Dial "M" for Musicology

The Four Ways of Practice

Phil Ford

[This is written a couple of months after the post below -- I have to add some stuff just to clarify a couple of things. Back when I this blog's last post, Jonathan and I decided to discontinue this blog and I decided to stop paying for the multi-author option in Typepad, since  the number of blog authors was now somewhere around zero. So when my contract ran out the whole site reverted to the free, no-frills format. The good news is that we have a durable archive of roughly 4 years' work and I don't have to pay for it; the bad news is that the site now looks terrible and is hard to navigate. The old category list is gone, as is the month-by-month list of archived stuff. But you can hit "next" at the bottom of the page to navigate backwards, I guess, and you can click on the tags at the bottom of each entry.

Also, for some reason the description of a long-deleted class blog reappeared and attached itself to  Dial M. So for the record, folks, this blog is not, and never has been, the blog of my seminar "Sound, Media,  and Performance." (I only just figured out how to get that wording off.) You'll notice that the site now makes it look as if I, Phil Ford, were the sole author of this blog, but for those who might be happening on it for the first time now, I should make it clear that it was always a collaboration between Jonathan Bellman and myself. If you're confused about who wrote what, Jonathan's posts (as well as the posts by the various guest-bloggers who contributed things over the years) are "signed": there's a little Typepad handle at the bottom of each post. The posts I wrote have no such signature. OK, I'm done.]

Hello everyone -- 

(I write this with the hopeful assumption that there still is an "everyone" to address)

I was on vacation when Jonathan posted his final blog post, and I've been very slow to follow up. Typical. I haven't written anything here since, what, January 4? That's no way to treat poor old Dial M. God, there's something so sad about an abandoned blog, or any abandoned project, really. And there's no way to end a blog without abandoning it. It's not like a book; you can't write the last chapter. At some point, you're just going to stop writing, and whatever the last thing that passed through your bloggy head will be preserved at the top of the page forever (or until you stop paying to keep the site up), something you wrote in the last presidential administration about something now impossibly antique and irrelevant. Or maybe you wrote one of those "I haven't written anything here in a long time, but I'll get back to it soon, I promise" sorts of things, like a New Years resolution to lose 20 pounds and go to the gym three times a week, and your last blog post will preserve the sad shriveled husk of an aborted intention. Or perhaps you wanted to go out with a bang and wrote a Dear John letter to the medium of blogging: things were exciting when we started out together, but my needs are no longer being met, I'm feeling unfulfilled, I need to make some changes . . . 

I don't want to do any of that. Regrets, I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention. I started this blog back in 2006, which is like 20 years ago in blog years. Jonathan and I (and our various guest contributors) have written a lot of stuff in the meantime. I'm proud of it, happy I did it, and now it's time to end it. We're done.

I'm not necessarily done with blog-like activities. I continue to believe that academic communication will continue to be shaped by the commons-based peer production model that the blogosphere models. Whether or not it will be a "blogosphere" I couldn't possibly guess. Whatever it is, I'll probably show up there, and so will you. In the meantime, I have writing projects lined up for, like, actual books, and they need attending to. That's what's been taking up most of my writing headspace since the new year, and that's not likely to change for a long time. 

I would like to thank everyone who wrote in the comments section or sent an email (even though I've been shockingly bad at remembering to check the Dial M gmail account and have probably missed a few -- sorry if that was you*). Thanks to all the people who come up to me at AMS meetings and say hello because they read something I wrote on Dial M (it makes my day). Thanks to all the other musicolobloggers and culture-bloggers and anyone who ever gave us link love. Thanks above all to everyone who read us. I have no delusions about Dial M being very important in the grand scheme of things, but it was important to me, mostly because we had a readership that made it worth doing. 

I'm writing this at home, and my daughter just came home from her last day at "Writing and Illustrating Your Own Books" camp. She handed me a book of poems she made. Here is one poem, inspired by her violin practice:

The Four Ways of Practice:

1. Always believe in yourself.

2. Do whatever you are doing with effort.

3. try!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11

4. Be truthful.

Young musicologists, heed this teaching! I have nothing to add to it.

