Dial "M" for Musicology

Testing

Phil Ford

On occasion I've wondered just where on earth Terminal Degree is teaching. Now we know: a Mordecai Richler novel from the 1970s. Just read her story. I've never been at an academic gathering that got that badly out of control. But, as she says, nothing good happens after midnight, and we all know what happens when you mix alcohol and musicians.

We'll just sort of assume that Loud Guy's future in academia doesn't look too good. But still, Terminal is left with a decidedly icky after-the-party vibe that has to do with the fact that she was a woman being hassled in that way that guys always seem to want to hassle women -- shoving a stinky handful of crude up under her nose and seeing what she'll do. Terminal asks a bunch of questions for which I have no good answer, but which I'll throw out there for Dial M's perceptive readership:

Do you laugh to show you're "one of the boys?"

Or do you act disgusted by every crude statement?

Or smile and understand that "boys will be boys"?

Do you risk looking like a prude and leaving when the conversation gets too rough?

Or do you ask a bunch of half-drunk (or, in Loud Guy's case, very drunk) guys to remember that you're in the room?

Or do you wait for one of the guys to be a gentleman and change the topic, rescuing you from the discomfort?

And if you're a feminist, and usually a strong woman, shouldn't you be able to handle it yourself?

And why the hell are they grabbing your leg, anyhow?

Oh, right. Because you're the only female in the room. And since you laughed at the first off-color joke, and since you're willingly hanging out as the lone female in a room of men, your body must not be off limits, right?

Gene Simmons put Terry Gross to the NPR interview version of this; it's interesting how she dealt with it. I heard an interview with her about the notorious Gene Simmons incident, and she said that she couldn't just say "oh my goodness, Mr. Simmons, what a terrible thing to say!," because that would have been to fall into the trap that Simmons had laid for her. I have to say, listening to the show, she's pretty tough, and I suspect that Simmons has tried to suppress this interview not because he feels sorry for what he said but because he got his ass kicked. Like MF Doom says, he picked the wrong thug to test. But of course she didn't have Simmons grabbing her leg in a room full of drunks, so the situation isn't exactly parallel to Terminal's.

My teaching assistant for the undergraduate music history sequence at UT last year used to talk to me about how students would test her in a different way. I've heard this from other graduate students -- if you're a woman, undergrads are constantly testing you to see if you'll push back. My undergrad music history class had about 70 students, and the lecture hall had about three times that many seats, and of course they would always sit at the very back, which I hate, so I made them sit only in the first six rows. After a week they did this without my having to tell them to. But every time I went out of town and my TA would take the class, they'd be sitting at the back again, and she'd have to bring them down to the front all over. Of course, students are always testing their teachers anyway, whether you're a man or a woman or a prof or a grad student, but this little detail stuck in my mind, because nothing quite like it ever happened to me in all the years I was a TA back in graduate school. I'm wondering what your collective experience on this is.

