Dial "M" for Musicology

The Dark Within The Dark

Jonathan Bellman

At the beginning of my final year—quarter, actually: fall 1979—enrolled at UCSB, there appeared a green, hyper, talkative violist and composer, an odd mix of self-confidence and neurotic insecurity named Gregory Michael Amov.  For reasons never became clear, Greg apparently decided I was someone to know and began to affect certain aspects of my manner: growing something vaguely beardlike, smoking black cigarettes (I smoked Shermans MCDs at the time), shadowing me.   Friends would badger me about it in a good-natured way—“Like father like son, eh, Jon?”—and I did not really know how to respond to them, except that there was something indefinable that prevented me from saying something crushing to him in the heartless way I might otherwise have done.  The only time I went volcanic on him was when he proudly showed me a pendant he’d bought at a head shop—a Jewish star with a coke spoon on it.  That was the last time he misjudged me that radically.

And we went our separate ways when I left Santa Barbara at the end of that year.  We spoke on the phone every few years, though; he called my parents, discovered my whereabouts, and we were able to reconnect.  I pursued the academic-music route, and he went virtual, becoming proficient in an operating system called Pick, which led to jobs and consulting and so on.  My father even asked him, at one point, if he could help me “get started in computers”!  (I was suffering on the job market then, and Greg gallantly assured Dad that he could.)  He was gleeful about the amount of bulletin boarding he was doing, in the days of bulletin boarding, and positively exultant in telling me about his first conversation with Diane, an author who was to become his wife, everything they had in common, how they had already decided on the names for their three children, and so on. 

 

I began to hear about different kinds of musical activities; ambient soundscape music, how being a rock star was now completely democritized and non-mass media dependent since one could post one’s own music on the internet and have people on the other side of the world respond with riotous approval, and so on.   “And I’ll tell you this, Jon: being a rock star feels GREAT.”  Greg sent me a couple of CDs of his work (though he promised several more I never got): a CD of his own music called The Dark Within The Dark, and a collection of demos by his “band” Systems Theory, a collaboration between (primarily) himself and his longtime friend Steven Davies-Morris.  I twitted him about never having kids—why name them if you end up not having them??—and I remember a lot of laughter on that subject.  And a year or two ago, he shared his “successful” battle against esophageal cancer with me.  All the medical drama, the recovery, the gradual venturing back to work.  My God, I thought.  What did he do to deserve this?  I don’t think his smoking went beyond the occasional Russian Sobranie at UCSB; his music is making him happy, professionally things are hitting a kind of stability…  Then we friended each other on Facebook, and could bounce wisecracks off each other on a regular basis, and all was right with the world.

 

Recent months, however, saw a diabolically vicious recurrence of the cancer—now in the brain, and other places—and an agonizing but fast tailspin.  Last night, Greg Amov (1959–2009) took his last breath and went on to the Big Soundscape, three says short of his fiftieth birthday.  I have not actually seen Greg since UCSB, and was (unsurprisingly) unable to get back to California during his last days, so—I ask myself—what can I do?

I am listening to the Systems Theory demos and The Dark Within the Dark.  I have never been into ambient music, particularly, so when I first heard it I thought it was nice, and reflected on how far Greg had evolved from playing string quartets…and that was that.  Today it sounds very different.  Now these pieces are rather like distillations of everthing in the air back then, including wisps of Celtic, world musics, drum patterns etc. all interwoven on long sonic canvasses: “The Dark Within The Dark,” “The Cathedral At Ys,” The New Worship Of Old Gods,” “Nightfall On Io.”  Of course, I have no computer chops at all, and so cannot begin to imagine how music like this is produced, realized, and so on.  What is hard to describe is the odd familiarity this music has, as if I can hear the real Greg in these tapestries.  I’d love to discuss these with him 

In some inconceivable dimension, maybe.  Until then—

Forn gezunt, my friend; soar high and far.  Gregory Michael Amov: may his memory be for a blessing.

Performance Practices Goes REALLY Mainstream

Jonathan Bellman

So I’m picking up some sliced turkey at the Safeway deli counter.  The conversation usually goes this way: (1) the counter person asks me what I would like, (2) I place my order, and there is some chitchat about this variety vs. that variety, whether I want cheese or not, and perhaps whether I’d like a sample or some salads also, and then (3) “So, how’s your day been going for you?”  So, today, just at the cue for (3), the counter person, a young man I did not recognize, asked—without greeting me by name, or letting on that he knew anything about me other than my current interest in a half-pound of sliced hickory-smoked turkey: “In the Mozart clarinet concerto, if I see four whole notes in a row, is that a sign to improvise and fill in, or what?”