*My real email is fordp at indiana dot edu. Keep in touch!

In Praise of Musical Obsessions

Jonathan Bellman

Perhaps I have mentioned this before, but among what I consider to be Universal Musical Experiences is the obsession.  The obsession can be a single piece, often a short one, or perhaps a popular song, that simply takes over your very being.  I remember several from my student and early professional years: Chopin’s Ballade No. 1, the Bach-Busoni Chaconne, Brahms’s songs “Sonntag” and “Von Ewiger Liebe,” the F Major Pastorale Sonata of Domenico Scarlatti (“Allegrissimo”).  You listen to them so much that you don’t need to listen any more; they are in your head, and you can play them over and over.  For a larger-scale work, it is life changing: once you are intimately familiar with something like Monteverdi’s Vespers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of 1610, part of you will forever be in Wonderland; there is no way to walk back through the door to where everything is gray and sepia and people don’t really smile.  You know better, now;  you know the Vespers.  Bliss!

My most recent book appeared in October, and it was devoted primarily to one work: Chopin’s Ballade No. 2.  Of course, it has been an obsession of mine for a long time (and also of certain others in the Chopin community), but really any of the four Ballades will be that way; they are all that extraordinary.  Bach’s Chaconne for violin is another such utterly transformative piece: to venture inside that one is to be, in key ways, mended.  One of the things I really appreciated about Maria Thöne’s work (I’ve probably mentioned this, too) is that, right or wrong, she put forth a really extraordinary explanation for that extraordinary piece—that is was really a tombeau for Bach’s first wife, Maria Barbara, that it quoted lots of chorales (clearer to some than to others), etc.  Even if she’s wrong, I give her points for aiming long: the Chaconne is, if I’m not mistaken, longer than all the movements of the D Minor Partita combined.  Surely that requires a better explanation than, well, the Chaconne was an optional dance of the time, and including one would not have been impossible, so…no more explanation needed, right?

This all is by way of preamble.  At the recent AMS meeting in Philadelphia, I bought a book I’d been hoping for, then waiting for, for two decades: a sort of life’s-work book by Owen Jander titled Beethoven’s “Orpheus” Concerto: The Fourth Piano Concerto in its Cultural Context.  I read it every evening, almost finishing it before the meeting was over.  Now, Beethoven Four is out-of-this-world extraordinary, and not just because of the solo piano opening.  Donald Francis Tovey simply said, to close his analysis of the work, “The music dies away in the upper ether, which it has never left,” and there is truth to it: this work is probably the biggest pianists’ obsession in the entire concerto repertoire.  It feels ethereal, otherworldly, holy, wholly different from mere piano concertos.  Why?

Jander’s idea, developed in a series of articles (I only read the first couple and wasn’t aware that more followed), is that the concerto is Beethoven’s fairly literal take on the Orpheus myth, especially alive in the culture of the time via opera and other vehicles.  The Orpheus character, for obvious reasons, captivated readers and opera composers alike—a musician of gifts so supreme that nature herself looked on in wonder, a musician so in love that he journeyed to the Underworld to win back his beloved Eurydice from Death, and succeeded (until he disobeyed instructions and looked at her), and who subsequently denied his love to other womankind and was torn to shreds for it.  There are a variety of historical indications that Beethoven saw himself (musically at least) as an Orpheus figure, and Jander goes into very deep context to demonstrate how the concerto can be heard to reflect the Orphic legend.  He addresses various kinds of symbolism operative at the time (iconographic and musical), he goes into a variety of arcane aspects of Beethoven’s biography (such as the composer’s attachment to a particular biographical portrait, rife with personal symbolism, of his grandfather), and provides a very close reading of the concerto’s three movements which, triptych-fashion, he holds to depict three different episodes from Orpheus’s life: Orpheus charming nature with the beauty of this music, Orpheus taming the Furies and winning Eurydice back from Erebus, and the aloof Orpheus being torn apart by the resentful Bacchantes. 

