Dial "M" for Musicology

You want postmodern? I'll give you postmodern.

Phil Ford

So you wanna play rough, huh, Jonathan?

By way of the fabulous UBUWEB, I give you David Soldier's "American Most Unwanted Song." I actually own this CD.

An explanation: in the 1990s two Russian artists named Komar and Melamid did a kind of conceptual-art thing where they hired a market-research firm to determine the American public's likes and dislikes in art.  As the project's pleasingly retro-90s* website explains,

In an age where opinion polls and market research invade almost every aspect of our "democratic/consumer" society (with the notable exception of art), Komar and Melamid's project poses relevant questions that an art-interested public, and society in general often fail to ask: What would art look like if it were to please the greatest number of people? Or conversely: What kind of culture is produced by a society that lives and governs itself by opinion polls?

The project expanded to include preference polling in several countries; you can find the raw data here and paintings here. America's most wanted painting has it all: an autumnal landscape with wild animals, a family enjoying the outdoors, the color blue, and George Washington.

The methodology Dave Soldier used to determine the most and least wanted songs is basically the same, though (it must be admitted) with a rather more desultory methodology. From a sample of 200 people, Soldier determined that

The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and quiet sections, between fast and slow tempos, and features timbres of extremely high and low pitch, with each dichotomy presented in abrupt transition. The most unwanted orchestra was determined to be large, and features the accordion and bagpipe (which tie at 13% as the most unwanted instrument), banjo, flute, tuba, harp, organ, synthesizer (the only instrument that appears in both the most wanted and most unwanted ensembles). An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and "elevator" music, and a children's choir sings jingles and holiday songs. The most unwanted subjects for lyrics are cowboys and holidays, and the most unwanted listening circumstances are involuntary exposure to commercials and elevator music. Therefore, it can be shown that if there is no covariance—someone who dislikes bagpipes is as likely to hate elevator music as someone who despises the organ, for example—fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population would enjoy this piece.

To get the full lyrics you'll have to buy the CD, but the opening soprano rap is especially arresting: lyrics are simultaneously rap and cowboy-related, while the vocal line is atonal and the bass is provided by a tuba. Note the bagpipe breaks.

Yo, I'm ropin' up my saddle for the long long ride
Every time I see the desert there's something inside says
Yo, yo,  this is the life
Give me open land and a big ol' knife
To get some bear, deer, even a snake
I light me a fire, do the shake and bake
I say yo, yo, I'm a cowboy now.

*Actually not retro, just old.

Blogospherical miscellania

Phil Ford

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

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

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

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

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

Sexy Holidays To You!

Phil Ford

This semester is OVAH! I'm sick unto death of music, musicology, and related matters, so I'm not planning on posting anything for a while. In the meantime, a few things:

1. Alex Ross linked to my post on tacky classical album covers and we got a bajillion hits. It's trashy, dashy, and gets the cashy, so here's a few more. Westminster gold, baby!

More cheesecake:

And one for the ladies:

One of our commenters pointed out this potent metaphor of fate:

And one more, sent in by Kyra Davies. This is not a Westminster Gold cover. It's far too strange for Westminster Gold. In fact, looks more like outsider art:

Someone call MOBA.

2. I changed the Dial M email address, because some #%*^#**%#@ has been spoofing our old one and using it to send spam. But I only keep a special Dial M email account because Typepad insists that I publish some email address, and I don't want the spambots to find my university email. So I almost never check the email account that pops up when you hit the "email me" link. If you send me something and I don't answer, that's why. If you want to send Jonathan or me a message, just look up our institutional emails on our department website profiles. Here's Jonathan. Here's me.

3. It wouldn't be Christmas without the Dusty Towne Sexy Holiday Special.

EXTREME!!!!!!!!!

