Dial "M" for Musicology

Brian Eno, Mr. Potato Head opera theater, etc.

Phil Ford

There are some people who have a genius for awesomeness. This is not the same thing as being cool. Having a genius for awesomeness means that you have an unerring instinct for awesome ideas, for figuring out what things out there in the big wide world are awesome, for thinking of awesome things to do. Stewart Brand has that kind of genius, as does Edward Tufte. It's the kind of genius that album producers ideally have: someone like Rick Rubin is famous not only for knowing which knobs to twist, but for having out-of-left-field intuitions about framing concepts, like being the guy who invented rapcore and then getting Johnny Cash to do a series of recordings of songs by people like Glenn Danzig, Beck, and Trent Reznor in stark minimalist roots arrangements. My friend DD liked to call such people conceptualists. The greatest musical conceptualist of them all is probably Brian Eno: indeed, his "Oblique Strategies" deck, which I have been perusing this last week, is both a stockpile of concepts and, as a mechanism for deploying them, a particularly elegant concept itself.* 

My Ph.D. advisee Kim Schafer, who is writing about the carillon as a component of the collegiate soundscape in America (and is herself an expert carilloneur), informs me that Eno is now working on something called the Dartington Carillon. The carillon is itself one of the great undiscovered cool things in the world (well, undiscovered by musicologists, for the most part): when you think of it, what musical instrument is as environmental, as intimately bound up with architecture and landscape, as the carillon? And no kind of music from before the 20th century is as well suited to the style of background listening that contemporary listeners have developed in response to the 20th-century ubiquity of recorded and broadcast music.** It's probably not surprising, then, that Brian Eno (who theorized and damn-near-invented ambient music) would be interested in carillons. The as-yet-unrealized Dartington plan is a grab-bag of modern-artsy ideas  -- it's a combined theater and art gallery with poetry written on the bells and leather-head mallets provided to visitors so they can strike the bells themselves and participate actively, etc. -- which makes it sound a little like a whole bunch of community arts project funding proposals all jammed together. But still, it's a cool idea to emphasize the carillon's environmental properties and create a building that is at the same time both a landscape and a musical instrument:

On an unrelated note, I found the most heartbreakingly sweet video clip at Parterre Box. A four-year-old boy listens to Donizetti's La fille du régiment while his Mr. Potato Head guys dance along. The look on his face at the end . . .

La Cieca also tells us that Celine Dion is planning on starring (and singing!) in a new biopic of Maria Callas. Now Carl Wilson has written a wonderful book making the case for Dion, so I'll tread lightly here and suggest that while Dion's art doubtless has its value, she might be overreaching a bit. The news article to which La Cieca links is worth a read: at one point La Dion told Kent Nagano (the conceptualist of the piece, the guy who's been putting this together) that she doesn't read music, and he consoled her by saying, well, Pavarotti didn't either. He also suggested she get some coaching from someone like Renata Scotto. I wonder what that would do. No, seriously, I'm actually kind of curious. OK, now that I think of it, I'm in favor of this. Do it, Celine! it would be kind of interesting to see what happens. I think the project is doomed to almost certain failure (as when-worlds-collide crossovers often are) but it would be an interesting failure. 

*Today's oblique strategy: Be extravagant. OK!

**Click here for an old cogitation of mine on kindred topics -- the best thing about it is the recording of Kim and Leanne Zacharias playing a cello-and-carillon duet.

History in its underwear

Phil Ford

Barnet Bound has a good post in response to my own from a few days ago. In the first part he thinks a bit about how parallelistic thinking* is still valuable despite whatever may be said against it, and he's right. For one thing, any kind of political or social interpretation of music would be impossible without it, and my own work would basically disappear if I were denied the ability to draw speculative lines between various nodal points within a total system of culture. To get back to my original parody post, I don't think the basic idea of reading unspoken (and perhaps unconsciously-held) social attitudes in architectural details is silly in itself. For example, the hideous McMansiony architecture I've gotten to know rather well during my time living in Austin** seems to me to encode certain social pretentions, not least the desire for a cut-rate appearance of prosperity. The odd proportions of vaulted grand foyers that are just a tad too narrow (because whatever kind of house it is, the lot it is built on is basically a tract lot) seem to me to bear mute witness to the contemporary middle-class gamble that the appearance of success will turn into success itself.

The thing is, I live here, I know these neighborhoods, and I know what it's like to live here. So while my architectural interpretation here is speculative, it's built on the kind of intimate daily experience of life in early 21st-century suburbia that some future historian of this period will have to built up painstakingly and at second hand.*** Which means that the key here is research. To avoid making specious, superficial parallels, you have to develop a feel for that fine grain of history through a lot of reading -- not just published stuff either, but the archives of people and institutions connected to your chosen field of history.

And what do you get from archival research? It's hard to put it briefly and well, but I guess I'd say that you have the feeling of being backstage at history. Reading Allen Ginsberg's Howl, for example, puts you in the audience: you're watching as Ginsberg cuts the figure of a ragged-robed Old Testament prophet of the Atomic Age, filled with apocalyptic visions of Moloch. Spend time with the Ginsberg papers, though, and you can see Ginsberg off-stage; you can more clearly measure the distance between the public persona and the private person. Reading the unpublished notebook of a depressed, stoned 25-year-old Ginsberg a few years before Howl, you see someone who looks less like an ecstatic mad-eyed shaman and more like George Costanza, pissed off at himself for being stuck in Patterson NJ and living with his Dad, underemployed, and unable to get laid. It's like wandering backstage at The Magic Flute and seeing Sarastro smoking a cigarette and playing cards. Spending time in archives gives you the chance to see history in its underwear.

