Dial "M" for Musicology

Mozartiana

Jonathan Bellman

One of my first blogs ruminated on the subject of the rediscovered fragment, the little piece of tertiary importance, the scrap of manuscript paper by a great composer and why such things mean so much to us. A new Mozart fragment has just been rediscovered: a complete melody, apparently, from 1787–1791 (obviously; his death year), without harmonization or orchestration, but a complete melody. This scrap was known in the nineteenth century but since its positive identification has slipped under the radar. I have not seen the melody, so it is impossible to say what I would get from it. This is a period in which Mozart was interested in Church Music, so it is not impossible that the melody could be an example of what Wye Jamison Allanbrook has called Mozart’s “exalted style,” and anything that adds to our ongoing style database is a great gift. Jeffrey Kallberg has an article on the Aesthetic of the Sketch as it relates to Chopin in Early Music XXIX/3 (August 2001)—this includes his famous reconstruction of the early E-Flat Minor Prelude—and my thoughts always go back to that when new discoveries are made. It is not that sketches provide undiscovered masterworks, nor are they footnotes fit only for obsessives and completists. Rather, they expand, even incrementally, the eye-view of the composer’s output and aesthetic. Making this up for speculative purposes, now: an incomplete church piece? No big deal. But, a new relative of what was previously considered an atypical melody? An italianate church melody for a Quid Mariam, or a French, or a German? What would these things mean about how his creativity worked? A relative of a melody from an instrumental piece? A relative of a melody by another composer? What new ideas can we now consider about Mozart’s compositional journey, his relationship to the music of his time and perhaps even to the wider culture? I wish the thing would be made available to those of us who can’t afford the gazillion dollars to buy the manuscript. Meanwhile, it’s another one in the eye to those who imagine that the study of history (of any kind) is a primarily static, placid endeavor.

"Trendy"

Phil Ford

Hey everyone, I'm back. Kind of. I'm wrestling with an article that's due on Aug. 1, and I'm still in my Asperger's-syndrome zone of mental perseveration, which means I'm here, but I'm not really here, y'know?

But I still have a couple of musicology-geek things to talk about. First off, thanks, Brent, for stepping in and keeping the place lively this summer. Also, awesome banner! The backwards-musicology thing is genius. Those of you too young to have ever used an old-fashioned rotary phone should know that the letters on the dial go backwards, like this:

It's kind of amazing to think of an interface staying in regular use for sixty-odd years. Nowadays the iPod click wheel feels like it's been around forever, and it's about seven years old.

Speaking of graphics involving musicology, good ol' Google Images brings up a couple of interesting deployments of the term. From this photo blog, a shop front:

Try though we might, it's hard to avoid thinking about the symbolism. Does musicology dignify a shabby, failing enterprise? Or does musicology give your exclusive event a touch of stretch-limo-and-sparkling-rosé class?

Or does musicology mean fun times in Nashville? Could be! The August AMS newsletter is up at the AMS website, and with it the schedule for the November annual meeting. I'm particularly up for this year, because (a) my paper got in, and (b) it's not going to be on Sunday morning, plus (c) I'm on a panel with Gail Sherwood Magee and David Ake, who are two of best Americanists in the biz plus totally great human beings, and (d) Nashville is easily drivable from Bloomington, which means my family can come with me this time. And (e), the usual, seeing old friends, etc.

It's always interesting to look at the AMS program and see what's up this year. To me, it looks like a lot of new faces, which is nice: it'll be good to see what kinds of crazy things the kids are into these days. This AMS annual meeting is a joint session with SMT, so there's an awful lot to choose from. (Best session title: "The Math Session." Honorable Mention: "Critters and Kids.") There's bound to be a certain amount of grousing about the program; there always is. Whoever is on the program, someone's always going to feel shut out. It's interesting to look at the dialogue on the subject at the musicology jobs wiki. A telling exchange:

- Received [my rejection notice] as well. I'm starting to think you have a better chance of landing a tt job than getting a paper accepted at the national meeting.

- Yeah, I'm starting to feel the same way. Maybe it's time to make all 144 selections based on blind reviews only.

- That may be an idea. I wonder when the current selection rules were first instated--probably when the society was much smaller.

- They were instituted in 2003 after some big names were not selected in 2002.

- Wow. Well, part of it may be that it's the big names who provide the big bucks in terms of donations. Have to keep the donors happy!

- Oh dear. Even if that had anything to do with it, those are the big bucks that pay for the AMS 50 or the book subvention that you may or may not ever get, so don't knock them so glibly. More to the point, the 'big names' are usually big for a reason, namely that they tend to be worth listening to even if their abstract wasn't the trendiest. Finally, don't blame the society for your failure to get a paper accepted; get feedback from colleagues or advisors on your rejected abstract and write a better one next time.

There's a certain sour aroma to such exchanges — like the smell of bitter almonds, a sign of poison, in this case the perennial academic resentment against those whose work seems to be getting more attention. I pretty much agree with the last comment in the above-quoted exchange, but something still bothers me: the use of the word "trendy." I hate it when academics run down other approaches for being "trendy" -- it just reeks of resentment. This was not this particular writer's point, but still, I couldn't tell you how many times I've heard someone sniff "well, I guess my work just isn't trendy enough for the program committee" when talking about the AMS annual meeting. "Trendy" is the word you use to dismiss an idea that (a) isn't your thing, but (b) is the thing of enough people that you can't just dismiss it as a fringe enthusiasm unworthy of the discipline's support. Sometimes I think that academics have a kind of mental operating procedure designed to insulate them from having to consider anyone else's ideas at all:

Musical Nationalism, Swanee River, Russian Peasants, and a Cool Israeli Online Journal

Ralph Locke

Musical nationalism is one of those looming problems in the history of music that generations of scholars have tended to avoid dealing with.

