Dial "M" for Musicology

All Music is Soundtrack music

[Orig.: “Every Life is a Biography.” A & E network blurb for the TV show Biography.]

A week ago our friend Eric had a gathering at his house to watch the films made by his 16-year-old son Connor, who has already won a variety of film-making awards (film competitions often have high-school divisions). Connor’s special talent is silent films—he excels in a kind of off-center retro take on Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. The event was a hoot, and I could well have been seeing the early works of the next Robert Rodriguez.

What I could not help thinking about throughout was the music he chose. The silent films had generic honkytonk piano throughout (I came home and was gleefully playing some of it by ear much to Debbie’s and Ben’s…disgust; what does a guy have to do to get a little adulation at home? And don’t say “SOME HOUSEWORK,” ladies, it hasn’t worked so far), a kind of period-specific musical white noise that did not necessarily accompany, comment upon, or interact with the visual material in any way, but locked in the century-old context inside the first three notes. Other films had random cues stuck in—stuff from the Lord of the Rings soundtracks, I think, and from other soundtracks, musicals, whatever. Often these were used with ironic effect, and I found myself giggling much of the time. Sound cues that come under the categories of Epic and Momentous and Tragic and so on can be sidesplittingly funny when the actors are a high school student’s friends and the scripts are, y’know, by high schoolers. High school humor can miss a lot, but when it bull’s-eyes something, that something is forever skewered—film conventions, literary pretensions, whatever. It’s wonderful.

Was it Cadillac who advertised the “set your life to music” feature for their car CD players, where you program in tracks from your own CDs and work in the fades so that you can basically assemble your own soundtrack for the drive home from work? It’s like that moment in the Disney feature The Emperor’s New Groove where the narrator (David Spade, I think) snipes at another character for singing his own cheesy soundtrack music while skulking about on some comically fell errand. A camp Disney joke, sure, but how many of us haven’t, at some point or other…

All Common Practice music, including most soundtrack music, has ideas of reference. The vocabularies of film music—I’m saying nothing new here—are derived from virtually all music that came before: the symphonic and operatic repertories, orchestral Jazz, popular music of all kinds, everything. In this, composed soundtrack music is no different from the music a talented theater accompanist would provide for silent films. You could do generic white noise, or follow the drama, making musical references and providing sound effects and so on. So it was with some of the soundtracks we were hearing on Connor’s films: knock-offs of Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody, of Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever,” etc. That is not so different from famous cues that scream Epic or Momentous or whatever; in fact it’s precisely the same pattern: you need the music to say something that you either can’t, or that you feel would be crude if you just came out and said it. You need a strategy with more deftness.

Now, think of—let’s say—a young person in love with his or her favorite song. James Huneker has a cute, if dated and saccharine, image of the female Chopin fan: “Surely these Nocturnes are my whole life!” Is our attraction to the popular songs with which we have most closely identified in the past really all that different, though? Man, that one hits me right…there. Cosmic Truth, that one. That’s me surviving the hopelessness of work, that’s me wandering alone on dark streets, that’s me tormented nigh unto death by my memories. Oh, man, and that guitar solo says it all. ALL! I’ll just hit “play” again and turn it up…

My favorite quotation from Gustav Mahler is “There is no music, from Beethoven onwards, that is without its inner program.” In Mahler’s view, that makes The Great Masterworks Of The Repertoire…soundtrack music. They either narrate or accompany a story, most often unknown to the listener, with a coherence and continuity that establish them as real, lasting art. In no way does it mean, though, that they aren’t talking about something else: love or war or a hunt or a hopeless quest or whatever. The natural way of listening—letting your mind wander and allowing a story to be told—may be far closer to the “right” way than listening for structure and thematic coherences and the rest of the stuff people with training are supposed to be listening for. In some measure, all art is escapism, as all literature is: escape to the imagination, to idealization, to something that both entertains and teaches something deeper about this Real World. But as we negotiate this Real World, we need our soundtrack: inner conversations, inner music: favorite tunes we play in our heads or on our iPods, and it can be the most celebrated of masterworks or the most ephemeral of pop songs. The soundtrack spins on and on.

