Dial "M" for Musicology

By Request

Jonathan Bellman

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

 

 

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

Up and at ’em!

Silly heads, part deux

Phil Ford

A couple of people have stepped up to the sleevehead/jackethead challenge. But not enough! C'mon! I thought we could get someone working in a music library to amuse us with the old LPs gathering dust in the closed stacks. As we all know, old classical LPs have some molto bizarro cover art. Surely someone can do something with some old Westminster Gold albums? Think what could be done with these jackets:

And of course there's this perennial favorite:

But in the meantime, Scott is representin' with Kenneth Burke:

While Ryan Dohoney at Columbia sports Gallic cult-crit flavor:

And the Nonchalant Savant (great handle, btw) offers an old-school sleeve-head:

Keep 'em coming.

Silly Heads

Phil Ford

There's a page devoted to sleeve heads -- photos that juxtapose record jackets and people in perspectivally interesting ways. A couple of my favorites:

And Cat Scratch Fever is always good for a laugh. I think I'd be wearing the same expression as Paul McCartney if I ended up in a tastefully-decorated loft with the Nuge:

Anyway, in the interests of wasting time at the end of semester, I hereby challenge academic bloggers and classical-music bloggers -- geeks, in other words -- to come up with their own sleeve heads. But it has to be geeky. Classical bloggers could use classical recordings. Academic geeks could do a "jacket head" adaptation of the concept with a favorite book. Here, for example, is my own humble first effort, with Tha Notorious H.U.G.'s Production of Presence:

You make 'em and I'll post 'em.

Closing the Circle with a Skewer

Jonathan Bellman

I have recently been enjoying a book I had not read in probably thirty years, though I probably read it twenty times in the early-to-mid 1970s: The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle. A simultaneous fantasy novel and self-satire of the genre, the book is rife with anachronisms and Yiddish-inflected humor (a main character’s name is Schmendrick (=“not bright”), and withal still packs some of the most achingly beautiful and deft prose I’ve ever read. This was one of the books in my Tolkien/fantasy literary mix (which I treated like a slow-motion playlist) in high school, read so often I wasn’t reading it anymore. Had anyone at that time asked me what I wanted to do with my life, I would have assured him or her (after perhaps an eye-roll and a suggestion that I be left alone) that 1) I didn’t know, 2) the one thing for CERTAIN was that I wasn’t going to be a professor like my Dad, which was a certain waste of time, and 3) perhaps I could sit and read Tolkien and play Billy Joel and Steeleye Span songs for my whole life. Now, will you please go away? My Dad has gotten much, and well deserved, mileage out of my eventual career path, and though I didn’t become an English prof as, for example, a revered English teacher in high school suggested (“Would you like to be an English prof like your Dad?” “GOD, NO”), my writing about music text probably demonstrates that the acorn fell about as close to the tree as possible. What I apparently completely missed in Beagle’s book, though, is the skewering of a certain kind of academic, a kind of free mix of folksong collector, historian, musicologist, and ethnomusicologist. One character, named Captain Cully, is a leader of adventuring rascals and incompetent legend-in-his-own-mind who keeps hopefully mistaking Schmendrick for the folksong collector Francis J. Child and trying to sing him merrie songes he wrote about himself. The episode ends with Schmendrick bound and forced to listen, against his will, while Cully sings this repertory—thirty-one songs in all—and offers commentary: “'Whoever you are, you know very well that Robin Hood is the fable and I am the reality. No ballads will accumulate around my name unless I write them myself; no children will read of my adventures in their schoolbooks and play at being me after school. And when the professors prowl through the old tales, and scholars sift the old songs to learn if Robin Hood ever truly lived, they will never, never find my name, not till they rack the world for the grain of its heart. But you know, and therefore I am going to sing you the songs of Captain Cully. He was a good, gay rascal who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. In their gratitude, the people made up these simple verses about him.' …Whereupon he sang them all, [and] paused often to comment on the varying rhythm patterns, the assonantal rhymes, and the modal melodies.” I am neither folksong collector nor ethnomusicologist, but that last sentence sounds painfully close to some work in musical archaism that I’ve done. Ouch! I both laughed aloud and blushed. That was a punchline it took me thirty-plus years to get.