Sure, there are standard ways in which we bring nationalism into the picture.  We tend to acknowledge the impact of German nationalism (in its negative and even racist aspects) upon the music dramas and prose writings of Wagner.  Anti-Wagnerianism and anti-German sentiment are main themes in discussions of French musical life in the late nineteenth century (as, for example, when the classic textbook by Grout et al. reaches Vincent d'Indy and the Société Nationale de Musique).  And nationalism is a box into which critics and teachers (I plead guilty) have comfortably consigned lots of interesting, distinctive, and important composers from regions deemed peripheral (Smetana and Dvorak, Glinka and the Mighty Handful, Grieg, Albeniz, and so on).

Still, it took Richard Taruskin to bring the topic front and center, in his astonishing, insightful, broadly sweeping entry on the topic in Grove (2001), and, more recently, in vol. 3 of his Oxford History of Western Music.  One of Taruskin's main points is that cultural nationalism is, in many ways, a German invention.  The Germans simply (well, nothing is simple, but...) persuaded themselves and the rest of the musical world (I don't know about literature, visual art, etc.) that the German way of composing was the best, the norm, the highest--in short, universal in its message and means.  These writers and practitioners (e.g., composition teachers in Leipzig) succeeded, to the extent that composers in other countries often adopted a German musical manner.  To write a Germanic-style symphony (as Saint-Sae"ns did several times, superbly; or as late nineteenth-century composers in England and the United States did, at least capably) was to attempt to matter on the international musical map, as well as on the musical map back home.

The topic of musical nationalism, though, is a lot broader than just faux-German symphonies.  I was delighted and challenged to stumble recently on the current issue of an online journal published by some of the leading musicologists in Israel (with contributions from outside Israel as well): Min-Ad Israel Studies in Musicology Online.  Currently edited by Adena Portowitz, an American-born musicologist who teaches at Bar-Ilan University (in Ramat-Gan), Min-Ad devotes much of its latest issue to articles about nationalism and music.  Portowitz summarizes all the articles in her helpful editorial, so I'll just discuss a few that I found valuable for my own thinking about the issue of music and nationalism.  (Your mileage may vary....)

The most surprising of the lot for me is by David Z. Kushner, about debates and policies in the state of Florida during nearly a hundred years concerning what the official state song should be.  (I figure that "Floridaness" is a kind of nationalism.  Certainly Texanness is!)  A song about this "bright sunkissed land"--so that's where the citrus-fruit brand name Sunkist comes from!--was knocked off its pedestal by the state legislators in 1913 in favor of Stephen Foster's song "Way Down upon the Swanee River (Old Folks at Home)," whose standard words declare that the protagonist is "still longing for the old plantation."

I'll let you read all the details, but, by the year 2007, plantation longings were coming to seem distasteful to many.  The Florida state legislature ran a contest for a song to replace Foster's well-known song.  A new song (which focuses on the beauty of the sawgrass and the sky) got voted in as state . . . anthem.  Foster's "Swanee River" ended up keeping its some-pigs-are-more-equal-than-others status as official state song, and will continue to be sung at official state functions.  Its words, though, have been revised to "still longing for my childhood's station."  The latter phrase is apparently drawn from some version published long ago.  I fear it may today suggest nostalgia for choo-choo trains.

The Florida debate is mostly about words, of course, though words fraught with major tensions deriving from America's history as a slave-holding nation.

Other articles in this Min-Ad issue have more to do with musical style and genre.  Marina Ritzarev writes a long article about changing trends in musical nationalism in Russia, from the use of a polonaise as the czarist anthem ca. 1800 to the insistence on "the singing peasant" and Russian Orthodox sacred choral music as the only two models of acceptable Russian musical nationalism in the late nineteenth century.  These two models then got blended (and secularized), during the Soviet era, into the government's policy of sponsoring choral arrangements of rural folksongs.  I particularly liked Ritzarev's reminder at the end that "the same symptom" (i.e., a given musical style or piece) "can indicate different diseases" (e.g., progressive policies or reactionary ones).

Two fine articles focus, intriguingly, on lack of national style.  Jehoash Hirshberg discovers six pieces that Paul Ben-Haim composed before settling in what would become the State of Israel.  They give some indication of Ben-Haim's original compositional orientation, in contrast to his later role as a self-appointed determiner of the compositional style appropriate to a Jewish state in the Levant.  (Four of these six early pieces are Heine lieder, one is a piece for violin, and the sixth is a Libera me for chorus.)

Ronit Seter describes the problems that Israeli composer Verdina Shlonsky encountered because of her disinclination to adopt the "Mediterranean" (i.e., Arab-influenced) style that Ben-Haim and others had established as normative.

Essica Marks gives a helpful overview of a major book co-authored by two well-known Israeli scholars: the authority on pop music Motti Regev and the ethnomusicologist Edwin Seroussi.  The book, published by University of California Press, is entitled Popular Music and National Culture in Israel.  Marks notes one of its intriguing main points: "Popular music is the most prominent symbol of 'Israeliness,' and is the most convincing proof of Israel's existence as an 'indigenous,' or authentic, entity."

Of course, the question of who is "indigenous" to various countries in the Middle East has raged on and off for centuries.  So, in this review (and book), the question again arises about how "Middle Eastern"-sounding Israeli music (but now in the popular sphere) has become and should be.  This question was further complicated (or enriched) by the influx of Jews from various Arab states (e.g., Morocco, Algeria, Iraq, Yemen) during the first decades of the State of Israel (1950s-60s).

This question about music's importance as national symbol has, I think, a broad resonance elsewhere.  Is the pop music that any country/region produces one of the most accepted marks of its authentic (i.e., taken-as-authentic) identity?  Is the USA defined (to itself, to the larger world) by its pop music--and maybe by its movies, fast food, and clothing styles--almost more than by anything else, except, obviously, its foreign policy?   Maybe there should be some debates here in the USA--in scholarly circles, in the mainstream media--about what our various musics (Bruce Springsteen? GreenDay? Shania Twain? 50 Cent?) say about who we are as a nation.  That is, if we can manage to debate such matters without (I hope) calling for censorship of things we don't like....