WELL.  Without asking who he was (a side issue, at that point), I put down my basket and explained: the figuration is set up beforehand, you need to assume Mozart was using a kind of compositional shorthand, fill in the lines with appropriate passagework using the notated notes as terminus points in each direction, and so on.  He nodded, said it probably should be done in the right style—right; of course—and I offered to look over anything he came up with.For all I know, he might have been set up by a roommate to surprise me, or something like that—an affectionate prank.  I don’t know, though.  All I can say at the moment is that it was a hell of an invigorating conversation to have at the end of a pretty fun day; my editor at Oxford sent me an E-Mail saying she’s seen the book and it’s really beautiful…

So, how’s YOUR day been going for you?

The Come-To-Jesus Talk

Phil Ford

It's just a little more than week away from the beginning of classes here at IU, and moving vans are disgorging futons and M.C. Escher posters everywhere in the streets of my neighborhood, out-of-towners are driving the wrong way down one-way-streets, and new graduate students are getting braced up for the exciting, arduous course of study they'll be engaged in for the next few years. You've arrived! Congratulations. And for those for whom graduate school (or at least post-graduate life of some sort) is a small fluffy cloud way off on the horizon, it's too early to think about grad school applications for next year. But it's not too early to start worrying about the major life decision that those applications represent. Should I go to graduate school?* It's time for the Come-To-Jesus talk.** 

Please understand that I don't know you, so nothing I'm going to say should be taken personally. You might be America's Next Top Musicologist for all I know. It doesn't matter. I give the Come-To-Jesus talk to everyone, because some in the biz are like those salmon you see jumping up waterfalls on nature shows, blindly seeking only to reproduce themselves. We all have an interest in putting behinds in seminar chairs, and it's easy to lose sight of where our grad students are going once we're done with them. I think we owe it to prospective graduate students to be blunt with them about the enterprise for which they might choose to consecrate their time, money, energy, youth, health, and happiness. 

OK, so here's the quick answer to Should I go to graduate school?, which I'm cribbing off of the Credo of Leonard Bernstein's Mass. Possibly yes, probably no. 

I am by no means the first person to say this. Read this.

Still here?

Eulogies for Dad

Jonathan Bellman

At 8:30 PM on 23 July 2009, my father, Samuel Irving Bellman, passed away.  The funeral was yesterday, and my older brother Joel and I both gave eulogies, in addition to my Aunt.  My son Benjamin read a poem he liked—The Darkling Thrush, by Thomas Hardy; when I had told my father Ben was struck by it he was transformed from a severely ailing man of 81 or so to . . . “Tell Benjamin that he made Grandpa feel as he was floating on clouds!  Wonderful!  Unglaublich!”

So here are our eulogies: first that of Brother Joel, then mine.  No, this isn’t musicological, but I’m doing it anyway.  My Dad was such a presence, and had such an impact on what Joel and I became (whatever that is!), that it is only meet and fitting.  I present this as heartfelt memorial, without the slightest apology for non-musicological content, nor for sentimentality or lachrymosity.

May his memory be for a blessing.

----------------

From Joel Bellman, the older son (reprinted with permission):

 

Samuel I. Bellman, 1926-2009

July 26, 2009

 

            Good afternoon, everyone. I want to thank you all – our relatives, friends and colleagues – for joining my family and me on this occasion today.

            We’ve shared so many happy times and celebrations in the past that I hardly know how to begin these remarks, but let me try.

            For years, there was a kind of a standing joke between my father and me. Every time I met someone in the course of my work who was famous or in any way newsworthy, Dad, a university English professor, would ask, half-seriously but all hopefully, “You tell ‘em about your old man?”

            Sometimes I’d lie and say, “Oh, yeah, I mentioned you.” Other times, maybe feeling mean or immature, I’d say, “Hell, no! Why would I?” Because what he was really asking was, “Did you tell them where you came from?”

            Now, with your indulgence, I want to tell you about my old man.