Rediscovered Ginsberg tapes

Phil Ford

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.

Literary history

Phil Ford

The first part of this story is here. The third part is here.

My parent split up when I was 17 and I didn't talk to my Dad much for a few years. The summer I turned 18 I went to Orford and borrowed Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye from a friend. The book is about a woman returning to Toronto and seeing old friends and haunts, and much of the narrative is taken up with remembered episodes of an unhappy first marriage to a bohemian artist-type named Jon. Jon reminded me a lot of my Dad -- not in every way, but in some ways, particularly his sense of humor. My Dad was a funny guy: he had an encyclopedic memory for jokes, and at his funeral his old friends remembered his prankish streak. The story I particularly remember had to do with a visiting professor from England who complained about a raccoon who kept knocking over his trash can. My Dad, without missing a beat, said "Well, you know, the thing about raccoons is they're very intelligent. If you give them any sort of challenge they'll keep coming back to figure it out, so what you want to do is make it easy for them. Just leave out a lot of food for the raccoons and they'll get bored and will leave you alone." And this English philosopher, with no prior experience of raccoons and not a lot of common sense, did exactly what my Dad told him. A couple of weeks later he came up to my Dad with a sour look on his face, saying "Jay, I don't know where you got that idea about feeding the raccoons, but it doesn't work. Now there's a dozen of the damn things on my porch every night!"

Anyway, I mention this because there's an episode in Cat's Eye where the narrator finds Jon painting his apartment black. "Jon says this is to get back at the landlord, who is a prick. 'When I move out, it'll take him fifteen coats to cover that up,' he says." And this struck me as exactly the sort of thing my Dad would do. When I got back to my Mom's apartment in Toronto at the end of the summer (shortly before going to IU for my freshman year as a piano student), I mentioned the book and how much the character of the ex-husband reminded me of Dad. "Well, it's not very surprising, is it? Your Dad was engaged to Peggy Atwood, after all," she said matter-of-factly. I was surprised by this, and surprised that everyone knew about it except me; I must not have been paying attention. When I asked my sister about it, she said, oh, yeah, I knew that. Somehow I had missed it, but apparently my grandparents never entirely got over the disappointment of my Dad failing to make a match with Canada's foremost novelist and would every now and then make a point of it. Once, when my family was unpacking from a long drive from Sudbury to my grandparents' house in Toronto, my Mom started yelling, "Goddam Peggy Atwood! Bloody Peggy Atwood!" My grandma had thoughtfully left a copy of Macleans magazine open on the dresser at the first page of an article on Atwood. But I was busy unpacking in the basement spare room and had no idea what was going on upstairs. Anyway, it was an interesting story, but I didn't think much about it, and later, when my Dad and I became close again, I never asked him about it. He didn't like talking about his early life anyway.

And then he died, and I couldn't ask him. But one day just before Christmas of 1998, about four months after his death, I was buying presents at a Borders in Minneapolis and noticed, on the "new non-fiction" shelf, a new hardback biography of Atwood by Nathalie Cooke. So I think, huh, I wonder . . . and take it down from the shelf, and open it up. And you know how books often open to the place where the glossy photo plates have been stitched in? This was the first thing I saw:

My Dad, the photographer. He loved making pictures; it was where the best part of him went, the best part of his creativity, his pleasure in the things of this world. Here's the self-portrait he took later in life:

My Dad, his face amused and intelligent and showing pride in his tools, capturing something of himself for posterity.

And here I am, in a mall bookstore, paging through a critical biography just as I've done a million times before (I mean, it's what I do), only this time, there's my Dad, a different part of him captured for posterity, a part I never knew about. Literary history.

I think my Dad would have enjoyed the irony of his picture appearing opposite the chapter titled "feminism." Atwood and my Dad were engaged in summer 1963 and spent a lot of time at my grandparents' Lake Simcoe summer cottage. And then they got un-engaged for vaguely described reasons. "But by Easter 1964 a strain had developed in their relationship, due partly to Ford's workload at Massey [college] (he was teaching two courses and preparing for comprehensive exams), and the engagement was broken off." (Cooke p. 118) But of course I know things Nathalie Cooke probably doesn't; I think I know why they broke up.

