Dial "M" for Musicology

Aloha 'Oe

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.

Great moments in scholarly research

Looking back at my "friends of the maximum" post of the other day, I fear that I gave in to the temptation of making myself sound more interesting than I really am -- posing as some sort of rascally roué emitting a barrelly chortle* as I twirl the ends of my waxed moustache and contemplate my next obliquity.  Anthony Bourdain's does a "punk chef" version of this -- his show "No Reservations" goes to this well a little too often for my taste. (OK Anthony, let's get one more shot of you wearing the Ramones T-shirt . . .) It's probably impossible to write about this sensibility without taking sides and, so doing, sounding either like Hugh Hefner or the Church Lady. But when we write about sensibilities, and the people who inhabit and embody them, we always end up writing about abstractions, ideal types that allow the type a forensic clarity. When we write about hipness (to choose a favorite topic of mine) we write about hipsters, those "lucifugous creatures of the dark" that Anatole Broyard wrote about in his 1948 "Portrait of the Hipster," despite the fact that such persons are quite rare -- far less common than those who are not hipsters but who have absently taken on something of their emotional coloration. Likewise, the approach to life best summed up by Sir Arnold Bax's advice to try anything once except for incest and folk dancing seems to demand a concrete embodiment -- Hugh Hefner, say -- but this raises the bar rather high. Does a general philosophical disposition towards (say) eating unpasteurized cheese mean you have to wear an ascot or something? Hope not.

I'm more of a Fellow Traveler of the Maximum than a Friend of the Maximum. Some of the people I research and write about go way beyond being Friends of The Maximum -- these are the people The Maximum had to take a restraining order out on. Which leads to some odd research situations. When I was a postdoc at Stanford I was doing research in the Stanford Special Collections reading room, which had (among many other treasures) a complete run of Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts, perhaps the most uninhibited of Beat poetry little mags. This caused me a certain perplexity: once the materials had been paged from remote storage, you had to go to the desk and ask for your materials.

Me: Um, I paged . . . a periodical.
Librarian: Which one?
Me: The . . . one with the brown covers.
Librarian: They've all got brown covers. What's it called?
Me: It's an unprintable epithet.
Librarian: Oh, Fuck You.
Me: Yup.

So anyway, the other day my friend John Howland, who shares with me a penchant for cold war lounge culture, was telling me about a wonderful new resource: Bondi, the digital publishing company that created a digital archive of the New Yorker's backlog did the same thing with Playboy's complete 1950s run. You can install the archive on your computer and keyword-search everything Playboy's first seven years. This is incredibly useful -- I'm beginning a think through a project that has to do with pop music and the cold lounge ethos (hint: it has to do with this) and Playboy is just about the most important and relevant publication for what I want to do. I've been sitting in the Kinsey Institute library going through the paper issues by hand (it's easier on the eyes than microfilm), but this is much easier and more thorough. You still need to browse page-by-page, because you never know what you might find that your keyword searches might miss, and anyway there's a certain meaning in the total arrangement of items within a publication, but still, keyword searching! And Amazon has the whole (slightly pretentious, in the Playboy style) deluxe package for a steal, $20.00, so I bought it and am now wondering where to put it. Putting it on my office shelf next to my Chicago Manual of Style might give students visiting during office hours the wrong idea. But if I put it on a shelf at home, what will the babysitter think?

I guess geeking out about keyword searching in a Playboy digital archive is taking "I read it for the articles" to a whole new level. It's kind of funny, though, when you do research on the wild Dionysian reaches of human experience, you are inevitably professionalizing them. And this means that your reactions are the furthest thing from whatever the authors of Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts were going for. You're not shocked, you're not aroused, you're not angered, you're not digging the unspeakable visions of the individual, man, you're just . . . interested. It's kind of funny -- in the Kinsey Institute reading room you're surrounded by the world's most formidable collection of erotica, and you and you're sitting around with your fellow researchers, sober as a judge, thinking "hm, that's a pretty neat font."

I've quoted the great Jaroslav Hasek saying that those who are well brought-up may read anything. This is one of the consolations of scholarship: becoming professional in your work is a process of becoming well-brought-up. The academic vocation, This Thing Of Ours, has landed us in countless boring committee meetings, but it also gives us license to read anything, listen to anything, entertain any idea. That's the trade-off.