Dust-Up over Elgar—and the New Musicology—in "Times Literary Supplement"

 

Ralph Locke

I’ve been asked by Jonathan and Phil to offer an occasional blogpost this summer.

Here’s something that caught my eye at From Beyond the Stave, which is the blog run by Michael Richards of the academic book publisher Boydell and Brewer. (The word play in the blog's title is clearer if you use a long “a” when pronouncing “stave”—which is the five-line thing that in America we call the “staff.”)

Hugh Wood is a noted composer and critic in England.  On March 19, he objected strenuously in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement to objections by American musicologist Byron Adams to Anthony Payne’s much-heralded completion of the Elgar Third Symphony.  Along the way, Wood also took a swipe at musicological work written in a spirit of cultural critique.  (The immediate context, or perhaps pretext, was the recurring focus on the British Empire—e.g., provincial/patronizing attitudes toward the peoples of India—in various chapters of one of the books Wood was reviewing, Elgar and His World, edited by Adams.)

Objections to objections tend to stir up more objections. Of the three letters that followed, Richard Taruskin’s was predictably quotable, accusing Wood—and perhaps English music critics more broadly—of “defensive insularity, anti-intellectualism, know-it-all complacency, proud ignorance, [and] blimpish spite.”

An Englishman (and noted authority on ancient Roman literature), Leofranc Holford-Strevens, wondered plausibly how long the rage for this new symphony by, or we should perhaps say “by," Elgar will continue.

Hugh Wood then wrote in turn, objecting to Taruskin’s objections.

Oddly, I don’t recall that any of these objections, whether to Elgar or to the New Musicology (if we must use that unfortunate term), have been mentioned in musical blogs other than From Beyond the Stave or in postings on any musicological e-list. Surely there’s room for another round of objections to the objections to the . . . .

I can say that I’ve listened to the Elgar-Payne Third Symphony (at least two superb recordings are available) and that I was taken with it, despite my initial doubts. Maybe Anthony Payne is a composer whose output I ought to get to know better. Or is he the Süssmayr of our age, capable perhaps of producing pages that will endure—but only when he is working with material left behind by, as T. S. Eliot said admiringly of Ezra Pound, un miglior fabbro (a greater craftsman)?

 

Permission Denied

Brent Reidy

Over the last couple months I've been working on a set of songs. The texts are borrowed from various Bukowski poems. I'm a big Bukowski fan (here and here). I recently encountered a poem of his that threatens to stop my song writing:

several months ago I was sent some tapes
by a musician who had put several of
my poems to music.
he professed much interest in my
poesy.
I played the tapes on the way to the track
and back.
very classical (and I am a classical music
freak)
but the overall tone of the work was
I felt
tinged with intellectual
elitism---the pretentious soprano voices and the
general presentation.

I was both abashed and honored that
the composer had lent so much effort and
musical learning to my work.
at the same time I felt that the overall
effect was anti-life, anti-me, anti-the-
clarity of directly seeking joy, pain,
anything reasonable or
sufficient.

it was the same old con, the same old
snobbism, the same old murderous kiss
of death clothed in a creative
act.

so I wrote the gentleman back, "you know,
I have certain problems, one of them
being with instruments.
some instruments which I dislike
are the piano, the violin and the soprano
voice, especially the latter.
the human voice besides being basically
ugly also reminds me of the human
race

and one of the last things I want to
think of and one of the first things I
want to get away from when I listen to
classical music is
the human
race.

(Sorry to quote at length, but it was worth it. The poem is "How to get rid of the purists" and the rest of it can be found on p. 195 of Bone Palace Ballet.)

I don't ever intend to publish my songs, so I've never once considered seeking the Bukowski estate's permission to use the texts. Now, however, I feel that I'll never have Bukowski's spiritual blessing--I know that what I do would displease him. I can't pretend that my songs are different--that he might have really liked them.

Why does that matter? The concept of non-legal, non-required permission is a tricky thing in both composition and musicology. What does it mean to have the "blessing" of an estate or subject? What des it mean to not?

Back in college, my musicological mentor Steve Swayne was working on his book How Sondheim Found His Sound. He joked that the best thing is to have one's subject alive and have his or her permission when you start a book, but then have them die the day one's work is published. But Sondheim, who had given Steve's book his blessing, lived through the book's printing. And, to Steve's relief, he very much likes the book.

I recently watched I Like Killing Flies, the documentary on Kenny Shopsin. He is the chef and owner of downtown NYC diner. He's an eccentric foul-mouthed cook who often waxes philosophical and regularly throws people out of his restaurant for not following the rules. He disdains publicity and only allowed a documentary crew into his kitchen as he was losing the lease on his restaurant and considering closing or moving--he wanted the death throes of the old place memorialized. Because of his dislike of the press, not much was written or made about Shopsin's before the documentary. One major article appeared in the New Yorker in 2002, in which author Calvin Triller confesses:

Anytime there seemed to be a threat of my becoming entangled in a piece of unauthorized publicity about Shopsin’s, I have resorted to rank cowardice, spooked by the fear of a lifetime banishment that might not even carry the possibility of parole . . . Yes, I’ve managed to write about Shopsin’s from time to time, always observing the prohibition against mentioning its name or location. That is one reason I’ve never been offended by Kenny’s refusal to recognize a reporter’s God-given right to turn absolutely everything into copy. In a piece about Greenwich Village a few years ago, for instance, I asked a restaurant proprietor “who tends not to be cordial to people wearing suits” what the difference was between the Village and uptown, and he said, “I don’t know. I’ve never been uptown.” Kenny has never objected to any of the mentions. He has always thought of us as being in similar fields, and, as someone who has to be prepared every day to turn out any one of nine hundred dishes a customer might ask for, he has a deep understanding of waste not, want not.

This article from which this quote is pulled earned Kenny's approval. And so did Steve's book. And never will my songs.

I'm going to keep writing them, though. I like them. Isn't that enough? Sorry, Bukowski.