The book does not wholly convince me, I have to admit—Jander waited just slightly too long to put it together and is now, apparently, not in good health, which means that certain tasks were finished by others.  For a start, the proof-reading is pretty shabby: a dropped line here, a random word or punctuation mark there.  I always liked Jander’s work on the second movement, but some of the readings of the third movement seem forced to me, particularly given the homoerotic subtext Jander feels it necessary to posit and stress.  I also tend to be unconvinced by “what could this be but a depiction of” kinds of arguments when the primary reason is that that is what should happen next in his program rather than a compelling musical reason.  In at least one case, Jander draws a variety of conclusions from a cloak slipping off his grandfather’s shoulder in his portrait…but to my eye the cloak does not seem to be going anywhere.  And so on.

For me, however, it is unquestionable that Beethoven’s Fourth is one of those works which require an extraordinary explanation.  Unexceptional explanations—“Well, he wanted to write another concerto, OK?  There are some formal anomalies but other aspects that are true to concerto form, so…what more do you want?  Mozart K. 271 has a piano at the very opening of the first tutti, so now Beethoven is going him one better.  Next week, Berlioz, and remember to study for the midterm!”—simply do not answer the call.  So I am not convinced by every last point, but I am very sympathetic to Jander’s ideas (some very much so), and above all I appreciate that he wrote the book more or less honoring what was clearly a life-long obsession with a superb, utterly bewitching musical work.  Nothing conventional about his discussion of the work; it’s all way out there, and if he overshoots sometimes I will gladly float him the difference.  What to me is the bold step is that he ventured something risky and provocative to explain (to rise to the level of explaining, really) a unique musical work and virtually universally recognized sui generis masterpiece. 

Hats off, even though I’m not with him on his whole journey!  I would love to see more such studies of individual pieces.  Musical works are written one at a time, after all, not as generic groups, ripe for generic oversimplifications.  This is one of the most magical of musical works—I say that without an iota of exaggeration—and I’m grateful to see a treatment this risky.  

Philly AMS breakdown

Phil Ford

So I'm back from the annual American Musicological Society meeting. As usual I feel like I lived about 3 weeks in 4 days, so where to begin? Maybe with a song.

Guidance, or Not

Jonathan Bellman

Phil forwards me a letter from someone who thinks he would like to be a musicologist, and who desires guidance along this rocky road.  Do I want to take a crack at this?  Sure.  For protection of those intimately involved, I will not mention any names.  Here’s the other thing: I apologize if I repeat sentiments offered in previous blog posts, and (contrariwise) I warn you in advance that I’m not going to be offering a bland YOU CAN DO IT message.  So:

Dear Sir,

You write as a dissatisfied 27-year-old, interested in musicology, who (initially) was not accepted for a music degree at Canadian Maritime University I and so opted to attend Canadian Maritime University II in music.  Although you subsequently decided you should have been more persistent at CMU I, you enjoyed your time at CMU II very much, and subsequently finished an English degree back at CMU I.  You are now working on a Music and Culture minor there at CMU I, which you also enjoy, and you tell me that you’ve gotten above 70 in all courses for the minor.  You feel directionless, though; friends tell you to get a government job or something that would use your English degree, but you want to do music somehow somewhen.  Can we help?  What about music librarianship, and do we know any good Canadian universities for that?

What is clear, here, is that you are a young man with regrets.  You left to attend CMU II but should have stuck with, you say, CMU I.  You are not happy with the advice you have gotten from friends—telling you to get a job for which an English major might be qualified, or get a government job.  You inform us that your—ah—love life it not what you’d like it to be.  (However much this is on your mind, you should never volunteer information like this.)  You’re feeling time’s relentless march, but still cling to musical aspirations—you’ve played bass in lots of bands, etc.  And, ultimately, you say: “I am not getting any younger, and without pursuing my dreams, I have found that life isn't much worth living!”  Maybe Music Librarianship, you think, as a middleground between music and writing.  Well, yes, maybe, but what do we know?  And when you mention the musical accomplishments—playing in bands, good grades, etc., a Yank like me really has no frame of reference.  I don’t know what “above 70” means (I’m assuming it doesn’t just mean better than 70%, because that’s not all that wonderful). 