            You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who was more proud and supportive of his family. My mom, as many of you know, can fend for herself; she’s from Chicago, as we are often reminded, and while she may not be as skinny as Obama, she too is tough. Dad adored her and depended on her utterly. And when it came to his boys, he was invariably our biggest champion no matter what we were up to.

            It’s hard to imagine two more impractical career aspirations than radio journalism at the dawn of happy-talk TV news, or classical music scholarship in the blighted age of disco and heavy metal. But Dad choked back whatever reservations he had and became our biggest boosters.

            What else can I tell you? When I was 10 years old, he took me fishing at Happy Jack’s Trout Farm – this son of Lithuanian immigrants who had settled in El Paso, Texas and opened up a tiny country store in what Dad used to call the “Christ-forsaken place” of La Mesa, New Mexico. He taught me to ride a bike, without training wheels, when he himself had never learned how.

            He took us on long summer driving vacations - Lake Cachuma, Lake Isabella, Lake Elsinore and especially Lake Arrowhead, where I always looked forward to setting off by myself in a little motorboat with nary a peep of concern from Dad. Years later, as an adult, I finally came to appreciate how lucky I’d been to have a father who, because he taught, had most summers off just like I did. He taught me to drive and let me take the wheel on some of those vacations and never criticized my driving or showed any anxiety about it – a feat I doubt very much I’ll be able to manage with my own sons.

            He took us on our first trip to San Francisco in 1966 – no, not that kind of trip. Thanks to his friend and Department Chair Bob Morsberger – and his own enterprise in cutting through the academic red tape, we had our first experience traveling to and living in England, during a year-long house swap and exchange teaching visit. This stoked and solidified my lifelong Anglophilia and led to at least half a dozen later visits.

 

            He took me to my first theatrical movie when I was only five years old –“Cinderfella,” with Jerry Lewis. And more Jerry Lewis: A drive-in movie double-bill of Gore Vidal’s “Visit to a Small Planet” and “The Bell Boy.” Later, when like every other 10-year-old boy I was into the secret agent and spy craze, he took me to see “The Ipcress File” with Michael Caine, one of the coolest ‘60s movies I ever saw. Still later, live theater: “Man of La Mancha” with Richard Kiley, “Fiddler on the Roof” with Herschel Bernardi, ”Othello” with James Earl Jones.

            One time, he saved my brother’s life when, before Jon could swim, he accidentally drifted into the deep end of a colleague’s swimming pool. Dad jumped in fully clothed and rescued him – despite not knowing how to swim himself.

            To my mother’s consternation, my dad discovered, and fueled, my appetite for dark and weird and often age-inappropriate fiction – Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, the fantasy, science fiction and horror of H.G. Wells, the corrosive cynicism of Ambrose Bierce, the tragic fatalism of Stephen Crane and Joseph Conrad, Edward Gorey’s eerie Victorian ghost-story anthology “The Haunted Looking-Glass,” the collected New Yorker cartoons of Charles Addams, morbid and violent old radio thrillers like The Shadow, Lights Out and Inner Sanctum.

            There was the lighter stuff, too – Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” and “Through the Looking Glass,” the nonsense work of Edward Lear, Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop cartoons, Walt Disney’s Silly Symphonies with cheerful choruses of singing flowers; his collection of Big Little books featuring comic-strip and radio serial characters from the 1930s; his L. Frank Baum Oz book collection; and later, an eclectic and improbable assortment of 60s pop singles ranging from Ernie K-Doe, Little Peggy March and the Troggs to Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Peter, Paul and Mary.

            Unfortunately, the world was rapidly changing, and from his standpoint, not for the better. As a yellow-dog FDR Democrat, he found things more and more politically intolerable under a succession of disastrous presidencies – that of “Nixie,” AKA “the anti-Christ;” Jerry Ford and his WIN buttons, too contemptible even to be graced with a pejorative; Jimmy Carter and his Sunday School pieties, a nuclear engineer my father derided as the “peanut boy,” Ronald Reagan, “the Beast” straight out of the Bible’s Book of Revelations; Bush I, who was “Bushie;” Bush II, who was alternately “the bastard,” “the Illegitimate One,” or just “The Boy.”

