Dial "M" for Musicology

Sound Editing Oscar

Jim Buhler

JWB here:

The New York Times published a nice article by Virginia Heffernan on the nominees for Academy Award in sound editing. The article opens with this evocative bit of writing on The Hurt Locker, which I agree should win the Oscar:

”The Hurt Locker” is a bomb movie that mutes its booms. It derives suspense by withholding the expected “boomala, boomala” . . .

“The Hurt Locker” is not cool. It’s hot and dry, a heaving desert parable with a mounting sandstorm howl at the center. The internal explosions matter more than the fireworks. . . . The top notes in the soundtrack are arid metallic clicks, snips, squeaks and creaks, the chatter of wrenches and wire clippers, as bombs are defused in air so parched as to seem combustible itself. Men can hardly summon the spit or breath to speak.

After running through three other nominees—Up , Star Trek and Inglorious Basterds—rather harshly (and I would say a bit unfairly), Heffernan turns to Avatar, calling its sound "brazenly cartoonish”; this characterization is in fact a positive.

What stands out is the whoosh of muscular—not fluttery—reptile wings as they flap and glide. This has to be the sound of flying in dreams. The dragonlike creatures vie for sonic dominance with the machinery in the film and particularly with the man-machine tanks that have their own distinctive sounds, especially in the fantasyland of Pandora, where a clash of resounding arms takes place in an atmosphere of no oxygen.

Heffernan understands sound as one of the best avenues filmmakers have for opening up to the representation of the other worldly, especially one deprived of oxygen, which must then stage the breath of life.

It’s intriguing that both “Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker” have built otherworldly environments in which humans are intoxicated—in part by being deprived of oxygen. You can hear this danger much better than you can see it, and it falls to sound editors to exploit its dimensions. What a great challenge in moviemaking: the various sounds of breath—gasping, sighing, speaking, expiring—may be film’s first and most consequential sound effect. Here’s to films that revisit and rethink the sounds of breath and breathlessness.

I would caution against valorizing the breath in this way, however, as it couples rather too easily with the naive authenticity of location sound—Heffernan goes out of the way to inform us that the dialogue for The Hurt Locker "was almost all recorded on location in Jordan (and not looped in a studio)." Surely, like the sound of the breath itself, it is the effective representation of the dialogue—the way its difficult mediation through technology and body is rendered—not the location of its recording that matters.

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All I Want For Chanuka

Jonathan Bellman

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

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

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

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

Wishing everyone a happy Thanksgiving!

Where is the self that performs?

Phil Ford

A while ago I started writing a series of posts about sound and technology studies. I stopped after doing two of them, partly because I've been getting blog fatigue anyway, and partly because it seemed like an impossibly large problem (actually, a complex of interrelated problems) to tackle in the blog medium. It feels like trying to bail out a lake with a china cup. But whatever, anyway, OK, so here's something I've been thinking about in the same line. 

In my earlier posts I had argued that the concept of the musical work not only regulates and guides our formal study of Western art music, but also ends up ignoring a good deal of our actual musical experience. Then why study only musical works? Why just study compositions? Why not study performances of compositions? And of course a lot of scholars have started doing just that. 

I'm listening to a recorded musical performance -- the Vladimir De Pachmann 1907 recording of the Chopin Barcarolle. At 1:06 De Pachmann starts playing a new theme (those of you who know the piece will notice a big cut). The melody starts on scale degree 5, slides down (by way of a chromatic passing note) to 4, then skips down to 2 and curls back around, landing on 3 and moving upward through an arpeggiation of the A major triad. The apex of this arrival is the tonic pitch (1). When De Pachmann gets there, he gives a little pause. It's a nice little pause, an apt way of marking a short-range melodic and harmonic destination, and De Pachmann makes the pause in a very characteristic way, articulating the highest note of the chord a little after the accompaniment, so that the hands go slightly out of phase for a moment. One might be able to map this moment, perhaps on a temporal graph. (There are problems with this approach, but it's certainly practicable -- tempo graphing is common in musical performance studies, if only because tempo is more quantifiable than other parameters of performance.) If we gathered enough information about similar moments of rubato, we might be able to start talking about De Pachmann's general approach to rubato. We might use this general understanding of De Pachmannesque rubato to understand certain exemplary moments of interpretation, moments where De Pachmann makes some interesting decision -- for example, when he does something especially noticeable to mark the boundary between sections or the end of a piece. 