The long-delayed and inevitably anticlimactic post-AMS breakdown

Phil Ford

I guess I still haven't written anything about AMS. Sorry. I kind of haven't wanted to. I enjoyed myself, enjoyed seeing old friends, loved the food, dug the view from my hotel room window, even saw a few good papers, but I find that little of the experience translates into compelling bloggy prose. Maybe I was just too content. If I were bitter and outraged I could probably fire off a good jeremiad about how Our Discipline Is In Crisis, but I actually think our discipline is doing pretty well. There were signs. For example: Charles Carson's "'Sounds Middle Class': Smooth Jazz and the Black Middle Class." Carson's paper was an ingenious investigation of cultural poetics and class, looking at a normally despised genre (smooth jazz) and asking questions about the sensibility that animates it. What is "smoothness," anyway? I love thinking about stuff like this. One especially sharp commenter, The Guy With The Purple Hair (I never caught his name, but he was at a bunch of the same sessions I was and always asked the best questions) picked up on this structure-of-feeling aspect of the paper, and Carson was himself a remarkable smooth interlocutor. When he publishes this material I'll be the first in line to read it.

Before leaving the topic of smoothness, I feel that we should hear from the acknowledged master.

My favorite single moment of the entire meeting came during the comments period after Jessica Sternfeld's paper on High School Musical. Sternfield's presentation was well-done and amusing and informative, and what most interested me was the fact that HSM is at once very newfangled -- not a film musical, not a stage musical, but some new hybrid multi-platform thing that started out on TV -- and also oldfangled, a throwback to the old studio system. Disney is the closest thing we have to the old vertically-integrated MGM machine. I would have like to hear more discussion of this, although Carol Oja, who had given a fine paper on Bernstein's Wonderful Town in the same session, commented that the songs seem to have been committee-written. Which (though no-one said this) is another way HSM seems to a throwback to older studio practices. The classic studio film musical is, as Salman Rushdie said about The Wizard of Oz, "as near as dammit to that will-o'-the-wisp of modern critical theory: the authorless text." The Wizard of Oz, like other MGM products, is "authorless" in the sense that its final shape is the result of decisions made by unstable alliances of quarrelsome studio employees rather than any single Orson-Welles-like auteur. One good example: Yip Harburg wanted to cut "Over the Rainbow" because he thought it would kill the film's momentum and he didn't think Judy Garland was up to singing it. But he was overruled, and so it was only by mere contingency that the AFI's "song of the century" made it into the final cut. Which implies, alarmingly, that "Hollywood makes its masterpieces by accident, because it simply does not know what it is doing." (Rushdie, again.) Hollywood makes its junk by accident, too. You can decide for yourself whether HSM's committee-built qualities result in a masterpiece or junk; my point is, though, that a thing isn't junk just because it's committee-built.

Anyway, one consequence of HSM's committee-built structure is Disney's usual careful attention to representational balance: as Sternfeld pointed out, each high-school clique was shown to have roughly equal numbers of girls and boys, whites and blacks, etc. The show is about a basketball player who secretly wants to sing in a school show but is worried that it would be kind of well, you know, gay. (Not that anyone actually says "gay" in HSM, but that's the implication.) And after his secret gets out, there's a number called "Stick to the Status Quo" that shows member of various high-school cliques admitting similarly unacceptable desires (the bookworm who loves hiphop dancing, the skater kid who loves playing the cello, etc.). It's the usual tween-friendly stuff about being yourself, believing in yourself, and accepting others. All very nice and progressive in the modern Disney style. But the comments after the paper were the usual message bookkeeping: sure it's progressive, but is it progressive enough? Is it really covertly heteronormative? What about that balanced racial representation, surely they left someone out? Like, Samoans or something?

And then J. Peter Burkholder stepped to the mic, and said that he wanted to talk about "Stick to the Status Quo" from his experience as a gay man.

And JPB said, this song reminds me of something that happened at a Quaker meeting some years back where he was asked, what good news do you bring? And his answer was something like this: being gay, you understand what coming out of the closet means, and you come to understand that everyone is "in the closet" in some way or other. The good news, I guess, is not only that you should come out, but that you can, it's OK, everyone's sort of in the same boat.

Those of you who read this blog and are not professional academics should know that this is not the sort of thing you hear very often in an academic meeting. But you could feel the unexpected comment shoot home, and be pondered. The vibe changed; people seemed to lift, to wake up and loosen up a little, get involved. The discussion lit up. Hearing what JPB said kind of gave everyone permission to calm down, to relax. Academia is a profession where the currency of success is peer evaluation, and so we are constantly worrying about how people see us and what they think about us, and fronting is always a very great temptation. You front, you come off as you think a person in your situation should, you bend the flight of your thought toward some accustomed destination, all the while quietly marinating in self-doubt and self-loathing. Academic meetings (not just AMS) freak a lot of people out because they can end up being front-a-thons: it's horrifying to see so many people caught in a self-made emotional tornado, generated by the updraft of self-regard and the downdraft of self-doubt. A professor at Rate Your Students asks "Does anyone else ever feel like a fake or a fraud?" Yes, pretty much everybody.

Maybe this seems like a banal thought -- "be yourself." But it's not, really, because saying "be yourself" isn't quite the same as saying "don't despise what is inside you." "Be yourself" is abstract -- it can mean almost anything. I have no idea what "being yourself" is supposed to feel like. (Which self? Everyone has a few, and they're all "real.") But everyone has a very specific sense of what it feels like to keep a blameless part of themselves a secret.

Anarchy in the AMS

Phil Ford

Good evening --

I am speaking tonight on Thursday, November 1, at the American Musicological Society Annual Meeting in Quebec City. The session at which I am speaking is the Committee on Career-Related Issues forum on collaborative internet tools. If you are attending this conference, you might be hearing my words as I speak them, though it's more likely you're drinking at the opening-night reception. Or you might be reading my words on Dial "M" for Musicology, the blog I write with Jonathan Bellman, since the blogging software I use has allowed me to write out my remarks in advance and arrange for them to appear online at the same time as I am delivering them in person.