            He was alarmed and offended by anti-intellectualism and tabloid journalism, even as he occasionally fell victim to both crackpot theories and crank populism. Prefiguring Philip Roth, my father once informed me that Hitler had a secret plan to bomb his hometown of El Paso as part of a planned takeover of the United States. This was news to me – and undoubtedly would have been to the Third Reich as well – but challenged for proof, he produced a yellowed newspaper column from the El Paso Times in 1942, speculating that the anti-aircraft artillery training center at the nearby Civil War-era Army post of Ft. Bliss might make it a tempting target.

            Back in the early 1970s, he grew enamored with the writings of Erich Von Daniken, a one-time imprisoned swindler and author of “Chariots of the Gods,”  who grew rich promoting the idea that extraterrestrial aliens – whom my dad reverently referred to as “the Fellas” - had somehow salted the earth in ancient times with the seeds of the human race.

            Several years ago, he once received a strange package in the mail, bearing no return address, and opened it up to find a talking Ann Coulter doll. I don’t pretend to know the actual provenance of this mysterious gift, but I’m pretty sure it was not, as Dad insisted, personally sent to him by Ann Coulter herself.

            The proliferation of new-media devices – from cell phones to personal computers - my technophobic father found it increasingly impossible to master. Despite it all, he remained surprisingly, if obscurely, productive – we’ve found dozens of essays, poems and articles tucked into every nook and cranny of my parents’ home that I’d no idea he’d ever written.

            As my brother and I grew up, married and started families of our own, he embraced his three grandsons with the same ferocious affection he’d shown his own sons, as eager to school them in the fundamentals of scholarship, literacy and the joys of reading and writing. In the era of the Internet, iPods and video games, it was increasingly a fool’s errand – but he never gave up.

            Oscar Wilde – another writer Dad introduced me to, through his novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” – counseled that we put our talent into our work and our genius into our life. I guess Dad sort of did – he raised one son who’s a professor and scholar who teaches and writes for a living, another who writes and periodically teaches for a living. We both share many of Dad’s crazy enthusiasms from the most arcane and even disreputable corners of popular culture to the most respectable highbrow literature and conventional symphonic works.

            With the passage of time, more and more it’s my father’s face that I see in the mirror; his voice that I hear when I speak, his values and ethics I hope to transmit to my children. I am proud to be my father’s son.

            That’s really what I wanted to tell you about my old man.

 

----------------

From Jonathan Bellman, the younger son:           

 

Dear Dad,

I guess this means it will be more difficult for us to visit each other, right?

You told me that when you were young, a recently departed relative (perhaps Uncle Sol Levenson) visited three male relatives in their sleep the same night.  Your father—Grandpa Max—said (in his dream), “We sure do miss you, Sol” and he responded “No, Max, it’s better this way.”  Dad, I’m sure it is better, but if you’d like to stop by—while we’re dreaming, perhaps, or if you would just waft a breeze through our hair or give a quick kiss on the forehead—please don’t hesitate, even if there are some tears.  Death is unavoidable, but the separation is a choice, and you will be close to me eternally.  You used to speak of tribal beliefs that major chunks of parents’ souls are instilled in their children; as a son I believed it, and now, as a father, I know it to be true.  Whether it is literally or figuratively true could not matter less.  I will always feel you nearby.

One of the last times we saw each other, you directed me to “keep up the Bellman family tradition,” and I do: I teach, I learn, I write, I publish—as Joel does, and as you did your whole life.  I go to school every day, as you did, as your grandsons do, as their children will do…as we are meant to do.  And in the face of life’s losses and vicissitudes, we—like all teachers—still get to class, because people are waiting for us, people who need and want what we’re offering.  Teaching and Learning—passing it on, in other words—is the great chain, reaching back to before Abraham and Isaac, back to prehistory, back to the animal kingdom even, and it has been our profound privilege  to spend our lives as links in that chain.  As you did, Dad, so I do.  We’re still at it, with me putting my feet in your (bigger) footprints.  So as surely as I breathe, I declare: no bond between us has been broken.  Our closeness remains, and our work continues, as does our family tradition.  It will be some time before we see each other again, but that is the nature of the distance between this world and Olam ha-Ba, the World to Come. 

I miss you, though.  Forn gezunt: go well, and fly high and far, with freedom and joy, with the spirit of the Almighty cradling you and putting wind beneath your wings.  And I love you forever.

