Dial "M" for Musicology

All I Want For Chanuka

Jonathan Bellman

Ever heard of Geoff Smith and his “fluid piano”? Dig this article and video.  Now, forget all the experimenting-with-eastern-scales-a-genuinely-new-world-awaits claptrap.  That’s as may be; I’ll leave that to the—um—visionaries.  I’ve got my bona fides, after all; I published an article on Raga Rock once, so I’m, y’know, all cross-cultural and about breaking down barriers and like that.

Not!, but never mind.  What this instrument would be for me is the ideal workshop instrument for experimenting with unequal temperaments and the music of Chopin, which has been an ongoing research project of mine.  So forget (until later) the tuning hammer, the SAT III electronic measuring device, forget all of it.  Just me and Chopin and my ears and his music, and tuning slides that would enable me to change things as subtly as I can, almost instantly, to get his music into focus with what I conceive the exact right tuning to be.  My methodology has been, more than anything else, to tune the temperament to the music (if that makes any sense at all), and though I’ve published a short and very obscure piece on the subject I’ve yet to write it up in more readily available form.  Some of the effects are truly astounding, though.

I don’t, frankly, see the fluid piano as a concert instrument, at least as a classical concert instrument; I can’t tell but I don’t think it has 88 (or even 85) keys, and that lets it out for much of the Romantic repertoire, really.  I don’t know what one of these things would cost, but I’d sure love one. 

Let me finish with the incomparable chutzpah of quoting Wagner: “But will such a prince be found?”

Wishing everyone a happy Thanksgiving!

Where Angels Fear to Tread

Jonathan Bellman

In several different blog posts I have chronicled the Mendelssohn/Moscheles reconstruction project, in which a collaboration with my friend Michael Cooper went from incomplete rediscovered but incomplete score to reconstruction to live premiere.  (This one links all the others.)  Previous to that my only involvement in such a reconstruction had been as the guy who (first, I think) played my friend Jeffrey Kallberg’s reconstruction of the early Chopin E-Flat Minor Prelude (not the one that eventually became part of Op. 28), and offering an opinion on the identity of one note thereof.  Now, Prof. Kallberg has drawn my attention to an ongoing project involving an incomplete Fourth Piano Sonata by Robert Schumann, and of course there is the Unheard Beethoven site, which has MIDI realizations of a variety of Beethoven fragments, sketches, incomplete works, etc. 

What is the attraction of such projects?  I can assure that it is not the stupid “undiscovered masterpiece” cliché, trotted out so often when a new fragment is discovered.  The recent Mozart violin fragment is one such case, though to the BBC’s credit such a claim was not made in this linked article (though other articles on the subject did not show the same restraint).  Undiscovered masterworks are extremely rare; even Prof. Jay Rosenblatt’s discovery and reconstruction of Liszt’s “other” E-Flat piano concerto in the 1980s brought to light a piece that Liszt himself had decided not to revise and thus discarded.  No, it is really something closer to the completist’s impulse, the almost obsessive desire to harvest everything from a lost sound world, not just the pieces that the composer, his publishers, and serendipity have managed to pass down to us.  In such cases, what is compelling is why—perhaps—the composer decided not to complete the work.  Was it that no one was paying, or was it that the work really did not pass muster?  The germ might have been good idea, as in the case of the Chopin prelude, but the composer may later have had one he liked better.  Was it an occasional piece, something composed for a particular event but for which the composer foresaw no longer future?  That would be the Mendelssohn/Moscheles, at least as far as Mendelssohn was concerned.  Or, as in many other cases, the composer’s circumstances may just have led him elsewhere, or prematurely offstage, so much remained undone.  For the student of musical language and compositional practice, the stone that the builders rejected may not have become the cornerstone, exactly, but it can be highly instructive.  The internet now makes such things available to everyone.

