Dial "M" for Musicology

the aesthetics of politics, part XXVIII

Phil Ford

Deepest respect and gratitude to Jonathan for the beautiful memorials he posted to his father. Deep bows of regard to Samuel Irving Bellman, whom we did not know, but whom we would have liked to. 

A random cranky political observation (did you miss those?): I've been following the Henry L. Gates imbroglio in a very vague way, mostly by reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog, which is almost the only political blog I still read. (Also: Dave Chappelle.) So I don't know all the angles. I feel I ought to, since this seems like a good academic-blog post topic, but there it is. But the unpleasant experience of seeing cable-news hamsters trotting out the old it-would-be-the-same-if-it-were-a-white-guy, you're-just-playing-the-race-card lines, has recalled to my mind something James Baldwin wrote in his essay on Norman Mailer: "the really ghastly thing thing about trying to convey to a white man the reality of Negro experience has nothing whatever to do with the fact of color, but has to do with this man's relationship to his own life. He will face in your life only what he is willing to face in his." Being an anglo Canadian I don't have anything to say about what it's like "trying to convey to a white man the reality of Negro experience." But I do have experience being a white man, and I say Baldwin got it right. There is this reluctance in some quarters (including, at a certain point, in myself) to admit that other people's experience might be different from your own, not for reasons of individual and contingent experience, but for impersonal systemic reasons. Especially if that system is racism, which would imply that we have something we might feel bad about. God forbid anyone should harsh our mellow. 

I'm a big fan of James Kochalka, so this might be a good time to post the video for his song "Don't Trust Whitey." 

I love Kochalka as the embodiment of whiteness, dressed up in a 18th-century perruque and knee breeches, running around stealing a kid's tricycle and grabbing fistfuls of a stranger's dinner. There is just the right degree of irony in the line "don't trust whitey/he lies and he lies and he lies/I'm not whitey/this is just a disguise." This is often sort of there in the background when white people write about race; there's this half-buried hope that you can disavow white privilege just by saying you have. I've gotten interested in whiteness as a concept (Richard Dyers's White is a must-read), and there's a lot more to be said about it all -- but then I would be doing that white thing of always wanting to put whiteness back in the picture. There I was, starting in on Henry Louis Gates and now I'm just talking about being white. The usual thing, I'm afraid. Dyer is remarkably good at avoiding the obvious pitfalls.

Anyway, on another topic, I have a couple of new articles out. Actually, one is not so new anymore, but I have unaccountably not mentioned it. It came out when I was sick back in December/January, so I guess it slipped my mind. It's in Jazz Perspectives, which is for my money the best and most necessary new journal in music academia, and it's called "Hip Sensibility in an Age of Mass Counterculture." Download it. Back when it first came out, Michael Kramer, a historian at Northwestern who deals with American rock culture and is a generally awesome guy, wrote a great blog post about something about "radical parallelism" that I had written. Michael wrote one of the most perceptive things anyone has ever said about my stuff. I'll quote lavishly, so you have something meaty to read (god knows I haven't given you much lately): 

. . . making politics the causal factor has been one of the markers of radical parallelism. The more unlikely the linkage, the more scholarly chips one acquires in placing the bet. “My little corner of specialized cultural scholarship matters,” this approach proclaims, “because it reveals the operations of a larger political power guiding everything.” This perspective has been important for overcoming antiquarianism (though one might argue that something was lost when we started to insist that everything had to be politically relevant or was pointless to study). It was also crucial for previously marginalized topics: legitimizing their political importance was a way of staking a claim for the study of women, the poor, and others who used to get left outside the old-fashioned historical record of great (usually white and typically elite) men. 

But now that antiquarianism is a bad word in academia, and since previously marginalized topics have increasingly moved to the center of scholarly focus, the problems of privileging the political have become more apparent. In particular, the more narrowly-defined idea of the political tends to monopolize the more elastic and curiously multivalent cultural domain. 

I think what Ford’s post hints at, in some fashion, is a de-privileging of the political. What if we flipped it? What if the political was subsumed in larger cultural forces? Culture, in both the abstract, anthropological sense of beliefs and the material, artistic sense of artifacts, is so dense — so able to contain tensions, incoherencies, conflicting tendencies — that it might be the better realm to privilege. Making culture the dominant track rather than politics might take pressure of the reduction of epochs to one dominating element. Maybe cultural containment shaped political policy during the Cold War? 

