some time from fall through winter, the applicant will be shunted along through a series of department decisions. The hiring department first meets and works out a "long list," a few candidates (maybe 10-12) who stand out as especially promising and well-suited to the job, and asks for further materials. These typically include published research, chapters of dissertations, teaching materials, statements of research or teaching philosophy, or other, more dubious things. After reviewing these materials, the department decides on the "short list": three (rarely four) candidates to fly out for a campus interview, during which the candidate will meet with the department, present a public lecture based on his or her research, teach a guest class (usually), meet a dean or two, maybe meet some students, etc.

I mention all this because this is the time when letters are flying thick and fast between applicants and departments, and those on the job market try to figure out what's going on in the minds of the institutions to which they've applied. This process has gotten a lot more transparent lately, thanks to the academic jobs wiki. (Ryan Banagale's post on this topic is a must-read for anyone on the market.) But it's still a fraught process -- when you send out your c.v. you hope to kindle a spark, and (assuming you actually want the job, which is probably a safe assumption) you bend all your thoughts on keeping it going, hoping it bursts into flame. Or (to switch to the pregnancy metaphor) your candidacy  is like a little life you carry around, in your head rather than in your belly, but you carry it with you all the same, and carry the same intense expectancy. You worry it will all just end, that you will stop getting emails from the hiring department, that the spark will fail, that your little embryonic future life -- the life you hope to live wherever the college is, the life you are now spending every spare moment envisioning --  will die.

Maybe this is a bad metaphor, and maybe I don't really know what I'm saying -- I never carried a child myself, obviously. But I'm trying to get at something of just how emotionally intense these early weeks of the new year can be for young academics. It's not just a job -- it's a whole vision of your future life. Academia, unlike many lines of work, doesn't let you say "I really like [City X]. I'm going to move there and look for a job." It's more like the army: you go where there's a post for you to fill. You might find yourself in a place you never heard of before, much less aspired to live there. So if you get invited to send further materials to, say, Manhattan, Kansas, you immediately ask yourself, what would it be like to live there? And if you get closer -- you get a campus interview, you actually get to see the place and see what kinds of students you'll be teaching and what the expectations of teaching and publication are -- you ask, what will my life be like here? How will this reflect back on everything that's led up to this moment? What will change? It's practically impossible not to think in these terms, and it is emotionally draining, because when you don't get the campus interview (which happens to everyone), that little future version of you has just been snuffed out of existence. All the emotional energy that went into creating that future just . . . vanishes. It's depressing not to get a job, obviously, but it's also strangely deflating, too.

But then, if you do get the call, such a surge of emotion! Your world changes. You set about learning everything you can about the job that suddenly might be yours; you get your materials together, you think about how best to present yourself, you get a new tie, you talk to all your friends, you talk constantly with you spouse or S.O. about it, trying somehow to peer around the corner between now and the future. You are with child to know how it will all turn out. You are caught between elation and hope and apprehension and anxiety. And you are in a funny relationship to time: everything is now directed towards the future, so you are not really in the present, but then again, nothing really has happened yet, either. You're in a transitional or liminal state.

I just came back from a trip to the park with my son, a budding natural historian who likes to muck around in the creek bed and look for critters. I kind of half-watched him from the adjacent playground, warming myself in the wintery sun and reading Karol Berger's recent article in the Journal of Musicology. And I was overhearing a young woman telling some friends -- obviously all young Ph.D.'s or grad students -- about how her husband just got long-listed at Vassar. She was in that liminal state, you could just tell -- you could hear it in her voice, excited and apprehensive and expectant. And I felt strangely nostalgic all of a sudden. I realized that this is the first year since 2001 that I haven't been scuffling for some job or other. This time last year I was completely caught up in preparing to interview here at IU. And I look back at that time, and all the other times before it, when I was waiting, waiting, and realize that there's actually something kind of beautiful about that in-between state. It's not a terribly easy state to remain in, but while you're in it you live a life of possibilities. It's a time when it is your professional obligation to take a step back from your life and reflect on it. You visualize the paths that led you here and the paths that fork away from you; you imagine alternate realities, alternate versions of you, that might actually be born. It's freaky, but it's also kind of beautiful. There aren't many times in life when you look out to the far horizon so intensely. Most of the time, we're staring at what's six inches from our noses.

