Dial "M" for Musicology

The Four Ways of Practice

Phil Ford

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

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

Hello everyone -- 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Four Ways of Practice:

1. Always believe in yourself.

2. Do whatever you are doing with effort.

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

4. Be truthful.

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

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

Introduction

Jim Buhler

JWB here—

Yet another writer joining the merry crew of Dial M, and I want to thank Phil for the invitation. A little background: In my academic work, I’ve written a lot on Mahler and Adorno, but these days my research is focused primarily on music and film sound, and I'm currently writing a book on early cinema. I’ve been ranting blogging on and off since 2004, and, besides contributing occasionally to Dial M, I also blog specifically on music and film sound at Hearing the Movies. I very much look forward to adding my voice to the conversation at Dial M.

Happy birth of the cool day!

Phil Ford

It's Claude Thornhill's birthday today. Friend of the blog and jazz radio hipster extraordinaire David Brent Johnson just turned out a Thornhill centenary episode on Night Lights, although David points out that it has just been discovered that Thornhill was actually born in 1908 (in Terre Haute Indiana, no less). David and I just had breakfast this morning and DBJ pointed out that Thornhill is one of those guys who jazz buffs always like to call "unjustly neglected." Ah, the trope of unjust neglect -- where would we be without you? But jazz arrangers really do get the shaft -- no-one but the hardcore jazz geeks remember who they are or what they did, even though they are often responsible for what we remember about our favorite albums. Case in point, Thornhill had as much to do with the much-mythologized "Birth of the Cool" sound as Gil Evans did. 

Anyway, DBJ and I decided that hipsters need a national holiday, and August was wide open. So we have deemed August 10, Claud Thornhill's birthday, to be Birth Of The Cool day. DBJ and I celebrated by loafing around at the Runcible Spoon, which seemed appropriate. Those of you playing along at home might not have an institution of such unimpeachable hipster credentials in your town, but be inventive. You could get a six-pack of PBR or bake some cupcakes or something. (Is that still hip? I actually have no idea.) Whatever you do, it should involve

• not working
• aimless socialization and BSing 
• listening to jazz or some canonically hip substitute. Dylan is good, but maybe a bit obvious. How about Bruckner? Don't be afraid to try new things on Birth Of The Cool Day! To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, hip is whatever you can get away with. 
• consumption of drugs -- well, caffeine, anyway. Cigarettes recommended only for historical reconstructionists and original-instrument fetishists. Mormons and Straight-Edgers can substitute chocolate. 

The dress code for Birth Of The Cool Day is naturally a rather complicated matter. DBJ wore a Lester Young T-shirt, which is cool, while I wore my Stanford T-shirt, which is uncool, but I was hanging out with DBJ, so it was OK. You have to kind of play these things by ear. Hang out with someone cooler than yourself and watch what they do.

So, onto other news. Dial M is growing! After three years of writing Dial M, Jonathan and I want to keep it going but don't want it to be just our show. The original conception for Dial M was that it be a forum for multiple voices within the discipline of music scholarship, so in the next few weeks we'll be seeing some posts from new folks, who I will leave to introduce themselves. 

No Diplomacy; No Regrets

Jonathan Bellman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

COURAGE

Jonathan Bellman

This in response to Phi’s Blog Fail.  I really ought to take more time with this, but I leave tomorrow for California for a few days, and wanted to respond.  I understand—deeply—end-of-the-semester fatigue, the suspicion that one’s blogs haven’t measured up, haven’t hit their mark, and haven’t produced the kind of intellectual reaction desired, and so on.  Sure; who doesn’t think this? 

 

However, some shots were taken at our discipline, and I’m fine with that as long as they’re fair, and don’t think they were.  The number of blogs in—ah—Latin and whatever are all very nice, but unless you’ve read them and they have more to offer than other academic blogs—Dial M, say—don’t give ‘em a thought.  How many blogs are more blogger insecurity than anything else?  Are all those Latin blogs really intellectually thriving, or are they a bunch of Latin geeks talking to each other?  Unless you have their usage stats, there’s no evaluation to be made of the extent to which they thrive—and, basically, the list of wikis means not more than a list of listservs.  So what, in other words?  Unless one has gone through all the blogs to ascertain quality, frequency of postings, and readership…

 

And as far as those vaunted “other disciplines,” which I’ve been hearing about since grad school:  we should not be looking over our shoulder at them, no matter how the insecure among us think we should.  They should be learning from us, because we are a polyglot discipline facing problems shared by philology, linguistics, history, symbolic languages, music theory, morphology, art history, literature, God knows what—not to mention the linguistic competences that are expected.  Oral musical traditions, written musical traditions (difference between them), traditional historiographic issues, all jumble and combine in a way that make musicology perhaps the most complex arts discipline there is.  Which other disciplines have this many methodologies and strains of thought in which they have to function?  It’s true that we see a lot of lame musicology, but much of that happens when we stick too closely to one particular methodology or philosophical orientation: Cultural Criticism or (as you say) Philately or a very narrow kind of analysis or whatever. 