Now look.  It seems me that you have received lots of advice you that you feel has not been helpful, and that you have not been satisfied with a lot of things that have happened thus far.  If I may be so bold: given this impression, who would venture to give you any advice at all, now?  As far as I can tell, you’ve been a student most or all of your life.  Nothing wrong with that, but…sorry, I can’t help but ask: has the government been paying for this?  Even a pro-education liberal such as myself cocks an eyebrow at a government this generous. 

Musicology is something that makes me very happy, as does my job in particular, so I can certainly understand why that would be enviable.  You are 27, have peregrinated from University to University, and are clearly (to paraphrase Shakespeare) out of mirth with yourself.  I don’t know what to tell you about musicology, or music librarianship—the best music librarians command several languages, and I don’t know if you do or not—but it is a fact that if someone gives you advice, and you follow it and it doesn’t lead you to happiness, that becomes another entry on your growing list of regrets.  One thing I am certain about, from your letter, is that it is time to change that pattern.  It seems likely that another course—with its structure of Authorities and Learners, and Assigned-Tasks, Completion-of-Tasks, and Evaluation-Thereof—is (ultimately) well-charted territory, beginning to end, and won’t solve your problem.

My recommendation is to get out in the world—find some kind of job, keep your musical interests up on the side, work steadily on your writing skills and musical knowledge.  What you need right now is to dig deep into your own independence, initiative, ambition, and drive, NOT yet another program.  Perhaps there is a part-time gig available writing program notes, CD reviews for a website, whatever—these are credible things to do when you’re not working.  You mention that you are not getting any younger, and that is true (who is, after all?), but it’s time for some experience Out There, now.  Getting out of the Canadian government-supported education pipeline might, paradoxically, open some doors you are not habituated to looking for, and it might afford you some new tools to use in making yourself happy.

But no, I won’t give any advice about you and musicology, you and music librarianship, you and this or that Canadian university.  It’s down to you, now, whatever choices you want to make, and you might just take a deep breath and make this decision on your own, and then go all out to make it the right one.  Rear up on your hind legs and get something going.  For decades, the people who have become successful are those who have forced it, with weirdly checkered backgrounds, atypical skills, and (above all) prevailing diehardism, as I called it years ago.  Somehow, we squeezed through a crack, or forced out way in.  If you want to get anywhere even remotely associated with music, you need to adopt this mindset and stop asking for guidance.  What is more, prepare yourself for failures, reverses, and disappointments—if you can’t deal with those, music is not a good place for you.  (I’m not saying you have to like failure; just withstand it and learn from it.)

Other choices tend to fall into place and make more sense when viewed from a perspective of motion and activity as opposed to stasis.

Thus endeth the sermon. 

Jonathan

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. 

Interdisciplinarity

Phil Ford

Geez, I should write self-hating blog posts more often. People always say the nicest things! Thanks for all the supportive comments; at least no-one wrote to say "yeah, you really do suck. Pack it in." 

Since Jonathan has apparently left for holidays after posting a response to my blog fail post the other day, it would be churlish of me to escalate this into a full-on blog fight. And in any event I appreciate the intention of the title ( all-caps COURAGE), which I take to be a kind of "buck up, soldier" kind of thing. Actually I ended up getting some kind of flu-ey bug over the weekend, which might explain some of my crankiness on Friday, though only some. In truth, these are things I've been thinking about for a while. Which isn't the same thing as saying I'm throwing in the towel, though god knows I've been tempted to, and maybe will anyway. But I'm not going to right now, because it's Christmas, and Christmas is all about giving. Self-loathing: this is my gift to you.