Another Canon

Jonathan Bellman

This is the second weekend of my son’s high school musical. He’s a sophomore, this is his first theatrical experience, and he’s Nibs, one of the Lost Boys in the production of Peter Pan. While I didn’t know the show* (my high school never did it, to my knowledge), the entire experience—rehearsals and performances (of which I’ve seen two) is somewhat nostalgic for me. I was in Technical theater in high school, doing sound and props and building sets and stuff, so I understand the pressure, the excitement, the climactic last night, etc. Debbie, of course, sang and danced in her high school productions, and both she and Ben are of the opinion that I don’t remember well enough what it was like. Possibly true. I, grumpily enough, think I do, and I’m the Dad. The music didn’t strike me as particularly interesting (Mary Poppins, say, is much more memorable), but the show itself is a model of its kind: something for every stereotypical childhood fantasy: laughable and clueless parents, a big loving dog, flying, fairy dust, fairies, fleeing reality and having fun and never growing old, a slightly older girl who wants to be a mother and have a husband and have rambunctious boys to look after and scold and mend for and so on, pirates, Indians (correct spelling, here, should probably be Injuns), a pack of boys running around and getting into innocent mischief (shades of Leo Edwards’s Jerry Todd and Poppy Ott books, on which my father was raised and to the charms of which he introduced us). I don’t know how much of this was in the original Barrie story (play?), but it all seemed to me to be prodigiously well-conceived in order to excite virtually any youthful imagination. This is with Disneyesque slickness: no stone of a child’s psyche is left unturned. The actors had, and are having, a great time, including having Q & A and photo shoots afterwards with kids from the audience. What’s not to admire? What struck me most forcefully, though, is the idea that high schools all over the country devote huge amounts of time, effort, planning (and, very occasionally, financial resources, though we all know how that goes) to doing these musicals—and the musicals themselves are not in any way current or relevant. The views of society found in these works reflect the idealized popular culture of decades ago—before Vietnam, the 1960s, Watergate, Reaganomics, the two Gulf Wars, the ongoing crisis in the Balkans, the Sudanese genocide…and the same kids who listen to new bands and download music and so on happily and unwittingly flip an inner switch and give themselves over, body and soul, to something that was essentially nostalgic when it first appeared in (perhaps) their grandparents’ youth. Is this not an odd thing? Why is this entire sector of musical activity—among youth, no less, who might be expected to be the most cynical and resistant and inclined to question and challenge received entertainment product—given a pass from cultural resistant reading? A note, before I continue: I am not advocating a harshly critical reexamination, even one justified with the fatuous claim that it would “reinvigorate” these familiar works, and that we should all interrogate and so on. Obviously these musical fill some deep cultural need of parents and kids alike, and the value of the roar-of-the-greasepaint-and-smell-of-the-crowd aspects of a shared project, a project in which parents are marginalized to the point of bringing food, writing checks, and skeddadling, cannot be minimized. Nor can the deep and probably universal human need to strut the boards, somehow, in formative years: to discover who you are by making believe you’re someone else. Still, these theatrical works are often not immortal masterpieces, dramatically or musically, yet their currency is prolonged, seemingly in defiance of cultural pressures and market dictates. So my reaction is really wonderment; I am not calling for wholesale change, but rather am just somewhat awed that something so counterintuitively popular continues to maintain a not-unimportant cultural niche. There is a largely finite repertoire of these things, and as I say they are not all masterpieces by a long shot. I remember some of the spring and summer musicals from my high school, in the late 1960s and 1970s, and if I’m not mistaken they are still in the High School Musical Theater Canon: South Pacific, Guys and Dolls, Mame, Bye Bye Birdie, Carnival, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, Annie Get Your Gun, and of course Fiddler on the Roof. Think of the cultural phenomena these are playing off: sailors in the Pacific, emigration from the miseries of Eastern European shtetlakh, 1950s middle-class cultural anxieties about Rock and Roll (esp. Elvis), and so on. And kids in the 1970s, and the 2000s also, line up to act, and to act out, and to dress up, and to get into all of this. On some level these must be works that transcend their time, at least for a substantial segment of the public (but not everyone; for me, a lot of these musicals are utterly unmemorable, but never mind). That, actually, makes for an odd parallel with our cherished classical repertoire, with its putative artistic universals and ability to speak beyond its time and place. For that matter, Classic Rock—the stuff my parents screamed at my brother and myself for liking (mostly him; he’s older)—shares that status too: young people now listen to it in addition to their own stuff, and the more discerning/snootier among them feel it is better than current stuff and are prepared to make the arguments, at great pseudo-intellectual length. (How relevant to contemporary views are the lyrics to the opening verse of I’d Love to Change the World by Ten Years After, after all?) By the way: a condescending assertion of “well, it IS better, so there” by anyone about classical music, or by my parents about musicals, or by me about Classic Rock, may or may not be true but is really beside the point. The point here is that there is something at work here beyond cultural relevance, beyond contemporary taste, and even beyond (frankly) actual artistic quality that grants artworks of whatever length a place in their appropriate Canon. After watching a gleeful group of young people put up with a great deal of indignity and directorial pressure and logistical upheaval and so on to put on the likes of Peter Pan, and to hear them theorize about what the next musicals might/ought to be, I confess that quite a few of my customary musings about canons and cultural relevance and so on are being quietly put out with the trash. That always makes me very, very happy. I really like it when my habitual modes of thought have large holes blown in them. Off for several days to California on what may be a very sobering family visit. Will catch you, as they said in the Days of Vinyl, on the flip side. Remember, to quote Ray Davies’s final song from the Kinks’s Soap Opera album, “They can’t stop the music playin’on.” ------------------- *Debbie points out that this is not a typical musical for high schools, because of the resources need to get the actors to “fly”; we brought in a company from Kentucky to set up all the pulleys and train people to do it properly and safely. This is true, but in all other ways (subject matter, values, worldview) it fits squarely within the musical theater canon.

Brave New or Same Old, Same Old?