When I was just 18, I was given John Hale’s Renaissance Europe, 1480–1520 to read in preparation for my first year of college (some catch-up for my year reading history at Portsmouth Polytechnic—Portsmouth, England—when my father was teaching there on exchange). One image that stuck with me was that of the constant presence, in the ear of the Early Modern European, of bells: bells for the many church services, for civic notices and signals, for marking the hours. The soundtrack, in other words. Other epochs have had street singers (often satirized iconographically), laborers and farmers who sang at their tasks, the huge repertory of folksong that is the human inheritance. A constant sounding, a constant accompaniment, a constant association of particular music and songs and gestures with particular emotions and activities.

Plus ça change, in other words. What I like about this is the image of us all singing our own soundtracks, so to speak, setting our lives to music, and that in key ways most western music functions the same way—accompanimentally, referentially, children’s rhymes up through symphonies. And, one suspects, it has been this way for a long, long time.

A Style Out of Time

“They were graceful and heroic songs in a style out of time…” (Maddy Prior)

One of the questions commonly asked of music students and musicians—probably something like the one asked to physicians: “A friend of mine has this problem…”—is asked by friends and family members who, y’know, like classical music but not that dissonant modern stuff. The question is something like, “Well, why don’t people write like Mozart anymore? We’d like modern music then, wouldn’t we? I mean, what he wrote worked…”

This one is surprisingly hard to respond to. You’re studying music, and you’ve just fallen in love with Pierrot Lunaire, with George Crumb, with Bartok, with Cage, with Ligeti. And you’ve just fallen in love with all this really challenging music but you can’t really explain it to people who want their music to be purty, period. And they think they’ve stumped you, and you think they’ve let their stupid side show, and in any case there’s no real way to respond to them—you cannot explain to them why Mozart is really edgy, in a sense not pretty, why people who liked nice music didn’t really respond to Mozart, all that you hear in Mozart. Forget it. They’ll think you're crazy, or pretentious.

I wasn’t thinking about Mozart when I had the radio on a couple of days ago; I was thinking about…Traffic. (Not traffic but Traffic: the fabulously gifted early-to-mid 1970s ensemble, consisting of Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi, and Chris Wood.) Steve Winwood has a new solo album, and the single, “Dirty City,” sounds an awful lot like Traffic in the glory days. It sounded wonderful, but…old, from Back Then. I honestly was not sure if it was an old song or new song. Really enjoyable, beautifully played, but…well, dated. Great, but somehow not right. The retro stuff on Springsteen’s latest (I’m hearing “The Girls in Their Summer Clothes” on the radio these days) is not old-style dress-up in the same way, but rather a tribute, and (somehow) more current and immediate. I really like this new Winwood tune, but it just does not feel culturally vital; it feels not like the immediacy of my youth, but rather like me too comfortably remembering my youth.

There is a reason, though probably an inexplicable one, why even the best music written in counterpoint class sounds like a beautiful…museum-piece, exercise, or artifact, but not really an expression of anything real. Contrast Brahms’s olden-style pieces for, say, women’s chorus, which sound like he is ruminating on a beloved style of music, which is something different—there is still elements of Brahms and own time there, hence an intensity and vividness (and, I guess, the same is true for Springsteen). This may be why much academic music sounds so blisteringly yesterday; it is, too often, music constructed in response to a codified structure or belief-system or aesthetic (whether historical or “contemporary”) and ends up talking to itself only, if it talks at all. I can’t help thinking of the vanilla silliness of what the composition profs in the 1970s were turning out, or the sugar-water of the New Agers later. The Moment for those styles was brief indeed, and the compositional nokhschleppers (draggers-after) were so weirdly self-righteous about How It Ought To Be, long after their stuff stopped communicating. I have to admit that some of this self-righteousness can be heard among Classic Rock aficionados: it was fantastic then, now it has no foundation, the kids don’t know what they’re hearing, it all sucks. O Tempus, O Mores!

Myself, I can’t get through the wall to the Mystery—why music from its time can sound timeless, but music out of its time is somehow culturally less connected, less vivid and immediate. And I will still listen to it, and gladly; good music commands attention. There’s a nagging feeling, though, that music in a believable historical stylistic costume just a tad too comfortable. The sort of thing a middle-aged guy listens to in the car. No offense, Mr. Winwood, Sir.

