Dial "M" for Musicology

Guidance, or Not

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

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:

Bad habits and fortune cookies

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. 

On Ignorance

The other day my daughter asked me what "ignorant" means. It's one of those words which is itself an abstraction, surprisingly hard to define in concrete terms, although we know the concrete manifestations the instant we see them. I guess the obvious thing to do is to compare it to stupidity: stupidity is about poor mental functioning, the relative inability to put knowledge to good use, while ignorance is simply the absence of knowledge. So from that point of view, it's worse to be stupid. A stupid person will stay stupid, while an ignorant person can go read a book or something (I'm thinking of the ugly-drunk perplex of the famous Winston Churchill story). But then again, Frank Zappa once said that while stupidity has a certain charm, ignorance does not. Stupidity is blameless, while ignorance carries some responsibility. Or another way of putting it: ignorance is a willed state. And ignorance can be very intelligent, in its way. 

I forget what I said to Alice in answer to her question, but I've come to think of ignorance as the business of recasting the world as self. Think of it this way: there's you, and there's everything that's not-you, and there's a whole lot more of the latter than the former. But the self wants to convert everything that is not-self into self; it would fill the universe with itself if it could, and so it does the next best thing, recasting the world in its own terms, seeing itself reflected in everything it encounters. 

Happy new year

You know how different people have different new years days? Like Chinese New Year is a few weeks after the ball drops in Times square? Academics have their own New Years Day -- it's the first day of fall classes. It's different for everyone, but at IU, New Years is today. 

I teach two classes today, a total of 4 1/2 hours in the classroom -- kind of a brutal Monday but basically welcome, since it frees up another day later in the week that I can spend a bit more time working on the current chapter of my book. Anyway, in lieu of anything more substantial, I'm posting the syllabus course description of my doctoral methods seminar, "Current Readings in Cultural Studies." I like doing long, ruminative, blog-post-like course descriptions in my syllabi. A course is a course, of course, of course, but it also represents the unfolding of an idea -- an idea of a topic, an idea for something you can offer that the students might find useful, an idea of how to take a given topic and frame it in some interesting way. In this case, I wanted to create a current-readings course that would give our doctoral students some practice in the border-language of the present-day interdisciplinary humanities, the creole of notions derived from (at times quite distantly) the "hard theory" days of the 1980s and 1990s. One idea that motivated this course is the odd situation of cultural-studies scholars working at this particular historical moment, living after the rampage and ruin of the Bush years and still very much in their shadow, working in a conceptual domain whose best and formative years now feel rather distant, and unsure how to proceed. In some quarters there is a feeling that we are living in a "post-theoretical" age. I'm not sure how much of this mood has seeped into musicology, but even a few years ago when I was working at Stanford it was pretty noticeable across the humanities. A friend of mine, a formidable cultural theorist in the art history dept., told me he found himself defending his syllabi from students who regard the classic theoretical texts he assigned as just another imposition of passé academic dogma. And my friend ended up using the same “you have to walk before you can run” arguments on his students that an earlier generation of teachers used to warn their students away from theory.

So what's going on in journals like Representations and Critical Inquiry these days? I actually think there's a lot of pretty funky stuff going on these days. Uncertainly and free-wheeling eclecticism can be a pretty productive state. Anyway, that's what my course is about. Here's what I wrote in my syllabus:

The mood of the academic humanities is always one of crisis, but the present mood of crisis has its own particular coloration, a tinge of mingled disappointment and indecision. We are not so many years away from the gilded age of the late 1990s, whose economic optimism and reckless plunging investment in barely-understood technology stock was strangely mirrored in the speculative bubble of postmodern cultural theory. The euphoria of the age was marked by a collective sense of living at the brink of a whole new mode of economic production, and it found its echo in cultural theory’s claim to have begun a new mode of scholarship, perhaps even a new mode of consciousness and communication. 

Well, that sure didn’t happen. We have settled into a post-euphoric age, where claims so confidently made a decade ago ring hollow. In the humanities, there is an anxiety that theory has not brought the gains we thought it might, that the paths we followed have led nowhere, and that, in the absence of theory, we have nowhere to else to go. Current scholarship speaks in the canonical idioms of cultural theory and is shaped by theory’s characteristic problematics of race, class, gender, and sexuality, even as the “hard theory” orientation of the 1990s has given way to an uneasy pluralism. 