Or maybe an infinite loop develops between culture and politics, so that we need new terms, particular to their specific contexts, that identify more fragile, tentative, overlapping tendencies rather than one coherent, all-powerful logic? Can we re-purpose the liberating but clunky tools of social theory for subtler interpretive projects?

Worth saying again: "What if we flipped it? What if the political was subsumed in larger cultural forces?" This is exactly what my whole thing is about. It may not be your thing, but it is my thing. The goal of pop music scholarship has almost always been to find a political understanding of the aesthetic: my goal is to find an aesthetic understanding of politics. I particularly like Michael's notion of the "infinite loop between culture and politics." Which brings me to the other article I've published, this one just out in the Journal of Musicology: Music at the Edge of the Construct. It's maybe the closest I've come to really twisting those strands of politics and representation into a loop, or maybe a Möbius strip. It's part of JM's double issue on the Cold War. I haven't yet sat down to read most of the other articles, but still it's clear this publication is gonna put y'all on notice and bring Cold War studies into musicology with a sharp call to order. We've long needed some sort of between-two-covers survey of current musical work in the Cold War studies field, and now we have it. It should go without saying that there are many more excellent music scholars working on the Cold War, including musicoloblogger Phil Gentry, so interested parties are encouraged to dig deeper and find out what's out there. (For a start, here's the AMS Cold War interest group member list.) Peter Schmelz's introduction and Richard Taruskin's afterword are particularly worth reading, the former as a fine overview of the conceptual and methodological problems of coupling politics and music, the latter a powerful critique of the perennial (and typically Cold War) desire to uncouple them. 

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.

Ward Churchill Again

Jonathan Bellman

Associated Press, April 2, 2009:  A jury ruled Thursday that the University of Colorado wrongly fired Ward Churchill, the professor who described some Sept. 11 victims as “little Eichmanns,” a verdict that awards him $1—one greenback dollar—and a chance to get his job back. “What was asked for and what was delivered was justice,” Ward Churchill said outside the courtroom.  Here’s the Churchill Wikipedia article, for those new to the story, and here’s the UPI story on the recent verdict. 

 

OK, so we might cackle gleefully at the $1 settlement.  Har har, he only got a buck.  I’m not laughing, because I tend to be an Old School guy with regard to a lot of educational issues; the settlement is, to me, entirely beside the point.  On what basis, may I ask, does Churchill—Masters only, no doctorate, a demonstrated plagiarist, a nakedly self-serving political ambulance chaser, a mannerist satire of the worst of hard-Left so-called thought, a non-Indian who made a career trumpeting the resentments of an imagined American Indian heritage—on what basis does a jury decide that the University of Colorado’s attorney did not sufficiently demonstrate that such a manifestly unprofessional, inappropriate character would have lost his academic appointment irrespective of his political beliefs? 

 

Of course, jury trials always have a wild-card element to them, and perhaps the attorney did not, in fact, adequately demonstrate this.  Or perhaps he did but the jury got confused, threatened, and resentful because he used words of more than two syllables.  Or maybe CU, for all the current faculty resentment of this clown’s slovenly so-called scholarship, really would not, after all, have had the moxie to can him.  It is quite plausible, sadly, that they instead would have continued to pretend that Churchill was a forward-thinking intellectual jewel in their crown, and continued to pay him an inflated salary on his tenured-after-one-year position.  In which case, shame on them, but it is the faculty and students who pay the cultural price for this kind of thing—not to mention the Colorado taxpayers who pay this guy’s salary.  Oh, yeah, did I mention CU’s reputation?  I used to hear the morning guys on my rock radio station (from Boulder, where the CU is) savaging the university for its role in this…and CU is generally an object of pride in this state.

 

Unfortunately, it is the rare University administration that not only admits an error but accepts responsibility for it and for cleaning up the mess.  Administrators change, the department chairs who agitated most loudly for stupid decisions to be made (say, hires and “programs”) accept jobs elsewhere or leave in disgrace or “change their focus of interest.”  In music, say, they might go from hard-core Victim Studies (to the “concerned”: we disagree, and you know that already) to “Music and Healing.”  Those left holding the bag are always left with a bad choice.  On the one hand, there is the unfortunate business of owning someone else’s error and the painful process of rectifying it, and on the other is the PR damage that results from making a public acknowledgment that will imply that the University—any university, I’m not just talking about CU—has once again shown the same arrogance, foolishness, and infantile defensiveness shared by the rest of humanity.  Often, and especially when skittish administrators and Trustees and so on are involved, the decision is to keep shut, circle the wagons, and try to act like nothing’s wrong.  The wages of dissembling are bitter, but it’s a lesson almost never learned.