And I'm doing this because I think it's kind of cool, and because I can. But I suppose I could also use it to illustrate why I blog at all. As I speak these words I'm in a small roomful of academics. Not just academics, musicologists; not just musicologists, members of the AMS; not just AMS members, but that subset who have paid especially punitive travel costs to come to Quebec City; and, of that already small subset of the academic community, we are left with those who have resisted the temptation of caffeine-, nicotine-, and alcohol-fueled socialization in the ballroom. But there are no such restraints of space, time, and academic specialization on my blog, or on any blog. Granted, the people who come there regularly (and we get between 200 and 400 site hits on an average day), are self-selected -- people with an interest in music, musicology, academia, or some combination of all three. But we also get people who surf in on false hits, like the guy who found my post on Tom Lutz's cultural history of slacking with the search term "wife discipline," or the unknown soul, perhaps tormented beyond endurance by her accompanist, who found us when she typed "I hate pianists" into the Google search box. More to the point, there is no prior restraint on who might find us, or why, and no restraint on who might link to us, or how they might respond to what we write.

Neither, in writing the blog post version of this talk, is there anything preventing me from littering the page with cuss words, or passing unprovoked personal remarks about Ryan Bañagale, though I would certainly forbear both in the Committee on Career-Related Issues, out of fear of community disapproval and a stony glare from the moderator. As we all know by now, blogging enables virtual communities but erases the social restraints enforced by real ones. Bloggers can choose to be anonymous and write with all the unrestrained savagery of the anonymous student evaluation or journal peer review. But even when they're not anonymous, bloggers can fall under the spell of an illusion common in ostriches and toddlers: the belief that if I don't see you, you don't see me. I see the same crew of friendly, helpful blog commenters every week at Dial M, and can believe that they represent the views of our much larger silent audience. But they don't: there will always be people who hate you and hate your stupid blog and will lie out there in the weeds, silently hating. And every blogger will at some point say something mean, ill-considered, or frankly stupid, because even when you're not anonymous, you kind of feel as if you are, and anyway, it's an informal medium that discourages lengthy reflection. All of which is to say that when you're blogging you're exposing yourself in ways you can't control or even fully understand, and this exposure, with all its associated risks, is probably why there are still so few musicology blogs out there, and why many of them disappear after a while. Academic careers are bought and sold with the currency of peer evaluation, and academic bloggers get freaked out when they feel themselves losing control of the image they present to their disciplines.

Some non-blogging scholars are freaked out by all this, too, and argue that blogging lures people to do damage to themselves and their careers. Quick hits for easy kicks, fun in the short term and personal ruin in the end -- blogging is like crack for academics. And there's another argument against academic blogging that's familiar from debates over Wikipedia: how can anything of value emerge from a medium where there's no-one in control, no editorial board, no-one maintaining intellectual standards and norms of civility? Without such oversight, blogging is mere anarchy.

Well, this is quite right. The natural state of the blogosphere is anarchy. The essence of the medium is the reciprocal and nonhierarchical relationship between bloggers and their audiences. In fact, writing about "bloggers and their audiences" is misleading, because it implies that this is a clear distinction of roles, like the distinction between those who read a newspaper and those who write it. But in the blogosphere there is nothing preventing any reader from turning into a writer, and every blogger has the same megaphone as everyone else. To be sure, there's a pecking order -- Alex Ross is more widely-read than I am, for instance -- but it's an abstract, intransitive kind of authority. Alex Ross has authority, but he doesn't have authority over anyone. He can't shut me up, or compel me to talk about the things he and other A-list bloggers have deemed most important. If I hate Alex Ross I can buy the domain name ihatealexross.com and devote my site to mocking everything he writes, and while this would be nutty and pointless, people would probably read it. And it is the ability to attract readers and links to your page that makes you visible, and nothing else. You may get links only because you're that crazy guy who hates Alex Ross, but still, you're getting links. It's a kind of anarchy that mirrors the anarchy of an unregulated free market, where the only thing that controls what is being offered for sale is whether someone is willing to pay for it. A geek show gets the same pull as a poetry reading. In the blogopshere, the currency is not money, but popularity, but the principle is the same.

Now surely this is inimical to the values of scholarship, if not art itself. It is infamous to judge ideas according to their popularity, and besides, very few of us went into musicology because we wanted to be more popular. I suspect that many of us became academics because we wanted to preserve the things we love from the tyranny of popularity, from the demand that artistic values line up with worldly success. Better, then, that musicology stay where it can be protected; better that there should be protectors.

When anyone says that we need protectors, the first question you should ask is who they have in mind. Usually it's them, or people who think just like them. So then the second question should be, why you? And it is at this point that we start hearing moral arguments that appeal to things unseen and benefits we must take on faith. It is here that people begin to insist on transcendent goals to which our universities and scholarly societies should be directed. Musicology should resist the philistinism of the market, or preserve the cultural heritage of the West, or work for social justice and fight race and gender discrimination, etc.  But of course there is never any agreement on these goals. While all academics pay lip service to the idea of free and unfettered intellectual inquiry, we all have our blind spots. There is always some school of thought to which we cannot extend even a minimal assumption of sense and good faith. The new-musicology debates of the 1990s were envenomed by the fact that people on both sides simply could not believe in any of the warrants that underwrote the scholarship of the other side. The only thing you can really say about who was right is that they all thought they were right. But when the question of who's right is also a question of who should call the shots, as it inevitably is in zero-sum situations like, say when we're deciding who's getting published in JAMS, intellectual matters become political matters. Not any particular kind of politics, necessarily, not politics of the left or the right, but the principle of politics itself, which is power.