Jonathan Bellman

David Mermelstein’s January 6 New York Times article about the Colburn School profiles a new institution that should promise more than it seems to. It seeks to be a conservatory, train professional musicians, and does not seek to train music scholars. This is made explicit: “We are a performance school,” said Robert Lipsett, who teaches violin and helped map the conservatory’s evolution. “If you want to be a musicologist, Colburn is not the place. It’s for musicians who are going to make their livelihood as performers, at one level or another.” Fair enough, I suppose. The Colburn website (click on the “Conservatory of Music” link and choose “Faculty”) indicates that they have precisely one music historian for ninety-four students. There are more theorists, true, although I can’t say I recognize any of the academics’ names (and few enough of the performance faculty). Shouldn’t a Brave New Conservatory, near Disney Hall and emblematizing the hot, new, ever-revitalizing, multinational and multicultural Angeleno classical music scene have some uniqueness, some stated special reason for being, some reason that students should choose them over Mannes/Juilliard/Oberlin and so on? Taking Lipsett’s remark at face value, they’re talking like a trade school, and for all the practical realities involved in music performance we are still talking about art, often great art, and there is a hell of a lot more to address than fingerings, bowings, tonguings, and metronome markings. The—ah—Colburn Vocational Institute for Orchestral Infantry doesn’t do it, for me at least. “Musicians who are going to make their livelihood as performers” is a pretty ambitious statement, given the market realities. (I’m not going to get into Blair Tindall’s nauseating book here, but there is some distance between “I’m going to be a professional musician” and actually being a professional musician. I wonder if this is acknowledged in the Mission Statement of Colburn?) Perhaps I’m being unfair. (If so, it would be the first time.) As one raised from early childhood in Los Angeles County, though, I would really like to think that a school with those kinds of cultural resources to connect with and draw upon would come up with a better training model than the one reflected in this article. I don’t mean a required pedagogy class, a Jazz appreesh class, and a history class, all of which would never be attended because the teachers would all be part-time and have no status; that’s standard conservatory faire. I do mean some approach other than the influential-teacher-anointing-promising-students model, because that one truly is OVER. I am not doing a Chicken Little about the Death Of Classical Music, but I think it is inarguable that the old institutions (Conservatory, Canon, Symphony Society etc.) are bloated and inefficient, and that they are either changing (usually far too slowly) or dying. It is not my place to draw up curriculum for a performance school that (full disclosure here) I probably never would have made it into, but the fact is there is no shortage of obedient executants, so something more is clearly wanted. So for the new pure Conservatory in Los Angeles, I would look for a vision reflecting West-Coast Brave New Out-Of-The-Boxism rather than also-ran we’re-also-important us-tooism. Let’s all keep “Colburn School” in mind, just to see how often we hear about it, and why.

Pleasures of grading

Phil Ford

OK, after all that bellyaching, I should add that every now and then you get something that makes the year-end stack of grading a little less burdensome. Enjoyable, even. In fact, damn funny. In response to a question about whether and to what degree Milton Babbitt and Harry Partch's philosophies have anything in common, one student wrote this:

Had they been locked in a house together, Milton Babbitt and Harry Partch would have made a great reality TV show. While the drama over Babbitt's tape reels getting in the way of Partch's lightbulb marimba ensued, their monologues in the confessional would surprise viewers hoping for more disagreements. For while Babbitt would fight for more private time, free from Partch's constant percussion, their ultimate frustration would be shared: the fear of stagnation in modern music, and the importance of radical reform. What follows are some thoughts on how the episodes might go. (Although, it should be said: who cares if you watch?) 

Awesome.

Grading

Phil Ford

Oh god, it's grading time. My least favorite time of the year. I suspect that some people got into the education biz expressly in order to evaluate people and rank them by their abilities, but this has never been the payoff for me. It's in grading year-end papers and exams that I am brought face-to-face with my shortcomings as a teacher -- I encounter, in my students' final work, the sloth and ignorance I failed to dispel. Although, it must also be said, there are also unexpected delights -- the student who worked like a galley slave to come out on top after a trying semester, the student who discovered a new enthusiasm through your class, the student whose final paper is the crowning triumph of their brilliant academic performance. So it's not all bad. Still, term-end projects more often than not have an air of desperation, or at least doggedness, that midterm projects do not. It's just the way things are.

Terminal Degree has posted a few choice excerpts from a colleague's end-of-term stack, which make me feel both better, insofar as I haven't had to read anything so bad for a long time, and worse, insofar as these are college students, FFS, and are presumably typical of some portion of the American collegiate student body today. Most of the papers appear to deal with the topic of gay marriage, which is apparently not popular in the unnamed Southern college where Terminal works:

"Gay marriage was legalized in the State of San Francisco."

"Traditional marriage is better...well hell yea it is more stable; how messed up do you think a kid is going to be when they think that two guys are really their birth parents. For instance how is a young boy supposed to grow into a man; when both of his parents are men, and one of them is a little bitch for the other one to pound on whenever he gets the urge."

"Fagots claim that it is not their fault they are queer, but every person has the knowledge of write vs. wrong."

"The only thing that can save them from going to hell is to change their lifestyle, get saved by God, and confuse their sins."

"No one should feel comfortable being interment with the same sex. A child raised by same sex parents wont make since." ("I think he meant intimate," adds Terminal.)

Jesus wept. And of course, while we're busily evaluating our students, in the last weeks of class they return the favor. Ah yes, student evaluations. Are they a blessing or a curse? You can usually get a good argument going on this question. I suppose my feeling is that they're only as good as the students filling them out, and the problem is that the university administrators who read them and judge your fitness as a teacher have no way of telling the difference. Course evals are anonymous, after all. I would dread to have those troglodytes I quoted sitting in judgment over me, but then again, course evals have dealt me some hard truths over the years.

One friend of mine at another institution once got the funniest comment I've ever seen. "I feel that Music History 101* should be able to change the way you view music and western civilization and religion, and although that happened a bit, I felt that it could happen much more."

*Course title changed to protect the innocent.

How to Educate?