 

Perhaps that is not a surprise, but we wanly continue to hope that we are different, that wise, sober judgment has a permanent home here, and that we are not as susceptible as others to the randomly twirling weathervane of intellectual fashion and fad.  Instead, it seems that we are constantly confronted with the fruits of our own intellectual insecurity, vulnerability to bad decisions—in other words, our own posturing equivalent of what is really a lemming mentality.  I have mentioned before, I think, how much I love the phrase “the herd of independent minds” (Lawrence Summers?) to describe the professoriate, because it is so cruelly true.

 

The Ward Churchill fiasco is a seemingly endless story that makes no one look good at all.  There are myriad lessons to be learned here, and I have every glum confidence that—as with the oil crisis of the 1970s—we will instead forget it as soon as possible, sweep it under the rug somehow, and continue to make similar misjudgments.

 

As Ian Shoals of the Duck’s Breath Mystery Theater used to say, “I gotta go.”

Against Familiar Thinking, However Correct

Jonathan Bellman

Recent weeks have seen two recent righteous testimonials that immediately went internet platinum, at least in my circles.  One was the welcoming address by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of the music division at Boston Conservatory, to the entering first-years.  Of course, the musician’s chest swells to read it; it hits all the familiar points, including parental concern about the choice of music as a vocation, the ancient Greeks’ understanding of the power of music, Why We Do This, Greater Truths, and virtually everything else.  We all love clarion calls of this kind, we all shed a tear or two, and we all feel renewed.  At my most jaded, even I cannot argue with the likes of this:

 

“You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. […] Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet.”

Yes, indeed.  Art ennobles, you will make both your life and others’ lives more worth living, you’ll be studying the greatest artworks wrought by the greatest creative minds in history.  As William Billings put it, “Onward, ever onward, ye sons of harmony!”

There is also the Why the Humanities? article from the February 25 New York Times.  This one is equally familiar: in the old days, universities didn’t have to justify teaching the humanities, because education is timeless and the humanities teach you how to live.  A job is just a job, but…  But then again, in Times Like These (a mantra whether it’s boom or bust, Wall-Street-Shark-Feeding-Frenzy or Depression) it’s never good for the Humanities.  Wise up, young man, it isn’t the old days, today  you need to have a skill.  Young lady, do you think someone’s going to take care of you for the rest of your life?  Can’t depend on that anymore.  So the universities have to justify the humanities, using ever more Jesuitical logic-chopping (OK, no offense: “Talmudic hairsplitting,” if you prefer), to try to make the humanities marketable, practical, worth…well, Dad’s money, almost all of which he just lost.  Good luck with that. 

 

Let me suggest, heretically, that these approaches, however well intentioned or justified or even righteous, will no longer do.  Overplayed to the point of irrelevance, these tropes are as thematically familiar as Coming Of Age or Boy Meets Girl.  So here’s the predictable quotation from that article:

 

“In the last three months at least two dozen colleges have canceled or postponed faculty searches in religion and philosophy, according to a job postings page on Wikihost.org. The Modern Language Association’s end-of-the-year job listings in English, literature and foreign languages dropped 21 percent for 2008-09 from the previous year, the biggest decline in 34 years.

“’Although people in humanities have always lamented the state of the field, they have never felt quite as much of a panic that their field is becoming irrelevant,’ said Andrew Delbanco, the director of American studies at Columbia University.”

 

Do we really have nothing more to bring to the table than this?  It Is So Worthwhile—which I accept and endorse—and Watch Out Times Are Rough—which I also endorse, though never followed?

 

It is to Albert Einstein that the thought is usually attributed that insanity may be defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.  What about saying the same thing over and over?  Or asking the same questions over and over, and expecting people to pause, stroke their beards or purse their lips thoughtfully, and say “You know, that person sure has given me a lot to think about…”?

 

Bullshit.

