Dial "M" for Musicology

Great moments in scholarly research

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

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

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.