But you can find out yourself: go read Edible Woman. Because, I'm reading in this biography, the character of "Peter" in this novel, a landmark of feminist fiction and the mainstay of a thousand women's-studies courses, is based on my Dad. So I tuck the biography under my arm and walk over to the fiction section and pull Edible Woman off the shelf. And there he is again, my Dad, as real and present to me as the photo. Well, not exactly. It's a dark funhouse image of my father; my Dad in parody, my Dad as a sexist would-be playboy, my Dad as The Bad Fiancé, my Dad as a negative archetype of the feminist literary imagination. But at the same time it's an alarmingly, painfully accurate pen portrait. It's hard to read. What must it have been like for my Dad to see himself laid out on the slab and dissected like this? To Cooke he said that he found it "immensely amusing," but again, I suspect I know better. He was big about the whole thing to Cooke, but there's probably a reason he didn't ever mention this part of his life to me.

Flipping to another page in the biography, I discover that Atwood's early cycle of love poems, Circle Game, is also inspired by, and dedicated to, my Dad. So I go over to the poetry section and look for that book.

I have a hard time expressing just how strange this felt.

Blogospherical miscellania

Phil Ford

A quick tour of the musicoloblogosphere after teaching this morning turned up a couple of interesting things: the Joseph McCarthy Youtube clip at Phil Gentry's blog, and, at Likely Impossibilities, another musicologradstudentblog, a mash-up of Syberberg's film version of Parsifal with Bye Bye Birdie. Writes Micaëla,

Sample comments from the YouTubes: "This is awesome." "This is so wrong."  Both are true.

And, from The Black Torrent Guard, a response to my thing about Christmas book swag. What's most interesting about the post is the photo of Andy H-D's books. The top one is something called Dissertation Most Deadly. What's that all about? Aha. A musicological murder mystery. From the publisher description:

"I couldn't believe he was dead." So explodes an unexpected whirlwind tour of international proportions that propels music scholar Leigh Maxwell through a bizarre series of events in the course of investigating her dissertation. From a musty archive in Madrid, to treasure-troves of libraries in recently reunited Germany, to the warm and sultry breezes of the Caribbean, Maxwell, a doctoral student of Music History, uncovers 100-year-old secrets that reveal a web of theft, jealousy, deceit, treachery and surprising discovery.

Why am I always the last to hear about things like this?

Book swag

Phil Ford

This will be my last post for a week or so. (Really, this time I mean it.) If Christmas is your thing, I hope you had a good one. I know that the spirit of Christmas is supposed to be about love and giving and stuff, but really, for me, it's about books. Not necessarily a lot of books, but for me it's not Christmas without at least a couple of things to read. And not professional stuff, either. That'll be waiting for me when I get back to work. This is a holiday, dammit, and I'm going to read what I want to read.

So, here's a challenge to whatever music bloggers or litbloggers or academic bloggers might still be trawling the blogosphere in these quiet days. What books did you get/were you given this month? This is my own haul of Christmas book swag:

• American Elf Sketchbook Diaries, Volume 2, by James Kochalka (my favorite comix evar)
• Pierre Bayard, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
• Jo Walton, Farthing
• Neil Stephenson, Quicksilver
• John Crowley, Little, Big

The last three obviously cater to my SF/fantasy jones. (How about this for a better term of literary genre: Geek Fiction, or GF). This is all I really wanted for Christmas.

Well, also a hat.

Father Christmas

Phil Ford

Just as soon as I announce my intention to not blog, I am seized by the desire to blog. Well, just a little blogging, just one non-music-related Christmas post. In case anyone thinks that my posting SCTV's elaborately cynical take on holiday specials suggests a certain lack of Christmas cheer, I should also say right now that I love Christmas. I don't love the ridiculously hypertrophied "Christmas season" that now stretches from Halloween to the New Year, and I don't love the fact that for two months you can't go anywhere without hearing stale Christmas music in a variety of unpleasing arrangements. So while I don't share Christopher Hitchens' loathing of Christmas and all its works, I do sometimes feel oppressed by what he calls "the assault of the one-party state totalitarian Christmas music."