 

We repeat this kind of stuff because we can’t seem to think anything new.  This may be wrong, but I’m going to try because I very easily lose patience with stuff I agree with.  Write this down, young’uns:

 

Times for musicians are never good.  In indefinable ways, musicians have a huge advantage over the rest of humanity: we work well independently, we take responsibility for ourselves, we have learned to defer gratification because learning anything of value takes a long time, and we usually do understand What It Takes.  If we believe in it, so much the better: if we’re engaged, we have diehardism, the sacred fire, like no one else on earth.  So here is the One Rule:

 

There Are No Rules. 

 

Sorry, folks.  Statistics are not relevant in our field.  There are, purely and simply, too many variables for even discouraging statistics to have any validity.  Few jobs; few gigs.  Yeah, but what’s different about each person?  An interest in rock, in Gilbert and Sullivan, an ability to improvise, to double on another instrument, an understanding of another musical culture?  Intangibles count for a great deal.  Yes, brute ability counts for a lot, but for any gig there are, unavoidably, numerous qualities that cannot be adequately described that will help you get the gig.  You know all that stuff you maintained a secret interest in when you were supposed to be doing something else—practicing responsibly or whatever?  That’s the stuff.  It may be your fiftieth application, but it’s that.

 

Or, if you think there’s something else you could do and the odds look too unfavorable, do the wise thing—the other thing.  If you’ll never forgive yourself for not having tried this, well, damn the torpedoes. 

 

Nothing new there—musicians have known all of this since the beginning of time.  But there’s nothing new in golly-times-is-sure-tough, and (frankly) not in you-can-save-the-world either. 

 

New thoughts, anyone?

Air/Simple Gifts

Jonathan Bellman

A quick couple of observations about John Williams's Air/Simple Gifts piece for Obama's inauguration.  I really enjoyed the piece; the folk tune is unimprovable, and Williams has the kind of command of his craft that means he can execute a project like this brilliantly.   Americana: short, pretty, folk-derived, with the kind of independent-lined quirky euphony that is a major part of our national art-music language, and may safely and conveniently be taken as a metaphor for American something-or-other, with my blessing. It was beautiful, and beautifully played.  

One write-up said the ensemble was "out of central casting," which isn't far wrong: clarinettist Anthony Gill (Black guy), cellist Yo-Yo Ma (Asian guy), pianist Gabriela Montero (Latina), violinist Itzkhak Perlman (differently-abled Jewish White guy—a threefer!).  They sounded wonderful, in what must have been cold and miserable conditions to play.

So: did anyone else mark that the ensemble—Clarinet, Violin, Cello, Piano--is Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time ensemble?  That point struck me immediately, as soon as they started playing, and I can't help wondering if there's some symbolism there: end of time?  No, Olivier, on this side of the Atlantic we're just getting started.  Cheers!  And Let Freedom Ring.

Against Parallelism

Phil Ford

Further (long and probably very boring) thoughts on interdiciplinarity following from this pre-Christmas post. 

From McLemee, a Newsweek piece that's been making the rounds ponders a question sure to bait humanities types with a presentist bent: name a piece of culture (book, movie, album, TV show, etc.) that "exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush." So 24, Battlestar Galactica, American Idol, Borat, etc. (Nominate your own in the comments.) It's a great question because it asks us to start writing notes towards a future history of right now; it asks us to look at our own time, the Bush II era, as if it were something that happened long ago, as if we could look at it as a bounded and complete thing, like the Reconstruction or the Great Depression, and see the ways the fears of the time (and it certainly has felt like a time when Americans, who have less to fear than almost anyone on the planet, started being afraid of everything) are made manifest, unconsciously or semi-consciously, in its self-expression. This is a style of thought we have cultivated for other periods of American history. For example, library shelves groan with books on cold war America that seek to find the total logic of the era in its culture. "Cold war culture," in such studies, is not just culture created in the time of the cold war, but culture whose inmost cells contain the DNA script of cold war geopolitics. The script, the DNA of history, is (we would like to think) found equally in George Kennan's "Long Telegram" and Disneyland, the Army-McCarthy hearings and Frank Sinatra's Capitol records: the script lies buried at the root of collective consciousness and writes itself into parallel political, social, and cultural expressions.