And it is here that the abstract and intransitive power of the blogosphere becomes a very great virtue. No-one can shut anyone else up, ideas can cross-pollinate unpredictably, and since the blogosphere is not a zero-sum enterprise, there is nothing forcing people to "take a side" with this or that school of thought. Those who gather around their shared faith in Academic Theory X might face questions from which they would otherwise be insulated by institutional mechanisms. And I suspect that this is something a few academics secretly resent and fear about blogs. They don't want someone who hasn't been properly housebroken asking cheeky questions, and they don't want to be denied the institutional authority to control the discourse.

People who complain about blogs, like those who complain about Wikipedia, ask why a medium that puts any random crank on the same footing as an expert should be taken seriously. Defenders of Wikipedia always point out that it's self-correcting: the damage that malicious and incompetent people cause is quickly undone by dedicated Wikipedians. Now, you can't quite say this about blogs. A stupid blog post stays stupid. But there is a kind of self-correction at work -- call it peer review. The freak who writes ihatealexross.com may get links, but this won't earn him a place in the minisphere of classical music bloggers. A geek show may get the same pull as a poetry reading, but it's not as if they have the same clientele: poets don't have to start biting the heads off chickens. And while one of the charms of blogging is that it allows you to post a long piece of serious writing one day and pictures of your cats the next, a clarinetist who only posts pictures of her cats isn't going to get any play, except from the crazy cat people. (And that's a whole different scene.) The classical music blogosphere and the smaller sphere of academic music bloggers are communities of interest, and while you can be an enormous hairbag, you also need to be an interesting, entertaining, and at least marginally relevant hairbag if you want anyone to read you. This kind of peer-review is non-binding, of course. It won't keep you from saying dumb things in public and getting denied tenure.* It is implemented only in blunt remarks in your comments section, rebuttals in other blogs, or ostracism, in the form of no links and no love. But again, there's no one person doing the ostracizing. Decisions are collective (if non-binding) and power flows (intransitively) from a decentralized structure enabled by the logic of the internet itself.

Which means that blogs have something in common with Wikipedia: they rely on what Yale law professor Yochai Benkler calls commons-based peer production (CBPP). Peer production means that knowledge (in the form of a Wiki, Project Gutenberg, Librivox, a piece of open-source software, or whatever) is being created by a widely distributed, non-hierarchical network of volunteers whose willingness to work on a shared project is their main qualification for doing so. Commons-based means that nothing created in this way is proprietary and no-one's doing it for money. The magic ingredient that makes it work is the internet, which allows for a decentralized peer review structure and which also permits a large number of people to make something huge (i.e., an ongoing self-sustaining intellectual conversation on music) by adding tiny pieces to it.** This is a model of production that now drives a good deal of software innovation, and something like it is beginning to happen in scholarship as well. The academic blogosphere is self-selected, ungoverned, and nonhierarchical; the knowledge it produces is generated collectively as ideas are passed along, argued, and transformed from one blog to another; and while individual blogs (including Dial M) might stipulate which rights they reserve on their own work, no-one can be said to own a conversation.

However, the problem with understanding the musicoloblogosphere as commons-based peer production is that the musicological commons is still very small: for reasons I've described, there just aren't a lot of music-academic blogs yet. But perhaps this is also a secret strength. There aren't enough music academics to sustain a conversation, but this means that those of us who are in the blogosphere end up spending a lot of time conversing with music people who aren't academics, or academics who aren't music people. And the best of them are brilliant: aforementioned critic Alex Ross, pianist Jeremy Denk, composer Matthew Guerrieri, and intellectual critic Scott McLemee, to name only four. And what happens when you spend a lot of time sharing space with these people is that you start to develop a lingua franca, a border language synthesized from the things you have in common. And as I've argued elsewhere, that common tongue has its own special characteristics. It is "cool," in the McLuhanesque sense: readers can profitably interact with it in a wider variety of ways than they can with more traditional forms of academic communication. Blog writing tends to be "porous," filled with open spaces that readers can fill with their own contributions. This kind of writing doesn't make the "hotter," denser kinds of academic writing obsolete, of course, but I would guess that as academic blogging continues to grow it will "cool down" academic discourse generally. Whether this is a good thing or not is a tough question, and maybe at this point an unanswerable one. I should blog about it some time. Or maybe someone else can. I'm looking at you, AMS.

*But then, we're all grown-ups, aren't we? Grown-ups take responsibility for what they do and don't blame their bad decisions on the medium. It's not "the medium" making you post all those pictures of cats, it's you. 

**Benkler treats these conditions of commons-based peer production in "Coase's Penguin," the article where the term was first introduced. See also Benkler's book on the subject, The Wealth of Networks, which (of course) has a Wiki. Other things you should read that I didn't have space to mention in the main text: James Boyle's classic article on the "second enclosure" of the intellectual commons; the CHE forum "Can Blogging Derail Your Career?", and Alex Ross's recent New Yorker piece on classical music in the internet age.