Stop Me If You've Heard This Before

I, too, have been aching inside over stories like the one Phil cites in Exploitation, about the challenges faced by our friend Terminaldegree. Phil rages--rightfully--at the exploitation of (especially young) faculty by understaffed, resource-starved departments, and acknowledges feeling something like survivor’s guilt when he considers his own situation, which has landed him at an A+ institution. The psychological, physical, and professional health of young faculty are very much at risk in the all-too-common exploitative situations, and we are all right to be concerned, to implore graduate students and prospective graduates students in our discipline to have a clear-eyed, pragmatic view of the future, and so on. All too often, the newbie faculty member feels persecuted (which he or she may indeed be), unsupported, un- or underappreciated by students-- barely afloat and rapidly taking on water, so to speak, rather than moving confidently to the safe harbor of tenure and promotion.

I do understand. I worked in one-year positions after which…good-by. I had a barely-employed year (the year my son was born, an event for which we had to fly three thousand miles because of health insurance issues)--after the two one-years--which almost drove me out of the field, and out of my mind. My job here in Colorado was initially a revolving one-year position that was not tenure-track and, I will honestly say, I was made aware of my provisional status a couple of different times in the form of not-so-veiled threats relating to my teaching evaluations. (Those administrators are no longer here.) My own travails were at the height of Affirmative Action at its most rampant, so no one wanted to hire me anyway: no extra points, no ancillary funds, nuthin’. So please: I do understand young faculty members’ Dark Nights, and I do not teach at a musicology powerhouse like Indiana. My own reaction is something more like survivor’s pride, with a substantial dose of there-but-for-the-grace-of-God. What I want to do here is offer some few suggestions for ways to face the impossible challenges of the early stages of employment. You can’t change the wind, as the old saw has it, but you can change your sail, so here are a couple of ways for fledgling academics to work smart rather than merely working hard, yea verily nigh unto death.

1. Hang On. Academic faculty will never work as hard on preparations as they do their first couple of years. My first year as an academic was my second full-time year, when I went from a Piano Performance one-year to a Musicology one-year. My load that year was 3+3 plus five piano students (the top five from my previous year, who elected to stay with me rather than go back to the old teacher). It almost killed me. I remember realizing that had Yom Kippur not occurred one particular week, I would have died--that holiday represented, I think, two fewer preparations, and it made the difference between my surviving and my being buried in Richmond, VA. A twenty-five-hour fast? Oh, man, piece of cake by comparison. Two fewer preps!

Just survive this year, and there will be a tremendous amount you can re-use, the percentage of which will increase yearly.

2. Teach Defensively. Class limits, independent studies, students with special needs. Friends, you cannot be Mother Theresa in your early years. You don’t have the fat to survive the long winter of students taking advantage of you--and they will seek to do so; that’s human nature. Know University policy about grading and course caps and so on, put it in writing in your syllabi, decide on your policies, and stick by it all. A 3+3 or 4+4 faculty member is absolutely not in a position to add work and headaches, show mercy, extend him- or herself for the greater glory of. Take care of yourself and your record (OK: cya!), and realize that your have to care for yourself on a marathon-runner model.

A possible alternate course of action is to intentionally cultivate beneficial campus figures. For example, Terminaldegree here (20 January 2008) notes how much a campus Coach likes her. (She has never, by the way, presented this as a strategy; I am extrapolating a plausible strategy from her situation.) In many places, if the coach feels good about how you work with his or her students, you’ve got one BIG dog in your tenure-and-promotion corner. I never worked this way, but it is possible. (As a green TA in the Ohio State English department, my father was once approached by one of Woody Hayes’s assistant coaches about a particular illiterate student who was a great football player…)

Beware of putting out too much--overpreparing and so on. The kind of place that has a 3+3 load, and especially those that have 4+4, are not looking for memorized lectures in Latin for every class meeting. Figure out activities, films, different kinds of learning situations. Don’t deplete yourself preparing to teach consistently at levels from which the students cannot benefit. Music Appreciation and its equivalents must be good experiences in addition to whatever hard content they proffer. Remember, you are not on a suicide mission. However worthy or underprivileged your students, no one benefits if you burn out, have to be hospitalized, etc.