Jonathan Bellman

In my last blog, commenting on Richard Taruskin’s review-article in The New Republic I suggested that, while the usual high-culture, cod-liver-oil (“but it’s good for you!”) approach to music appreciation is a demonstrable failure, “Just keep listening!” is not really sufficient either.  Here’s why: almost the entire performance repertoire of art music was composed more than a century ago—not just the much-complained-about German repertoire; also the Russian and much of the French also.  The culture that produced it is long gone, in other words.  To expect “just listen”ing to afford sufficient cultural currency to understand the art music of a largely alien culture seems a bit like urging people to “just expose yourself to the beauty of the language” in order to understand Dante—in the original Italian. 

Let’s forget about form and the adventures of a motive and all the usual approaches to “appreciating” art music; I’d go with styles first.  National styles, high and low styles, and certainly the topics and styles (e.g. dance topics like Sarabande and Mazurka, styles like Pastoral, Storm, Hunt) are immediately easier to recognize, given a modicum of background, than form and motive.  (“Modicum of background”: being able to make pastoral out of “pretty and peaceful,” hunt from “stirring and energetic,” “Turkish” Style from “thumping and percussive,” etc.)  The character of the musical surface is the composer’s first choice, and it’s what defines the affect of the piece.  Learning topical vocabulary and style literacy gives the listener far more tools for musical enjoyment and—dare I say it—understanding than will trying to discipline a normal human attention span to follow the adventures of a motive throughout a 50-minute symphony.  If we understand styles, we get the joke when Mozart moves almost indiscernibly from Singing Style to Brilliant Style to Turkish Style, and we recognize—and are captivated, as was Clara Schumann—when Brahms explodes from a turbulent, stormy texture into the noble strains of Romantic Medievalism and remembered chivalry.  Communication between composer and listeners takes place without our having to enter the workshop and check the voice-leading. 

One level deeper, I cannot overstress the importance of pre-college music experience of the far-too-infrequent kind where students actually play in band and orchestra and sing in choirs without intending to be music majors later.  In the Common Practice vocabulary (and its modern derivatives work the same way), the play of styles rehearses the play of associated emotions.  Learning Common Practice music is in a way like learning a theatrical role—working through by proxy, in other words, a sequence of emotions and ideas, or varieties of human experience (grief, fury, horror, joy, contentment, yearning, the full gamut, all modulating smoothly one to another), without having to experience them in a real way, via the symbolic Common Practice language.  This of course means that one rehearses emotional experience in a controlled, supportive atmosphere, undeniably advantageous in facing real emotional turmoil in later life.  (This is not my own idea; I first ran across it in a Senior Honors Thesis I mentored in 1999, that of the now-English teacher Alberto Aguirre.)  This struck me—once I saw the issue laid out like that—as one of the most urgent reasons that music in the schools desperately needs support: the social and societal reason, the value of practice at emotional health, if you will.  (Increased test scores and so on are the icing on the cake, societally, not the main act; as Shinichi Suzuki stressed, music makes good citizens, which are more immediately needed than virtuoso musicians.) 

Understand: I consider this kind of participation important groundwork for understanding musical language, but even those who don’t participate know people who do—the more participation, the more cultural understanding.  Participatory music making results in emotional education and musical experience, and through the experience one learns the vocabulary.  True, vocabulary can be learned in classrooms too.  All of this means, though, that historical vocabularies remain, if not current, at least familiar, vivid, and understood.  The same would then apply for works composed in those historical vocabularies, which retain enough currency among those with at least minimal education that they can communicate.  This is basic foreign-language education, I think—get some vocabulary and jump in.  No mention of high culture, or better and worse music, or nice and not nice, at all.  Just get some idea of what they’re talking/composing about, and go to concerts armed, so to speak, with some vocabulary.  Then: “Just listen.”

A final thought: we should keep tabs on what is happening in the Shakespeare education industry if we need new ideas.  Though dissenting voices at the Modern Language Association may carp about it (I read an article about this once), the Bard is still a major audience draw, and his work still communicates.  Whether you want to call his values and concerns “universals” or not doesn’t concern me, nor would I even claim that most directors and actors (not to mention audiences, at least where I live) have a complete understanding of what is going on in his language and subtexts.  Down to the grade-school level, though, teachers are creating a variety of interesting approaches, some of which are outlined in the final chapter of Herman Gollob’s Shakespeare and Me, a somewhat self-indulgent but interesting read.  Can we claim that music education on any level reflects this kind of flowering of creativity?  Shakespeare died almost four centuries ago, his plays were written for a world of capricious kings and queens, the counterpoint of the privileged high-born and those born to serve, the constant realities of conquest and cruelty.  Still, the plays have maintained a currency with audiences today, in the English-speaking world especially.  It is worth at least trying to achieve similar success with the “classical music,” the much-loved, much-derided, much-defended, much-misunderstood.