Strange Bedfellows

Jonathan Bellman

Quite by accident I find myself listed in the Wikipedia New Musicology Article as a New Musicologist. This stopped me dead in my tracks. Moi? After the amount of sounding off I’ve done about it? Wikipedia, noch? New Musicology was for a long time a label used both as proud, confrontational self-identification and vilifying accusation. This started, roughly, when I was at a very vulnerable point in my professional life: on the job market. Old Musicologists were considered to be, by outsiders, crabbed, unmusical pedants who Controlled The Whole Field and did nothing but root in archives, grazing passively amongst Ockeghem manuscripts, Tudor choirbooks, and Beethoven sketches. Supposedly, they considered themselves to be the Only True Musicologists. New Musicologists, in contrast, trumpeted their interest in all kinds of new methodologies (of varying value, and which I will not critique here), and in the Voices Of The Marginalized: Gays, Minorities, Women, etc. In the late 1980s and 1990s, I and many others believed that the job market was largely controlled by fashionable NM interests, which was cause for great personal bitterness. (It would be disingenuous to act as if some of that resentment didn’t survive into my Sept. 18, 2006 Radical Musicology blog.) Young people associated with this area, by contrast, were of the opinion that their views were being repressed by the Entrenched Powers of Old Musicology, The Man and so on, and they cited—with some justification, probably—departments that would never hire women, that were bastions of the musicological old-boy network…basically, that were everything they were trying to correct. “Balkanized” best describes the situation. Into the field blundered yours truly, trailing a DMA in Piano Performance Practices and (among other things) an interest in musical exoticism, specifically the style hongrois, the Hungarian-Gypsy style of Schubert and Brahms and many others. In some ways I came in on the ground floor, being one of the first to outline the dialect in terms of its constituent musical gestures, and to map out the sociology of “hearing Gypsies,” including Europe’s wretched treatment of Roma and the idea of using Romani musical accent, so to speak, in formal compositions as a way of getting beyond typical musical discourses of the nineteenth century. It is not hard to see how the connection between my work and New Musicology was made, but my lineage was really neither Old nor New Musicology: as a student of Leonard Ratner, I was really interested in musical styles and topics, and my interest in the style hongrois proceeded from that more than any outsider’s awareness. (I had some good models, such as Thomas Bauman—also at Stanford then—with his treatment of the “Turkish” style in his terrific Cambridge Opera volume on Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio.) The fact that I have not been very sympathetic to post-colonial musicology, which is one of the places musical exoticism led, has been cause for some pretty harsh criticism, particularly in the UK. So being lumped in with some who have—well—pilloried me leaves me a bit bemused. What this illustrates above all is the idiocy of labels, which we tend to wear much the same way mobs in banana republics wear pictures of military leaders. “I’m with the X group; don’t mess with us.” Is that really, truly, the best we can do, particularly in the intellectual realm? Today (older, and having negotiated the professional rapids to the point of being senior faculty) the labels Old Musicology and New Musicology seem a bit embarrassing, inidicative of a kind of mindless, grade-school, red-team vs. blue-team tribalism. “Old” and “New” as unavoidably values-laden adjectives is reminiscent of Liberal and Conservative. For example, as a political liberal (not so much “left” or “progressive,” really: LIBERAL) I am in a constant state of boiling rage because of the way W, Bill O’Reilly, James Dobson and other Republican Administration, Media, and Church Death-Eaters have hijacked and distorted the term. I am old enough, however, to remember when (at least in the worldview of a Eugene McCarthy-supporting 10-year-old) “Conservative” meant essentially a snaggle-toothed, 60-IQ Southerner cackling at a lynching. How different are those kinds of stereotyping and intellectual laziness, really? We’re liberals, but like most liberals I’ve known our family is conservative (whatever that means) in many ways—sociologically, educationally, economically. The labels persist nonetheless. It seems that as a species, we are hell-bent on convincing other life-forms (should they exist) that we have the mental (and moral) capabilities of plankton. Is there really no other possible model for anything than a binarism? (Guest-lecturing at Stanford, Leo Treitler once suggested, in answer to a question, that we ought to “eschew binarism,” but I’ve never noticed anyone taking him up on this point.) I hope the authors of the Wikipedia article keep me there as a New Musicologist, if they feel some of my work qualifies me for that designation. Anyone who knows me or my other writing (or my AMS-L posts or this blog) will be puzzled, probably, by that inclusion. Fact is, I would rather not fit snugly into anyone’s category of anything, preferring to sort of fit into several. I think it was LBJ who said “If two men agree on everything, only one of ’em’s doing the thinking,” and that holds true for intellectual categories; a comfortable fit makes you easy to pigeonhole. Being a rank-and-file, card-carrying member of ANYTHING should always be regarded with the greatest suspicion, because the easier your beliefs are to categorize, the easier they are to appropriate and distort.

Reactions to the Record

Jonathan Bellman

I, too, was gone for the weekend, at a Stanford symposium titled “Reactions to the Record.” The basic idea was to examine not only early recordings themselves and what they document about changes in performance style, but also how recordings and recording culture have changed the musical consumer culture, music making itself even, and how the study of recordings has changed academic musical study. Ultimately, the idea of “reactions” to the record implies a kind of interaction between listener and recorded performance—How do we learn from what we hear? How do recordings change our approach to performance?—more than passive listening, or consumption. Many people there were both performers on some level and writer/researchers—a lively, lively community. This was a real party. Lots of intense conversation, in meetings and over meals, about topics of mutual concern. Now, this is not academic chit-chat about salaries and so on; we are exchanging as much information as possible, as fast as possible, about topics that hold the most burning interest for us. Those present included a vast majority of performer-scholars, including conductor and NY Times critic Will Crutchfield, musicologist Richard Taruskin, the pianists Anatole Leikin, Kumaran Arul, and George Barth (both to be found here; George was my doctoral advisor), all three superbly intelligent and sensitive musicians, Malcolm Bilson, Andrew Rangell (here's a review), Jazz historian and composer (and Dean at SMU) José Bowen, recording historian Robert Philip, and quite a few others. Cool people to hang with! What is particularly enjoyable is a gathering of souls interested in the same general subject, an interaction of performance and performance history and criticism that excludes so many interested in only one of the areas. Whatever was played, you knew people were really, I mean really, listening—listening intelligently, with thoughts and reactions and real appreciation. Yeah, the stakes were punishingly high (I played first on the first concert, without having touched the piano that day), but it was extremely rewarding to be part of that. There were two concerts, and I enjoyed everyone. A talented and razor-sharp young graduate student from UC San Diego named Jeffrey Treviño played Henry Cowell’s The Banshee, the first time I’ve heard that inside-the-piano classic live. Anatole Leikin played some Granados and Skryabin, two composers whose piano-roll recordings he has studied, so his approach to these composers’ rhythmic inflections as pianists comes directly from them. George Barth played Brahms and Chopin with real eloquence (especially the Chopin Barcarolle, Op. 60). Three performances in particular, though, will illustrate how a conference like this can work, and the kinds of doors it can open. Malcolm Bilson is one of the real pioneers of fortepiano performance, and has built a long career playing Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven on various fortepianos, carefully noting how various pieces reflect the capabilities of the pianos for which they were written, and acknowledging the complications of playing such works on different instruments. Bilson played Schumann’s Waldscenen on a Graf piano…like an absolute god. Querulous entry into the forest, haunted spot, hunting song, you name it; we were plopped down in the middle of a nineteenth-century German forest-tale, with all the ghoulies and beasties, evocative images, and delicious terrors one might expect to find therein. So, here we had a wonderfully effective performance of a historical work on an appropriate historical instrument. Kumaran Arul played, among other things, Chopin Mazurkas, and he has clearly internalized the composer’s celebrated Polish agogic rubato, in which the beats of a measure in three-four time are inflected so that they seem to be in duple. This is a terribly difficult thing to do persuasively, because it is a style that was extraordinary long ago, worth comment even in Chopin’s time. So, while in a sense a historically inappropriate instrument (a big, modern, 350-horsepower Steinway is a far cry from Chopin’s preferred Pleyel of the 1830s), the historically appropriate technique absolutely sold the playing, making the pieces vibrant via access to the old rhythmic vocabulary. Andy Rangell, a Boston-based pianist, did a fascinating experiment: he played the Bach D Minor French Suite and Schoenberg’s Suite Op. 25…trading movements from each, dovetailing them so to speak. As the composers intended? Of course not; impossible. Yet, threads appeared. Hearing Schoenberg after Bach highlights the German heritage that underscores Schoenberg’s work, especially in terms of rhythmic impetus, and to hear Bach again after Schoenberg is to have your aural palate cleaned. To hear them alternate in dance-suite mode was just a banquet, and Rangell plays both superbly. These interlineated suites made for some of the most refreshing and thought-provoking listening I can remember. The piano was more or less appropriate for the Schoenberg; of course, historically utterly inappropriate for the Bach. Rangell plays Bach incomparably, and I am in complete agreement about Bach belonging on the piano, but I bring up historical appropriateness to point up the varieties of approach we encountered at this meeting (no orthodoxy or narrowness, please). This is academic life at its highest point. Hail, George and Kumaran, who put the meeting together! Being involved was a real privilege. Now, I have to see if there’s a reasonable publishing venue for my paper, which involved a lot of recordings. And now I’m back trying to put out fires and catch up. Heigh-ho—this is academic life at a far more typical point.