There is doubtless something to this. Historical epochs do have deep structures of sensibility, and I spend most of my time trying to find out what they are. (And in the cold war, no less.) But as I've written elsewhere, it's a dangerous game. It is telling that Newsweek asked its critics a question that assumes this kind of thinking-in-parallels; it shows how an academic habit has become part of the intellectual vernacular, which is also the point at which people don't bother to stop to ask questions about logical warrants -- like, you know, is this how cultural history really works? I used to teach a course on American music in the 1950s, and one of the pieces I would assign was Elliott Carter's String Quartet no. 1. Now, what does that have to do with containment, red-hunting, paranoia, or any of those other durable tropes of cold war explication? Carter himself would doubtless answer "nothing at all" -- the work occupies itself with certain musical and aesthetic problems (especially problems of time), and if it is "about" anything, it is surely these. Ah, comes the reply, but the ideology of high modernism (with which Carter's music is richly imbued) is a classic cold-war maneuver of containment. (In this case, it is the culture of the lower orders, the middle- and low-brow, that is being contained.) So if the music has no apparent connection to its time, it is in fact all the more covertly connected to it: the appeal to "purely musical" problems and concerns comes to look like an excuse. Heads I win, tails you lose. This game can be played with anything. We might take "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima" as a somber memorial to its time, but the opposite kind of piece, a cheesy featherweight pop song, sounds sinister when thrown into the harsh raking light of the Bomb, so with very little effort "How Much Is That Doggy In The Window" can become a somber memorial to its time, too. Once an explanatory structure of sufficient abstraction is in place, almost anything can be fit into it.

So we can all see how the torture apologetics of 24 play into the Bush II zeitgeist. I'm not going to argue against that -- any future study of American culture in the Bush II era will doubtless (and correctly) point to 24 as Exhibit A of an America scared shitless and consoling itself with the spectacle of tough guys torturing bad guys. But the details, the details . . . what would you do with Ghostface Killah's insanely great Fishscale or The Big Doe Rehab? What about The Runners Four by Deerhoof or Final Fantasy's He Poos Clouds? And here I'm only naming CDs I have in the car -- I could make the list a lot longer if I thought about it for longer than a blog second. Classical music, and particularly classical music performance, is particularly hard to historicize in this way. OK, so Phil Kline's Three Rumsfeld Songs recommend themselves to the zeitgeist, but what about Hilary Hahn's excellent recording of the Bach concertos? Does zeitgeist-hunting in the particular cultural-studies way we've become accustomed to simply become another way of making historical narratives to which some things belong and other things don't? I seem to recall a certain amount of heavy breathing at this most recent AMS about Carl Dahlhaus's notion of music that belongs to history, that participates in a certain state of the musical material, etc. Well, such notions now seem like just another excuse for canonizing Schoenberg and leaving out Rachmaninoff, or teaching Babbitt and leaving out Barber -- an excuse for Germanocentrism or the modernist old-time religion or both. But the newfangled way of writing "history in the strong sense" is not to proceed from compositional technique but from those "explanatory structures of sufficient abstraction" I just wrote about. 

This is one of those complicated problems I have no ready solution for, partly because these are problems I'm trying to work through in my own work. I'm all about explanatory structures of sufficient abstraction -- it's what I do. I suppose what I'm trying to do in my own work is to refine those explanatory structures enough that they work to illuminate certain pieces of music but don't seek to explain everything -- because when you explain everything, you explain nothing. Marxism, Freudianism, post-structuralism, Schenkerian analysis, etc. can become all-encompassing systems, the belief in which (and fanatically intense commitment to) manifests the academic’s perennial enthusiasm for monisms, great big single things that can explain everything and subordinate all competing systems. The flip side of this enthusiasm for monisms is a mania for decoding: the more intellectuals aggrandize the power of a totalizing system, the more they aggrandize their own power and extend the reach of their interpretations. So perhaps one thing that might be useful in writing interdisciplinary history would be a little humility: you're not trying to find the master key for history, you're just trying to tidy up one little corner of history, make connections, find patterns. You can talk about Les Baxter or Elliott Carter and don't have to worry about which one is more zeitgeisty or participates more fully in the state of the musical material or whatever; you can burrow into the logic of each thing on its own. Or, god knows, you can hook them up, try to see what interesting patterns are created when you look at them together. Carter's first string quartet and Baxter's hit album Ritual of the Savage are from the same year, 1951. Is this a meaningless coincidence or is it interesting? Who knows -- try and find out. But if it doesn't want to fit, don't force it. 