Transgression in the Classroom

Jonathan Bellman

Yes, the silly title is intentional. I can’t resist joining the discussion about transgression in class, real and imagined, and students’ reactions. There are several different operative possibilities: Gratuitous profanity in the classroom, F-words and so on, used to be a professorial attempt either to shock students or be hip. And, I suppose, go fishing among the female students, who I guess were presumed to like swearing. (I saw it work enough for others, that I always wondered…well, never mind.) This was more common when I was young, early-to-mid 1970s, when people were thinking that youth equaled--umm--hippies and counterculture and swearing and stuff. F- and S-words seemed more transgressive then. Ridiculous, but there it is. I’ve also seen it used simply as an attention-grabbing device, when the class was starting to fade, and I had to admire that usage. The late and lamented Paul Wienpahl, my History of Philosophy professor at UCSB, could jerk a class out of its stupor with the odd, “‘But wait a minute,’ Aristotle might say, ‘why are you being so f---in’ insistent on this matter of Forms?’” We’d all lurch bolt upright, and the lecture would continue without a hitch, and no facial acknowledgment that anything odd had taken place. We need to guard against a certain glibness, though, about what might be called Received Standard Transgression and lemming-like “challenges” to societal mores. Just because some of us are not shocked by swearing, or even do it too much ourselves (this is me, I’m ashamed to admit), does not mean that only puritan squares aren’t hip enough for it, or that it shouldn’t be shocking, or that such transgression is the proper province of the University. For some people—and this was demonstrated to me recently in a market—bad language is real violence, a profoundly disgusting, unacceptable behavior. This may not be because they were raised by the most narrowminded of Bible-Belt hypocrites (or fill in your favorite stereotype here); it may be because they were raised by violent sacks of rage who used language like that—on them. In such cases, the unecessary use of profanity becomes something akin to a person in authority waving a Confederate flag at an African-American or wearing a Nazi armband in front of a Jew. Only the lowest sort of smug jerk would claim to be doing an educational service in transgressing such social mores. I’ve offended people other ways—I made the mistake of referring to “Saul of Tarsus, a.k.a. good-time Charlie” at one point. No, that didn’t go over well with a student or two. Nor did muttering “Jesus Christ” one time when an underachieving class arrived for a review session with no questions prepared, though they were told to bring some. I learned; one of the reasons I always teach in a tie is that, in the words of one of the grad students, “Oh, for you it’s like a leash!” The more nicely I’m dressed, the more likely it is that I will remember that I can’t walk around swearing and insulting people in the self-indulgent manner of my past. One walks a thin line, though, with curricular materials themselves—one reason I can really sense the difficulties when one is teaching in Phil’s area. One of the things I used to do in the music history sequence was to teach the Doctrine of Ethos on the first couple of days, with the protestations of Plato and (later) certain churchmen about the dangers of inappropriate music in terms of encouraging dangerous behavior. From here we could go to censorship, questionable language in Rock music, wherever—thus demonstrating for the newbies that the most ancient questions are still relevant, still being fought over, and how much though they need to put into what they’re doing, not only how but why. I would often bring in The Crystals’ He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss), until (I may have told this story before) one year I noticed the conversation got a bit well-behaved and earnest and dutiful. The TA later asked gently if I’d actually heard any Rap lyrics, which made the Goffin/King tune seem tame. To go one step further, year after year I’d bring a tape of the five-star obscurity Michael Perlitch’s Pete the Bondage Freak. This was a mean, dark, keyboard-driven song that dealt with child abduction and—er—violence. Truly creepy. Year after year, I’d find myself somehow not quite having enough time to play it, which I think was probably a good idea; one complaint, particularly in this part of the world, and I might well have lost my job. No point in pushing the free-speech issue to the point of destroying my own career, thanks; first grub, then…everything else. Perhaps I overreact; the one time I used it, to an adult evening class at Stanford, one youngish woman suggested that it might have been “kind of a goof; ‘I’m Pete, Pete, the bondage freak, I hide in the bushes down by the creek’…y’know, it’s like a joke.” Now, that’s certainly a kind of citified ironic distance; maybe even true. The song never disturbed me, for example; I really liked it when I was in high school, and still do, but I like the sound; it’s all traditional keyboards: piano, harpsichord, organ. The lyrics are weird, but who listened? Here’s the danger, though: that’s me, southern California upbringing, non-dysfunctional family of teachers, irony was one of the major food groups, and my friends were pretty much the same. Of course I didn’t find it disturbing. I’m sure it wouldn’t fly in other places—let’s say the south, Kansas (note to Kansans: get “creationism” out of the schools and then we can talk about unfair stereotypes), etc. To bring it into class would simply be too much of a risk, and besides—do I know what every student in my classes has suffered? What if, God forbid, someone actually knew whereof the song was about? Am I going to lecture that student about getting out of his or her comfort zone and meeting challenges? Or smile ironically and look away—I am from California and am by definition so much cooler than you are—because the student clearly doesn’t get what I’m trying to do, and I’m intellectually so much farther ahead? Remember, a town in Colorado recently went crazy when a young grade-school teacher played and educational film about Faust, in connection with opera education. It’s sinful, it’s damnation, how could I look at my daughter when she came home with questions…the usual. (I thought: isn’t this a great opportunity to talk to your daughter about something that matters, you idiot?) And that teacher was a singer, both opera and (get this) gospel. I don’t know where she is now, but I’ll wager not the same district. I guess I have no major message or punchline here—which might mean Phil will start mockingly counting words again!—other than to say that, particularly for new or recently transplanted profs, get the cultural lay of the land before you start going long in your classes. Acceptable culture in these fifty states differs more, I think, than many people from the coasts, from good universities etc. can even begin to imagine. Don’t let your fire put you in hot water, so to speak; learn something about the local culture and expectations before you start confronting and challenging. P.S. On Phil’s last blog: I’d never seen the “Player-Hater’s Ball” before, and it had me on the floor. Playing the Dozens in the best old tradition of cutting with one-liners. Howlingly funny!