Glenn Gould's 3-D House of Pancakes

OK, I'll admit it, I've been kind of phoning it in on the blog for the last little bit. It's lame to blog about how you're too busy to blog (something I've called "the Teachout method"), but you get to do it once a year, I reckon, so I'm doing it now. You might have noticed that the number of "cool" postings has increased in proportion to "hot" ones, which basically means, more posting to other people's funny/smart/imaginative doings and more posting of Youtube clips.

This isn't going to change anytime soon. I've still got a lot of stuff to do before the semester ends, and all discretionary brain power (i.e., whatever's left over after teaching) is being used to write about angry hippies with guns.

Another sure-fire way to get hits 'n' links without trying very hard is to write something -- anything -- about Glenn Gould. So here we go. The other day in my sound and performance studies seminar I talked a little about Gould's approach to recording. Gould thought of a recording as a crafted audio composition in itself rather than a transparent rendering of a performance -- or, in Thedore Gracyk's terms, it is an autographic artwork. Gracyk's excellent book Rhythm and Noise rejects what he calls realism in favor of a notion in which a recording -- rock recordings especially, though hiphop does it too -- tiles together sounds assembled in the recording studio to create virtual performances, which is to say, performances that never existed in real time or a real place.

Anyway, the culture of classical music almost never challenges the realist ideal of recording. Even after 4+ decades of rock musicians and their audiences taking studio-based composition for granted, classical heads still get in arguments over the morality of splicing. Glenn Gould is an interesting historical figure (quite apart from the interest his piano playing as such might hold) because he is such an unusual figure within classical music, arguing what is basically a rock position on recording in a classical culture to which such a position is almost totally alien. A good article about all this may be found here. Its author makes the point that Gould's own studio practice is actually rather conservative in his piano recordings. Gould really only broke out into something more innovative in his "Solitude Trilogy" of CBC documentaries. There's a rather beautiful representation of his this in Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould:

In my seminar the other day, I played one of the recordings that Gould made late in life, when he had begun to experiment with what he called "acoustic choreography." This idea was basically that since studio recording allows one to create various acoustic "perspectives" on the piano, one could change from one perspective to another within the same piece, in effect creating the musical analog of a cinematic zoom. So, for example, in Sibelius's Kyllikki op. 41 no. 3,* Gould set up four microphones at varying distances from the piano, and in the first section, where he wanted a dry, analytical sound, he faded the distant mikes and boosted the close ones, eliminating most of the room sound and drawing close into the piano. In the more lyrical middle section, he "zooms" way back, boosting the room sound and giving the recording a "wet," bathroom-like acoustic ambiance. It sounds as if the microphone is mounted on a cart that has just been pulled away from the piano. Compared to the very sophisticated pseudo-spatial effects in an album like, say, Kid A, this is a rather obvious effect, even a bit absurd, like SCTV's classic skit, "Dr. Tongue's Evil House of Pancakes":

Still, you gotta love Gould for trying. And I think it's the fact that he did try, and in the face of considerable hostility and incomprehension from the classical music establishment, that has made him the unlikely hero of such musicians like Buckethead and Uri Caine.

*This example is drawn from Kevin Bazzana's extremely awesome scholarly monograph on Gould, Glenn Gould: The Performer in the Work, the last chapter of which contains a fine detailed investigation of Gould's "acoustic choreography," including photo reproductions of the scores Gould marked up to reflect his planned zooms and pans.