But what I do love about Christmas is crystallized in Raymond Briggs' Father Christmas, which I read as a boy and now read many times each year to my kids. (It's their favorite Christmas book.) It's such a lovely book, so unsmarmy, humorous without being "funny" (i.e., without the usual frenzied unfunny mugging), sentimental but not saccharine, and refreshingly free of sanctimonious cant. It pictures Father Christmas as a gruff, working-class Englishman, wearily getting out of bed on Dec. 24 and not looking forward to his busiest day of the year.

Father Christmas is magical, of course -- he has the flying sleigh and reindeer and everything -- but he also gets dirty when he goes down chimneys ("blooming chimneys!"), trips over housecats in the dark, and gets stuck in bad weather:

But when it's all done, he goes home, feeds the cat and dog, puts his dinner in the oven, takes a bath, pours himself a beer ("good drop of ale") and reads some travel brochures by the fire. And then he has his dinner, his pudding (the kind I had as a kid), and a postprandial cigar and brandy:

I loved this book as a kid, and love reading it to my kids, because this Father Christmas is the kind of person I always recognized in my own family and (now that I'm older) can sort of relate to -- a guy who puts up with the inevitable and likes the little pleasurable consolations that life has to offer. Briggs' cartoon panels are full of warm buttery light and plain household objects, lovingly observed -- they are the coziest pictures in the world. The landscapes and houses that Father Christmas visits are little oases of warmth in the darkness and chill of winter. I was living in a 19th-century brick house in Toronto's Annex neighborhood when my parents bought me this book, and  I recognized my neighborhood in one of the pictures

right down to the tracks in the snow left by a recently-departed car, and the little colored squares of lighted curtained windows along the backs of the houses across the alley.

My choice of pictures here -- FC on the toilet, FC swearing at the weather, FC drinking and smoking -- probably makes Raymond Briggs's Father Christmas look a little more punk than he really is. It's really a very sweet book, with lots of pictures of FC just doing ordinary stuff -- looking after his pets, putting the milk bottles out for the night, etc. But this book is sadly hard to find in the United States. There is a an expurgated version of the book and DVD, apparently, tailored to American audiences, which object to drinking, smoking, and even the very mild cussing. "Blooming" is no worse than "darned", but apparently it's still enough to trigger angry emails from concerned American parents. Look at some of the comments left on the Amazon page for the original, out-of-print edition: one, titled Outrageously INNAPROPRIATE [sic.] and CRASS!!!, says,

My daughter innocently brought this book home from her school library hoping to have a nice Santa book the week before Christmas. Unfortunately, this book isn't even a story, instead it is a cartoon strip about a grumpy Santa swearing throughout his Christmas chores. One panel depicts Santa with his pants down around his ankles while using the toilet. Apparently, the only thing that make this Santa happy is booze.

As Jaroslav Hasek once said, "This is only a small illustration of what bloody fools are born under the sun."

But hey, it's all love and no hate at Christmas, so I'll just stop right there. Happy non-specific solstice celebration, everyone!

The pedant

Phil Ford

Susanna Clarke's fantasy novel Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell posits a parallel-universe England where magic -- real magic, like raising the dead and traveling to Fairy lands -- was done as a matter of course in the Middle Ages. The book begins in the time of the Napoleonic wars, when no-one has done any "practical magic" for at least two centuries. The only magicians left are "theoretical magicians," who study the history of magic but can do no magic themselves. The book begins with an account of a meeting of the Learned Society of York Magicians, an inbred crew of pedants who find themselves surprised and displeased when a new member asks why no-one can cast even the smallest spell anymore. The Learned Society doesn't know and doesn't want to know. Its members have no interest in seeing magic done; they wish only to read about it in books. When a real magician does appear, though, it is in the uninspiring form of the peevish and pedantic Mr. Norrell, a man who has devoted his entire life to collecting magical books and learning their secrets. (And crushing his rivals and depriving them of their books.) After he makes his powers known, he falls in with a couple of London society types who want him to become a magical celebrity, an idea that alarms him. They try to convince him that he could publish book reviews, but he doesn't like that idea either:

"Besides," said Mr. Norrell, "I really have no desire to write reviews of other people's books. Modern publications upon magic are the most pernicious things in the world, full of misinformation and wrong opinions."