Warning: strong language

Phil Ford

Welcome, readers of Inside Higher Ed. My old "ten hiphop commandments" post has been published as an article there. Inside Higher Ed has a large and active readership, and there are many more comments there than we tend to get here at Dial M.  Most of the commenters were pretty nice about my piece (thanks!), but I was surprised by the number of people who took exception to the cusses. Some didn't seem to understand that these were lyrics from a hiphop song, while others seemed offended at the use of hiphop in an academic context. (Still others seemed offended by the very existence of hiphop.) But it's actually an interesting problem: not so much the professor's use of profanity in class, as an adornment to ordinary speech, but the teaching of material that includes harsh language. One commenter said that you're showing disrespect to your students when you swear in class, and I agree. This doesn't mean I'm always perfect on this score, but I try; you get all kinds of people in a class, and dropping F-bombs or casual blasphemies will most assuredly not be fine with everyone. Inasmuch as your job is to create a neutral ground on which wildly different points of view can be expressed equally and without fear -- the baseline precondition of any intellectual work, I think -- you need to respect that.

But what if you teach the cultural and intellectual history of counterculture? Dial M readers will have gathered by now that this topic is My Thing. Last year I taught an undergrad course in American music and counterculture, and it was plainly impossible to do it without assigning music and readings that use every socially inappropriate word imaginable and self-consciously trample hitherto accepted standards of decency. I mean, this is a chapter of American cultural history whose major players include a militant anarchist group whose name was (I'm not making this up) the "Up Against the Wall Motherfucker." And it's not about just words alone: race was always a big issue among hip radicals, who were accustomed to talking about it in terms that would make a University cultural-diversity facilitator blanch. People who know me will tell you that I have a pretty free way with cuss words, especially when provoked by falling inanimate objects,* but there were a lot of times when I was squirming with embarrassment at having to utter certain words. But still, what can you do? If you're going to teach something, I don't think anyone is served by bowdlerizing it. So I printed up an NC-17 warning in my syllabus, which I stressed pretty hard on the first day. The main point it makes is something I cribbed from Mark Applebaum, a Stanford professor of composition who was always dropping gems of pedagogical wisdom in the course of casual conversation.  He was once talking about a certain kind of person you meet in academia, the kind of person who thinks he or she has some sort of god-given right never to be made uncomfortable in a class. This is ridiculous, he pointed out. You learn when you're uncomfortable. What students need, and deserve, is not to feel comfortable but to feel safe -- to feel as if they can roam wherever their mind takes them without fear of censure and retribution. (This is, as I said above, the baseline condition of intellectual work.) So this is what I wrote in my syllabus:

This course deals with the art and thought of people who self-consciously rejected previously accepted standards of social behavior. Consequently, the music, film, and writing you will encounter here is laced with profanity, blasphemy, drug use, polymorphous sexuality, violence, the occult, and racism. (And I’ve probably forgotten something.) No historian of this period can afford to treat its culture euphemistically; right or wrong, its provocations make it what it is. You will probably feel offended or uncomfortable at times. But discomfort can be an instructive emotion. I care less that students feel comfortable than that they feel safe. By which I mean that students in this class should feel emboldened to offer their true thoughts and feelings on any given issue. I am committed to intellectual diversity; any point of view, respectfully offered, will be treated with respect.

This won't please everybody, of course. There are those who believe that any subject matter like this has no place in the University, that bad language is inherently wrong and can never be justified. The best rejoinder to this point of view is Jaroslav Hasek's epilogue to the first book of his epic comic novel The Good Soldier Svejk -- a favorite book of mine, and one I try to re-read every few years. Hasek was an anarchist constantly on the run from the authorities, and someone who seems to have been constitutionally incapable of restraining himself from provoking them. And this was Hasek's response to those who objected to Svejk's earthy language:

Where it is necessary to use a strong expression which was actually said, I am not ashamed of reproducing it exactly as it was. I regard the use of polite circumlocutions or asterisks as the stupidest form of sham. The same words are used in parliament too.

It was once said, very rightly, that a man who is well brought-up may read anything. The only people who boggle at what is perfectly natural are those who are the worst swine and the finest experts in filth. In their utterly contemptible pseudo-morality they ignore the contents and madly attack individual words.

Years ago I read a criticism of a novelette, in which the critic was furious because the author had written: "He blew his nose and wiped it." He said it went against everything beautiful and exalted which literature should give the nation.