Phil Ford

I'm wasting time, and so are you. So, let's talk about ugly/weird/inappropriate classical album covers. This blog post made me laugh. (Parts 2 and 3 here.) The best image is probably this one:

Although "Tito Wayne Gacy" is pretty good too. There's the inevitable Lara St. John cover art:

St. John could use a whole blog post of her own. In fairness, I should post a link to her spirited defense of her cheesecake album cover art. And anyway, she's hardly the first to do it. For example:

And then there are all those album covers that seek to get all in our face with their totally gnarly 'tude:

I remember years ago I saw a CD of some chump playing a thoroughly conventional piano program but flaunting, on the album cover, (A) a sleeveless leather jacket, (B) moderately accentuated biceps, with (C) a spider tattoo. EXTREME!!!

Nigel Kennedy has been guilty of such things in the past. I remember seeing an interview with him on MuchMusic where, in a carefully studied rockstar* manner, he told the interviewer that Beethoven was a total wild man "pissing in his piano" and stuff. But did he also bite the piano?

UPDATE: Jonathan reminded me of Westminster Gold! How could I have forgotten! And what Jonathan wants, Jonathan gets: behold, a whole website devoted to Westminster Gold cover art. You want cheesecake?

Beethoven's facial expression seems to suggest that he is about to burst from his pedestal, Commendatore-like, and scuttle around the room like the severed hand in The Evil Dead, driven mad and antic by the the sheer hotness of the Westminster model. The Austin-Powers-like "strategically placed musical object" trope, as we see, did not originate with Lara St. Jean. Indeed, we find more variations on the theme in the Westminster catalog:

And this is not the end of the hotness. Not at all.

Black socks . . . and nothing else. That's how we rolled in the 1970s!

Did you know that Birkenstock made disco boots? I did not.

This is a very abstract kind of sexy:**

This is just bizarre:

It occurs to me that "Westminster Gold" should join "cop show" in the Dial M slang lexicon. "Westminster Gold" should mean that something is sophisticated, yet totally insane. Dapper and heavily medicated. It's like a line from a Blackalicious song called "Beyonder": "like a war with levity/melody felonies/ heavenly heavenly make you feel like the seventies."

*Jagger in intention, Nigel Tufnel in execution.

**UPDATE 2: Oh, I get it. Military . . . and Farewell . . . But why a VW? And I still don't get the fox with the balloon. Fox, OK, Virgil Fox, but the balloon with the peace sign? Anyone?

I'm Buddy Rich when I fly off the handle

Phil Ford

It's Dial M's birthday today. It's been exactly one year since I put up the first post. 

The Onion AV Club has a great feature this week: fifteen clips of crazy musician-audience banter. In some, like the one with Venom's Cronos raving at an appreciative New Jersey audience, the musicians are funny (if unintentionally) and endearing; in others, they come off like total jerks. Keith Jarrett swearing at an Italian jazz festival audience falls into the latter camp. My favorite moment, though, comes from the band Fugazi, which stops playing to rebuke two inconsiderate moshers. (Note: lotsa profanity, not safe for work)

Now, taunting someone by calling him an "ice-cream-eating motherf?@#$&" is a pretty inventive way for a musician to cut someone down to size. But the musician best known for his obscenity-laced tirades has got to be Buddy Rich, who was famous for tearing into his touring bands back in the 1970s. Here he is on the tour bus between sets, losing it completely. (Do I have to tell you it's not safe for work?) And here's a transcript. Interestingly, one of Rich's former employees wrote in to the site where I found this stuff and defended him:

Hi, I have been looking at your site and I wanted you to know that Buddy Rich wasn't at all the way you have him portrayed, as a "prick". I played trumpet and stood next to him every night for almost three years from 1975-1977. We had a great band that loved and respected him and he was 95% a sweetheart the whole time. The only time I saw him as he sounds on the tapes is when he had a bad back, or a band full of young guys who couldn't play well but thought they could, who showed disrespect towards him and thought they were too good to be there. I went back later for a few weeks and the band was like that. He and I were both miserable. Steve Marcus and Buddy and I sat together on the bus one night and he asked what he could do to get the band back to a high level. He was frustrated that yelling didn't help. It only made the lousy players band together and feel persecuted while continuing to suck.

I know that tape sounds funny to most people, but to the people who knew him to be unbelievably generous, (I could tell you stories) funny, loving and a whole different kind of drummer than any other on Earth, that tape hurts because we hear his pain and confusion as to how guys can suck and not know it.