Reconstructive Surgery

Currently, it seems that my every professional moment not devoted to teaching, individual student needs, or offending colleagues is being spent trying to read the mind of a certain major nineteenth-century composer. I am in the midst of a project that involves an almost-complete score, a work that is laid out, bar for bar, from beginning to end, but because of haste and circumstances lots of parts have holes in them, blank measures and so on. My contribution is anything written for piano: to parse the compositional shorthand, to draw conclusions about what one hand is probably doing from what the other one is doing, and ultimately to reconstruct the piano part from educated surmises, cognate sources, and other works with the same authorship. What will later (I hope!) seem like the most commonsensical decisions, I am finding, currently seem like a mix of hubris, gall, and ignorance when one has to pull them out of the air and take responsibility for them.

(Note: I am not being cutesie here by not identifying composer and work; it is standard practice, in such situations, for all definite information to be withheld until the piece is premiered.)

I don’t believe there is formal training for such a task; one simply has to dig in—either out of desire, or because there weren’t any convenient exits when the solicitation was made—the music stopped and I didn’t have a chair, in other words. One small relief is that it is an occasional work, put together for a particular event, and as such is—ahh—not exactly Beethoven’s Tenth, in terms of immortal value. Nonetheless, it is a real lesson in humility to make a decision (“I’ll use this passagework here”), try it out, and have it sound like utter garbage. Or, a bit later, to have it sound not bad but uncharacteristic: inoffensive but flat, or OK but stylistically fifty years off, or just …wrong. Good, even, but wrong. One of the skills to be learned here is patience, because there are conflicting sources to be brought into harmony with each other (sketches, drafts, etc.), and there is a lot to consider; many wrong decisions to be made before the right one is found (he said bravely). Had this work survived intact it would have been widely performed and recorded now—at least on Complete Works projects!—thus, a part of the repertoire. Believe me, this realization tends to focus one’s attention.

The piece is, as I say, not Beethoven’s Tenth, nor is it Chopin’s early E-flat minor prelude, a project brought to successful conclusion in recent years by Prof. Jeffrey Kallberg at the University of Pennsylvania. I was involved with that in a different—more tangential—way, but I gained a healthy respect (OK, awe) for what the task requires: more than anything else, a willingness to step out into the scholarly wild blue in a way that simply giving an informed opinion does not approach. The work is, though, touched by the hand of a master, and the pressure to provide credible parts for those missing is very real. As musicologists, we tend to deal with ideas, history, and analysis and criticism of music; we weigh evidence, receive bolts from the blue and/or patiently construct theories, and we strive to write persuasive, elegant prose. For us to actually produce some music, even (or especially) in the service of completing an incomplete work by someone else, raises familiar questions in a less than comfortable way. How “authentic” will this be? If the work was hastily composed for a particular deadline, how significant is “compositional intent”? If the work was produced in a less-than-familiar place, how well were the capabilities of the collaborating instrumentalists—and their actual instruments—understood? These are ever-present questions for those of us interested in performance practices, but the circumstances of an occasional work (they tend to be rushed, more casually assembled, and so on) skew the equation. The ideal point is probably somewhere between not obsessing and avoiding carelessness in the decision-making process, but it’s still hard to find.

Like so many other things in music, though, there is no choice. Would it be better for the work never to be heard? Unthinkable. Perhaps it would be better to leave the challenge to someone else, and to remain on more familiar turf? Likewise unthinkable. Performers live on terra incognita, and it is a good exercise for us to visit there periodically, to walk on the wild side. Our scholarship improves thereby. The hardship, of course, is that one’s relative puniness is put before one’s eyes several times an hour. Ouch!

Ultimately, that’s good practice too, and likewise good for scholarship.