This is only a small illustration of what bloody fools are born under the sun.

Those who boggle at strong language are cowards, because it is real life which is shocking to them, and weaklings like that are the very people who cause most harm to culture and character. They would like to see the nation grow up into a group of over-sensitive little people—masturbators of false culture of the type of St. Aloysius, of whom it is said in the book of the monk Eustachius that when he heard a man breaking wind with deafening noise he immediately burst into tears and could only be consoled by prayers. 

Those who are well brought-up may read anything: I should have that crocheted on a throw pillow or something.

But the best defense is a good offense, as any football coach knows, so here's the "It's Easy, M'Kay" production number from the South Park musical, Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. The dialogue in this version has been dubbed in French, which I rather like. Follow the bouncing Cartman. Warning: contains strong language. Strong, strong language. But South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut is particularly good evidence that bucketloads of cuss words don't prevent something from being awesome. Stephen Sondheim apparently said he thought this was the best film musical of the last fifteen years, at least.

*The mute insolence of inanimate objects never fails to enrage me. I was delighted to discover a character in Martin Amis's novel The Information who shared this feeling, and who muses, what's in it for them?  Exactly. It's just so unprovoked.

Shcool

Phil Ford

More pedagogy (pedablogy?). Commenter Byron left a link to his academic blog, which I have duly added to the blogroll -- it looks great, and I'm particularly impressed by his most recent post, "The Scrabble Player's Guide to A Career in Academia," and not only because it was inspired by my own essay in gangsta musicology. Here is one of my favorite insights:

If you've got crappy tiles and no hot spots on the board to make up for it, then just trade in your problematic tiles and skip your turn. Don't wallow in your unfortunate situation--it might only get worse.

If you find yourself in a pit of uninteresting material or unsupportable arguments, turn around and start fresh. All you'll lose is a little time. If you try to make something out of your dead-end research, all you'll get out of it is bad scholarship. And that will hurt you more than a little lost time.

I guess anyone who's opened a newspaper in the last few years has gotten an education in how digging in on a bad idea, whether out of dumb pride or the sunk-costs fallacy, can end in catastrophe. But it's not always clear when you're the one doing it, y'know?

Another comment in response to my "Ten Commandments" post, from the Texas Tech Music Theory blog, asked what the proper way to address a professor is, or at least what we all like to be called:

What do your students call you? As I said above, I prefer professor. Doctor is a bit much for me, and heaven forbid someone actually confuse me with a proper doctor and ask me to start a chest tube or order a Chem-7. Some professors let their students call them by their first name--I see this particularly with studio teachers, who it seems to me have a much closer relationship than those of us who cater to the masses. Others permit their graduate students to call them by their first name (again, perhaps because of the typically close relationship). I don't let students call me by my first name.

My old Stanford colleague Mark Applebaum had a great line, which I've adopted: "If things are going fine, I'm Phil. If they're not, I'm Professor Ford." You hand in a paper late, and no way am I "Phil." I prefer graduate students calling me by my first name, but not undergraduates. Graduate students have already paid some dues; they're colleagues as well as students, and they're traveling the same road I am, so the  distance between us is a bit less. Undergraduates especially need to learn that they can't go through life weaseling out of every situation with a good line of bullshit and a smile. This lesson is harder to teach when you're all buddied up with them. Remember Biggie's counsel: keep personal and professional separated. At least to some degree.

Making a big deal of this issue probably strikes non-academics as incomprehensible, and perhaps confirms the suspicion we're all status-obsessed high-hat wieners who wear our commencement robes and mortar boards to the beach. But the question of honorifics and modes of address always comes up, and I think for non-trivial reasons.

On the one hand, college professors want to act like everyone else, which means that they don't want to act like they think they're better than anyone else. America is an informal and democratic country, after all, and you don't suddenly stop acting like a 21st-century American (or wannabe-American, in my case) when you get a Ph.D. So for me at least it always feels weird to actually ask someone to call you "Doctor" or "Professor."

On the other hand, for all that college marketing offices cynically deploy the rhetoric of carrying on proud traditions, etc. ("Generic State University: A Heritage of Tradition"), in order to squeeze money out of parents and alumni, universities really do carry on an old and venerable tradition of learning at its highest level. And attaining this level doesn't come cheap, either in the expense of time, personal commitment, or money. Humility is a virtue, as both Byron and I agreed, and not only because you don't want your colleagues hating on you. Humility is the right attitude in the face of The Tradition -- the great accumulated weight of thought we might imagine being kept in some Great Book, the Book of All Books, by the Recording Angel of Academia. Sometimes, when I've done something I think is clever, I think I'm pretty awesome. But nothing I've ever done, or ever will do, will amount to more than a footnote in the Great Book. And this is the same attitude everyone must learn in college. It's a bit like the "Cruel Tutelage of Pai Mei" episode in Kill Bill.  If the knowledge you seek is really worth attaining, it's worth showing some respect first. The professor who demands respect isn't necessarily demanding it for himself alone (although he might be). Ideally, the respect you demand is for the enterprise you share with the student, something that's bigger than both of you. Undergrads especially need to discover that there is something bigger than them.