After This Nonsense

Jonathan Bellman

On December 12, the New York Times ran a cover story on Elliot Carter's one hundredth birthday.  And many happy returns to him; he entered a period of unprecedented productivity at age 90, and has been composing many new works.  I would love to hear some—particularly the recently premiered Intervention for Piano and Orchestra, a seventeen-minute work—because Carter himself says, “I finally have done all my adventures and great big noisy pieces. Now I write simple ones. That’s a new adventure.”

 

Carter is a national treasure; there is no question about that.  Early works such as the Piano Sonata and his ballet  The Minotaur are deeply beautiful works, expressions of a young and assured Americanist, at least to my ear.  Later works are Important (thinking, for example, of the little timbre pieces for woodwinds), but I have difficulty purely enjoying them, and some of the big, ultra-complex stuff—well, I have to leave that to wiser sages than I.  One thing that made me smile in the article was Carter’s condescending comment about music from the age of “gaslights and horses,” and his preference that he’d rather hear music from the twentieth century, because twentieth century composers “have a spark” and their music expresses “what it’s like to be living now.”

 

Maybe; maybe not.  One doesn’t get into this kind of tired argument with an iconic centenarian.  I might point out that the time required for most mortals to play, say, works of Carter, Babbitt, or Martino renders such things all but impossible except for the independently wealthy and single-minded-bordering-on-obsessive, and that a certain number of people might differ with his assessment of precisely what the music of, say, Barraqué or Stockhausen actually express.  I am not taking major issue with either side of that argument, though; I sometimes surprise people with what I find beautiful and expressive, and sometimes disappoint them that I don’t appreciate more.  So it goes.  What really made me smile, though, was this:

 

“He said he has gone back to reading the classics, including Hamlet. After starting a third bout with Proust in the original French, ‘I got a little sick of it two months ago,’ he said. ‘That’s why I turned to Shakespeare.’”

 

Indeed, Sir.  So Proust and Shakespeare express modernity?  Proust lived much of his life in the era of gaslight and horses, dying in 1922.  Shakespeare’s life would have been lit by rush-light, candles, and torches, no?  So, “classic” literature (currently a contested idea in music, as we know) is OK, but music needs to be relevant and modern…

 

I offer this with at worst a gently arched eyebrow.  Few of us maintain complete consistency between our tastes and philosophies, and I daresay that those who do distort one to accommodate the other.  Carter’s remark about gaslight and horses got my attention because, obviously, I’m a nineteenth-century guy.  It continues to seem, though, that music is judged by a different measure than the other arts, with greater expectations of relevance or likeability or au courantisme than would be required of literature or visual art.  Or maybe I’m being hypersensitive.  (It would be the first time.)  Anyway: many happy returns, Mr. Carter; I wish you more happy birthdays, and I look forward to hearing your more recent music.

 

The title of this blog comes from the final two lines of the NYTimes article, which I can’t resist quoting verbatim:

 

“With the interviewer out of the apartment, Mr. Carter was heard on the other side of the door saying to an aide, ‘I’ve got to rest a little after this nonsense.’”

Expert Witnessing

Jonathan Bellman

“He. Has. No. Case.”

Thus my son, on the recent Joe Satriani lawsuit, in which he claims that Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida” (I assume that the recent Grammy nomination is not coincidental to the suit), uses substantial portions of his instrumental song “If I Could Fly.”  It’s the “I used to rule the world; seas would rise when I gave the word” lick.  The resemblance (melody, repeated chords IVmaj7—V—iii7—vi, at least to my ear) is clear.  My son’s argument is that it’s in a different key (irrelevant), that it is not nearly as important in Satriani’s song as in Coldplay’s (irrelevant and, I think, wrong: the rest of Satriani’s song is noodling), and that there aren’t any words and it’s so much better than the Satriani (irrelevant and quite, quite right).  The Satriani is six-and-a-half minutes of godawful noodling interspersed with that lick, and it sounds to me rather like a bland 1970s instrumental.  Satriani sounds like Satriani: absolute command over his instrument.  His tune, however, does nothing for me.