I have not yet spend any time with the Schumann site; all I can say is that the name Frederick Moyer (who collaborates on this project with Paul E. Green, Jr.) is familiar to me because he recently played a concert at Mt. San Antonio Gardens, the facility where my father was being treated and where my mother now lives.  From his website, I gather he’s doing musical life that other way, the way where the artist is responsible for all his own bookings, is involved with a variety of interesting projects as a kind of metamultitasker, and does not rely on a day job.  Bravo! and Corraggio! to Moyer and Green both, and I look forward to this work on what Schumann eventually did not manage to finish.  More and more work on the aesthetic of the sketch is beginning to be done, and (as I say) the internet now gives us the tools to make available much music that never fully made it out of the Realm Of Becoming.  

the aesthetics of politics, part XXVIII

Phil Ford

Deepest respect and gratitude to Jonathan for the beautiful memorials he posted to his father. Deep bows of regard to Samuel Irving Bellman, whom we did not know, but whom we would have liked to. 

A random cranky political observation (did you miss those?): I've been following the Henry L. Gates imbroglio in a very vague way, mostly by reading Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog, which is almost the only political blog I still read. (Also: Dave Chappelle.) So I don't know all the angles. I feel I ought to, since this seems like a good academic-blog post topic, but there it is. But the unpleasant experience of seeing cable-news hamsters trotting out the old it-would-be-the-same-if-it-were-a-white-guy, you're-just-playing-the-race-card lines, has recalled to my mind something James Baldwin wrote in his essay on Norman Mailer: "the really ghastly thing thing about trying to convey to a white man the reality of Negro experience has nothing whatever to do with the fact of color, but has to do with this man's relationship to his own life. He will face in your life only what he is willing to face in his." Being an anglo Canadian I don't have anything to say about what it's like "trying to convey to a white man the reality of Negro experience." But I do have experience being a white man, and I say Baldwin got it right. There is this reluctance in some quarters (including, at a certain point, in myself) to admit that other people's experience might be different from your own, not for reasons of individual and contingent experience, but for impersonal systemic reasons. Especially if that system is racism, which would imply that we have something we might feel bad about. God forbid anyone should harsh our mellow. 

I'm a big fan of James Kochalka, so this might be a good time to post the video for his song "Don't Trust Whitey." 

I love Kochalka as the embodiment of whiteness, dressed up in a 18th-century perruque and knee breeches, running around stealing a kid's tricycle and grabbing fistfuls of a stranger's dinner. There is just the right degree of irony in the line "don't trust whitey/he lies and he lies and he lies/I'm not whitey/this is just a disguise." This is often sort of there in the background when white people write about race; there's this half-buried hope that you can disavow white privilege just by saying you have. I've gotten interested in whiteness as a concept (Richard Dyers's White is a must-read), and there's a lot more to be said about it all -- but then I would be doing that white thing of always wanting to put whiteness back in the picture. There I was, starting in on Henry Louis Gates and now I'm just talking about being white. The usual thing, I'm afraid. Dyer is remarkably good at avoiding the obvious pitfalls.

Anyway, on another topic, I have a couple of new articles out. Actually, one is not so new anymore, but I have unaccountably not mentioned it. It came out when I was sick back in December/January, so I guess it slipped my mind. It's in Jazz Perspectives, which is for my money the best and most necessary new journal in music academia, and it's called "Hip Sensibility in an Age of Mass Counterculture." Download it. Back when it first came out, Michael Kramer, a historian at Northwestern who deals with American rock culture and is a generally awesome guy, wrote a great blog post about something about "radical parallelism" that I had written. Michael wrote one of the most perceptive things anyone has ever said about my stuff. I'll quote lavishly, so you have something meaty to read (god knows I haven't given you much lately): 

. . . making politics the causal factor has been one of the markers of radical parallelism. The more unlikely the linkage, the more scholarly chips one acquires in placing the bet. “My little corner of specialized cultural scholarship matters,” this approach proclaims, “because it reveals the operations of a larger political power guiding everything.” This perspective has been important for overcoming antiquarianism (though one might argue that something was lost when we started to insist that everything had to be politically relevant or was pointless to study). It was also crucial for previously marginalized topics: legitimizing their political importance was a way of staking a claim for the study of women, the poor, and others who used to get left outside the old-fashioned historical record of great (usually white and typically elite) men. 