Jonathan

Aloha 'Oe

Jonathan Bellman

Apologies for the lack of blogging.  The semester was a punishing one (papers, performances), and the END of said semester even more punishing, in terms of grading and so on.  Since then, I’ve been doing program notes for a couple of summer concerts, and indexing my book manuscript.  It was my first major indexing project—I used the MS Word indexing function—so there was a learning curve, do-overs etc. involved, and thus a hell of a lot of time.  But when I get the proofs, most of the work will be done.  High time!

So I’ve forced myself not to respond to comments, critical and supportive alike, and I’ve not picked up on other matters that I would in other circumstances have run publicly amok about, like a certain idiotic piece in the New York Times by Mark C. Taylor.  Simply no time.  And we’re off to Hawaii tomorrow (tomorrow being our 25th wedding anniversary, as it happens), to return around the first of June, and I have errands to run…

So I’ll be back in a couple of weeks.  Stay cool, everyone.

A Conversation from 1975

Jonathan Bellman

Spring 1975.

 

Dramatis personæ: 

 

DR. SANDRA EAGLETON, my Advanced Placement English Teacher, my senior year at Claremont High School, who had also taught English part time at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, in my father’s department.

 

JON, a long-haired, mouthy legend in his own mind.

 

SE:  Jon, would you like to be an English professor like your Dad?

 

JB:  God, no.  Anything but.

 

SE [consternation]:  Why not?

 

JB: I know what it’s like when I write papers for you—beating my brains out the night before it’s due.  I do NOT want to spend college like that, trying to think of something to say.

 

SE [smiling knowingly]:  You’d be surprised how many English majors are like that.

 

JB:  I know, but…

 

*            *            *            *            *            *            *            *

 

Dear Dr. Eagleton,

 

I know you’re no longer among us, having lost a long battle to cancer some years ago, and I regret that we never reconnected after I found my way to a somewhat different career choice, but an academic one that involved writing papers.  Perhaps you saw something I didn’t yet know was there.  What I can say is that in most cases I’m done with my papers much further in advance than I seem to be right now.  OK, so it’s two nights before, not the night before, but still.  I do find myself smiling and thinking of you tonight, though, and of our conversation so many years ago.  Thanks for everything you provided us, not least the challenge and attention and modeling of what teaching really could and should be.

 

And yeah, I’d better get back to my impending local AMS paper now.  Wishing you and all with you in the Empyrean every eternal Joy.

 

All Best,

 

Jon (Bellman; Sam’s son)

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?

Another pointless meme

Phil Ford

. . . this time courtesy of Terminal: "Fill this out about your SENIOR year of high school. REPOST with the name of high school and graduating year in the subject box." I'll call this post whatever I damn well please, but for whatever reason I feel like thinking about high school, which is something that very, very rarely happens.

I should explain up front that I didn't exactly have a senior year in high school. In Canada at that time you could take four or five years of high school -- four years (to grade 12) for a general school-leaving certificate and five (to grade 13) if you planned to go to college. My parents separated just before my grade 12 year and I moved from Sudbury to Toronto. You can imagine how much fun that was. I was desperate to get out of high school and I discovered that some American schools (including Indiana University School of Music, where I eventually went as an undergrad piano student) would actually accept an Ontario grade 12 education as equivalent to an American senior year. So I kind of weaseled out of my last year of high school, meaning that the piquant last-year-of-high-school experiences this meme is doubtless intended to celebrate are things I've only ever experienced in movies. Leaving high school didn't feel like a bittersweet curve in the road to adulthood, it felt like a jailbreak. For years afterwards I had occasional bad dreams that someone in the registrar's office would discover I hadn't really graduated from high school and would send me back there.

1. Did you date someone from your school? Nope. Except for a girl I dated (kind of) in grade 10, I didn't have anything resembling a love life until college.

2. Did you marry someone from your high school? Hell no. 

3. Did you car pool to school? No, I biked or walked. 

4. What kind of car did you have? My Mom got rid of our car when we moved to Toronto -- we lived in the Bloor West Village right in the center of town, and having a car was pointless (the transit system is good). I actually never learned to drive until my son was born (I was 30). 

5. What kind of car do you have now? A Subaru, just like Terminal and half the people in Bloomington. When did the Subaru become the new Volvo?