So I appreciate what Jonathan wrote and (as usual) don't actually disagree all that much, but I want to follow up with a few more thoughts of my own on that much-abused notion, interdisciplinarity. I don't think we should be "looking over our shoulder" at other humanities disciplines just for its own sake, like they're the cool kids and we're the geeky bespectacled plaid-clad orthodontia-sporting outcasts who desperately want to be like them. (The internalized voice of Mom: So what if the MLA likes to smoke out by the dumpsters, you think that's a reason to start smoking too? If the MLA went and jumped off a cliff, would you follow them?) And in the 1990s, when musicologists started trying to incorporate various lit crit approaches in their work, it did sometimes seem forced, a manifestation of lit-crit envy. Some, like my own advisor Michael Cherlin, who had been reading Harold Bloom for years and working Bloomian insights deep into his own way of thinking, did it for real. For others (self included), the appropriations were more superficial ("Lee press-on theory," as I like to call it). Still, if talking to other disciplines is not a sovereign good in itself, neither is complacent isolation. Maybe "they" should read us, but they don't, and we all know it. Everyone* knows musicology exists in a state of disciplinary isolation, including and especially our own parent organization, the American Musicological Society, which has publicly called for new ways to address that isolation. This blog was started for the usual reasons (narcissism) but also in response to that call. And my point in my last post was that this call still goes mostly unheeded. 

I really don't know what to say to people who acknowledge this state of affairs only to dismiss it by blaming everyone but themselves. There is this stupid habit (NOT a habit of Jonathan's, I hasten to add -- I speak more generally) of dismissing concern about our place at the outer edges of humanities discourse by saying "well, we're not TRENDY or anything, just good humble music-analyzing musikwissenschaftlers." As if the only reason people are reading other stuff -- cultural criticism or social history or whatever -- is that they're "trendy." And as if we're keepin' it real by embracing our isolation. I hate that entire way of thinking. It is the mentality of a defeated people, of people who stop liking their favorite band when it gets too popular, people who cherish resentment against those big city folk who think they're better than us, people who burnish a tribal memory of historic defeats to keep the edge of their resentments honed . . . I just hate that whole psychology. 

Actually, I take back what I wrote earlier: talking to those outside our tent IS a sovereign good, if only because we're in the ideas business, which means the business of communicating ideas, freely and without prior restraint. The more people you talk to, the better it is for business. Perhaps outsiders will have a hard time understanding what we write about? Figure it out how to explain it to them -- it'll do you good.

What interdisciplinarity means, if it means anything, is not the forced kloodging-together of unrelated notions, but the investigation of things that cannot properly be investigated within the boundaries of a single established discipline. Right now I'm reading Peter Gay's study of Victorian sexuality, Education of the Senses. Here the entity to come to terms with is Victorian sexuality, which is a big, rather shapeless thing that can be carved up lots of ways. Although Gay is one of those genius people who can survey the whole field, you don't have to: you could write a book on music and Victorian sexuality, or Victorian sexuality and the visual arts, or Victorian sexuality and literature (etc.). But the point is of the exercise, the thing to be investigated and understood, is still Victorian sexuality. What's the right way to proceed? It seems to me that even if you want to remain rooted in a single discipline (and for practical as well as intellectual reasons I think you generally have to) you still have to map the whole shapeless terrain, read as widely as you can from all across it, accept that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in RILM. You hold in mind the tension between your own area of specialty and the wider area of your relative ignorance, so that when you write about your specialty it takes on the shape of the whole. What we shouldn't do, I think, is start off by asking "but is this really musicology?" Because then you amputate your subject from the get-go, limiting yourself to only those aspects of (say) Victorian sexuality that pertain to music, policing what things are "really" musical (works, genres, composers) and what things seem too distant (diaries, paintings, advertisements). The tension between the part (music) and the whole (Victorian sexuality) collapses, and what you are left with is chunk of an idea crudely cut out from the whole, its limits arbitrarily set by the fear of not talking enough about music. This is one way to write bad interdisciplinary scholarship, but it is easier just to stay with the "purely musical" and not even try. 

Now, you might ask, what if I don't want to write about Victorian sexuality? Or anything else remotely like it? What if I'm interested in tuning and temperament in 1540s Zurich? Hey, different strokes and all that. We all have our things we're into, and I wouldn't presume to lowrate anyone else's particular enthusiasm. Even if I don't want to write about tuning and temperament in 1540s Zurich, I'm glad you do. Where it matters is in those zero-sum places -- in academic journals, job searches, AMS paper sessions, and the like -- where one man's meat may be another man's poison, but someone has to choose: chicken or steak? Victorian sexuality or tuning and temperament? I've said before that this was always one of the best reasons for academic blogs: the blogosphere is never zero-sum. But then no-one seems to be starting any musicology blogs, so oh well.