*stolen from Martin Amis, The Information

19th century interior

From Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, "The Interior," p. 216:

Nineteenth-century domestic interior. The space disguises itself—puts on, like an alluring creature, the costumes of moods. The self-satisfied burgher should know something of the feeling that the next room might have witnessed the coronation of Charlemagne as well as the assassination of Henri IV, the signing of the Treaty of Verdun as well as the wedding of Otto and Theophano. In the end, things are merely mannequins, and even the great moments of world history are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances of complicity with nothingness, with the petty and the banal. Such nihilism is the innermost core of bourgeois coziness—a mood than in hashish intoxication concentrates to satanic contentment, satanic knowing, satanic calm, indicating precisely to what extent the nineteenth-century interior is itself a stimulus to intoxication and dream. This mood involves, furthermore, an aversion to the open air, the (so to speak) Uranian atmosphere, which throws a new light on the extravagant interior design of the period. To live in these interiors was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded onself within a spider's web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry. From this cavern, one does not like to stir.

I read this and thought, wow, I once wrote something very similar, about cold war loungin':

Lounge is music for a state of heightened sensual receptiveness, or heightened desire. Except desire impels movement towards the thing desired; when you lounge, everything you want is right there, surrounding you. The lounge is where you array your pleasures just so, everything in easy reach, all contingencies handled in advance. It is where pleasures are contained—and pleasure is refracted back through its containment. Civilization, depending on your point of view, is either a prison or the lounge writ large. Or it is both: the velvet prison. Either way, loungin' is the proper mode for civilized existence. Lounge music offers the consolation of small vices and taboo indulgence.

Taboo!

I was on vacation last week (hence my spotty posting to Dial M) but went back to school yesterday -- time to get my courses in order for the fall. I stopped by the mailroom and was greeted by our ebullient new mailroom person, Karen, who handed me a package I wasn't expecting. And . . . it's . . . my Representations article! Wheee! It's finally out! Look!

My name on it and everything! And in rather august company. (The Representations website has a comprehensive list of past issues and authors.) Sorry, it's probably unbecoming to show too much enthusiasm for your own journal articles, but I'm proud of this one. If you're wondering what my article ("Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica") is about, here is the abstract:

In the 1950s, exotica was a genre of pop music that specialized in depicting imaginary exotic paradises and conventionalized natives. By the late 1960s, exotica pop had disappeared, but its tropes of temporal and spatial disjuncture persisted, structuring the music, visual art, and social theory of the utopian counterculture. While 1950s and 1960s kinds of exotica differ in their preferred imaginary destinations, both raise the question of what intermediate shades between belief and disbelief are demanded by aestheticized representations of human life. This essay theorizes exotica as a mode of representation governed by a peculiar mode of reception—one of willed credulity enabled by submission to its spectacle. What exotica demands is what intellectuals are least likely to give, though, and the peculiar pleasures of exotica spectacle are denigrated or rendered invisible in the hermeneutic regime.

And here is the article itself, free for all who might want to read it.

There seems to be something of a boom in what might be called exoticism studies in music at the moment. Ralph Locke in particular has a book called Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections coming out from Cambridge University Press, and I am keenly looking forward to reading it. I read his Journal of Musicology article "A Broader View of Musical Exoticism" only when my own article was in final proofs, so it doesn't show up in the notes, but Ralph's way of thinking about musical exoticism is very congenial to mine. In his gentlemanly and unassuming way, he revises much of the conventional understanding of musical exoticism by showing that exoticism doesn't happen only when the music sounds weird, alien, non-western, etc. Against this "exotic style only" paradigm he posits an “all the music in full context” paradigm, in which an audience's understanding of exoticism takes place within the music's larger narrative frame. Which is a much more satisfying way of dealing with the matter. In one part of my article I write about "Blue Jungle," from the Les Baxter album Jungle Jazz. The theme of this album is South America, as the liner notes tell us in the usual bombastic exotica-album style :

Les here ventures forth . . . this time on a musical exploration into the wilds of South and Central America. Here are the spectacular results. Here the timeless meets the modern in a breathtaking, pulsating whirl of sound. This is music of high adventure with a beat—exotically presented in a Baxter blend of ‘Jungle Jazz.’