So this while this course has something of the unexciting aspect of a salad bar—it is a general survey of interdisciplinary music-related scholarship published within the last eight years—it does nevertheless have a point. Our goal is to investigate what interdisciplinary scholarship looks like now, which means how it looks at a historical moment where old and hardened positions have softened but the new ones have yet to shape up. This in turn means thinking about disciplinarity and language. If we begin by asking how music fits into the wider culture, we will soon start asking where musicology fits into cultural studies; if we question what we write about, we will soon start questioning how we write about it.

The very first class I ever took as a graduate student in musicology was a version of this course that James Hepokoski did in the fall of 1993 -- a long time ago, at the beginning of the disciplinary realignment that the New Musicology precipitated, and it was a "hard theory" class indeed. This book was one of the main texts, and even looking at the cover at Amazon still gives me pain. My god, that was a rough introduction to academia. On any given page I was given to read, half the words were words I didn't know and the other half were familiar words being used to means things I could only guess at. I hated, absolutely hated, the whole cult-studs enterprise, which (insofar as I could understand it) seemed to be some kind of empty mockery of everything I actually liked. One of life's more enjoyable ironies is to see how some of your most passionately-held convictions will eventually turn inside-out. 

The Come-To-Jesus Talk

It's just a little more than week away from the beginning of classes here at IU, and moving vans are disgorging futons and M.C. Escher posters everywhere in the streets of my neighborhood, out-of-towners are driving the wrong way down one-way-streets, and new graduate students are getting braced up for the exciting, arduous course of study they'll be engaged in for the next few years. You've arrived! Congratulations. And for those for whom graduate school (or at least post-graduate life of some sort) is a small fluffy cloud way off on the horizon, it's too early to think about grad school applications for next year. But it's not too early to start worrying about the major life decision that those applications represent. Should I go to graduate school?* It's time for the Come-To-Jesus talk.** 

Please understand that I don't know you, so nothing I'm going to say should be taken personally. You might be America's Next Top Musicologist for all I know. It doesn't matter. I give the Come-To-Jesus talk to everyone, because some in the biz are like those salmon you see jumping up waterfalls on nature shows, blindly seeking only to reproduce themselves. We all have an interest in putting behinds in seminar chairs, and it's easy to lose sight of where our grad students are going once we're done with them. I think we owe it to prospective graduate students to be blunt with them about the enterprise for which they might choose to consecrate their time, money, energy, youth, health, and happiness. 

OK, so here's the quick answer to Should I go to graduate school?, which I'm cribbing off of the Credo of Leonard Bernstein's Mass. Possibly yes, probably no. 

I am by no means the first person to say this. Read this.

Still here?

Against Familiar Thinking, However Correct

Recent weeks have seen two recent righteous testimonials that immediately went internet platinum, at least in my circles.  One was the welcoming address by Karl Paulnack, pianist and director of the music division at Boston Conservatory, to the entering first-years.  Of course, the musician’s chest swells to read it; it hits all the familiar points, including parental concern about the choice of music as a vocation, the ancient Greeks’ understanding of the power of music, Why We Do This, Greater Truths, and virtually everything else.  We all love clarion calls of this kind, we all shed a tear or two, and we all feel renewed.  At my most jaded, even I cannot argue with the likes of this:

“You’re not here to become an entertainer, and you don’t have to sell yourself. The truth is you don’t have anything to sell; being a musician isn’t about dispensing a product, like selling used Chevies. […] Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet.”

Yes, indeed.  Art ennobles, you will make both your life and others’ lives more worth living, you’ll be studying the greatest artworks wrought by the greatest creative minds in history.  As William Billings put it, “Onward, ever onward, ye sons of harmony!”

There is also the Why the Humanities? article from the February 25 New York Times.  This one is equally familiar: in the old days, universities didn’t have to justify teaching the humanities, because education is timeless and the humanities teach you how to live.  A job is just a job, but…  But then again, in Times Like These (a mantra whether it’s boom or bust, Wall-Street-Shark-Feeding-Frenzy or Depression) it’s never good for the Humanities.  Wise up, young man, it isn’t the old days, today  you need to have a skill.  Young lady, do you think someone’s going to take care of you for the rest of your life?  Can’t depend on that anymore.  So the universities have to justify the humanities, using ever more Jesuitical logic-chopping (OK, no offense: “Talmudic hairsplitting,” if you prefer), to try to make the humanities marketable, practical, worth…well, Dad’s money, almost all of which he just lost.  Good luck with that. 