6. It's Friday night -- where are you? (then) Practicing, probably. In earlier years I would have been in the freezing backseat of my Mom's Chevy Citation, making the five-hour drive up to Toronto to take a piano lesson at the Royal Conservatory. But on a Friday night in grade 12 I might have gone off to the Bloor Street theater, a rep movie house where I learned to love weird movies. Or I might have been hanging out with my friend Mike and listening to music. Sorry, I was a pretty boring kid. 

7. It's Friday night -- where are you? (now) Reading or something. I'm still boring. 

8. What kind of job did you have in high school? I didn't have a job, I practiced.

9. What kind of job do you have now? Musicologist, but you already knew that.

10. Were you a party animal? Nope. In Sudbury a lot of kids drank enormously (less so in Toronto, for whatever reason), but I stayed away from that scene. I didn't like being around drunk people, and I still don't. I went through my obligatory "party animal" phase in the summer between the end of school and my freshman year of college, when I was at Orford and decided to become a new, less boring person. I continued in this vein for a while at Indiana until I realized that I was still boring, only now with hangovers.

11. Were you ever considered a flirt? Doubt it.

12. Were you in band, orchestra, or choir? Once I had figured out my escape plan from high school I set about taking the most undemanding schedule of classes I could and still graduate. So I ditched math* and took choir, where we sang a lot of Burt Bacharach arrangements, as I recall. 

13. Were you a nerd? What do you think?

14. Did you get expelled or suspended? Of course not. "Do your time and go," the motto of many a wise old con, was my own guiding principle.

15. Can you sing the fight song? I don't even know if we had one.

16. Who was your favorite teacher? My piano teacher, Marietta Orlov, though I suppose that doesn't count. I liked my Italian teacher, who was a crazy loud Calabrian lady who liked me because I was the only mungy-kek** who wanted to learn Italian. Since all the kids in this class (which was also my homeroom) were also from Italian families and spoke Italian constantly, I could actually speak Italian pretty well by the end of the school year -- probably the only real thing I learned that year, though my knowledge of the language has decayed badly from disuse. 

17. Where did you sit for lunch? In my living room, or Mike's house, or Pizza Pizza, or that cafe with the foosball table. 

18. What was you high school's full name? Harbord Collegiate Institute.  

19. When did you graduate? 1987

20. What was you school mascot? A tiger, though I had to look that up.

21. If you could go back and do it again, would you? If you mean, would I do anything different, then no. Well, I'd probably have worn better clothes and gotten a haircut. But if you mean, would I go back in time to experience it all over again? No.

22. Did you have fun at the prom? Didn't go.

23. Do you still talk to the person you went to the prom with? N/A

24. Are you planning on going to your next reunion? No -- I've never been to any reunion of any place I've gone to school. Neither for that matter have I ever attended any graduation ceremony, not even for my Ph.D.

25. Do you still talk to people from your high school? A couple.  

Looking back over this post, it looks as if I'm burnishing some kind of emo-kid my-life-was-tragic legend about my high school experience, but really it wasn't all that bad. I didn't like having to move for my last year of high school because I had a lot of really good friends in Sudbury (grades 10 and 11 at Lockerby High in Sudbury were fun) but it was a good thing, really, because it gave me motivation to finish early and get on with my life. High school wasn't bad, but it was only the prehistory to what I think of as the Era of Modern Phil.  

* Yes, math. I am so bad at math I suspect I am mentally disabled in some way -- actually, I was put in a learning-disabled group when I was a little kid, which in Sudbury in the 1970s involved leaching and exorcisms. 

**"cake-eater," i.e. WASP

Back to school

Phil Ford

OK, time to buckle down and finish these damn syllabi. School starts on Monday. Oh well, it was a nice holiday. In the meantime, enjoy these passive-aggressive notes. Especially this one, taken at an Indiana University dorm:  

Someone finally wrote what everyone is thinking.

Notes Towards a Future History of Right Now

Phil Ford

Fair warning: this isn't about music, it's about politics, so those of you who don't want to hear another damn academic for Obama should come back later. Thank you.