And when we do that, we will be talking about De Pachmann's interpretation as if it were like a work, but just a different kind of work. Instead of being a notated composition, this kind of work is a creation of sounds, gelled into some kind of permanence by recording technology. It's the special ability of recorded sound to allow us to repeat a moment of time endlessly, to take what is evanescent (music played on a piano more than 100 years ago) and make it permanent, so we can review and analyze the minutest details of a performance in the same way that we can go through the score of a piece of music and look at long-range connections between different themes separated by hundreds of measures. To analyze music in this way you have to be able to freeze and reverse time -- otherwise it doesn't hold still long enough for us to nail it down. Recordings and scores freeze time in different ways, but in either case they are technological contrivances that give us an object for analysis. 

Now if performances are works, performers are their authors, so we naturally will start interpreting particular moments within a performance (like that little hitch at the beginning of the new melody) as authorial utterances. Notice I used the phrase "interesting decisions" in a previous paragraph to describe the sorts of things we might want to go looking for in an analysis of a performance. But to what extent are performative gestures decisions? Are performances the result of conscious choices that performers make? We don't ever really ask this question when we're thinking about things like the Chopin Barcarolle that De Pachmann plays. We speak of the composer's intentions, which performers are enjoined to realize; we speak of tonal structures, phrase lengths, motivic relationships (etc.), everything in a composition we might be inclined to analyze, as the result of a conscious application of mind. Chopin chose these things, they didn't just happen. This is not usually something we argue, but rather something we assume, and this assumption enables us to write sentences like "Beethoven shortens the lengths of his phrases as he approaches the modulation to G major" (or whatever). It feels natural to assume the same thing of the distinctive features of a performance. ("Serkin slows down as he approaches Beethoven's modulation to G major.") On this account, a performance takes the form of a virtual conversation between conscious subjectivities. And indeed I have assumed just this sort of thing before. 

But here's the problem. If you have ever performed music professionally you have probably had this experience where you're playing and everything is going really well: the music is just flowing out of you without anything to block it. You're not thinking, "I am am playing this thing," you're just playing it. And in such states -- "flow states" -- you aren't exactly making conscious decisions. In a really good performance, you're just kind of going with it; your subjectivity merges with "it", the thing you're playing, or whatever it is that lies behind what you're playing. And time has a different meaning; you begin a piece, you end it, you begin another one, and so on to the end of the program, playing as if in a dream where time is mysteriously dilated. Your concert is over in like five minutes (or so it seems) and you can't really remember what you were playing. The worst thing that can happen is that you're kind of flowing along and then suddenly your conscious mind, your ego, the thing that makes conceptual statements, suddenly interrupts and says "oh shit, we're in the recapitulation! how did we get here?!" And at this point, as you well know if you've ever played Western art music from memory, you are most in danger of having a memory slip. In these moments you become aware that there are at least two kinds of consciousness that come into play when you perform -- the state in which you stand apart from what you're playing and can make little comments about it (oh god, here comes that leap, don't fuck it up now; well, you fucked it up, didn't you? hope it goes better in the exposition repeat) and flow state, where you are fully integrated to what you're playing. And it's in the boundary between the two -- coming out of flow and into critical consciousness with a jolt and possibly a memory slip -- that the distinction becomes clear.

My point is this: the kind of interpretation of performances that I've described here, where we treat the recorded performance as if it were a new kind of work, treats everything in a performance as if it were the result of a critical consciousness. We tacitly assume that when (for ex.) De Pachmann makes that little hitch of rubato that I described he is actually thinking something like "OK, here I am, coming to the apex of a melody -- I'm going to take some time." But anyone who's ever played music in flow state knows that you don't necessarily think any such thing. In a flow state, it's almost as if someone else is playing the music. This explains why musicians are often surprised (sometimes pleasantly) by what they hear when they hear a playback of their performance. Ornette Coleman's liner notes for Change of the Century mentions this experience:

When our group plays, before we start out to play, we do not have any idea what the end result will be. Each player is free to contribute what he feels in the music at any given moment. We do not begin with a preconceived notion as to what kind of effect we will achieve. When we record, sometimes I can hardly believe that what I hear when the tape is played back to me is the playing of my group. I am so busy and absorbed when I play that I am not aware of what I'm doing at the time I'm doing it.

