Dial "M" for Musicology

Consciousness

Phil Ford

There was a young man who said "though

it seems that I know that I know, 

what I would like to see 

is the I that knows me 

when I know that I know that I know."

--Alan Watts (I think)

Today in my seminar we're talking about Kevin Korsyn's Decentering Music, many of whose arguments issue from a widespread assumption within cultural studies: that the notion of the centered self, the independent and self-willed self, is an illusion. Many of those arguments follow from psychoanalytic or semiotic arguments, some of them formidably abstract. As a grad student I always had a hard time quite imagining what such a notion could really mean: I'm, like, not me? If I'm not me, then what am I? What might the alternatives be? 

So anyway, everyone in my seminar has been writing questions for up to cogitate upon leading up to today's class. This was my contribution:

In the passage of pp. 42-46 (and elsewhere), Korsyn maintains that the conception of the individual self as developed in the post-enlightenment West, the self of the Cartesian "cogito ergo sum", is a historically- and culturally-specific invention (i.e., not something that is natural and universal), and cannot therefore serve as the basis for anything that might describe itself as a non-ideological, "objective" study of music. So, in a nutshell, your notion of yourself as a separate, bounded, rational individual, a subject who works on an array of objects "out there" in the objective world -- your ego, in other words -- is an illusion. 

OK, we've heard all this before. Now, the question: using only terms and examples drawn from your own experience, and without appealing to philosophy or cultural theory, can you make this understanding of the self plausible?

So, just throwing that out there. What would you all say? I ask the question because (a) the problem of individual identity is such a universal one in contemporary humanities thought, and (b) the point is seldom argued in any but the most abstract way. Usually we just get appeals to the authority of Lacan or Derrida or whomever. But is it something we can experience? If so, what is that experience? I'm not asking that rhetorically. I think the question of the self is real, not just an airy-fairy pseudo-question dreamed up by bored humanities professors who have run out of real things to talk about. But I'm impatient with any purely abstract statement or explanation, and cultural theory, if it is to amount to anything more than some glass-bead game of shuffling abstract concepts around in some airless realm hermetically sealed from human life, should be able to throw light on things that happen to us in our lives. If it doesn't, then what's the point? 

(Well, I suppose you could argue, a la Milton Babbitt, that then it would be like pure mathematics, where theorems are valuable for their intrinsic beauty rather than their practical applicability to life, though that would be a strangely formalistic argument for a cultural-theory practitioner to make.)  

The Dark Within The Dark

Jonathan Bellman

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

In some inconceivable dimension, maybe.  Until then—

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

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

Exercise no. 5: the second seminar game piece

Phil Ford

Two things. First of all, friend of the blog David Brent Johnson has done a new show for Night Lights on the 1957 film The Sweet Smell of Success. David interviewed me and James Naremore, whose book on film noir is a favorite of mine. Go check out of the show. You'll learn a lot about a great film and you'll also be impressed by David's editing skills, which were considerably taxed by my, uh, elliptical manner of speaking. 

Second, more about exercises. Are you getting tired of them? I'm not. Last week I devised a new one for my seminar. It was rather more complex than the first one, whose rules were designed to keep the conversational ball in play through time-keeping. For this one, I wanted to assign each student a role based on a characteristic style of personal interaction, so that the conversation would be kept in motion by the dynamic tension between the assumed characters of the seminar participants. So here it is:

Asteria in Boulder

Jonathan Bellman

Imagine the Platonic Ideal of a performance of songs about Love—Love incarnated as a poetic idealization.  You might conceive of vocal lines sinuously interwoven with the kind of insouciance born only from total contrapuntal command.  You might imagine performers able to match pitch and timbre to achieve the two-becoming-one and one-blossoming-into-two effects with seeming effortlessness, and you might fantasize that, when short phrases were exclaimed together, the singers would be in such sympathy that breath and enunciation, attack and release were utterly simultaneous, a poet singing in stereo. 