The Original Instrument

I suppose this is what I deserve for studying performance practices, and what you deserve for reading a blog by professors. A student found an old recording of the Schubert Arpeggione Sonata (arpeggione, which is a bowed guitar—also called a guitarre d’amour in its time—and piano), and shared it with me. Coincidentally, the very same day a different recording came in on an old LP, ordered by our music librarian. I mentioned before the I was dying of curiosity to hear what the thing was like, how idiomatic, etc. Now, at last, my chance! This rare instrument, how Schubert plumbed its depths, the new light about to be cast on a familiar piece…

The first recording I heard, very well played by Gerhart Darmstadt (arpeggione) and Egino Klepper (Schubert-era piano) did not change my world. It is always possible—I admit up front—that my expectations are colored by versions of the piece with which I have already become familiar. That said, my initial feeling about the arpeggione os as follows: it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Six strings on one bridge doesn’t give the player much in the way of room to maneuver without hitting other strings; a cello allows for much more room. On the basis of the melodies and textures I hear on this recording, I suspect Schubert was no more intimately familiar with the arpeggione that was anyone else; he was probably thinking of a “Supercello’ with a better high range than the cellos we know. This music seems to need a member of the violin family to speak, really: powerful bow-work is balanced by gloriously insouciant melodies. And the arpeggione sounds like a …viol. For me, at least, that’s just the wrong sound-world. The instrument is not sufficiently robust and extroverted to stand out against a Schubert-era piano, and the entire presentation seems like an idea that just didn’t quite work. Of course, the straight, uninflected, and polite (though wonderfully accurate) interpretation did not help bring vernacular Vienna alive for me, either.

Enter Klaus Storck, arpeggione, and Aloys Kontarsky, Schubert-era piano, on the 1974 Archiv recording. My objections are softened somewhat, but not completely. Where Darmstadt sounded a bit awkward on strums and chordal playing (what they English viol players called “playing the lyre way”), Storck sounds lovely. This recording also has a lot more Viennese vernacular flexibility and rhythmic kick (if you think I’m making this up, read Hans Gál on the subject), and so I found it more persuasive for that reason also. It is also recorded better, so the arpeggione does seem to hold its own against the piano.

All that said, I don’t regard a cello or viola transcription as so far off as to betray the piece. It is still a masterpiece, and works beautifully on the members of the more robust violin family. As it happens, I have just recently, for the first time, heard a recording of Ravel’s Tzigane for solo violin and luthéal, as was originally written—some kind of a contraption that made a piano sound more like a cimbalom, I think. Interesting, but the piano is fine on that one. For the Arpeggione Sonata, I'm fine with the middle strings, though clarinet, alto sax etc. are beyond the pale. It is possible to take the original-instrument fetish too far.

So, let’s summarize. Those who read this far have read my comparison of two long-out-of-print recordings of an instrument that had, essentially, the life of a dragonfly and had a negligible effect on the history of western music, and some philosophy in the bargain. Is this self-satire? Am I really this boring and peripheral? If so, at least it’s MY turf to stake out.

Go easy on the comments, please!

Rediscovered Ginsberg tapes

A wonderful discovery -- a tape recording of Allen Ginsberg reading Howl in 1956 at Reed College for a small audience. Much to their credit, the college made the tapes available for free this morning. The whole unedited tape contains seven other poems and a certain amount of informal chit-chat before Ginsberg begins Howl (slightly after the midpoint of the recording). I'm not the biggest Ginsberg fan -- don't hate it, don't love it -- but audio postcards like this always interest me. Ginsberg's reading style in Howl is self-consciously intense, in marked contrast to his very introverted style in the 1949 Holmes acetates. He says in his introduction to Howl that he's trying to emulate the feeling of chorus piled on top of chorus in bop -- he references a fabled Lester Young performance of "The Man I Love." Interesting to hear him trying for a jazz style; it's intense but it's actually not very jazzy. His reading doesn't have the musicality of Kerouac's readings, which are really very beautiful.

An unintended, but lovely and poetic touch -- the drone of the passing airplane (a prop plane -- this is 1956, after all) just as Ginsberg begins to read Howl. Don't know why this sound is so perfect -- mechanical but dolorous, like a train whistle.

More Lost Sounds

Friend Eric (eba) forwards several links to youtube clips of forgotten instruments: the Ondes Martenot (for which Messiaen among others composed), the Toy Piano (a favorite of mine; I’ve played such and (once or twice) really moved the parents of the kid-owners of such instruments), Trautonium, and even the Mellotron. Those who remember it from late-1960s Rock albums may be surprised to find how it’s used here.