So in a situation like this, where is the self that performs? Where is the subjectivity to which we can ascribe intention, and whose intentions form the basis of our interpretations? It suddenly seems to me that the problem of consciousness is a great and unexamined problem of performance studies. And perhaps it is also a problem of musicology in general. Where is the self that composes? Not being a composer myself I have nothing to say about the degree to which compositional decisions belong to intentional states, but perhaps someone out there has something to say about this question.

Anarcho-primitivism for the win

Phil Ford

To continue from the other day, re. Gould, McLuhan, and their shared vision of a world retribalized with the help of electronic media:

What's interesting about McLuhan isn't whether he's right or not. His notion that an electronic "global village" would bring back tribal society throughout the technologized West seems crazy now, but as I like to say, cultural theory, McLuhan’s especially, is often best read as if it were a kind of speculative fiction. The collisions of different and incommensurable frames of time and space that both Gould and McLuhan are here imagining -- the ancient and the modern, the tribe and the nation --  are also everywhere in science fiction, or, for that matter, in the anarcho-primitivist political imagination. Or some combination of both.

Did you watch Fight Club? Perhaps you remember this passage, part of which appears in one of Tyler Durden's monologues:

We wanted to blast the world free of history.

We were eating breakfast in the house on Paper Street, and Tyler said, picture yourself planting radishes and seed potatoes on the fifteenth green of a forgotten golf course.

You’ll hunt elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center, and dig clams next to the skeleton of the Space Needle leaning at a forty-five-degree angle. We’ll paint the skyscrapers with huge totem faces and goblin tikis, and every evening what’s left of mankind will retreat to empty zoos and lock itself in cages as protection against bears and big cats and wolves that pace and watch us from outside the cage bars at night. . . . ”

“Imagine,” Tyler said, “stalking elk past department store windows and stinking racks of beautiful rotting dresses and tuxedos on hangers; you’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life, and you’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. Jack and the beanstalk, you’ll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway stretching eight-lanes-wide and August-hot for a thousand miles.

This is a vision of the primitive breaking out within the modern world, bursting out of it and tearing it apart in the process. The special pleasure it offers comes from putting the modern and the primitive in the same mental frame; the resulting collisions of time and space (the ancient jungle in the concrete city, etc.) allow our ordinary workaday world to become newly mysterious and exotic. As I argue in my forthcoming Representations essay, exotica entertainments, including the music of Les Baxter, are structured by this trope of temporal disjuncture.

But what's interesting about this trope of representation is that it's never entirely clear whether the picture of the world it paints is for entertainment purposes only or whether it is meant to offer a serious theory. McLuhan's notion of technologized retribalization was certainly intended as a theory, which is to say, as a comprehensive understanding of how the world works and what direction its operations are leading it. But inasmuch as this theory has turned out to be spectacularly wrong, perhaps it's now more interesting to think about its late-1960s vogue the way we might understand the 1950s vogue for exotica pop—as a collective fantasy, a way of viewing the world that that was less about finding enlightenment than finding pleasure. In short, we could read cultural theory as a fiction -- that is, as a notion entertained not because it might be true, but because it is fun to imagine. 