Last night, one of the culminating events at Early Music Colorado’s Fall Festival took place: at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Boulder, there was a performance by Asteria, an early music duo specializing in late medieval Burgundian chansons: Du Fay, Binchois, Robert Morton, a few less familiar names, plus other anonymous but gloriously refined works.  The time period was, roughly, the third quarter of the fifteenth century and the context was the wealthy and artistically inclined courts of the Dukes of Burgundy (Phillip the Good and Charles the Bold).  These chansons all have to do with Love, in the prevailing conception of amour courtois, Courtly Love: the despair of love lost, the exquisite pain of love found, the miseries of gossip and insecurity, the poison of suspicion, the exaltation (or thrill of the chase!) of a love affair in full bloom, and so on.  The artistic culture of the Burgundian court centered, at last as far as the secular poetic and musical realms, on love above all else; the repertoire seems to be primarily three-part, delectably elegant music featuring graceful counterpoint, musically realized dialogue, and sweetly expressive lines realizing the middle French poetry.  

Asteria consists of a married couple: Sylvia Rhyne, soprano, and Eric Redlinger, tenor and Lute.  Their performance was surpassingly intimate, from a musical perspective: timbral matching, interwoven lines, and miraculously unisono declamation, when homorhythmic lines called for it.  They also incorporated a certain tastefully theatrical realization to the performance: close physical proximity, gazing into each other’s faces, turning sorrowfully away when the text called for it, singing both to and (seemingly) about each other, and so on.  The concert felt like an ideal courtly performance: performance artistry of the most sensitive and refined kind, conceived for an appropriately sensitive and knowledgeable audience who could appreciate what they were hearing.  So we heard a selection of all-but-unknown repertoire, interpreted with superb musicianship but always proceeding outward from the poetry.  For the encore, Rhyne and Redlinger stepped well outside this repertoire: all the way to the 1530s, for a song by Claudin de Sermisy.  This, too, was stunning.

This is a stellar sort of music making that transforms this repertoire—usually limited to doctoral-exam fodder—to something glistening and vivid.  I find myself wishing that interpretations of this quality (and all Asteria’s live-performance intimacy survives, miraculously enough, on their recordings) could be required listening in undergraduate music history classes.  What the Burgundian art was about and from whom it was produced seem so clear and natural, upon the hearing of it, that the explanation can wait: it bewitches and compels without the necessity of the usual here’s-why-you-should-know-it justifications.  Asteria’s level of musicianship is stellar, the conception of this music profoundly informed, and the presentation an unmitigated joy.  Their music is available on magnatune.com, and the CDs readily available by order.

Really.  You DO deserve pleasure this intense.

Exercise no. 4: Dress badly and become a fascist

Phil Ford

I'm dressed badly today. (Worse than usual, I mean.) Everyone in my family except (mysteriously) me has the Swine Flu, so my schedule is off and I was running around this morning and just grabbed whatever in my closet came readily to hand. This is the result:

At one point I had to talk to Peter Burkholder about some department matter and apologized for dressing in a manner unbecoming to a musicologist. He told me that an old professor of his dressed in the coat-and-tie professorial style, but sometimes changed it up with Western wear. Students puzzled over this incongruity and had managed to assimilate it to their collective perceptual framework when the professor changed it up on them again and wore a suit and tie with cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat. 

I like that. It seems like the seed of another exercise:

1. Dress in the style you deem most "professional" for your work environment every day for a long enough period of time (days, weeks, months) for that style to become commonly associated with you. Believe that "clothes make the (wo)man" and style your persona accordingly. Become the person whose image you project. Be sincere.

2. Come to work dressed in a way you only ever do in front of your friends and family. Style your persona accordingly. Be sincere.

3. Come to work dressed in a way that combines aspects of no. 1 and no. 2. (Coat and tie with birkenstocks, for example.) Be sincere. What kind of person are you now?