Let me suggest, heretically, that these approaches, however well intentioned or justified or even righteous, will no longer do.  Overplayed to the point of irrelevance, these tropes are as thematically familiar as Coming Of Age or Boy Meets Girl.  So here’s the predictable quotation from that article:

“In the last three months at least two dozen colleges have canceled or postponed faculty searches in religion and philosophy, according to a job postings page on Wikihost.org. The Modern Language Association’s end-of-the-year job listings in English, literature and foreign languages dropped 21 percent for 2008-09 from the previous year, the biggest decline in 34 years.

“’Although people in humanities have always lamented the state of the field, they have never felt quite as much of a panic that their field is becoming irrelevant,’ said Andrew Delbanco, the director of American studies at Columbia University.”

Do we really have nothing more to bring to the table than this?  It Is So Worthwhile—which I accept and endorse—and Watch Out Times Are Rough—which I also endorse, though never followed?

It is to Albert Einstein that the thought is usually attributed that insanity may be defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.  What about saying the same thing over and over?  Or asking the same questions over and over, and expecting people to pause, stroke their beards or purse their lips thoughtfully, and say “You know, that person sure has given me a lot to think about…”?

Bullshit.

We repeat this kind of stuff because we can’t seem to think anything new.  This may be wrong, but I’m going to try because I very easily lose patience with stuff I agree with.  Write this down, young’uns:

Times for musicians are never good.  In indefinable ways, musicians have a huge advantage over the rest of humanity: we work well independently, we take responsibility for ourselves, we have learned to defer gratification because learning anything of value takes a long time, and we usually do understand What It Takes.  If we believe in it, so much the better: if we’re engaged, we have diehardism, the sacred fire, like no one else on earth.  So here is the One Rule:

There Are No Rules. 

Sorry, folks.  Statistics are not relevant in our field.  There are, purely and simply, too many variables for even discouraging statistics to have any validity.  Few jobs; few gigs.  Yeah, but what’s different about each person?  An interest in rock, in Gilbert and Sullivan, an ability to improvise, to double on another instrument, an understanding of another musical culture?  Intangibles count for a great deal.  Yes, brute ability counts for a lot, but for any gig there are, unavoidably, numerous qualities that cannot be adequately described that will help you get the gig.  You know all that stuff you maintained a secret interest in when you were supposed to be doing something else—practicing responsibly or whatever?  That’s the stuff.  It may be your fiftieth application, but it’s that.

Or, if you think there’s something else you could do and the odds look too unfavorable, do the wise thing—the other thing.  If you’ll never forgive yourself for not having tried this, well, damn the torpedoes. 

Nothing new there—musicians have known all of this since the beginning of time.  But there’s nothing new in golly-times-is-sure-tough, and (frankly) not in you-can-save-the-world either. 

New thoughts, anyone?

You say "professorial" like it's a bad thing

One of the great perennial academic-blogging topics is the effect that student evaluations have on their professors. It's worth noting that the practice of mandatory, anonymous student evals for every course is a post-1960s phenomenon, and it seems to me that one of its effects has been to kill off a certain kind of professorial persona -- the Prussian-officer type, harsh, judging, and peremptory, the kind of professor who brooks no opposition and whom students hate and fear. No professor who has come up the ranks in the age of student evals can afford to maintain this kind of posture. Professors who are mindful of student evaluations have learned to reconcile their professional sense of standards with a more informal, empathetic, feel-your-pain kind of teaching and to invent new classroom personas and strategies. Which brings me to Friday's presidential debate.   