To these I will add a clip of my old friend Roland Hutchinson introducing the Baryton, a mostly bowed instrument for which Haydn wrote many works, and a more modern version of the Arpeggione, which here—in a more modern version (but I believe essentially the same instrument)—is called a Bowed Guitar. What I continue to await is a serious performance of Schubert’s Argeggione Sonata actually ON one of these instruments—even a newer one. I’ve been the collaborating pianist on this piece, and it is a masterwork, but is only performed in transcription: double-bass, cello, viola, alto saxophone, what-have-you. It is a probably unique situation for a superb piece like this to have been written for an instrument that really never caught on at all, so all questions of performance practices, idiomatic writing for the instrument and so on are…utterly irrelevant until we see how the instrument really worked.

I’ll keep waiting. I’m used to waiting.

Listen to the divine

From James Kochalka's sketchbook diary American Elf, New Year's Eve 2007.

Guitar Zero

I have to get this off my chest. I have had a roiling dislike and mistrust for the game Guitar Hero (XBox 360—I think that’s what’s downstairs) ever since my son started playing it. He knows, and has kind of enjoyed tweaking me about it; I don’t prevent him from playing it, but it really rubs me the wrong way. Only yesterday did I finally figure it out:

I would rather he play aggressive (meaning, like Halo; nothing worse) games than this. His sole comment: “That’s really weird, Dad. Everyone will find that odd.” I gave him to understand how much I cared about what his friends thought, which didn’t surprise him. But: for a psychologically healthy person to play aggressive video games is a kind of play-acting, a way of gettin’ yer ya-yas out in a controlled and safe atmosphere. It defuses the violent impulse, I’m guessing, by enabling one to play at it. Team play: stylized war, right? Like, frankly, football or soccer or any other sport. The only thing that differs is the stylization.

Cut to the music. The very last thing I want is to short-circuit the musical impulse, to enable people to play at playing music. What is this, an Eminee chord-organ? (Does anyone remember those?) Look: you want to play? Great. Practice an instrument, sing in a choir. Is that too much discipline? T.S.! You can buy your music, then; you get to be a pure consumer—that’s your choice. There’s some kind of bizarre, practicing-is-its-own-reward puritanical streak in me that believes that make-believe music-making past the age of young childhood…’tain’t fitten, an illegal shortcut. You want to thrash? Figure out how to make the guitar do that, and go do it—or, better, thrash and figure out how to make the guitar do something else also. Time with the instrument, whatever instrument that is. No shortcuts. Shut up and stop whining. It’s music. This is what it takes.

Don’t ask me how I feel about karaoke. I have no opinion, and stay as far away from it as possible.

Not to mention that the Guitar Hero version of “Jessica” is presented, scandalously, without the piano solo…

It has been explained to me: the game not playing at playing music, it’s playing at being a rock star. This was not an argument I found persuasive. I can only echo the statement I heard Dr. John make on a radio interview in recent years: It’s about the music. So: open the piano, take a guitar pick out of your pocket, moisten the reed, warm up the horn. OK, all together now, with feeling!*

*I guess I concluded like this once before. No apologies; it can’t be said often enough.

This You Believe?

Three weeks or so ago I saw this perfect pitch blurb on yahoo. Such notices or advertisements appear periodically, and not only is the issue presented as if you-the-reader can easily acquire this knack (many consider it to be something you’re born with, period), it’s also assumed that you-the-reader want it. I remember one of my piano students, when I was doing my masters, angrily accusing me of expecting her to have perfect pitch (she was unhappy that I was letting her have it for not practicing). To her credit, she did get about ninety seconds of confusion before my annoyance really took over: I expect you to what? Why would I do that?

I do not have perfect pitch. I have very good relative pitch on the piano, probably timbrally based, because I’ve spent so many hours at the thing. Perfect pitch has always struck me as a disadvantage, because it’s harder to transpose at sight. People with perfect pitch have virtually a physical connection between G and this frequency, this specific number of cycles, and so—if, say, you’re singing a piece of early music originally written for men but there are women in your group, you may have to go up or down a second, third, or even perfect fourth. Yes, it’s initially disorienting for everyone, but you learn to hear notes in intervallic relation to one another, as opposed to “this is where God put G-sharp, and when I see a G-sharp this is the noise I make, period.” Wind players often have the almost crippling association of individual pitches with, more than anything else, finger position—a G is when my fingers do this, a C when they do that—which can put them at a real disadvantage in other kinds of music making.