Fight Club is entertainment, right? It had Brad Pitt and Meat Loaf and everything. But the passage I quoted is also basically a blueprint for the anarcho-primitivist conception of revolution. The idea is, at some point we'll stop being passive consumers, we'll stop allowing ourselves to be penned like veal calves in fluorescent-lit cubicles, we'll wake up: suddenly aware of our alienation, we will erupt in a sudden and spontaneous paroxysm of smashing and burning (the necessary and inevitable moment of creative destruction), and then a tribal, archaic, peaceful anarchy will be born from the broken shards of the old consumerist technocracy. This is, I think, as wildly unpersuasive a theory as McLuhan's retribalization thesis. It has the same underpants gnome business structure as other theories of revolution with a counterculture/left flavor—Step 1: develop revolutionary consciousness. Step 2: ??? Step 3: Revolution! But as a theory it is no less seriously meant than McLuhan's (with which it shares some obvious similarities). This wordless series of comics panels (done in the style of those instructional laminated cards that show you how to use the safety equipment on an airplane) lays out the anrcho-primitivist theory of revolution in graphic form. (Warning -- some sex and nudity, not safe for work. Actually, even without the sex and nudity it would  unsafe for work anyway, inasmuch as it promotes the violent destruction of the corporate workplace. "Unsafe for work" gets a new meaning here.)

I found these images here, but it originated in a West Coast anarchist group's project to put Fight Club's Project Mayhem into practice: this flier was produced to be mailed to corporations in their business reply mail envelopes.

A side note about anarchism in general: I'm actually somewhat sympathetic to anarchism, being anti-statist myself, but I acknowledge that as a political philosophy it doesn't yield many feasible plans for alternatives to the various kinds of statism currently on offer. That's kind of the point, I guess. But anyone who's spent any time in a place that's experiencing real anarchy -- for example, Haiti in 1993, where I was working for the summer -- isn't going to recognize the peaceful, creative society of panels 10-16. Indeed, a lot of anarchists don't seem to have much in mind beyond panels 1-9. I sometimes wonder if "anarchism" isn't usually a way of dressing up a general desire to break things in the clothes of serious-sounding political critique. Even pacifist anarchists seem to place just a little too much faith in purgative violence -- putting off the personal responsibility for peaceful action onto the idea that revolutionary violence is a necessary and unavoidable historical stage. (This trick of putting things off onto History -- what I want is irrelevant, the logic of history dictates that heads must roll, etc., is a bad habit borrowed from Marxism, about which a lot of self-described anarchists really should be a bit less credulous.) The comic V for Vendetta, probably the most remarkable single anarchist piece of pop culture, plays the standard line on violent revolution:

. . .  then meet with them no more, he continues in the next panel. But they never seem to want to leave on their own, you know? That's always the problem.

It's all about meme

Phil Ford

The dead body of the old meme has hardly cooled before another follows quickly to take its place. (Oh, and by the way, from Kim Schafer here's another one, which gets extra points for sort of looking like her, only in a Lichtenstein-esque way.)

Scott has tagged me with this:

1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Since I've just sent a couple of dozen books back to the library in my biennial half-hearted-desk-clearing, there was actually only one book near at hand -- Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner. Which, by the way, I recommend warmly, since it neatly anthologizes a great many invaluable pieces of writing that lie at the intersection between music, sound, technology, and the listening body. A few of my favorite pieces in it include Simon Reynolds's "Noise," Frederic Rzewski "Little Bangs," Brian Eno's "The Studio as a Compositional Tool" and "Ambient Music," and Glenn Gould's "The Prospects of Recording." Most of these essays have been abridged, but intelligently, and Gould's essay (the full-length version of which can be read here) is actually improved by the editing. (Gould's prose style was pretty undisciplined -- he would have made a good blogger.) As it happens, this is the essay that's on page 123. And here are the relevant sentences:

When we find that the expression of that culture represents what seem to us archaic ideologies, we condemn it as old-fashioned or sterile, or puritanical, or as possessed of any other limitation from which we consider ourselves emancipated. With simultaneous transmission we set aside our touristlike fascination with distant and exotic places and give vent to impatience at the chronological tardiness the natives display.  To this extent, Professor McLuhan's concept of the "global village" -- the simultaneity of response from McMurdo Sound to Murmansk, from Taiwan to Tacoma -- is alarming.