I talked to my Mom, who lives in Canada, and found that she had been as tense about the debate as we were. People around the world are following the presidential election with bated breath, and most of them, it seems, are rooting for Obama. Sarah Silverman says Obama is "probably our last hope of ending this country's reputation as assholes of the universe," which is certainly how my Mom sees it, but she was worried that McCain came off better in the debate -- tougher, more forceful, landing more punches. But as the post-debate polling has made clear, it was exactly because of this that McCain came off worse to American voters. A lot of pundits have noticed that something seems to be working for Democrats in 2008 that baffled and exasperated them in 2000. Back then, all the pundits and political professionals agreed that Gore "won" by nailing Bush on the issues again and again, but Gore actually lost with the voters because he kept sighing and rolling his eyes when Bush responded. This seemed an incredibly superficial reason to prefer one candidate over the other, but as media analysts from McLuhan on down have pointed out, potential voters pay less attention to the message than the medium -- the way things are said, rather than what things are said. People personalize performative gestures:

Mr. Bush’s biggest boost among married mothers might have come unwittingly from Mr. Gore. In a focus group of Democrats, Republicans and undecided voters assembled by ABC to watch the debate, the women deemed Mr. Gore obnoxious and arrogant.

All those sighs and eye rolls! Married women know those sighs all too well. They have heard them from their husbands and know they are meant as condescending putdowns.

In Friday's debate McCain looked stiff with anger and refused to look Obama in the eye. Obama, by contrast, not only looked his opponent in the eye but opened his body profile to him, gesturing courteously towards McCain even as he landed his own shots. Apparently, the thing that viewers really hated was when McCain would say that Obama "doesn't understand" this or that. Again, Obama's approach was the opposite: he began his counter-arguments by outlining the points on which he was in agreement with McCain. So if Gore in 2000 reminded women of their overbearing first husbands, what archetypal role did McCain fill? Who else but that contemptuous prick of a professor everyone can remember from their college days? You know who I'm talking about: the guy who asks you a question and then cuts you off and says "let's hear from someone who knows what he's talking about"; the guy who cannot stand disagreement or argument and cuts dissenters down to size by ridiculing their knowledge; the guy who says, in effect, that only someone with a Ph.D. and has spent a geological age in academia has the standing to speak. This is the kind of guy for whom knowledge is privilege, and privilege is to be protected from the likes of you.

Professors like this are deeply, seriously hated. And if any professor is so stupid as to come on with this kind of attitude in a class, their students will make them suffer for it in the evaluations. I simply cannot imagine any halfway clued-in academic of my generation thinking they could get away acting like this. And they don't; as the older generations retire, this Prussian-officer type of professor has come to exist largely in movies, where they play the role Margaret Dumont played for the Marx Brothers -- the dowager under whose ample bottom the whoopie cushion is always to be slipped.

Obama, on the other hand, managed to near-perfection a recognizable type of professorial persona that has been adapted to handle the post-student-eval landscape. In beginning his own arguments by saying "I agree with John that . . ." he reminded me of the clever and tactful professor whose student has said something he wishes to correct. You don't say "no, that's wrong," much less say "no, you're naive to think so." (Much much less "no, HE'S naive to think so," as if the student didn't even deserve to be acknowledged in the second person.) You begin by finding the part that might be useful, the kernel of truth or insight, however small, that you can work with, and you work with it. You make the student your conversational companion and make his contribution a thread you weave into the class discussion. And if you're keeping it real and trying to lead your students to some point or proposition that you hold to be more right that others, you work constantly to channel the class discussion towards it without shutting down the opposing point of view. You amend the opposition, you gloss it, you inflect it, you co-opt it, but you don't try to crush it, because that doesn't work. Bend, don't break; move, don't stick; water wears away the stone.

It's worth noting that Obama is actually a former professor. True, he didn't have a very long academic career, though it has certainly stuck to him -- it's something that's supposed to prove that he's an "elitist," I suppose. When pundits go on about his "professorial" demeanor they don't mean it as a compliment, but maybe they should. Our students are often prickly and defensive because they're anxious: they're in a situation where what's between their ears will be judged, and in front of their friends to boot. They are Americans, which means they want, more than anything, to improve themselves, to get ahead in life, and in America these days that means education. When they come into our classes it is always a fraught situation, and managing the tension of that situation requires considerable skill and poise -- a lesson that Obama seems to have learned. 

Adventures in bad writing

Happily, Andy H-D at The Black Torrent Guard is beginning to post again, and has apparently gone to Iowa to do a graduate degree in musicology.* Earlier this month he posted a clip of Ira Glass, host of This American Life and nephew of Philip Glass, talking about the challenges of writing for radio or TV.