A further question is what this physical attribute? condition? would have meant to musicians in previous centuries, when pitch wasn’t standardized. Temperament historians know from surviving Renaissance and Baroque organ pipes, recorder consorts and so on that pitch centers varied from place to place; the standard A in Köln might be a half-step, step or even more above or below that of, Leipzig. Local instrument makers standardized among themselves, of course, but what would this mean for a musician with this kind of physical pitch memory, what we now call perfect pitch? What happens when he goes to a town where the standard tuning is a quarter-tone or three quarters of a tone off? Does everything sound miserably out of tune? Does it become debilitatingly difficult to make music? Does music itself become an agonizing experience?

OK; so maybe you’re born with it. To me, though, it doesn’t seem to be a fundamentally musical quality, since it would have been a hindrance in the days before standardized pitch. I wonder what the evolutionary point of it is, or if it is simply one of the many neurological variants of sensitivity to frequency. I’m glad I don’t have it, and I marvel that people would think they want it, and would thus be such marks for “Learn Perfect Pitch!” ads. “Learn Narrowness and Absolutism! Become Straitened and Helpless in the Wide World of Music Making! Twelve Easy Lessons!”

The subject of what you will, unfortunately, believe rears up again in the Sept. 17, 2007 New Yorker, which has a thorough and informative article by Mark Singer on the Joyce Hatto hoax, which I blogged about months ago. This story is such a stomachache. We have, first, a pianist whose life-tragedy was insufficient critical recognition (yeah, sure, carrière and all that, but is that why you spend all those hours at the piano?!). Enter her husband, an utterly charming and ingratiating fraud, a pathological liar really. In the article, watch how he tailors his anecdotes to his listener, with heartstring-tugging vignettes involving Americans or Jewish holocaust survivors or whatever—diabolically disarming, clever stealth attacks upon reasonable skepticism. Then, of course, you’ve got the critics and chattering masses of recording aficionados: squabbling with each other, falling all over themselves at this wonderful woman, ignoring obvious danger signals (untraceable collaborating musicians and unknown orchestras), then—when the truth begins to bubble out—turning vengefully to discredit everything they formerly adored. Everyone behaves like a stereotype of one kind or another. It’s just a miserable story, all fatal flaws and almost no nobility, other than this, you know, pianist.

Pity the human being. Given a choice between naïve credulity and actual thought he’ll go for the first every time, and the resentment of those few who refuse to follow grows ever more palpable, and dangerous. “Politics,” “religion,” “morality,” anyone? Not to mention “musical taste.”

Music as Torture: A Dissonant Counterpoint

To raise a major moral issue like the use of music as a torture device (Phil’s August 20 blog “You like crazy drums?”) is on one hand a clarion call; of course this is serious, and why would the American Musicological Society not issue a symbolic statement such as Phil calls for?  Further, to carp about it and to point up inconsistencies in our collective reactions to perhaps related phenomena seems like a wretched legalistic dodge, the sort of fail-safe strategy that gums up the works, under the guise of earnest concern of course, and  ensures that nothing will change.

And yet, and yet.  The issue is really torture, which to me is always wrong, period.  I can’t see that music as torture is more or less wrong than anything else as torture, and I confess that deep down this feels like special pleading—e.g., water resource managers complaining about the use of water for torture, or (more ridiculously) Hello Kitty aficionados complaining that Hello Kitty armbands were to be used by a Thai police department as badges of malfeasance and indiscipline.* Phil quotes Suzanne Cusick in her concern about this aspect of the global war on terror (which she puts in supercilious square-quotes) “that particularly wounds me as a musician—wounds me in that part of my sensibility that remains residually invested in the notion that music is beautiful, even transcendent—is a practice whose contemplation would always lead me to contemplation of bodies and pleasures. Not bodies in pain.”