Funny that it should be this particular passage, given that I've written so many times about both Gould and McLuhan (though not at the same time). Gould here is thinking about what kinds of impact recording technology might have on people generally, and he's thinking about McLuhan's insistence on the simultaneity/instantaneity of electronic media. McLuhan defined a medium as anything that extends human senses and capacities -- a book, in his thinking, was an extension of the eye, the gramophone an extension of the ear, and so on. So In McLuhan's way of thinking, the worldwide network of electronic media made each individual like a spider sitting in the middle of its web, feeling the vibrations transmitted from the periphery, instantly aware of movements in a vast space beyond the limits of the body. For McLuhan, this new interconnection and receptivity would lead to the renewal of archaic tribal forms of social organization within which "the individual," an invention of modern literate man, would vanish. Though Gould didn't mention McLuhan by name very often, it's often been remarked that his ideas about technology and society were rather McLuhanesque. There's a passage in his eccentric self-interview "Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould about Glenn Gould" where he lays out his "neomedieval anonymity quest on behalf of the artist," a vision of ancient social forms (nonhierarchical, nonindividualistic) coming into new existence through the paradoxical mediation of modern technology:

I simply feel that the artist should be granted, both for his sake and for that of his public -- and let me get on record right now the fact that I'm not at all happy with words like "public" and "artist"; I'm not happy with the hierarchical implications of that kind of terminology -- that he should be granted anonymity. He should be permitted to operate in secret, as it were, unconcerned with -- or better still, unaware of -- the presumed demands of the marketplace -- which demands, given sufficient indifference on the part of a sufficient number of artists, will simply disappear. And given their disappearance, the artist will then abandon his false sense of "public" responsibility, and his "public" will relinquish its role of servile dependency.

But in my randomly-selected passage Gould shows some ambivalence about the "global village," too. Gould is disturbed by the thought that a "global village" might simply lead to a kind of large-scale rationalizing of the multiple and overlapping temporalities that exist throughout the world. McLuhan himself was often asked about whether his vision of a new tribalism implied a new mass conformity. In the Playboy interview (probably the best place to start for anyone wanting a quick introduction to his thought -- or at least that part of his thought that made him an intellectual celebrity in the 1960s), McLuhan responded to a similar objection in this way:

The tribe, you see, is not conformist just because it’s inclusive; after all, there is far more diversity and less conformity within a family group than there is within an urban conglomerate housing thousands of families. It’s in the village where eccentricity lingers, in the big city where uniformity and impersonality are the milieu. The global-village conditions being forged by the electric technology stimulate more discontinuity and diversity and division than the old mechanical, standardized society; in fact, the global village makes maximum disagreement and creative dialog inevitable. Uniformity and tranquillity are not hallmarks of the global village; far more likely are conflict and discord as well as love and harmony — the customary life mode of any tribal people.

There's more to say about this, though . . . actually a lot more, because this gets into some of the stuff I write about in an article on exotica that I have coming out in Representations later in the summer.

Oh, and by the way, Brent, Phil, Rebecca,  Gabriel, and the dudes at amusicology  . . . tag, you're it.

Glenn Gould's 3-D House of Pancakes

Phil Ford

OK, I'll admit it, I've been kind of phoning it in on the blog for the last little bit. It's lame to blog about how you're too busy to blog (something I've called "the Teachout method"), but you get to do it once a year, I reckon, so I'm doing it now. You might have noticed that the number of "cool" postings has increased in proportion to "hot" ones, which basically means, more posting to other people's funny/smart/imaginative doings and more posting of Youtube clips.

This isn't going to change anytime soon. I've still got a lot of stuff to do before the semester ends, and all discretionary brain power (i.e., whatever's left over after teaching) is being used to write about angry hippies with guns.

Another sure-fire way to get hits 'n' links without trying very hard is to write something -- anything -- about Glenn Gould. So here we go. The other day in my sound and performance studies seminar I talked a little about Gould's approach to recording. Gould thought of a recording as a crafted audio composition in itself rather than a transparent rendering of a performance -- or, in Thedore Gracyk's terms, it is an autographic artwork. Gracyk's excellent book Rhythm and Noise rejects what he calls realism in favor of a notion in which a recording -- rock recordings especially, though hiphop does it too -- tiles together sounds assembled in the recording studio to create virtual performances, which is to say, performances that never existed in real time or a real place.