But now that antiquarianism is a bad word in academia, and since previously marginalized topics have increasingly moved to the center of scholarly focus, the problems of privileging the political have become more apparent. In particular, the more narrowly-defined idea of the political tends to monopolize the more elastic and curiously multivalent cultural domain. 

I think what Ford’s post hints at, in some fashion, is a de-privileging of the political. What if we flipped it? What if the political was subsumed in larger cultural forces? Culture, in both the abstract, anthropological sense of beliefs and the material, artistic sense of artifacts, is so dense — so able to contain tensions, incoherencies, conflicting tendencies — that it might be the better realm to privilege. Making culture the dominant track rather than politics might take pressure of the reduction of epochs to one dominating element. Maybe cultural containment shaped political policy during the Cold War? 

Or maybe an infinite loop develops between culture and politics, so that we need new terms, particular to their specific contexts, that identify more fragile, tentative, overlapping tendencies rather than one coherent, all-powerful logic? Can we re-purpose the liberating but clunky tools of social theory for subtler interpretive projects?

Worth saying again: "What if we flipped it? What if the political was subsumed in larger cultural forces?" This is exactly what my whole thing is about. It may not be your thing, but it is my thing. The goal of pop music scholarship has almost always been to find a political understanding of the aesthetic: my goal is to find an aesthetic understanding of politics. I particularly like Michael's notion of the "infinite loop between culture and politics." Which brings me to the other article I've published, this one just out in the Journal of Musicology: Music at the Edge of the Construct. It's maybe the closest I've come to really twisting those strands of politics and representation into a loop, or maybe a Möbius strip. It's part of JM's double issue on the Cold War. I haven't yet sat down to read most of the other articles, but still it's clear this publication is gonna put y'all on notice and bring Cold War studies into musicology with a sharp call to order. We've long needed some sort of between-two-covers survey of current musical work in the Cold War studies field, and now we have it. It should go without saying that there are many more excellent music scholars working on the Cold War, including musicoloblogger Phil Gentry, so interested parties are encouraged to dig deeper and find out what's out there. (For a start, here's the AMS Cold War interest group member list.) Peter Schmelz's introduction and Richard Taruskin's afterword are particularly worth reading, the former as a fine overview of the conceptual and methodological problems of coupling politics and music, the latter a powerful critique of the perennial (and typically Cold War) desire to uncouple them. 

Song as Genome?

Jonathan Bellman

A videorecording of a very interesting presentation, perhaps fifteen to twenty minutes, is to be found here.  Dutch evolutionary biologist —now working in England at Imperial University, London—Armand Le Roi discusses how he met Brian Eno at a party, and was talking to him about the music history of ancient peoples, far back in our evolution, and whether or not it would be possible to resurrect any of this.  Eno set him on Alan Lomax’s data and quantifications of many, many songs, since Lomax believed that songs were quantifiable; he had had a million-dollar research grant, had sought unsuccessfully to crunch the data, and so on.  So Prof. Le Roi went and got this data, and refined his crunching techniques, and hey presto! is now of the opinion that song- or melos-resemblances can be a key to not only geographical migrations but really our human history in song.  Of course, this hasty paragraph does not do his presentation justice; I urge you, dear reader, to click on the link and hear his presentation yourself.  Listen all the way to the end.

*            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *            *

That said—one notes a couple of familiar tropes in Prof. Le Roi’s presentation.  The first is the Bad Young Genius Scientific Polymath: evolutionary bio, music, ancient history, and oh he must have mastered it all, and he’s so brilliant and hot and hip he can dress like—well—a homeless person and if you’re so uncool as to notice that a grey T-Shirt and jeans may not be the most appropriate dress in which to present research near and dear to your heart, research about which you would like to persuade your audience, then that says something about you.  (My folks stressed dressing in a way that at least shows respect, so to my eye: should Le Roi’s ensemble have been accessorized, the most natural addition would have been some vomit on the front of the shirt.)  Then there’s the self-righteous, anti-musicology maverick trope, one of the most tired: of Lomax’s data, Le Roi proclaims, “You might have expected it to have revolutionized musicology, but it didn’t.  Musicologists hate it.  I think it’s because musicologists don’t understand numbers!”