And Jungle Jazz is adorned with a particularly, uh, problematic album cover:

But the music itself -- particular "Blue Jungle" --  doesn't sound "South American." It sounds like cop show music, or what I call "jazz exotica." I have an article on jazz exotica just out in the Journal of Musicological Research (this has been an exotic year for me) where I define jazz exotica as "music that attempts to conjure filmic images of the urban demimonde perennially associated with jazz and the narrative subject that traverses it." Which is a highfalutin' way of saying that jazz exotica is not so much jazz as music whose topic is jazz. But what does that have to do with the guy on the album cover? In the "exotic style only" paradigm we wouldn't look at the album cover or liner notes, but would insist that whatever the album means is to be found in its musical style only. But popular music just doesn't work that way. You never pay attention to the music exclusively-- otherwise it wouldn't matter if KISS performed in business suits or full kabuki drag. Likewise here: as I say in "Taboo," an exotica album "is a system of representations in which music plays the main but not exclusive role in creating an ethnographic fiction." And that "system of representations" is the music plus liner notes, cover art, and what academical types like to call the "discourse" (i.e., talk and hype) surrounding the album. And from that point of view, why yes, this is the music of the mysterious South American native folk! At least it pleases us to think so while we're listening to it. Or, as Heather Hadlock put it to me once, the audience is a participant in its own delusion. (Thanks Heather!)

Which reminds me: thank you, Ralph, for stepping in and writing for Dial M this summer. Those of you who aren't in the biz, this was a little like having Dr. J come and play a little one-on-one on your neighborhood blacktop.

God give me strength

As I mentioned the other day, I just bought the Rhino Burt Bacharach compilation, The Look of Love. Why did I wait so long? Who knows -- it's easy to take Bacharach for granted. I wasn't around for the days when Bacharach conjured an image of adulthood as playground. By the time I showed up his songs had been thoroughly assimilated into the ghastly netherworld of offices and waiting rooms -- entirely the wrong kind of adulthood. But then again, I remember hearing "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head" when I was a kid (as a bumper for a local news broadcast after the weather, that kind of thing) and feeling a sudden and unexpected jab of melancholy. Where did that come from? It was easy to discount as a random effect—a loose piece of pop-cultural shrapnel hitting me in an unprotected spot. Somehow you can never really hear pop until its language has faded, until it no longer works as a quotidian ornament. Then you realize that your response wasn't random at all: the music was doing exactly what it was built to do.

The other day I was mopping the floor and playing the radio, and a Bacharach medley came on. Jeez, a medley -- I hate medleys. But it occurs to me at some point that every phrase of these songs, even artlessly banged together in a "greatest hits" package, is a perfect little watchmaker's spring uncoiling with just the right force and velocity, clicking into place, tripping a catch, lifting a latch, cracking a door, opening out into some exact little place in the soul. And I thought, I need to listen to more of this.

So our old friend Robert Christgau calls this music "fancy hackwork." Hm. This describes Christgau's writing better than Bacharach's, I think. This music isn't coded with those conventional signifiers of noise and edge that might cohere in a rhetoric of authenticity; it's not the sort of thing that your standard-issue rock guy would normally like. Geoffrey O'Brien has a wonderful essay called "The Return of Burt Bacharach" in his collection Sonata for Jukebox that considers Bacharach in the context of the 1990s lounge revival and suggests that maybe this music got its belated due because it could plausibly form a "counter-counterculture" to rock:

Partly, the lounge phenomenon represents a generational shift conspiring to admit a range of musical effects that rock had excluded so as to preserve the purity of its identity. If one posits (as a worst-case scenario) a consciousness restricted to heavy metal, punk, and grunge, and then imagines the sudden infusion of, say, the "exotica" of Martin Denny, it becomes possible to grasp the revolutionary possibilities of tracks like "Stone God" or "Jungle River Boat." A new sensuous universe opens. Glissandos, bird calls, the undulation of waves and steel guitars: the massage music works its way into pressure points that garage rock failed to reach, an ethereal but efficiently lubricant patchouli oil. (p.12)

Then again, Martin Denny isn't Burt Bacharach. You can like Bacharach because you've decided you're part of the "cocktail nation" or something, but that reason would work equally well for Ray Conniff: within the generous boundaries of "lounge music," any music would do equally well. Explaining taste as a function of subcultural identity is a pretty blunt tool. It doesn't tell you much about what's special about Bacharach's songs, why they're different from anything Denny (say) might have written, and it doesn't suggest the possibility that you might love this music despite its lounge connotations, not because of them. It doesn't account for why Elvis Costello is singing Bacharach songs, or why those songs are still standing after all the years of abuse, including the grisly spectacle of Bacharach and Costello serenading an aroused Mike Myers in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. To understand all that, you need to read the rest of O'Brien's essay:

These intricate fetish-objects are about their own virtuosity, a virtuosity that delights in difficulty and intricacy, and delights even more in disguising them as just another pop tune. At his most characteristic Bacharach exudes a dry constructivist energy. A given song might evoke Stravinsky's Agon gone pop, or a fragment of Schoenberg deftly sweetened and cajoled, in extremis, back into conventional harmonic resolution. The drama—or the game—of a Bacharach melody is the risk that it might not circle back acceptably, might simply extend outward in a series of increasingly far-flung spirals. How far can he swim from shore before losing any hope of getting back? The melody branches at angles so abrupt that it threatens unbridgeable gaps, unacceptable dissonances: until, with the aplomb of Douglas Fairbanks as Zorro, Bacharach abruptly brings it home by one deft shortcut or another. One can imagine him as a connoisseur of emotional precision, whose own feelings would be irrelevant, the embodiment of a dandyism capable nonetheless of appreciating the expression of true feeling. In that light the music would be all surface, but the most beautiful surface imaginable. (pp. 25-26)

Or perhaps these are just some very deep surfaces. 

Questionable taste

Someone emailed me a while ago to ask where the American Idol liveblogging had gone. I'm glad someone liked that stuff enough to ask about it, but in truth I got bored of it by the end. Bored of blogging AI, that is, not bored of the show. Although, I don't know, maybe I did get bored of the show! It's possible! It's also a bore to have to write an analysis of what you're watching while you're watching it. So this year I (a) forgot entirely about AI until last week, and then (b) have just been, you know, watching it, without any pretense to having deep thoughts about it. I've also discovered a blog whose AI wrap-ups are more funny and on-target than anything I'd write, so here you go.  I'm leaving AI to the professionals this year.

I will say, though, that I sometimes just get annoyed at the limitations -- the limitations of the show, the singers, and the various pop styles that the singers use, or, more often, that use them. Beatles night: the moment my son has been waiting for. But no-one was anything more than adequate, and some a good deal shy of that mark. The performance of the evening was supposed to be that girl who sang "Let It Be." Please. The whole thing was done in a stiff two-stroke rhythm, only in slow-mo, and not at all helped out by her clumsy piano playing, which sounded like what every homesick college freshman sounds like in the dorm common room. And even with the sparse accompaniment she was able to manage she wasn't good enough to look away from her hands for more than a second, so that when she tried to maintain eye contact with the audience her head was bobbing up and down like an oil derrick. And the sad thing is, maybe this really was the best performance on the show.

On a brighter note, I notice that the University of Arizona now houses the Les Baxter Collection in its archives. You better believe I'll be doing some research there.

Yeah, like Les Baxter is soooooo much more tasteful than AI pop. Whatever, at least it's old. Don't know who I'm talking about? Here's Baxter's "Voodoo Dreams," with a fan-assembled video of cover art images.

And here's an in-house gag promotional spread for Baxter's Ritual of the Savage/Sacre du Sauvage I found this morning. Funny.

I've got a big article on exotica coming out in Representations in a few months. More to come . . .

temps perdu, Hoosier-style

Or is that À la recherche du temps Purdue?*

No, Bloomington, where I lived for six years. I've written briefly about this before. I studied piano at Indiana University School of Music (now called the Jacobs School) in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and I've always remembered it as a golden, Arcadian time -- a time when I really had nothing much to do all day but play music, go to concerts, go to operas, cook with friends, drink with friends, listen to records with friends, and just basically live la dolce vita. I did go to the odd class, but for my first couple of years there I was kind of a bum, weaseling out of as many courses as I could. My introduction to musicology was the first History of Western Music survey that Peter Burkholder taught at IU. The class met at 8 am, and, like many slacker students I have since had to deal with, I had some difficulty making it on time. So I slept right through the midterm exam, and had my first personal conversation with Peter shortly thereafter -- me all babbling contrition and resolving to mend my ways and please, help a dude out, man, PLEASE, and Peter's all like no. In the nicest possible way. And much to his credit. I had to study very hard to make a B+ in the class, but it kind of sparked my interest.

When I saw Richard Linklater's film Slacker a few years later, I thought, finally here's a movie that COMPLETELY captured what life back then felt like. Slacker was shot in Austin, but Bloomington was a lot like Austin back in the 1980s: a quiet, tolerant, cheap place to live. It was a little cove sheltered from the hard winds of practical existence, a place where people would start out at the university, develop some peculiar interests, and spend several pleasurably rudderless years after graduation (or in an extended penumbral zone between taking classes and graduating) pursuing them. That description didn't really fit me; I was on a foreign student visa, so I couldn't drop out without having to go home, and anyway I was always too guilt-driven to slack in real style, though I knew a lot of people who did. In the popular imagination, slacker types are always hanging out in lowdown dives listening to noisy bands with dramatic hair, but bohemianism is a hardy and adaptive plant: there are classical-music bohos too, and Bloomington, being a small town with an unnatural proportion of classical musicians (a town with a collective professional deformation, like Stunt City), you might see archetypal hipster-slacker scenes play out, smokin' and drinkin' and listenin' to music well into the night, but maybe with (say) obscure Dino Ciani records.