Anyway, the culture of classical music almost never challenges the realist ideal of recording. Even after 4+ decades of rock musicians and their audiences taking studio-based composition for granted, classical heads still get in arguments over the morality of splicing. Glenn Gould is an interesting historical figure (quite apart from the interest his piano playing as such might hold) because he is such an unusual figure within classical music, arguing what is basically a rock position on recording in a classical culture to which such a position is almost totally alien. A good article about all this may be found here. Its author makes the point that Gould's own studio practice is actually rather conservative in his piano recordings. Gould really only broke out into something more innovative in his "Solitude Trilogy" of CBC documentaries. There's a rather beautiful representation of his this in Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould:

In my seminar the other day, I played one of the recordings that Gould made late in life, when he had begun to experiment with what he called "acoustic choreography." This idea was basically that since studio recording allows one to create various acoustic "perspectives" on the piano, one could change from one perspective to another within the same piece, in effect creating the musical analog of a cinematic zoom. So, for example, in Sibelius's Kyllikki op. 41 no. 3,* Gould set up four microphones at varying distances from the piano, and in the first section, where he wanted a dry, analytical sound, he faded the distant mikes and boosted the close ones, eliminating most of the room sound and drawing close into the piano. In the more lyrical middle section, he "zooms" way back, boosting the room sound and giving the recording a "wet," bathroom-like acoustic ambiance. It sounds as if the microphone is mounted on a cart that has just been pulled away from the piano. Compared to the very sophisticated pseudo-spatial effects in an album like, say, Kid A, this is a rather obvious effect, even a bit absurd, like SCTV's classic skit, "Dr. Tongue's Evil House of Pancakes":

Still, you gotta love Gould for trying. And I think it's the fact that he did try, and in the face of considerable hostility and incomprehension from the classical music establishment, that has made him the unlikely hero of such musicians like Buckethead and Uri Caine.

*This example is drawn from Kevin Bazzana's extremely awesome scholarly monograph on Gould, Glenn Gould: The Performer in the Work, the last chapter of which contains a fine detailed investigation of Gould's "acoustic choreography," including photo reproductions of the scores Gould marked up to reflect his planned zooms and pans.

Anarchy in the AMS

Phil Ford

Good evening --

I am speaking tonight on Thursday, November 1, at the American Musicological Society Annual Meeting in Quebec City. The session at which I am speaking is the Committee on Career-Related Issues forum on collaborative internet tools. If you are attending this conference, you might be hearing my words as I speak them, though it's more likely you're drinking at the opening-night reception. Or you might be reading my words on Dial "M" for Musicology, the blog I write with Jonathan Bellman, since the blogging software I use has allowed me to write out my remarks in advance and arrange for them to appear online at the same time as I am delivering them in person.

And I'm doing this because I think it's kind of cool, and because I can. But I suppose I could also use it to illustrate why I blog at all. As I speak these words I'm in a small roomful of academics. Not just academics, musicologists; not just musicologists, members of the AMS; not just AMS members, but that subset who have paid especially punitive travel costs to come to Quebec City; and, of that already small subset of the academic community, we are left with those who have resisted the temptation of caffeine-, nicotine-, and alcohol-fueled socialization in the ballroom. But there are no such restraints of space, time, and academic specialization on my blog, or on any blog. Granted, the people who come there regularly (and we get between 200 and 400 site hits on an average day), are self-selected -- people with an interest in music, musicology, academia, or some combination of all three. But we also get people who surf in on false hits, like the guy who found my post on Tom Lutz's cultural history of slacking with the search term "wife discipline," or the unknown soul, perhaps tormented beyond endurance by her accompanist, who found us when she typed "I hate pianists" into the Google search box. More to the point, there is no prior restraint on who might find us, or why, and no restraint on who might link to us, or how they might respond to what we write.