Well, maybe we don’t—every last one of us.  I certainly don’t, as my wife and son (him of the A in calculus as a young high school junior) will happily tell you.  I like to think I understand music, however, and one of my most sensitive allergies is to people who think they understand music way they (apparently) understanding everything else, and who then consider themselves entitled to speak confidently about those silly head-in-the-sand musicologists and what we’re obviously missing.  Purveyors of this kind of nonsense, who can be extremely bright people, nonetheless evidence astoundingly fragile egos regarding trained musicians and especially musicologists, as if we’re somehow so much more intimidating than other specialists.  Let me be clear: I  certainly don’t think we are, or have any right to be, or consider ourselves to be so, but I am sick to death of being treated as a bête noire by people who have some undefined, nonspecific, probably wholly imaginary grudge/inferiority complex about musicology. 

Le Roi’s concept, as oversimplified in his presentation, is that similarities in the songs of peoples across the world amount to, essentially, an aural trail of breadcrumbs that traces not only the migrations of language and cultural groups but also preserves cultural practice long effaced from human record and memory.  To me, the presentation is attractive and lively and sets the imagination alight: I myself am extremely vulnerable to the promise of recovering sounds long-forgotten, as I have blogged before.  So the task of doing musically what evolutionary biologists have done with mitochondrial DNA and philologists have done with language, over the last couple of centuries, is particularly alluring to me.  The problem is that past a certain specious suggestiveness, a variety of key points about the presentation ring false.  After trashing musicologists’ numeracy, Le Roi himself doesn’t go to a lot of trouble to actually explain how the data work.  He talks about how much computer space the data take, and some of Lomax’s general parameters (wide vs. narrow intervals, rhythms and so on, but is not more specific than that).  He puts up some very pretty graphics of migrations and song-types groupings and so on.  Does Lomax specify actual intervals, or specific rhythms, or just generalized categories?  We never know, and we are certainly not introduced to any critiques of these categories, as must certainly have originated in the ethnomusicological community.  (Perhaps by musicologists he means ethnomusicologists.  We’ll never know.)

Then, the proof: some recordings.  Yes, his time is clearly limited (AMS papers get more time), and he has a complex argument to make.  Still, it is skating on rather thin ice to play Zulu, then Swazi music, with its call-and-response antiphony, then to observe that it is entirely characteristic of sub-Saharan Africa (maybe it is; I can’t say), then to it with the Bantu migration of twenty-five hundred or so years ago, and then to play a call-and-response worksong (“Rosie”) by African-American workers on a chain gang in the 1950s as final proof.  There you have it!  The red thread connecting the Bantu descendants throughout myriad histories and lands!

Or not.  Call-and-and response forms are found the world over: the psalmody of the Roman Church, the “lining out” practices of early Anglo-American hymnody, etc.  Is that African, or is it simply practical: I sing a line and you then learn it and repeat it, or I sing a line and you answer because I’m the leader?  One does not necessarily need a complex migratory theory to explain this.  Furthermore, anyone with a modicum of listening experience would be far less confident of “obvious” similarities than Le Roi is.  I remember taking a Romanesque Art course at UCSB with the scholar Larry Ayers.  When a student rather cluelessly blurted out that something on the screen reminded her of eighth-century Japanese art, Ayers lost it: “This is what I hate about interdisciplinary studies!  People don’t know anything about either discipline!  The lines in the two styles are entirely dissimilar!”  A sage warning taken to heart by this music major: know your s--- before you start popping off about how X is “obviously” like Y.  It is far too easy to posit causal relationships when it is not safe to do so. 