I suppose the point of such an exercise is (as it is with all these exercises) to mess around with the neural pathways, to break habits and thereby to experiment with being a different sort of person.* What's interesting about this exercise is that it involves self-conscious manipulation of belief. As I've written in "Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica," the very idea of manipulating our own beliefs runs counter to a certain taken-for-granted notion we have about how our minds work. Something is either true or it isn't; we either believe something or we don't, right? Max Black, author of the classic philosophical essay "The Prevalence of Humbug," puts it this way:

How can one hide one’s own disbelief in an intended act of private deception? Is it not absurd to say to oneself, ‘I don’t believe such-and-such and yet I am going to believe it?’ One cannot be an authority for oneself, and nothing that I know that I disbelieve can be a reason for me to believe it. And how can I fail to know my own disbelief?

But as Black goes on to note, we do become our own authorities and hide our disbelief from ourselves. 

As you can probably tell, I've gotten really into these game-piece/event-score/ritual exercise whatchamathings lately. (I sense the possibility of writing something on the subject that covers this ground from a different angle than Liz Kotz, but it's still a bit vague in my mind. More later.) I've started trying to collect as many examples as I can. Daniel Wolf suggested that I check out a book from 1979 called Water in the Lake: Real Events for the Imagination, which is a whole anthology of such things. I ILL'd it and it's pretty neat. That book pointed me in the direction of an anthology of scores called Scores: An Anthology of New Music, edited by Roger Johnson. I suspect there are other such collections out there; any recommendations you might have would be welcome.

Moving away from the specifically aesthetic kind of exercise, I'm finding that there's a number of writers in a vaguely occult/psychological realm who write such things as well. I haven't read anything by Gurdjieff, but apparently he developed a whole repertory of exercises that his followers use. (In researching all this I've discovered that Robert Fripp is the follower of a Gurdjieff disciple named J. G. Bennett. Did Gurdjieff's exercises had any influence on Fripp's guitar craft workshops? I wonder whether Brian Eno's exercise-like "Oblique Strategies" fit into this in any way.) Robert Anton Wilson, known previously to me as a science fiction author, also wrote a number of impossible-to-classify books that fall somewhere in between neuroscience, psychology, occultism, memoir, and fiction, one of which I bought from our friendly local anarchist bookstore today. It's called Prometheus Rising and I've only just peeked at the contents, but it's jammed with exercises aimed specifically at working on our capacity to shift our beliefs at will (moving into different "reality tunnels," as Wilson puts it). Some of them are pretty extreme; I suspect you might go a little nuts if you really went all out on them. I'll leave you with one of the more modest** ones:

Become a Nazi for thirty three minutes. Believe that all politics is a matter of strength, stealth, and treachery: that all liberalism is hypocrisy or folly. Plan a campaign to take over the world by force and fraud.

*Or to test the limits of your employer's patience. This one works best for academia, where people expect you to act weird.  

**Modest in the sense of time and energy commitment: some of them are crazy instructions like "take a course on kung-fu or karate for at least three months, then re-read this whole chapter. You will be surprised at how much more every sentence will mean." Actually, that's pretty cool, but I'm still not going to do it.

The Triumph of the Will to Intuition. . .

Michael Morse 

A grimly grand example of political musicology (and musicianship): overhearing the profound connections between Wagner and Mendelssohn. Listening to Midsummer Night’s Dream, it should impossible to miss the resemblances to a score of Wagnerian scores, not only in the flickering textures of the opening (which become the “Forest Murmurs” in Siegfried) and the chorale‑like passages which set the stage for Tannhäuser, but more profoundly still in the movement from idea to idea. The art of infinite transition that Wagner rightly praised in himself was learned from Mendelssohn far more directly than from Beethoven or Weber. Is this art or conception of transition "Jewish" or "German"? It belongs to a German tradition of music, true enough—but further refinements along "racial" lines of what "German" means are not just ugly but plain wrong.