The most archetypal hipster-slacker types I knew were Joe and Bart, a couple of guys I met my freshman year in the Collins dorm. For a few years in the early 1990s they filmed a TV show in their house called J&B on the Rox, which didn't really have any particular theme, except usually at some point Joe (a percussionist at the SOM) would mix a drink and pronounce it "potable." I liked to watch it in part because people I knew would show up unpredictably. It remains a perfect evocation of that particular time and place. Now, I'm a nostalgic guy anyway. I can be nostalgic for things that are happening to me right now. So finding the old shows archived on the internet delivered a massive, toxic, near-lethal dose of nostalgia.

Nostalgia is the melancholy awareness of the passing of time: I look at the old clips of J&B on the Rox and mark the distance between then and now; the beauty of the floating world is in part its transience. The critical sensibility opposes nostalgia, believes it to be mere regression, a desire to return to a simpler, safer, more comfortable time (which may in fact never have existed). But it seems to me that nostalgia is marked above all by the sense that you can't go back; it is, at bottom, an awareness of transience. Nostalgia is the organism's way of registering the press of passing time. Mircea Eliade proposed that the modern sense of time is linear and unidirectional, an arrow pointing to the future, while premodern cultures understood time as a cycle, an endless loop. If your experience of time is cyclical, do you experience nostalgia? Maybe nostalgia is a necessary complement of modernity, a way we have of accustoming our bodies to its rhythms.

These reflections, however random-seeming, actually have a point, of sorts. I'm going back to Bloomington --  I accepted a job on the musicology faculty at Indiana University, and I'll start teaching there in the fall. This was a hard decision to make: it means leaving friends and colleagues at the University of Texas, where I've been very happy, and it means uprooting my family, again. But it was in the end the best move for us, for many reasons. None of which have to do with nostalgia, I hasten to add. Though I would be lying if I said that my early experience in Bloomington played no part in my decision to take a job there -- it's a nice town any way you look at it, a place I want to raise my kids. But it's a bit odd to go back there at a completely different stage of life, a prof instead of a student, a mortgage-holding, kid's-soccer-attending bourgeois instead of a bohemian. (Although, as Jerrold Seigel has argued, a bohemian is simply a bourgeois with training wheels.) I suspect I'll be too busy to think about it much. But anyway, there it is, my Important Announcement, wrapped up in swaddling clothes of abstract self-reflection.

*My GOD what a horrible pun. A horrible pun even by the already abysmal standards of puns generally.

Loungin'

I spend part of this summer thinking about loungin.' Not actually loungin' myself, really, just theorizing it (theorizin').  Yes, I am a big walking cliche of academia.

Actually, what I did was to make a mixtape of music I thought most perfectly captured the essence of loungin' and sent it to my friends, with a picture of Maria Montez as the Cobra Woman glued on the cover and a small liner note I had written:

Lounge is a precursor element* of funk. Lounge can groove, but loungin' keeps you in the pocket. You might move but you're not going much of anywhere. Lounge is music for a state of heightened sensual receptiveness, or heightened desire. Except desire impels movement towards the thing desired; when you lounge, everything you want is right there, surrounding you. The lounge is where you array your pleasures just so, everything in easy reach, all contingencies handled in advance. It is where pleasures are contained—and pleasure is refracted back through its containment. Civilization, depending on your point of view, is either a prison or the lounge writ large. Or it is both: the velvet prison. Either way, loungin' is the proper mode for civilized existence. Lounge music offers the consolation of small vices and taboo indulgence.

Dig my hipster prose, daddy-o. Well, whaddaya want, it's a mixtape.

Virginia Postrel, a libertarian writer on culture who wrote the wonderful book The Substance of Style, wrote an article for the most recent Atlantic Monthly that can be founded excerpted here at her blog, The Dynamist.  It's about the photographer Julius Shulman, whose greatest claim to fame lies in the images he created of California midcentury modern architecture. This image, in particular, is, to me, the quintessence, the Platonic perfection, of loungin':

*As in the "precursor elements" to chemical weapons or methamphetamines. From Wikipedia: "Chemically, a precursor is a substance that, following a reaction, becomes an intrinsic part of a product chemical." That kind of precursor. Funk absorbs loungin' into its metabolism, to switch up scientific metaphors.