Far be it from me to get in the way of Suzanne Cusick’s contemplation of bodies and pleasures, but when did we all become passive mid-70s teenagers listening to Tubular Bells?  Not long ago listeners (particularly American listeners) were being openly browbeaten for their stubborn blandness of taste, wanting things to be pretty and nice.  “Americans do not like to have adventures with their ears!” I remember oboist and composer Heinz Holliger saying, and composers have raged for decades that we don’t have the patience or moral fiber for music that challenges us, discomfits us, or makes us think.  Were all the Dies Irae settings in history intended to make people contemplate pleasure, or to seriously disturb them?  The latter, it seems, if more likely; ask those who understand traditional teachings about the afterlife in the Roman Catholic church; if I’m not mistakent, the purpose was to terrify people away from sin, to “scare ‘em straight” as they’d say in gangster films. 

I can’t get over the feeling, moreover, that what sets us off is really not the torture but who is doing it.  You really do not want to get me started on the current administration and the people in it, but issuing high-minded protests on anything they do seems almost reflexive, the intellectual equivalent of shooting carp in a barrel.  Are other kinds of torture better?  We all know that torture has always been used by the thugs of both extreme Left and Right (perhaps someday someone will persuasively explain the difference).  Has Cusick et al. written articles against Central American governments that “disappear” people, or the treatment of women under Saddam’s regime (especially those designated for use by his sons)?  Perhaps she has, I don’t know. 

My enraged reactions to music I found fundamentally offensive—OK, torturously so—like Annea Lockwood’s Burning Piano and the like was always met with arch, ironic smiles, with bromides about people often resisting challenges and the comfort of the familiar.  I guess that torture really is relative, and mine doesn’t register on the meters.  Far be it from me to distance myself from love, pleasure, and transcendence, but can musicologists of all people afford to go on record with an earnest, carefully worded version of Music Should Be Nice?  (For a wickedly funny cautionary tale about what intellectuals look like when they venture out of their comfort zones, click here.)

So music as torture is OK?  Of course not.  The problem is the torture, not the music.

Let’s use a less extreme example.  We have all heard (NO I’m not going to look it up) of cases, over the years, where music was used as punishment in law enforcement.  How different is that from torture?  To me it seems a matter of degree, but surely what constitutes torture itself can be seen that way.  I seem to remember discussions on the AMS list: someone would find an article about how young malefactors would be punished by making them sit and listen to classical music, and we’d be outraged and cluck with disapproval.  There was also a case where the punishment was Barry Manilow was used, and we all cackled with glee: “Well, we don’t exactly approve, but…”  Going further back, I remember reading about a judge who sentenced some youthful criminals to a reading list with required reports—the two examples I remember were André Schwartz-Bart’s The Last of the Just and David Wilkerson’s The Cross and the Switchblade.  There was an apparent justice about that: make the little thugs learn something.  Just to be devil’s advocate, though: what if one or more of the little thug were severely dyslexic, and reading itself was torture?  Music, or for that matter physical pain, might have been preferable. 

As always, it’s a matter of elusive dividing lines: how do we distinguish, I mean really, between the you-like-crazy-drums? sort of musical torture, or even the war-on-terror kind and a stern parental you-sit-your-tail-in-that-chair-you-snotnose-and-listen-to-Beethoven-it’s-good-for-you?  In the latter case, would anyone get up in arms?  The neighbor playing hiphop would likely get more flak.  I am not convinced that there is really a distinction, but I am and have always been deeply suspicious about what we feel ideologically justified in criticizing.  Too often it feels passive, lemming-like, politically correct, and worst of all politically safe and, in a certain sense, protected.  Intellectuals tend to take unadventurous public positions, it seems to me, and they are among the most easily co-opted people on earth.  (Recommended reading: Mark Lilla’s The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics, which I’ve mentioned before.)

I repeat, I’m against torture (a very brave statement for a university professor, I admit).  Given its existence, though, I think I am willing to go on record as preferring the use of music as a torture implement to physical injury or physical or moral degradation.  I’ll leave it to everyone else to draw whatever conclusions are necessary about me.

*Relax, Hello Kitty fans, the idea was abandoned.