Camille Paglia may be kind of crazy, but she made some good points back in the day, and this is one of them:

The humanities are dismembered and scattered, with music, art, and literature residing far afield. Literature is chopped into national fiefdoms. English departments are split by recruitment "slots," a triumph of the minim, producing such atrocities as ads for "Opening in nondramatic literature, 1660-1740." What kind of scholar, what kind of teacher could satisfy this sad little mouse-view of culture? American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old nineteenth-century German style of universal scholarship is gone.**

This passage has a hint of Paglia's usual crackpot messianism (19th-century universal scholarship is gone . . . but its time will come again! The sixties people will return, bearing with them calfskin-bound folio volumes of Walter Pater and the Marquis de Sade! And I shall lead them!), but it's worth thinking about.

*This even came up in casual conversation at my kids' bus stop the other day. And yes, I live in the kind of neighborhood where this kind of thing actually does come up in casual conversation. 

**Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture, 120.

Blog fail

Phil Ford

It's almost Christmas -- the traditional time for anxiety and recriminations, so let's start here, on this blog. I want to look back over the last semester -- hell, the last two-plus years -- and talk about failure. Namely mine, and to some extent yours.

On the plus side: I've written some things I'm proud of, and I know that people read them. At AMS this year I lost count of how many times people told me they read Dial M every week (sometimes every day) and how much they appreciate what Jonathan and I write. It made me feel good, and I returned to Bloomington with a renewed feeling of commitment and enthusiasm for blogging . . . which then quickly dissipated. Don't get me wrong, it matters that you read. A number of people told me that my dispatches-from-academic-life posts, like the one about waiting for schools to call you back for an interview or not getting any work done before the election, gave them some comfort, made them feel as if they weren't alone in what they were going through. And I write those things for pretty much the same reason: I want to write down something I'm feeling to see if anyone else is feeling it too. (This is one reason why blogs have comments sections.) And as I say, I've written things I'm proud of. I'm glad I had a chance to write about my Dad. I'm proud of a memorial post for a guy I didn't know and didn't agree with but whose horrifying and lonely death deserved some kind of meditation. I think that the cross-blogger debates we've had here on touchy subjects like torture and religion have been some of Dial M's finest moments. I've gone all meta and blogged about blogging. (I guess now I'm taking another step on the endless spiral staircase of blogging self-reflexivity and am blogging about blogging about blogging.) I've even occasionally written about my actual research.

But there's an awful lot of stuff in my head that never gets written because whatever anyone says, blogging isn't about keepin' it real -- it's about the meticulous preparation and presentation of an artful rhetoric of keepin' it real. At one point in Nashville I ran in Jim Hepokoski, who expressed surprise that I would confide so much about myself to a bunch of perfect strangers. I replied that I wasn't confiding anything; whatever I write about myself is exactly what suits me for people to know about me. I don't lie or mislead; nothing I say about myself is false. But whatever I disclose is selective and calculated. This isn't the "real me" here, it's a version of the real me packaged for blog consumption. Come to think of it, is there a real me anywhere? Probably not. We all do the same thing, making strategic self-disclosures to manage the perceptions that our friends, family, colleagues, and students have of us. As Rameau's nephew pointed out, even the King poses for God and his mistress. And it's one of my Professor's Ten Commandments (with an assist from Biggie) to self-own in what you write:

Number two: Never let ‘em know your next move/Don’t you know bad boys move in silence or violence. Or, as MF Doom says, never let your so-called mans know your plans. This applies especially to bloggers. Seriously, bloggers, always assume that everyone you know, and everyone you might want to know, will read your blog. It’s easy to get suckered into the illusion that you’re confiding your innermost thoughts with an anonymous Them you’ll never actually meet. Nope, and when you confide stuff about yourself that you wouldn’t announce from the lectern of a plenary session of the American Musicological Society, you could end up like Youngblood Priest from Superfly, who accidentally kills his best friend when he drops the name of his connection in a nightclub.
As Curtis Mayfield comments in the title song: “But a weakness was shown, ‘cause his hustle was wrong/His mind was his own, but the man lived alone.”
Or, to put it in less poetically, if you want your mind to be you own, or if you want to be master of your own destiny, you need to live alone, metaphorically speaking; don’t confide, or a weakness will be shown, and your hustle will be wrong.  