  The egregious self‑deception that Mendelssohn's music is substantively (i.e., racially) different from Wagner's does not make itself audible in performance, however. There is no easy way, and perhaps no way at all, to tell from performances of either composer who does or does not subscribe to this counter‑intuitive idiocy. But that is precisely because the connections are so close. The musical skills of a good Wagner performance and a good Mendelssohn performance are so intimately intertwined that the constitutive moments cannot be pulled apart. Those who pretend that they can are deluding themselves, listening to their own political attitudes and not music.

  (Next time: how differently gendered is Clara Schumann’s music from her husband’s, and her young North German friend’s?)

 

Some Unwarranted Aphorisms from the 90s

Michael Morse

Some aphorisms for general entertainment, written over the last decade or so:

• Praising Bob Dylan as a singer is like praising W.C. Fields as an actor.
• Jazz: music which arises from the address-to and spring-from the individual beat.
• Stan Kenton: the question is not whether it’s jazz, but whether it’s music.
• Post-Modernism’s relentless, frenzied indifference to the marvellous..
• Mozart’s instrumental music is often exquisitely refined, but without dignity; a disquieting coalition.
• Canada: the Not-So-Great Satan?
• LeRoi Jones praises the stance as a core and crucial value of American black music. What he misses is the art required to bring it off. From the playing the dozens to the bandstand at the Five Spot, the stance is a social gesture which rests on artistic craft. The relation between the stance (and social gesture generally) is elusive and complex, but this much, at least, can be said: when the stance as such subsumes craft, the stance itself is subverted, since it devolves into mere posturing.  (Difference between Miles Davis or Dizzie Gillespie and Elvis, Bob Dylan.)
• Tristan: Dionysian madness proffered with Apollonian calm; this score perhaps Nietzsche’s deepest inspiration.
• Wagner “bombastic”? Wrong word entirely. “Verbose” is meant.
• Adorno’s eloquent perorations against the perils of routinized sterility appeal  to artists because they so frequently combat this danger directly. That does not, however, make Adorno’s struggle theirs, nor should  it confer honorary artistic status on Adorno’s view. However consoling the temptation, it is a mistake to consider the polemicist the confrere of the creator. Being on the same side is not the same thing as doing the same thing.
• Debating who was the greatest musician who ever lived is a vain enterprise for two reasons, first because it’s a futile question. And second because it’s so plainly Joseph Haydn.
• Contemporary literature seems to require so much profanity that the ostensible rule must be “Damn and be published.”
• What did the composer of West Side Story learn from Prokofiev about the tragedy of Romeo & Juliet? That theirs is a tragedy of children, not adults. (Once this consideration is addressed, all the specious objections to Prokofiev’s purported lack of tragic sense disappear.)
• If Beckmesser’s serenade is supposed to sound Jewish – well, all I can say is that Wagner must have had absolutely no talent for ethnomusicology.
• A Schoenberg scherzo – now there’s a joke..  (A very great musician, but, like Coltrane, humour is not his long suit.)
• Believe me, I hear the passion in your playing, the drive, the dedication. I hear how fervently you wish you were Miles Davis. And I agree. I wish you were Miles Davis, too.
• Sociology is not a compassionate science, since, strictly speaking, that’s a contradiction in terms; properly understood however, it is the science of compassion.
• Who so little string quartet music from Stravinsky? Too expressive.
• Academics scornful of academia are one of the main reasons academia is so worthy of scorn.
• Don’t misunderstand, I do like John Taverner’s music – but for some reason, it always makes me thirsty.
• Feminism's usual cure for virtually any problem is an overdose of heroine.
• “This is not a good time to talk.” Perhaps to listen, then?
• Critical, “New” Musicology? Taking the use of deceptive cadences as proof of the composer’s dishonesty.
• “Head” and “heart” are adjectives.
• “If you don’t count on your fingers, how will you know for sure you’ve got the right answer?” (Country Music.)
• Ride of the Valkyries: wonderful. ridiculous. wonderfully ridiculous. ridiculously wonderful.