Last week I was talking about the election to a colleague in the hallway outside the music history and music theory offices, and I remarked that I'm probably going to be a lot more productive once the election is over. Another colleague, whose door was ajar, heard what I said and came out to join us. He knew what I meant, and we got to talking about the brain-sucking omnipresence of the 2008 presidential campaign in our lives. Normally when my wife and I are both home from work we pour a drink and talk about our days -- what our kids are up to, how the day's teaching went, who we ran into, etc. Nowadays that lasts for like 30 seconds before we start breaking down the day's polls. We reload 538 obsessively, follow inside-baseball political blogs (the Atlantic and Politico rosters especially), and watch MSNBC, Colbert, and Stewart after the kids go to bed. (And I HATE cable news. This does not stop me.) We talk and think about little else but the presidential race, and our moods go up and down with the little crises of each day. I've been in the United States for 21 years now, and I've never been this obsessed with an election, not ever. And what my hallway conversation with my colleagues showed me is that the same thing is happening to everyone else. We're all going to be more productive after November 4. It's funny, I write this musicological blog and don't talk much about the background stuff in my life very much -- I try to stay mostly on topic and write about music or academia. But In truth there's no real line between them, and trying to keep them apart has felt so strained and artificial I've just been avoiding blog-writing altogether. Intellectual history -- the causes and quarrels hashed out in public -- is always shadowed by hidden private experience. Ideas take on the color of their emotional environment. And right now there is an emotional environment -- private, mostly unspoken, yet collective, a movement stirring within history -- the sum total of all those writers out there, like me, hunched over the computer and staring at it like a crystal ball, hoping perhaps that if they just keep clicking the future will somehow come into view. 

Looking back over the last few years, you can see the ways that the Bush Administration has gamed and marginalized its opponents. But this belongs to the realm of public life, and some future history of this era will have to come to terms with the private dimension as well, the tiny invisible lines between the public and private realms, just as cold war historians have tried to do for life in the 1950s. And it seems to me that what has really characterized private life in this era has been a numbing of the historical faculty, a feeling that someone is making history, but it's not us, and indeed that history has nothing much to do with us. Although the time has gone by for me as quickly as time in a busy life ever goes, until very recently I had the feeling that time (historical time, anyway) had somehow stopped, that things had been this way forever and would go on the same way forever. Bad men were doing bad things in the name of authority and nothing anyone said or did about it seemed to make any difference. Political culture had congealed into a frozen eternity, it seemed, and so the routine was to start the day by reading the newspaper in mounting impotent rage, and then go to work, and then come home, listening to the news on the car radio (again with impotent rage), and start making dinner. Political awareness was no less acute than at any other time, but it had been contained somehow, walled off from the rest of life: it was not that you didn't know what was going on, it was only that it didn't matter. It would be wrong, a historical caricature, to say that this has been a time of ideological weakness or timidity, an era of conformity, etc., as historians so often do with the cold war. (I think it's wrong when people tell that story about the cold war, too.) But as I've argued before, the signal achievement (if that's the right word) of the Bush era, or the leader cult we might call Bushism, has not been the crushing of dissent, but the debasing of public language to the extent that dissent just doesn't matter much. The last eight years of criticism of Bushism has been like the turning of a stripped screw -- motion without force. 

One of the things I've been writing about recently is how the revolutionary left in the 1960s felt the nearness of history, almost as if history were a living thing, a great beast they could feel moving beneath them. That historical faculty, that sixth sense by which we can feel the movements of history, has been long disused, gone cold and stiff, atrophied and pinched, forgot we had it. But it's warming up, unclenching, we're feeling it again. I apologize for all the "we" stuff. As Wayne Koestenbaum says, "I say 'we' wishfully, hypothetically." But it's a hypothesis with a certain number of data points now. I can feel it when I talk to people here, even when we're not talking about politics. You can see it in the huge crowds that Obama draws, in the news stories about long patient lines for early voting across the country. No-one knows what's going to happen on Nov. 4, but something is going to happen. Things were static for a long time and now they're starting to move very quickly indeed. Who knows where it's all going? It could be disaster just as easily as triumph. (Things didn't work out so great in the 1960s, after all.) But one way or the other, we are now all (to continue my metaphor) on the back of this beast, very big now running very fast indeed, and we know it: we can feel it. 

A side note: since I started typing this post, the ATF announced that it has foiled an assassination plot against Obama and Ted Stevens has been found guilty of corruption. It reminds me of a joke Dennis Leary once made about how much TV guys his age watch: they turned on the TV in 1963 and saw Oswald get shot, so they never wanted to turn it off again.  

Obama figured all this stuff out, y'know, which is why he'll probably win. (Though let's not get complacent.) "Yes we can" turned out to be a pretty appropriate political slogan.