3. Plan Obsessively, Preferably the Summer Before. Get your syllabi set, get lectures prepped, be thinking of exam questions, at least generally. The more you’ve got prepped, the longer you’ll delay the panic attacks. My first year as a musicologist, I had to teach (among other classes) the entire music history sequence from scratch, and without a textbook the second semester. I had my ten Medieval lectures already finished when I hit Richmond--was already into the Renaissance, in terms of my prep. There will be more than enough curveballs coming your way as it is: the more lectures you have in the can, the closer to minimum sleep you’ll get, and the better health you’ll maintain.

[OK, the truth. I still almost died. That year I was so ridiculously overprepared I probably owe everyone involved an apology. I thought it would “save time” for the students later if I taught them everything I knew in one year so they got heavy-duty early music, all the Ratnerian topics and styles, a research project, blah blah blah. That there were no fatalities was miraculous. This was also the year I learned a couple of pieces (Scarlatti sonatas) that my appreesh students were to hear in a piano recital because we didn’t have any recordings and I wanted to “prepare” them.

Please. Don’t look at me like that! Just don’t be like me. Look how you’ll end up.

4. Professional Activity is for Summer. No, friends, you don’t get a life--not for a while yet, anyway. Finish an article or two, from your diss, spinning off it, or perhaps something else, every summer. This way you have a “record of scholarly work” for both your evaluations, if it’s relevant there, and for the job market if you don’t want a 4+4 load. Yes, it’s bestially difficult, but you have to keep all the balls in the air to move forward. I once got a phone call from someone interested in a tenure-track job here; I asked her what she’d published and she said, “Oh, I haven’t had time to go back to my dissertation in the last three years. I’ve been teaching adjunct at three different places.” I understand, really. The fact is, though, scholarly work is a necessity, particularly where there are graduate programs, and peer-reviewed journals serve as endorsements of merit. No one ever said anything was fair about a life in music or a life in academics. Just find a way to get it done.

5. Don’t Burn Calories on Blame and Resentment. You need those calories to keep warm in the academic winter. Speaking of what I observe inside your head: your idiot chair, your ignorant university administration, your wretchedly anti-intellectual state are only human--I really do mean “only”--and they are the products of their circumstances too. Your university administrators are being publicly upbraided by posturing buffoon legislators who glory in lecturing them that they will have to make to with less and, incidentally, they should be held responsible for their students’ employability. Said posturing buffoons continue: after we’ve cut taxes for you Real People, let’s do away with tenure fur them lib’rals. Believe it or not, your administrators are often in a terrible vice themselves.

Truly, much of the secret to survival lies in the resourcefulness of your adaptation and acclimatization.

After some very questionable early years, we are now tenured (yes, I was converted to tenure-track); I’m a Full Prof and Deborah the thrice-feared--who got her job via a search from which I was rightfully excluded--is an Associate Prof, and because of various other duties we are not at--umm--4+4, by a long shot. We have autonomy and are trusted, and--perhaps the most important point--our skill sets seem to really match what is desperately needed in this large-but-so-not-IU School of Music. Fine lives can be made in many different kinds of places, and there is a huge spectrum of possibilities between 4+4 and Harvard one-seminar-per-year-if-I-feel-like-it kinds of institutions; it’s not one or the other. the blessed and the damned. (An ignorant exaggeration; I really know nothing about the loads at Harvard and am just making a rhetorical point.) To survive, to succeed, and to flourish, you must look beyond the first years of purgatory, and above all--in the words of a wise, wise friend and former administrator: Grow Where You’re Planted.

Strength, resilience, and resourcefulness upon all of you. For an uncharacteristically sunny close: you were right when you went to graduate school. I cannot imagine a finer life.