A later example involves moaning solo chants by old guys, one an Inuit on an ice floe and one an Indian from somewhere in, if I recall, South America.  So, of course, the Asian migration is the explanation.  In probably every culture, though, we can find old men chanting, whether it’s the American Indians who sing the world into being every morning, the Jews who intone prayers and readings, Hawaiians telling their old lore, or anyone else.  Besides being old guys chanting, I don’t hear all that much similarity.  Out of charity, I won’t belabor his playing of a lovely Scandinavian lullaby, pointing out its resemblance to what we usually associate with Celtic music (maybe or maybe not; real Celtic music is something very different from Celtic pop product), and then saying—I kid you not—“This is what Celtic music is really about.”  Another excerpt: “I don’t know what this sounds like to you, but to me it’s pure Bollywood.  But it isn’t; it’s a Macedonian Gypsy song.”  Ergo…?  So the “argument” runs: A sounds like B, therefore there is a causal relationship.

I hope there is more to this research than meets my ear.  The theory is (to me, at least), of siren-like beauty: imagine having the tools to recover the lost song styles of humanity and protohumanity!  To listen again to the melos of the distant past!  Problem is, the musical conclusions as presented are amateurish in the extreme.  Either that or I’m too hide-bound and unimaginative, just like all those musicologists, to get it. 

I don’t think so, though.  But please, make up your own minds.  I at least applaud the sheer out-of-the-boxness of this kind of project, but I wish there was more musical expertise evident in the musical study about which musical conclusions are drawn.  It is hard to feel all that bad about my undeniable innumeracy, though, because at least I shy away from lecturing mathematicians about their ignorance.

Great moments in scholarly research

Phil Ford

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

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

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

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

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

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

*stolen from Martin Amis, The Information

The "900-year-old" Anglican sacred-music tradition in Australia

Ralph Locke

In an earlier post, I asked why we music scholars study what we do.

I just noticed on a blog I've referred to previously, "From beyond the Stave," a new post by Suzanne Cole in which she explains how she ended up so fascinated with exploring the revival of the music of Thomas Tallis in nineteenth-century England.

As Cole explains, she was a student at Melbourne University in the early 1980s, and, despite a strong gender bias within the Anglican tradition, became an accepted participant in its musical practices.

"Although I was actually enrolled in a science degree, I also took organ lessons with Revd. Paul Harvie, an eccentric, infuriating, but inspiring Anglo-Catholic priest of the very ‘highest’ kind. After a couple of years, in the absence of suitable male candidates, Paul made me his assistant organist at the parish of Christ Church, Brunswick, and began, somewhat grudgingly (he was not known for his enlightened views on women), to initiate me into the mysteries of what he referred to on recruiting flyers for choir boys as the ‘900 year tradition’. There is much that could be criticised about Paul’s methods – I was occasionally allowed to sing with the choir, but never to robe or process, and was always referred to as an ‘honorary gentlemen’, and he was famous for flying into a rage if foolish parents allowed their child to make any noise in church. But his quixotic commitment to maintaining the English Cathedral tradition in a parish church in a working-class suburb of Melbourne was both inspiring and intriguing."

Cole gradually learned that the tradition that she had been taught to uphold in 1980s Australia owed more to early 19th-century England than to practices of centuries earlier.  She tells the story in her new book, Thomas Tallis and His Music in Victorian England.

Quad guitar

Phil Ford

One of the students in my graduate seminar did a research paper on 1980s hair metal, which is a pretty cool topic, but which is not the point of this post, except insofar as it gives me an excuse to post this clip of Michael Angelo Batio playing the "quad guitar":

Ha, you missed one.