• Most music today seems to have not a groove, but a compulsion. The rhythmic animation is so far offstage that only an intense, highly nervous shadow is left.
• Prokofiev turns two best-known stories almost on their head. He treats the protagonists of Romeo and Juliet as what they really were, children. And he presents Cinderella’s dilemma for what it is, a grim, very much adult conflict.
• Puccini: not very-smo, just rather-smo..
• Glenn Gould’s Canada: a land of unassimilated cliches (loon cries, throat singing..)
• Diana Krall’s intense lack of intensity..
• Who doubts Vivaldi’s musicality – a surprisingly large cohort – should listen carefully to the (quite unsurpassable) sensitivity with which he balances forceful strings with delicate mandolin.
• Schoenberg said that, for elementary composers, creating an accompaniment by adding parts to a melody is too easy, while adding parts to a given bass line is too hard. In jazz, exactly the opposite is true.
• Given the ferocity of Boulez’s condescension towards Shostakovich and Prokofiev, he must be very grateful to folks like De Gaulle, Nixon, and John Foster Dulles – who saw to it that he wasn’t required to write Stalinist cantatas..
• Anhydrous postmodernism..
• WordPerfect’s proofreading guess for the proper spelling of “Wynton” [Marsalis]? Wanton. Out of the mouths of programs..
• To the war against nostalgia, Critical Theory brings weapons of mass destruction. To the struggle against intellectual sentimentality, it brings acidic self-pity; not, of course, to be confused with sentimentality, this, s’il vous plait.
• Don Ellis, the Glenn Gould of jazz: someone who [often] got to incredibly right by way of incredibly wrong.
• The long, hot Summa of Thomas Aquinas..
• Verdi and Ellington? Not so far apart; both feature tenor solos..
• Isn’t Brecht’s dichotomy of thought and feeling the same as Gene Roddenberry’s?
• Nobody’s just a straight-up jive motherfucker any more; no, no, at best (and at least), they’ve got “Jive Motherfucker Syndrome.” Where has liberalism disappeared to? Into the maw of psychiatric medicine, I’m afraid..
• What’s death like? But that’s easy: remember how you felt when Bush junior was elected? How you felt when Bush senior was elected? How you felt when George Washington was elected? (That last one’s what death is like.)
• When anyone expresses distaste for Gilbert and Sullivan, my immediate thought is: you do know they’re kidding, right?
• Aleister Crowley: patron saint of amateurs.
• The (quint)essence of academic feminism?: “The opening scene of Jaws promotes violence against women.” (Tears for the patri-sharky)
• We don’t expect our teachers to works miracles, plural, but only one: “Save my child–to hell with the rest–from the savage Social Darwinist order we've created!"
• If I had to guess–I don’t–I’d surmise that Vladimir Nabokov was not a musical person. Preserving the beauty of moving things in a static form is instinctively anathema to the musical, I should think.
• Rock & emotion: even the most tender ballad moments [go] thud, thud, thud..
• Marsalis, Wynton, 1960- ; American-born Critic, Arts Administrator, and Curator.
•   Social science begins when we understand that making the logic of a position more comprehensible does not constitute an advance in the direction of that position.
• Child prodigies: Austria-Hungary has Mozart; Ukraine has Prokofiev; the United States of America has Jon-Benet Ramsey..
• rien comprendre, c’est tout excuser..
• Gilbert Kaplan, the businessman who conducts Mahler: most people do harm in attempting to do right. Here’s a rare case of the contrary..
• No wonder deconstruction ended up in the vocabulary of legal scholars; for the first time in criticism, the deconstructed text has no right against self-incrimination..
• Describing the contemporary Chinese government as “Communist” is like calling Roy Bean a jurist.
• Much in common?: Ellington: a musician who can make “It’s Magic!” sound like Debussy; Claude Bolling: a musician who can make Debussy sound like “It’s Magic!”
• Every story has a moral, even the Bible verses. The Gospel according to Matthew, for example: nice guys finish last..
• “To a child with a hammer, everything looks like a nail” – doesn’t McLuhan’s philosophy come to this?
• “earn,” v.t., also v.i.; “to get away with”
• “It’s good, yes, yes; I know; but is it any good?”
• At Nuremberg, we hanged Julius Streicher for doing exactly what is making Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter rich..