What would it look like if I were really keeping it real? It would look like this:

Chappelle's Show

Keeping It Real - Vernon Franklin

Charlie Murphy Clips
Buy Chappelle's Show DVDs

Black Comedy
True Hollywood Stories

Just like Vernon I have deep-buried rage which, if I started letting it out, would probably land me in a job at a gas station too. Which is one of the reasons why my contributions to this blog have been getting shorter, lamer, and less frequent. It's not that the only things I want to write about are the things that piss me off; it's that I'm constantly aware of all those things that piss me off and which I won't let myself write about. It makes what I *do* write about feel like trivial, self-serving happy talk, an unwitting confirmation of the image of academics in general (and musicologists in particular) as a pack of timid bores. Frank Zappa's jeer at academic composers always plays in my mind when I sit down to write something at Dial M these days:

Hey, buddy, when was the last time you thwarted a norm? Can't risk it, eh? Too much at stake over at the old Alma Mater? Nowhere else to go? Unqualified for 'janitorial deployment'? Look out! Here they come again! It's that bunch of guys who live in the old joke: it's YOU and two billion of your closest friends standing in shit to your chins, chanting, 'DON'T MAKE A WAVE!'*

When a blog post becomes just another occasion to contemplate one's failure, at a certain point it just becomes easier to say "screw it" and not write anything at all. Which brings me to the part I promised in the first sentence of this post, where I said I'd talk about your failures as well. And by "you" I mean the discipline of musicology, or more generally music scholarship. (There's enough fail to go around: music theory and ethnomusicology can each take a forkful.) I started this blog thinking that the strange absence of music-scholarly blogs was a temporary condition, and that musicologists, once they had learned about academic blogging by example and could see what could be done in the medium, would start writing their own blogs and a hundred musicoloblogospheric flowers would bloom. Well, that didn't happen. Look at the academic blog wiki list of music-scholarly blogs. Now look at the one for history. Or linguistics and philosophy. Or even Classics and Ancient Languages, for Chrissake. We're getting our asses kicked by Latin. 

I can't help but think that this is a cultural thing. Just as different parts of the orchestra each have their own micro-cultures, different disciplines within the humanities do too, and the culture of musicology is marked by its almost insane degree of caution and self-limitation. Sorry to be so blunt, but there it is: the other humanities, when they think of us at all (which isn't very often) tend to think of musicologists as something like stamp collectors, fanatically collecting and sorting and classifying stamps without caring about what they're attached to. We wouldn't want to start opening those letters! Just throw the letter away and keep the stamp. It's got pretty colors. This one from Zambia has a bird on it! Hey, it looks like this other one with a bird on it. Do I put it in the "birds" part of the album or the "Zambia" part? Hm . . . 

I usually dismiss this characterization, because it doesn't describe the musicologists whose work I admire. But I don't know. The point and challenge of blogging is to make connections with other parts of the intellectual world, and inasmuch as that challenge has hardly been taken up in the two-and-a-half years since I started this blog, I have to ask if we as a discipline are not actually just happier staying in our corner, playing with our stamps.

*Frank Zappa and Peter Occiogrosso, The Real Frank Zappa Book, 193.

 

Invincible murder machine

Phil Ford

So AMS was fun. For me. I don't know about you. But as usual I got to see old friends, only this time it seemed as if there were more of them, which means I saw fewer papers than I have in the past. I liked the ones I saw (one develops a certain skill in reading abstracts for promising papers), but there wasn't an awful lot of stuff in my line. Some of the jazz and pop people who came to my paper told me they saw almost nothing else all weekend -- there just wasn't a lot of American vernacular culture on offer. Not saying this was done on purpose (who knows what the submissions looked like), it just is what it is. Every year seems to have a distinct lean towards (or away from) some area or other. 