 

Summary: it is when we try to fit the models of other disiplines, “breaking down barriers” and trying to fit in and pass and all that, that we become less than what we should be.  Let the other disciplines come sit at our feet—the dullest musicologist has to master three languages: mother-tongue, oral music, written music.  Other European etc. languages etc. are on top of that.

 

Prescription for each of us: food and drink, home and hearth.  There are many reasons why we’re not a really populous discipline, logistical and otherwise, but I see no reason to say the discipline has failed in any way.  We’re slugging it out, still; yeah.  As I say, though, tell me what the other disciplines are bringing to the table that even begins to compare.

 

Sorry to overstep the 24-hour rule, but I’m out the door early in the morning.  Cheers, everyone.

Blog fail

Phil Ford

It's almost Christmas -- the traditional time for anxiety and recriminations, so let's start here, on this blog. I want to look back over the last semester -- hell, the last two-plus years -- and talk about failure. Namely mine, and to some extent yours.

On the plus side: I've written some things I'm proud of, and I know that people read them. At AMS this year I lost count of how many times people told me they read Dial M every week (sometimes every day) and how much they appreciate what Jonathan and I write. It made me feel good, and I returned to Bloomington with a renewed feeling of commitment and enthusiasm for blogging . . . which then quickly dissipated. Don't get me wrong, it matters that you read. A number of people told me that my dispatches-from-academic-life posts, like the one about waiting for schools to call you back for an interview or not getting any work done before the election, gave them some comfort, made them feel as if they weren't alone in what they were going through. And I write those things for pretty much the same reason: I want to write down something I'm feeling to see if anyone else is feeling it too. (This is one reason why blogs have comments sections.) And as I say, I've written things I'm proud of. I'm glad I had a chance to write about my Dad. I'm proud of a memorial post for a guy I didn't know and didn't agree with but whose horrifying and lonely death deserved some kind of meditation. I think that the cross-blogger debates we've had here on touchy subjects like torture and religion have been some of Dial M's finest moments. I've gone all meta and blogged about blogging. (I guess now I'm taking another step on the endless spiral staircase of blogging self-reflexivity and am blogging about blogging about blogging.) I've even occasionally written about my actual research.

But there's an awful lot of stuff in my head that never gets written because whatever anyone says, blogging isn't about keepin' it real -- it's about the meticulous preparation and presentation of an artful rhetoric of keepin' it real. At one point in Nashville I ran in Jim Hepokoski, who expressed surprise that I would confide so much about myself to a bunch of perfect strangers. I replied that I wasn't confiding anything; whatever I write about myself is exactly what suits me for people to know about me. I don't lie or mislead; nothing I say about myself is false. But whatever I disclose is selective and calculated. This isn't the "real me" here, it's a version of the real me packaged for blog consumption. Come to think of it, is there a real me anywhere? Probably not. We all do the same thing, making strategic self-disclosures to manage the perceptions that our friends, family, colleagues, and students have of us. As Rameau's nephew pointed out, even the King poses for God and his mistress. And it's one of my Professor's Ten Commandments (with an assist from Biggie) to self-own in what you write:

Number two: Never let ‘em know your next move/Don’t you know bad boys move in silence or violence. Or, as MF Doom says, never let your so-called mans know your plans. This applies especially to bloggers. Seriously, bloggers, always assume that everyone you know, and everyone you might want to know, will read your blog. It’s easy to get suckered into the illusion that you’re confiding your innermost thoughts with an anonymous Them you’ll never actually meet. Nope, and when you confide stuff about yourself that you wouldn’t announce from the lectern of a plenary session of the American Musicological Society, you could end up like Youngblood Priest from Superfly, who accidentally kills his best friend when he drops the name of his connection in a nightclub.
As Curtis Mayfield comments in the title song: “But a weakness was shown, ‘cause his hustle was wrong/His mind was his own, but the man lived alone.”
Or, to put it in less poetically, if you want your mind to be you own, or if you want to be master of your own destiny, you need to live alone, metaphorically speaking; don’t confide, or a weakness will be shown, and your hustle will be wrong.  

What would it look like if I were really keeping it real? It would look like this:

Chappelle's Show

Keeping It Real - Vernon Franklin

Charlie Murphy Clips
Buy Chappelle's Show DVDs

Black Comedy
True Hollywood Stories

Just like Vernon I have deep-buried rage which, if I started letting it out, would probably land me in a job at a gas station too. Which is one of the reasons why my contributions to this blog have been getting shorter, lamer, and less frequent. It's not that the only things I want to write about are the things that piss me off; it's that I'm constantly aware of all those things that piss me off and which I won't let myself write about. It makes what I *do* write about feel like trivial, self-serving happy talk, an unwitting confirmation of the image of academics in general (and musicologists in particular) as a pack of timid bores. Frank Zappa's jeer at academic composers always plays in my mind when I sit down to write something at Dial M these days:

Hey, buddy, when was the last time you thwarted a norm? Can't risk it, eh? Too much at stake over at the old Alma Mater? Nowhere else to go? Unqualified for 'janitorial deployment'? Look out! Here they come again! It's that bunch of guys who live in the old joke: it's YOU and two billion of your closest friends standing in shit to your chins, chanting, 'DON'T MAKE A WAVE!'*

When a blog post becomes just another occasion to contemplate one's failure, at a certain point it just becomes easier to say "screw it" and not write anything at all. Which brings me to the part I promised in the first sentence of this post, where I said I'd talk about your failures as well. And by "you" I mean the discipline of musicology, or more generally music scholarship. (There's enough fail to go around: music theory and ethnomusicology can each take a forkful.) I started this blog thinking that the strange absence of music-scholarly blogs was a temporary condition, and that musicologists, once they had learned about academic blogging by example and could see what could be done in the medium, would start writing their own blogs and a hundred musicoloblogospheric flowers would bloom. Well, that didn't happen. Look at the academic blog wiki list of music-scholarly blogs. Now look at the one for history. Or linguistics and philosophy. Or even Classics and Ancient Languages, for Chrissake. We're getting our asses kicked by Latin. 

I can't help but think that this is a cultural thing. Just as different parts of the orchestra each have their own micro-cultures, different disciplines within the humanities do too, and the culture of musicology is marked by its almost insane degree of caution and self-limitation. Sorry to be so blunt, but there it is: the other humanities, when they think of us at all (which isn't very often) tend to think of musicologists as something like stamp collectors, fanatically collecting and sorting and classifying stamps without caring about what they're attached to. We wouldn't want to start opening those letters! Just throw the letter away and keep the stamp. It's got pretty colors. This one from Zambia has a bird on it! Hey, it looks like this other one with a bird on it. Do I put it in the "birds" part of the album or the "Zambia" part? Hm . . . 

I usually dismiss this characterization, because it doesn't describe the musicologists whose work I admire. But I don't know. The point and challenge of blogging is to make connections with other parts of the intellectual world, and inasmuch as that challenge has hardly been taken up in the two-and-a-half years since I started this blog, I have to ask if we as a discipline are not actually just happier staying in our corner, playing with our stamps.

*Frank Zappa and Peter Occiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, 193.

 

A Short Guide to My Blogs

Jonathan Bellman

So there are times when one wonders if one is only capable of three or four discrete ideas, and the rest of one’s life is spent riffing on them.  When I’m feeling uninspired about blogging—yes, dear friends, it does happen from time to time—I take a hard look at my own stuff.  Frankly, I sometimes suspect I've got about six or seven licks and that's it.

 

To wit:

 

1)  An aspect of the interesting, poorly understood past that captivates my weird imagination.

 

2)  Take Courage!  Finish the dissertation and get the job!  Life's great!

 

3)  New musical discovery; not sure what I think so I'll cobble together a couple of sentences and leave it to you.  Actually I’m sure what I think but don’t want to come off the two-dimensional opinionated jerk I’m more than capable of being.

 

4)  I shore dew like the piano!

 

5)  Damn, I'm busy writing.  [Cue: “Cry Me A River,” by Joe Cocker.]

 

6)  Sometimes students piss me off too, but it's not as bad as you think.  [I don’t know if it’s because I lead a protected existence, or because I have calluses.]

 

7)  I like Randy Newman, Mark Knopfler, Bruce Springsteen, and select others.  I will sing their praises, yea verily nigh unto apotheosis.

 

The thing is, even a demon improviser has set licks, yes, but he also expands his repertoire, develops, changes etc. In some ways I don’t feel as if I’ve caught up since my senior recital. 

 

Will endeavor to have an actual thought or two for next time.  If I catch up, get back to the piano, finish what I’m writing, discover a new discovery…

Hello, Goodbye

Brent Reidy

Dear all,

My summer stay here at Dial M now comes to a close as our regular MCs Jonathan and Phil will be back full-time shortly.

Writing here has been fun. Summer is strange--so much free time, yet never as much accomplished as I'd like. For many other reasons, this summer has been stranger for me than most. Some of those details kept me away from Dial M over the last week and for that I apologize. However, in return, I have furnished a going away present for Dial M: behold the new banner at the top of the page!

If you'd like to keep up with my own blog, please visit me at musikwissenbloggenschaft, where I will resume posting soon. Expect a fun continuation of this post there soon.

Thanks all!

Summertime

Phil Ford

Yeah, what Jonathan said. I'm done for a while. But I'll be back in a few weeks. In the meantime, Ralph Locke and Brent Reidy (the latter of Musikwissenbloggenschaft) will be holding it down. Welcome them! I might poke my head up from time to time, but for the next few weeks I'm on vacation in Canada and will try to be thinking about things other that music, musicology, and related matters. It's summertime!