Anyway, my student said at one point that the challenge for her was going to be resisting the temptation to shoehorn a lot of quirky, funny, interesting-in-themselves details into an argument to which they were irrelevant. I know the feeling. Research (especially archival research) leads you to all kinds of odd little finds, small details that fill out your picture of the general subject you're researching and are really neat in themselves but which, let's face it, don't quite fit in the thing you're writing. One is always tempted to abuse writerly principles of economy and coherence and find some way to use them anyway. One is not always successful at resisting the temptation. And by "one" I mean "me." I'm pretty good at connecting distantly related points anyway, so I can usually gin up some semi-sorta-plausible rationale for stuffing one more amusing quote or peculiar historical detail into an argument. The thing is, you can always throw a couple of things that like into an article without hurting its structure too much, but past a certain point you run the risk of letting the details overwhelm the whole, of submerging the hard clean outlines of your conceptual structure in garlands of arabesque. And then you might find yourself playing the metaphorical quad guitar, captivated by the bright shiny gimmick but losing sight of the rock. (See what I did there, connecting the distantly related points?)

When I write, much of my revision process involves cutting back on the things I like but don't really need. But it hurts, HURTS, to leave those little gems on the cutting-room floor. I was looking through one of my morgue files this morning and found this little thing, a letter to the editor of Good Times (formerly the Express Times), a Bay area "undeground" (i.e., hippie) newspaper from the late 1960s. Some background: I had found (in the Hoover Institution archive of New Left/counterculture materials) an article by Greil Marcus that I'm using in my upcoming exotica article.* Marcus wrote it when he was quite young, either in or recently out of graduate school, and I've never seen it reprinted anywhere else, although it's an interesting piece and adumbrates some of the notions he would develop in The Old Weird America. But anyway, I also found a letter to the editor about it (titled "Intellectual Bullshit") in the next issue:

I really dig your paper, especially the good guy/bad guy slant, BUT please don’t print any more of that intellectual bullshit by what’s his name. You’re supposed to be hip, right? Well, just take the first sentence: "When we return to America remember there was no real innocence after Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Endicott, the severest of Puritans destroyed Hawthorne’s Merry Mount, erasing the orgies and childish bachanale in favor of a darker religion." Now what the fuck does all that mean? Can you tell me—in English? I mean, I know you can’t since this is a letter, but don’t print any more college papers. What did he get on it, anyway—a B-plus?” Joe Usetit, letter to the editors, Good Times 2, no. 14 (April 9 1969), 12.

Given that "Joe Usetit" looks like a pseudonym, I can't discount the possibility that Marcus wrote this letter himself, but assuming it's not a prank, this is actually quite an interesting letter -- not so much the letter itself as what it says about the incongruous appearance of Marcus's writing in a grubby obscure underground paper, and, more generally, the uneasy place of intellectualism in the 1960s counterculture.** It's not that intellectuals had no place in underground newspapers, rock mags, etc.; it's that the job of the "intellectual" had been redefined while leaving its fundamental identity in place.*** (And as this happened it created new difficulties and opportunities for intellectuals like Marcus.) But really, that's not what my article is about, and exiling the whole thing to an endnote is really no solution, because then what's the note doing there? You sometimes see articles by academics where the average page has about ten lines of above-the-line main text and two-thirds of the page is taken up by kitchen-sink footnotes. It's usually a bad sign when your writing starts to look like that. So that letter from "Joe Usetit" got expunged, though I at least have the consolation of being able to put it up on my blog.

*Greil Marcus, “American Classical Music,” San Francisco Express Times 2, no. 12 (25 March 1969), 5.

**All due apologies for using such a blunt and inadequate term for such a complicated and multifaceted entity, but you have to call it something, and anyway you know what I mean when I say "counterculture," right? Close enough for rock and roll, as they say, or at least for a blog.

***It's probably worth quoting Stuart Hampshire's definition of the intellectual again:

First, an intellectual is someone who takes it for granted that a strenuously developed and articulate intelligence constitutes a claim to be recognized, and an independent status in society, even apart from any solid achievements in science or scholarship or literature. . . Second, an intellectual is someone who refuses to be confined to one specialized, or professional, application of his power; he will be ready to inquire into almost anything that is formulated in sufficiently strict intellectual terms, and will find delight in the process of inquiry, quite independently of the results. . . . Third, an intellectual is someone who never lowers his voice in piety, and who is not prepared to be solemn and restrained, in deference to anything other than the internal standards of the intellect and the imagination.