Two other things:

1. There did, though, seem to be something of a subliminal theme running throughout some of the papers -- a wish to turn attention away from the monumental works of music history and towards the fragmentary, the faded, the ephemeral, the half-remembered, the forgotten. In short, there was a definite vibe of recovering unimportant pasts, or perhaps (better) recovering things, perhaps ephemeral in themselves, that pull great ineffable trains of history in their wake. This is the historical mood of Benjamin's Arcades project files (which I have been reading). Carolyn Abbate's paper on "Je Suis Titania" from Mignon was one such paper. and my own offering, dealing as it did in the faded traces of Beat socialization in the Holmes acetates, was another. No-one plans these things; they're just sort of in the air.

2. Another theme running throughout this conference was my beard. I've been letting it grow, and people are talking. At the IU party I ended up having a conversation with two eminent senior scholars about whether I more resembled Rutherford B. Hayes or James Garfield. 

Karl Marx and Brahms were also mentioned. Why am I doing this? There are many possible reasons, but I'm going with this one:

AMS notes

Phil Ford

This week (starting Thursday) is the big AMS annual hoo-hah. A few things to note about that:

1. On Friday at 7:30 a.m., I and a bunch of other people are going to get together for breakfast in whatever passes for a hotel restaurant at the venue. The main point of this breakfast is to get people who work on sound studies (a.k.a. auditory culture) to meet one another. I got the idea from telling graduate students I know from various institutions that they should meet one another, and at this point a few other people in the biz are coming as well. The thing is, we all work on some sound topic (or on the whole complex of issues related to sound -- performance, recording, media, orality, etc., which I've been writing about lately) in isolation -- each of us might be the only persona at our respective institutions who works on this kind of thing, but there are more than a few of us in musicology as a whole, and maybe it would be nice to meet up, work on our identity and institutional visibility within the AMS, that kind of thing. So, there's a breakfast, 7:30, Friday morning, in the Renaissance Hotel restaurant. If you're interested in coming, let me know at fordp at indiana dot edu. 

2. I'm doing a short presentation on music and torture at a lunchtime SMT "Scholars for Social Responsibility" panel. (Though anyone who knows me might be amused at the thought of me being associated with "responsibility," social or otherwise.) This is on Friday, 12-2, and as I did last year for my presentation to the AMS Committee on Career-Related Issues panel, I'll get Typepad to publish the text of my talk on the blog while I'm away. Not a cheery subject, I grant you, but an important one, and something I've written about a few times on this blog. 

3. I'm also reading a full paper on Saturday afternoon at 2 pm. It's on the Beats home recordings and how we can listen to Kerouac, Ginsberg, and John Clellon Holmes fashioning a jazz-based hipster identity, despite the fact that they cannot carry a tune in a paper bag. Lots of unheard Beat craziness. And it's what might be called a sound studies paper (see no. 1, above). 

4. This isn't about the AMS, actually. Typepad updated its software, and for some reason the mmusicology.com proxy address stopped working. musicology.typepad.com works just fine, but those of you who bookmarked mmusicology.com might have noticed it's not there anymore. Adjust your bookmarks accordingly.

5. And 5, it's election day tomorrow! Not that I'm going to vote -- I'm not a citizen, so for me the whole thing i merely a spectacle I cannot influence. Just as it is for everyone non-American in the world holding his or her breath, waiting to see the outcome. Helen voted yesterday (Indiana allows early voting). She waiting in line for two hours -- a heavy, heavy turnout. Something is happening out there; I guess we'll find out what soon. No-one left the line, everyone was very patient and friendly, someone even came by with cookies for all the people waiting to vote. There's all kinds of election-related viral videos I could post, but at such a moment as this it behooves us to return to the classics:

Sam is lured into self-destruction by the absence of melodic resolution. This, ladies and gents, is American greatness.

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.