These are the issues that are going to be debated in court, I imagine.  I think from time to time about the process of expert witnessing, and all the things that are involved, so I explained to Ben some of what was likely to go on at the trial.  The poor lad was outraged: “WHAT?!  People get paid to listen to songs and talk about the differences, and compare them? I would pay to do that!!”  Yeah, I said, but you don’t just walk in and blab.  “Of course not!  You have to do the research, which means listening to a lot of other songs, which you’d want to do anyway!”  Well…  “OK, Dad, I see your point; if it’s crappy music…”

I will be interested to see how this plays out.  I imagine there are a lot of other issues, legally: other music that has used the same lick, likeliness of influence, whether the cited music is common enough to be outside of copyright, etc.  One suspects that the persuasiveness of the attorneys in question will have a good deal to do with the success of either side’s perspective.  Shades of the “My Sweet Lord”/”He’s So Fine” lawsuit, at least in my memory.  There’s probably a much bigger pool of cases to talk about, cases that have gone both ways. 

Watch the news.  I can’t help but wonder why the lawsuit was announced after the Grammy nomination—it is hard to avoid the suspicion that Satriani smelled money, or notice, or something; he can’t have missed the song before this point.  I’m not in his shoes, though, as illustrated by my own experience:  

One of the very few ballet exercises I was proud of writing was a ronde de jamb par terre in kind of a mushy Scots idiom; it’s on the first of my two ballet CDs.  Years later, I heard another ballet CD from the same company that seemed to copy me, and even got a professional musician friend to verify my suspicions.  So I—huffily—asked the woman who owned the company about it (a dear friend; the woman who trained me as a ballet pianist).  She was mortally offended, and she asked the other pianist, who explained that his piece was…a Scots folksong.  So I got a copy of the folksong on interlibrary loan, and…my piece sounded a hell of a lot like it.  I thought I’d made it up.  Maybe I’d heard it on Garrison Keillor’s show a week or two before, because someone told me it was performed on the show…

 

So one of my best ideas was, indeed, really good.  Unsurprisingly, I probably didn’t think of it; my aural memory was better than I knew, and when I thought “Oh, maybe I’ll try something pseudo-Scots” in the ballet class, I played an actual Scots folksong I had heard but didn’t know I’d remembered.  I was not wronged; the only wronged people were those I questioned.  Sigh.

Warren Zevon once said in an interview, “You’re better off not knowing where it comes from.” 

I believe it. 

I wonder if Coldplay will? 

Yma Sumac died. And, uh, I guess something else happened . . .

Phil Ford

What with all the excitement you might have missed the fact that Yma Sumac has died.

And elsewhere in the news . . . well, I hardly have the words for it. So how about a cartoon?

From American Elf, my favorite comic.

At Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog (my new favorite current-affairs blog) someone asked for triumphant music. Might I suggest this?

Bach Cello Suites Questioned

Jonathan Bellman

An article from the Sydney Morning Herald explains how the conductor of the Darwin Symphony, one Martin Jarvis, has researched J. S. Bach’s ‘cello suites and come to the conclusion that they are not by Bach but, rather, by his second wife Anna Magdalena. He brings a variety of tools including—it is reported—music analysis to bear on the discussion, though it is not explained quite how. “During the past seven years, Dr Jarvis has used forensic analysis to examine various Bach scores, bar by bar, focusing on the musical structure and language, handwriting and the musical calligraphy.” Not surprisingly, this news item spurred some discussion on the American Musicological Society listserv, and one participant, a professional cellist, pointed out that the fifth cello suite was originally written for lute, which would need to be factored in to the theory. Jarvis’s suspicions were first raised many years ago, when as a student he was playing the suites on his viola—that is, an octave up—and noted how un-Bachian they were. One wonders if the tranposition might have had something to do with that? In all fairness, any opinion of mine is not going to be all that informed, since I am not a cellist. I will say that in addition to all the forensic-TV show stuff, I want to hear from Bach scholars and especially cellists—another point made by my friend on AMS-L. Anything can happen with a manuscript, and with copying and transmission, but I am interested in the informed opinion of cellists who know the suites in their hands, hearts, and DNA, and Bach’s other music as well. Those in the Bach scholarly community know his personal musical language as no one else does, also need to weigh in on such matters as “musical structure and language.” Cellists? Bach scholars? I have heard that the cello suites are not the equal of the suites and partitas for solo violin, for what that’s worth, but would really appreciate some well-informed thoughts on the subject.