I've written before about how music seems to bring out a certain strain of savagery in some people; maybe it's that, for musicians, music is so incomparably important that failure -- failure of attention in an audience, or failure of execution in a student or ensemble member -- is not just wrong but offensive, even indecent. But it doesn't do to romanticize this sort of behavior. A lot of musical tyrants seem to command slavish devotion because of, rather than despite, their viciousness -- a kind of musical Stockholm Syndrome, I suspect. But I've always had contempt for musicians who exult in their own power and use it to exploit those who are in no position to fight back. 

In classical music Arturo Toscanini has the most fearsome reputation for brutalizing his musicians. (Does anyone have an audio recording of any of his legendary tantrums?) Weirdly, and unfairly, Maria Callas is remembered in much the same way, thanks to Terrence McNally's Master Class, a fictionalization of Maria Callas's famous Juilliard master classes in which Callas is portrayed as a monster. When you actually listen to the tapes of her Juilliard master classes, you realize that she was actually very nice, in a professional and no-nonsense sort of way. The one bit that's most famous is probably where she advises a young woman to wear longer skirts. (I think this is the only bit from Callas's actual master classes that made it into Master Class.)  But it was the 1970s, and she probably had a point. At least she was good-humored about it.

Better than the other way, but still

All musicians know that too much work is far better than too little. No argument; most of us have experienced the latter, and it’s no joke. That said, I need to vent: if things continue, I think parts will begin to drop off. Here I am, with the following projects in various stages of disarray:

1) The Chopin Ballade project. The book proposal is out for consideration; the thing has been in the works for fifteen or so years, and I’ve given a paper related to it both here and in the UK over the last few years.

2) The Chopin and Temperament project. More recent, papers given in U.S., U.K., and Poland. Expanding to an article. Except that I keep thinking of new stuff, like with (1) above.

3) Write a paper for a symposium at Stanford this April, plus learning some music to play at the evening concerts there.

4) A major nineteenth-century reconstructive project involving sketches and drafts and partially surviving scores and so on.

5) My teaching, remember? Let’s not even discuss all the administrative add-ons…

6) A dissertation at a foreign university for which I’m serving as Research Advisor, on a sort of pro bono basis (I could not have said no, in good conscience).

7) All other aspects of life, such as fully operational and contributing member of my family, etc.

8) The myriad letters of recommendation one is asked to write, more or less constantly.

9) Occasional tasks like refereeing submissions to journals and so on. These may sound like less important tasks, but they are not; people read my Dreck too, and if the pieces are in one’s specialty there is a responsibility to contribute in this way.

10) SHOVELLING YET MORE SNOW GODDAMNIT—OK, it’s just this year and it’s Colorado, but combined with the weeks of bitter cold, it’s really beginning to tell on me.

11) Not to mention the stuff that’s back-burnered, such as the book on the reception of “national” music and musical exoticism, a subject on which I’ve also been giving papers over the last three years.

12) Other occasional tasks such as a guest presentation this coming week on the film of Jesus Christ Superstar for the Rock and Film class. Now, don’t jump to conclusions: I’m exactly the person to do this. It came out when I was in high school, I saw it several times, and I’m planning a bang-up musical back-story to the thing, the various musical languages Andrew Lloyd Webber uses and so on. In the past, I’ve done the same for This is Spinal Tap and Almost Famous. It’s a hoot. A time-consuming hoot, but a hoot.

OK, that’s a dozen. I’ll stop, and I’ll try to stop whining, because I feel (slightly) better. I fully acknowledge that not one of these things is bad; I’m buried in wonderful, invigorating, necessary stuff—stuff of the sort that I prayed my life would consist of.

Still beginning to crack, though! The flesh is weak, and weakening further.

I’m thankful that Phil is on his game, because I’m likely to be blogging a bit irregularly. Now, a certain Someone has a trumpet lesson tomorrow, so we have to go practice and run his Thomé Fantasy…

I! HATE! PIANSTS!

Best referral log query ever: "I hate pianists." Don't we all, honey.

In tune with fun!