Which is why you really should go and read Barnet Bound's post. He makes a point that I've often stewed over -- how few research grants are targeted specifically to Americanist research. My wife likes to tease me about how other professors' spouses get to tag along on research trips to, say, Naples or Paris, and all I have to offer is Newark NJ (home of the redoubtable Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies Archive). But beyond this, as BBound points out, "there is precious little money out there to encourage archival work in American music":

If you are doing European music, well, sometimes it seems like people are tripping over themselves to give you money. The AMS has no less than three travel grants for research outside of the United States, the Bartlet, the Wolf, and the Powers grants. At my own University, there is a travel grant for research in Europe that my colleagues regularly get, plus a grant within my department for travel which is limited to music before 1950. Plus, there are a number of interdisciplinary centers at my school which give quite a bit a support to musicologists, but are limited in spirit if not name to non-American research: centers for medieval and renaissance studies, for 17th- and 18th-century studies, and so on. And then of course there are the various federal programs like the Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, the FLAS, and so on. There are no equivalents for these Eurocentric programs, in the AMS, at my university, or in my department.

Tell it. Scholars who work on John Cage or Duke Ellington have to do the same kind of archival digging as those working on Haydn or Josquin, and it ain't cheap.

*Is this a word? No? Well, it is now!

**To all you people who think Austin is a rock'n'roll village with cute sleepy streets of tall old trees and picturesquely dilapidated bungaloes, well, it is, but only if you earn 200K a year and can afford to buy a house downtown. To everyone else, it's off to the suburbs with you, and Austin's sprawl looks like sprawl everywhere.

***Of course, what our future historian has that I don't is distance: my comments here are doubtless inflected by class prejudice (i.e., the traditional middle-class disdain for the middle class), my dislike of living in the 'burbs, and various things I'm too blinkered even to be self-aware about.

The Architecture of Containment: Towards a Marcusan Hermeneutics of the House We Just Bought

Phil Ford

I'm back. And we bought a house! Behold:

It's a ranch built in 1954, the year of the McCarthy-Army hearings, where Tailgunner Joe finally overreached and imploded. And as you can clearly see, the logic of the McCarthy era is manifested in the breezeway. Not a true porch, it mimes the gestures of interiority remembered (with regressive and compensatory nostalgia) from an earlier time even as true interiority is abolished. Like the well-loved screened porches of the 1930s foursquare, the breezeway here encourages one to "set a spell," perhaps with a frosty mint julep in hand and puppies gambolling on the wide lawn. But the architecture encodes a grim simulacrum of sociability: it is not screened-in, and its shallow draught, while encouraging the illusion that one might truly sit and enjoy oneself in a way possible in the progressive era of 1930s, really serves only to allow the homeowner to walk between his car and the front door without getting wet in the rain. The house subtly prioritizes the new axis of cold war sociality -- consumerism. The home has become a machine for enabling consumption: it enhances the newly symbiotic relationship between the consumer and his automobile, allowing him to carry the many newly-acquired purchases he now feels he needs to maintain his affluent lifestyle in such a way as to insulate him from the vestiges of nature his tract development has not entirely succeeded in repressing. All the while, the breezeway places a fig-leaf over the unmentionable truths of cold war life. The sad thing is that the homeowner will be blind to the overtones of domination implicit in his breezeway, and might truly think that his house is "just a house." In this he will find the ready collusion of liberal critics, who may complain that such a critique misses the point, that a house is just "a place to live." But the house is ideological through and through. It is irredeemably stamped with the hegemonic logic of the cold war.

Kidding! Everything I wrote in the previous paragraph is complete bullshit, except for the part about our house being built in 1954. It was fun to write, though.

(title redacted)

Phil Ford

Alex Ross Justin Davidson* writes a post about architectural trend of refitting massive old grungy industrial-era buildings and turning them into art galleries and concert halls and such. The classic exemplar of this approach is the Tate Modern in London, which turned a brick Victorian power plant into  an ethereal, light-filled space. I visited there in summer 2001 with my wife and 2-year-old son, who ran up and down the long, gently sloping floor of the Turbine Hall for a small eternity. (It's fun turning a 2-year-old boy loose on London's great buildings. I have a picture of him trying to push open the Great West Door of St. Paul's cathedral.) At the Tate, this architectural gesture is beautiful and impressive and oddly apt, and for this reason has caught on. Actually, it's been going on at least since the 1970s, when artists started carving lofts out of old warehouses in New York City. As Virginia Postrel has written in the most recent issue of the Atlantic, loft architecture has become a new vernacular style in high-end domestic architecture. Developers are now building new lofts, which is kind of a contradiction in terms, and which of course is cheesy and fake and vulgar, though Postrel makes the point that lofts are really cool, so where's the problem? But Davidson has another issue:

I have to admit to some queasiness about the current enthusiasm for fitting out power plants, factories and warehouses as postindustrial pleasure domes. Isn't there something inherently decadent about taking the means of production and transforming into the means of consumption for the bourgeoisie?

You say that like it's a bad thing.

When I used to program musical events for the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, I used to refer to the place as a rec center for bobos, which I still think is pretty accurate characterization of arts organizations in general -- especially the ones found in what used to be sooty brick warehouses. The unpalatable truth of the arts world in America is that you have to learn to love bobos. Or at least not long to see them hanging from the lampposts of some post-revolutionary Artsylvania. Because, let's face it, if you're working in the arts, you're not too different from the clientele. Hate on the bobos and you're just hating on yourself. And middle-class self-loathing is so cliché. 

* Oops. I thought this was by Alex Ross and it wasn't. Which means I had to sacrifice what I thought was a pretty nifty post heading.