"Then sir, you may say so. The ruder you are, the more the editors will be delighted."

"But it is my own opinions which I wish to make better known, not other people's."

"Ah, but, sir," said Lascelles, "it is precisely by passing judgments upon other people's work and pointing out their errors that readers can be made to understand your own opinions better. It is the easiest thing in the world to turn a review to one's own ends.One only need mention the book once or twice and for the rest of the  article one may develop one's theme just as one chuses. It is, I assure you, what every body does."

In passages like this Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is both a superb fantasy novel and satire of academia. Who hasn't had a professor like Mr. Norrell? He's a miser of ideas, a quarrelsome and petty man torn between his desire for renown and fear of sharing his knowledge. He takes a student (Jonathan Strange, an amateur who has somehow figured out how to do magic without consulting books), but their relationship sours because Norrell can never imagine a student being anything but a pale moon orbiting around his teacher's solar brilliance. He doesn't have the largeness of mind that could allow him to see that there are at least two sides to every question; instead, he insists on his own narrow views as the only possible correct ones and all competing views as heresies fit only for annihilation. Intellectual life is for him a battleground, and the only thing he can imagine doing is erecting towers and battlements and fortifications, so that, ideally, he need never even meet his opponents -- they'll never even get in past the front door. 

I'm not writing this post with anyone in particular in mind -- this is just a recognizable academic type. You are doubtless all thinking up your own examples of brilliant and deeply learned men and women who feel they own their areas of scholarly interest, and whose proprietary attitude leads them to sandbag their positions against all intruders -- scholars of X who take every pain to ensure that no-one ever gets to say anything about X that they have not personally approved. (Also, the friction between "practical magicians" and "theoretical magicians" might strike just a little close to home for musicologists.) But then again, Susanna Clarke probably never intended her novel to be an academic burlesque in the style of David Lodge. Fantasy novels just lend themselves to these sorts of interpretations. Vladimir Jankélévitch wrote that music has "broad shoulders"  -- you can hang just about any story or interpretation on it.* Fantasy has pretty broad shoulders, too. Tolkien was always annoyed at how his readers would turn Lord of the Rings into an allegory for this or that. Tolkien's contemporaries interpreted Mordor as Nazi Germany; the hippies, who were fond of Middle Earth, interpreted Sauron and his minions as the technocratic System facing down a peacful agrarian anarchism (i.e., the hippies themselves); and there's probably a book waiting to be written a decade from now about the meanings people took from the LotR movies after 9/11. Speaking of satires, here's a funny McSweeney's bit imagining Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky's LotR DVD commentary track. There was a lot of this kind of hermeneuticizin' floating around in those days.

And of course there's a cottage industry of Harry Potter hermeneutics. I don't love those books and I don't hate them. I've read the first four to my son, but he's lost interest for now, because Rowling manages, rather cleverly, to have each successive book mirror the psychology its main characters, so that the first one is basically a children's book and the last ones are all goth teen angst. (Nicholas can't relate to the goth teen angst. Yet.) Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea books, and Neil Gaiman's Sandman comix (to say nothing of Tolkien!) are all more satisfying to me as fantasy, maybe because they seem, I dunno, a bit more grown-up -- they're better-written and imagine their invented worlds a bit more coherently. As it gets going, the Harry Potter series distends the interior logic of its invented world more and more as the special exceptions pile up -- Rowling starts to indulge in narrative deus ex machinas in the form of new magical objects or hitherto unrevealed powers of said objects, which gives the whole thing the feel of a kid's game of make-believe. ("OK, when you died in that last battle you secretly had a magic horse that can make everybody live again, so now you come to life, but you're a good guy now, OK?") Who knows, maybe this is part of the charm. 

Of course a lot of people just hate fantasy novels anyway and aren't going to make distinctions between, say, Rowling and Clarke. For those people: yes, I know, it's very silly and wrong to like fantastic fiction. Now go crap in your hat. To the rest of you, I recommend Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell as a fine way to procrastinate on your term-end grading, and it makes a suitable gift for the literate fantasy non-haters in your lives. If any of you have read it, am I nuts, or is this really a novel about musicologists?   

Hat tip to Carolyn Abbate, in "Music—Drastic or Gnostic?"