Phil Ford

By way of Soho the Dog comes a comic book about playing the accordion. Straight-up accordion propaganda, yo. It is an amazing age in which we live.

Radical Musicology?

Jonathan Bellman

A CFP (Call for Papers) arrives over one of the musicology lists--there is a new online journal that will be called Radical Musicology.  I cannot get past this.  So, if they publish me, I’m happening and radical and de rigueur and à la mode, and if not I’m…what, Old Musicology, God help me, or just Old?  How damning is it, really, to be Not Radical?  Perhaps the real question is how damning will it be to have your stuff appear in the previous issue of Radical Musicology, not the forthcoming one?   (“Oh, yeah, X’s stuff.  That’s so Winter-Spring 2007…”)

I first encountered UK radicalism during my first year of college, which took place at Portsmouth Polytechnic, on the southern coast of England, because my father was teaching there for a year.  They had no music, so I did history, studying Reformation with a superb Australian named Bob Scribner (who later, I think, went to Cambridge).  This was an introduction to real disciplinary focus that few Americans get at age 18--all the English students had been through “O” and “A” levels, and I had merely been to a public high school in California.  Bob had just finished his dissertation, and buried us in his translations of historical documents, many relating to the Reformation: interviews with discredited churchmen, pro- and anti-Church propaganda, popular literature, stuff from Ulrich von Hutten and John Calvin and all the humanists and…etc.  Though I had no intention of becoming a historian (even a music historian, at that point), I lapped this up; how could I not?  This was my first exposure to real scholarship.  (It was also my first exposure to the historian Norman Rufus Colin Cohn, and to Guinness.  A year for which I’ve been profoundly grateful ever since!) 

There was a certain radical chic, though, that seemed bizarre and comical to me, even as an 18-year-old left-wing Democrat.  I mean, “Kill the blewdy Queen and set up workers’ councils!”??  I did hear this kind of thing, and I suspected I’d walked into a Monty Python sketch.  One of the sociology lecturers commented, after I’d offered an opinion about the U.S. in a seminar, “Ah, yes, America!  The number one enemy of the world’s people, according to the Chinese!”  The same guy (sorry; bloke) asked us another time what we thought of the possibility of violent overthrow of the government.  Being green, I was the only one who actually ventured an answer, with all my 18-year-old confidence.  It wasn’t the one he wanted.

Someday someone can explain to me why “radical” is a desirable label.  Change?  Of course--please, before we all die (either of shame or global warming).  Criticism of authority?  A right and a responsibility.  Resistance?  A personal decision, surely, and there are myriad ways, just as there are for working constructively for change.  But… “radical”?  Isn’t terming a sub-discipline and its government-funded online journal “radical” rather like wearing a T-shirt that says “I’m bad and dangerous and my Mom bought me this shirt”? 

Yeah, I know.  Since I was most interested in Little League in the late 60s I didn’t get it then, and don’t get it now.  Oi!

Because He Can

Phil Ford

Piggybacking on Jonathan's post on musical diehardism yesterday: when I was a teenager I was in one of those diehard phases, spending every hour away from school practicing piano and listening to records. One record in particular, Earl Wild's The Daemonic Liszt, was a kind of holy grail of pianistic virtuosity. The first cut, a performance of Liszt's Robert le Diable fantasy, is so extreme in its virtuosity it's like a new kind of martial art or something, sort of like the way Brazilian Capoeira is dancing transmogrified into whoop-ass.

Anyway. A shameful, shameful, dorky secret: I would sometimes play Robert le Diable with the speed setting on my Radio Shack Realistic turntable turned up from 33 rpm to 45, creating the sonic image of some bionic pianist whose pitiless, unstoppable volleys of octaves would leave you looking like a mad scientist after a lab accident, all tattered clothes, scorch marks, hair standing up, blank stare, and half an Erlenmeyer flask.

Sviatoslav Richter, playing Chopin's etude op. 10 no. 4 in C sharp minor, does exactly this, and without mechanical assistance. (This is a clip from Bruno Monsaingeon's documentary Richter the Enigma.)

Respect, suckaz!