Andy titles the post "Working Through the Suck" (such a good post title . . . wish I'd thought of it) and writes that "it encapsulates why I started writing this blog, why I stopped writing for several months, and a larger malaise that seems to affect the 'academic blog' community." I'm assuming that the malaise he's writing about is the tendency of so many academic blogs written by graduate students (the majority, since grad students tend to understand the medium more intuitively) to peter out after a while. Part of it obviously is that we're all busy and blogging is low on our list of priorities. But maybe it's also because of what Glass is talking about here: you have good taste and high standards, and what you're writing is not up to them, so you stop.

All I can say is, I couldn't agree with Glass more. You have to work through the suck, power through the feelings of inadequacy, because there is simply no other way to get better. Writing is an immensely complicated thing, and it takes years of doing it to get better. Of course you have to read and read and read, but that's only half of it. I went through my faux-Adorno phase and my faux-Orwell phase and some other phases I'm too embarrassed even to mention, and the stuff I wrote when I was imitating these various writers' voices was TERRIBLE. For example, there's this godawful analysis of Rachmaninoff's C minor piano concerto I did for James Hepokoski's 1995 sonata deformations seminar:

Theodore Adorno once wrote (with considerable scorn) that Rachmaninoff's early C-sharp minor Prelude is an exploitation of the semiotic germ inherent in the cadence --  "that is the way it is." Adorno's observation, applied in a neutral spirit, is germane to the concerto, which expresses itself through a kind of massive cadential overkill. 

"Germane," huh? My writing at this time had a certain thesaurus quality to it. Note the clumsiness with which cultural theory is being applied here. The syllogism is (A) Adorno complains about cadential overkill in Rachmaninoff's C-sharp minor prelude, (B) this other piece by Rachmaninoff contains cadences, so (C) Adorno can be applied to this other piece by Rachmaninoff. This is an example of what I call "Lee Press-On Theory," after Lee Press-On Nails of fond memory.

The development, which has been overtaken by motive b. (above), cumulates in the recapitulation, in which the P theme is now lashed to the piano's fortissimo repetitions of motive b. (mm.241-257). 

"Cumulates"? Also, your bar numbers are off, fool.

The fourth scale degree of the motive is now not sharpened, and we may now recognize the opening four-note motive that wrenched the introduction out of its delusional off-tonic opening. This is simultaneously the telos of the development and a moment of desperate recognition; the goal demanded in the opening was to escape or redeem C-minor, but in the recapitulation, the piano shouts its recognition of the truth present from the opening: there is no escape, there is no redemption. The disillusioning gesture with which the piece has opened has been elevated to a place of ultimate importance, and that gesture's content of meaning is likewise revealed as the ultimate truth: that is the way it is.

Wrenched! Delusional! There's a telos! Which shouts! There's a moment of desperate recognition! There's no redemption! There's C minor in the recapitulation! Wait, don't you always come back to the tonic in the recapitulation? What I'm trying to do in this paper is make up for the fact that I really don't have much to say by narrating a pretty ordinary formal event in a wildly melodramatic way. Also, notice how I can't get to the end of a sentence without tossing in a colon or semicolon. I was a serial semicolon abuser in those days. I'm still bad about that sometimes -- it's like I'm embarrassed to come to the end of a sentence too soon. Here colons are used in a ridiculously self-serious way. It's a feeble imitation of Adorno, who often liked to end a complex dialectical thought with something compact and epigrammatic. It's not a bad trick, actually, but not for every sentence. Plus, if your punctuation says "insert devastating insight here," it helps to have devastating insights.

The recapitulation is really an anti-recapitulation, which, like anti-matter, destroys whatever it touches.  Its occurrence "breaks" the frame of the music, so that nothing after can be the same; far from achieving the goal of redemption implicitly demanded in the exposition, the sonata has been destroyed, its aspirations smashed.  Thus the psychology of the remainder of the movement is unusual; it exists to chart the wreckage left by the anti-recapitulation's cruel realization rather than to defer that realization to the end.

I don't know what I even meant by "anti-recapitulation." The semicolon abuse continues. I was very into "redemption" in those days -- Adorno, again.