What You Is and What You Ain't, Uh-Huh

Jonathan Bellman

A recent blog by terminaldegree, inspired by one by Philip Copeland, touches on a issue central to not only the entire academic enterprise (i.e., What We Do) but also Who We Are, in particular whether it’s worth making more of us. How does one counsel students who want to pursue careers in music? What about, more specifically, a career in music in higher education? Philip Copeland and terminaldegree are both university music faculty, and so they face the same questions—daily—that I do. This issue is like any other coming-of-age issue: it is timeless and recurrent. Here is an autobiographical anecdote about it, in part to illustrate that you can REALLY say the wrong thing on a job interview and it won’t hurt you. Maybe it has to do with the way you mess up and make up, or throw down a perfect strike to pick up the spare, so to speak. Anyway: I interviewed here at the University of Northern Colorado in late spring of 1993. I was desperate. I had a pretty good record of publications and papers and so on, plus the performance background, which was well suited to this kind of place. Fortunately, the DMA vs. PhD issue was not a problem for them in and of itself, and so I was invited out. I had been nurturing a very strong feeling that I should not have had to spend 3–4 years NOT getting ongoing employment, given my record, and I was not at all happy about seeing people with no or almost no publications and/or incomplete doctorates get jobs. I thought at the time I understood the reason for it--having to do with targeted categories--and I suppose to this day I don’t know whether I was right or wrong. But I was desperate, with a six-month-old to support, and not a little bitter. The first event, the first morning here, was the meeting with the Search Committee. The senior musicologist (a Paul Pisk product from the University of Texas) asked the first question: Qu: A student comes to you, saying that he or she would like to study music on the doctoral level in hopes of becoming a college professor. How do you counsel this student? I answered: A: DON’T DO IT. There are no jobs, hiring patterns are difficult to fathom, and takes years to complete a degree, while family plans etc. are on hold. Find something else that can make you happy. Only study music if you absolutely, definitely have to. Long silence, followed by some mumbling. I thought, well, I’ve just f---ed up the one chance I’ll ever get, but goddammit I gave them the truth. Finally, the musicologist said, in some surprise, “Actually, all of our doctorates get jobs when they leave here…” This was the very last thing I expected to hear. My right eyebrow hit the ceiling, and I barked “WHAT??” To make me feel better, he said, “Now, sometimes it will take them a good year to get that job, but…” I said “A YEAR?? Only a year? Then what the HELL did I go to Stanford for?!” Uproarious laughter. Of course, where you go effects the kinds of schools you get hired at, etc.--I applied to plenty of schools who would hire a graduate of UNC but not Stanford because they’re intimidated by the name; I didn’t know any of this yet. And they floated me the difference and hired me, and the rest (so to speak) is history. But the issue is the same as that in the aforementioned two blogs: what do you tell someone who wants a doctorate in musicology, or history and literature? A performance masters? Who just wants to be a music major? The issue is not a simple one, particularly since many areas of music absolutely depend on recruiting in order to people the ensembles, and those pressures can suppress such other concerns as individual performance ability, academic prowess, personal discipline, or promise of professional success. Is it our responsibility what happens to the student when she or he emerges from our institutions…in the heart of the cold, cold job market? Should we really fall back on the idealistic “it’s her choice and her journey and not my right to interfere” defense, meaning don’t-butt-into-my-studio-everyone-says-your-class-is-too-hard-anyway? Or do we run the risk of not encouraging them, and being forever damned in their memories as the gate-keeper who killed their dreams? We’ve all heard that one, too. What to do? I tend to be old school on this one. If you think being a music major or college professor might be kind of neat, a fun thing to do, I am going to discourage you in pretty firm terms. Music is, as well all know, desperately competitive, and the sad fact is that not enough people are sufficiently free of the self-deluding trust human nature protects us with to really face up to the fact, early on, that there may not a pretty neat, kinda fun job waiting for them at the end of their pretty neat, kinda fun degree, whether undergraduate or graduate. You may like playing the piano, singing in choir and high school musicals, or playing clarinet in marching band, but a serious music major most certainly requires--in terms of academic mastery, self-discipline, and level of professional achievement--a lot more than the average college student’s workday will allow. I’ll be blunt: I don’t know what other majors require, and I don’t care, but if you want to be a musician on any level figure you have to do it all the time. If you don’t like that, find something else. So when people are considering pursuing music study, I am often less encouraging than I might be expected to be. I feel like that is a favor I can do the students; if they have other viable options, there is doubtless more success and material comfort to be associated with those. The ones still standing after I slam the door in their faces? They get everything I have to offer. But they would do it with or without me, because they have to do it. In music, heartless and clichéd as it sounds, if you don’t have to, don’t. You’ll only end up unhappy and inclined to blame others for not doing for you what they should have done, not showing you proper support, making unreasonable demands, and so on. Save yourself the headache. All right, then: save us the headache. If you’ve no other choice in life, well…maybe I can help. I’ve known people like that…