Exercise no. 3

Phil Ford

I'm counting this (the walking soundscape meditation) and this (game piece no. 1 for seminar) as my first two exercises. I'm really liking this idea of creating ritual/game exercises and applying them to lived situations. I've made up a few this week and have been running them. 

So earlier this week I did a lecture on Harry Partch and spent a lot of time on his lecture "The Ancient Magic," which is published in Bitter Music. I was pointing out stuff about how Partch wanted musicians to get back to the "art magic" that has been lost in an age of scientific materialism. A telling quote:

The loss of values through the magic of science is at least lessened when we are aware of, and try to make contact with, simpler ancient sources. The miracle button, the airplane, the automobile, have all taken their toll. I have walked through a section of country with a pack on my back, preoccupied constantly with all manner of petty personal problems, yet now and then I was aware of the magic of small growing things, the magic of a running stream where I threw down my pack, the magic of a fire by its side.

The pianist who has never studied the tuning of his instrument, and learned to achieve it, has never experienced the parallel of a fire of twigs by a running stream. He is already removed from that value by the analogy of a faucet in a sink and a button on a stove, because the miracle of tonal relationships comes to him already piped. (Bitter Music 185)

This is all somewhat relevant to the point of my "exercises," which exist primarily to break perceptual and cognitive habit. When you break a habitual reflex you get a fresh encounter with something real.

So here's exercise no. 3:

Travel a well-worn path, like the route you take most often to go to work or to go home. It should be tiresomely familiar. The means of travel is fairly unimportant, though walking is easiest, since it's simpler to do this exercise if you're traveling slowly and can stop without holding up traffic. As always, pay attention to your physical safety while performing this exercise. (Don't walk out into traffic or drive into the oncoming lane!)  

Find some detail along your route that you've never paid conscious attention to before—something which, if you had to visualize the route, you would not have remembered. It can be as small or large as you like: a shrub, a wall, a streak of rust running down from a rivet on a mailbox. It can also be a previously unacknowledged aspect of something obvious—the way the sun hits a certain shopfront at a certain hour in the afternoon, for instance. For that matter, is can be a repeatable and predictable process, like the timing of a motion-detector light in relation to your movement past it. 

Look at your detail with open attention. Don't think about it, evaluate it, intellectualize it, etc., and be careful not to let extraneous thoughts intrude on your contemplation. (When a distracting thought comes, redirect your attention back to your detail in the same manner as in exercise no. 1.) Just let the detail register on your senses; and when you can visualize the detail with some accuracy, you have properly noticed it.

At various points throughout the day, take a moment to recollect your detail, and be careful to note the detail again next chance you get. It is now a part of your collection. Every day, add another item to your collection. The exercise is over when your route is no longer tiresome.

Bad habits and fortune cookies

Phil Ford

Here's another dumb developmental essay. I realized the other day that this is pretty much all I ever write anymore -- stuff about the place of education within broader issues of human development. This has given things a decidedly psychological tone, which is disturbing, since I am completely unqualified (and probably unfit) to tell anyone how to live his or her life. But what can I say, this stuff interests me. I write about my experiences, what is or has been important to me, and if should go without saying that your mileage may vary. Never take anything you read on a blog too seriously. 

Anyway, to continue a thread I started the other day . . . 

We think of bad habits as childish stuff, like putting our elbows on the table at dinner or failing to put the toilet seat down. But the more you think about it, the more you realize that you are really a tissue of bad habits, or at least a tissue of habits, many of them bad. We don't notice them usually unless someone is sweating us to stop them ("for the thousandth goddam time, put the toilet seat down!") or unless we are in a situation where our unconsidered and inconspicuous bad habits start messing with some particular thing we're trying to accomplish. As a rule, the bigger and more demanding the task, the more conspicuous our bad habits become.