This is itself a deformation of the usual pattern of sonata teleology, in which the denouement is deferred to the recapitulation S or the coda, for the obvious reason that when placed any earlier it only "gives the game away," leaving little hermeneutic reason for the remaining part of the sonata.  In this case, the denouement arrives early for precisely this reason; it allows the extended contemplation of crushed subjectivity, of the life without hope.

Oh god, this is so horrible. Where to start? Mostly, it's the pathetic attempt at borrowing someone else's gravitas. "Extended contemplation of crushed subjectivity" indeed. This coming from a 20-something Canadian graduate student whose biggest problem in those days was not having air conditioning.

But the thing is, if I have made any gains as a writer in the 13-odd years since, it's because of horrors like this one. What's lousy about it —the imposture and fakery of it -- is what allowed me to write less lousy stuff later. You try on other people's writing styles until you develop a stylistic vocabulary; you keep trying out ideas until the ideas you have are your own. But the thing is, there is no shortcut. You can't become a half-decent writer without constant practice. This is one thing I like about blogging: it's like exercise. Back in the late 1990s, when I was taking a few years away from graduate school, what really helped me was writing music-appreciation textbook materials for high-school students, where Adornian narratives of redemption are not greatly in demand.

*ONE OF US! ONE OF US! ONE OF US! (explanation here)

Composer or Carver?

Computer music pioneer Max Matthews claims he is not a "musician." He had some training with some instruments, but considered himself an amateur. Not that that stopped him. He composed and created a great deal of respected music compositions and software.

On a visit to campus once he showed us his radio baton. The device consists of a flat table and a hand held stick. The device can track the three-dimensional movement of the baton relative to the table--a very early wii controller or sorts (but without nearly as fancy an accelerometer.)

The movements of the baton could control a midi device. In the demo he had for us, Matthews played through some of Beethoven's 5th. His movements along the x-plane regulated the tempo, the y-plane dynamics, and the z-plane elements of string timbre and attack.

It didn't sound that great. The radio baton hasn't really had that much of a legacy, besides the obligatory picture or paragraph in computer music histories. But the idea behind it is a very good one. Matthews told us that, as an untrained musician, he could not ever perform the music he so loved. When performing music, he explained, one always has to worry about "playing the right notes" and "playing then the right way."

The radio baton, he explained, freed a music lover to play music without having to worry about the technical details. It offered direct connection with the music, where crude swings of the baton could execute what might normally take years of practice or a stage filled with musicians. Matthews wanted that experience, that high.

Why bring this all up? On Youtube tonight (where all good grad students waste their summers) I came across a video  made by, Lasse Gjertsen, a self-proclaimed amateur musician. In this video, Lasse taped himself playing different things on drums and piano. He then chopped up the recorded and footage and put together a "live performance" of him playing a complete song from these chopped up bits:

The most creative stuff sometimes comes from the least trained. I don't think that video is musically genius or groundbreaking, but it sure as hell is entertaining.

I've known plenty of musicians who worried that their training somehow squelched their creativity. There's a precept that listening to Western scales makes it impossible to think outside the equal-tempered-box, just as learning "how to play" the flute might make one adverse to doing something...i don't know...like this:

Of course you can do that and more without a conservatory education. But maybe it's easier without one. I remember in high school imaging what might happen if someone (somehow, somewhere) had a piano in their house but had never heard piano music or any Western music for that matter. What might they create? Sure, the piano is already tempered to a single scale, but besides that, blank-slate for my imaginary person.

(I was very bored in high school).

Christian Wolff didn't teach music at Dartmouth for many years. He taught Classics. He actually refused to teach music (or so I was told) on the premise that teaching people music only limits the possibilities of what they might create.

I have a very spotty music education. I'm not very good at any instruments. Yet, I fancy myself a creative composer. I sometimes wonder if my lack of education accounts for my creativity. Maybe it's just a way of explaining away my lack of training and proficiency. Not sure--I like how William Billings explained it best:

"Nature is the best Dictator, for all the hard dry studies Rules that ever was prescribed, will not enable any Person to form an Air any more than the bare Knowledge of the four and twenty Letters, and strict Grammatical Rules will qualify a Scholar for composing a Piece of Poetry...For my own Part, as I don't think myself confin'd to any Rules for Composition laid down by any that went before me...I think it is best for every Composer to be his own Carver."