Neither, in writing the blog post version of this talk, is there anything preventing me from littering the page with cuss words, or passing unprovoked personal remarks about Ryan Bañagale, though I would certainly forbear both in the Committee on Career-Related Issues, out of fear of community disapproval and a stony glare from the moderator. As we all know by now, blogging enables virtual communities but erases the social restraints enforced by real ones. Bloggers can choose to be anonymous and write with all the unrestrained savagery of the anonymous student evaluation or journal peer review. But even when they're not anonymous, bloggers can fall under the spell of an illusion common in ostriches and toddlers: the belief that if I don't see you, you don't see me. I see the same crew of friendly, helpful blog commenters every week at Dial M, and can believe that they represent the views of our much larger silent audience. But they don't: there will always be people who hate you and hate your stupid blog and will lie out there in the weeds, silently hating. And every blogger will at some point say something mean, ill-considered, or frankly stupid, because even when you're not anonymous, you kind of feel as if you are, and anyway, it's an informal medium that discourages lengthy reflection. All of which is to say that when you're blogging you're exposing yourself in ways you can't control or even fully understand, and this exposure, with all its associated risks, is probably why there are still so few musicology blogs out there, and why many of them disappear after a while. Academic careers are bought and sold with the currency of peer evaluation, and academic bloggers get freaked out when they feel themselves losing control of the image they present to their disciplines.

Some non-blogging scholars are freaked out by all this, too, and argue that blogging lures people to do damage to themselves and their careers. Quick hits for easy kicks, fun in the short term and personal ruin in the end -- blogging is like crack for academics. And there's another argument against academic blogging that's familiar from debates over Wikipedia: how can anything of value emerge from a medium where there's no-one in control, no editorial board, no-one maintaining intellectual standards and norms of civility? Without such oversight, blogging is mere anarchy.

Well, this is quite right. The natural state of the blogosphere is anarchy. The essence of the medium is the reciprocal and nonhierarchical relationship between bloggers and their audiences. In fact, writing about "bloggers and their audiences" is misleading, because it implies that this is a clear distinction of roles, like the distinction between those who read a newspaper and those who write it. But in the blogosphere there is nothing preventing any reader from turning into a writer, and every blogger has the same megaphone as everyone else. To be sure, there's a pecking order -- Alex Ross is more widely-read than I am, for instance -- but it's an abstract, intransitive kind of authority. Alex Ross has authority, but he doesn't have authority over anyone. He can't shut me up, or compel me to talk about the things he and other A-list bloggers have deemed most important. If I hate Alex Ross I can buy the domain name ihatealexross.com and devote my site to mocking everything he writes, and while this would be nutty and pointless, people would probably read it. And it is the ability to attract readers and links to your page that makes you visible, and nothing else. You may get links only because you're that crazy guy who hates Alex Ross, but still, you're getting links. It's a kind of anarchy that mirrors the anarchy of an unregulated free market, where the only thing that controls what is being offered for sale is whether someone is willing to pay for it. A geek show gets the same pull as a poetry reading. In the blogopshere, the currency is not money, but popularity, but the principle is the same.

Now surely this is inimical to the values of scholarship, if not art itself. It is infamous to judge ideas according to their popularity, and besides, very few of us went into musicology because we wanted to be more popular. I suspect that many of us became academics because we wanted to preserve the things we love from the tyranny of popularity, from the demand that artistic values line up with worldly success. Better, then, that musicology stay where it can be protected; better that there should be protectors.

When anyone says that we need protectors, the first question you should ask is who they have in mind. Usually it's them, or people who think just like them. So then the second question should be, why you? And it is at this point that we start hearing moral arguments that appeal to things unseen and benefits we must take on faith. It is here that people begin to insist on transcendent goals to which our universities and scholarly societies should be directed. Musicology should resist the philistinism of the market, or preserve the cultural heritage of the West, or work for social justice and fight race and gender discrimination, etc.  But of course there is never any agreement on these goals. While all academics pay lip service to the idea of free and unfettered intellectual inquiry, we all have our blind spots. There is always some school of thought to which we cannot extend even a minimal assumption of sense and good faith. The new-musicology debates of the 1990s were envenomed by the fact that people on both sides simply could not believe in any of the warrants that underwrote the scholarship of the other side. The only thing you can really say about who was right is that they all thought they were right. But when the question of who's right is also a question of who should call the shots, as it inevitably is in zero-sum situations like, say when we're deciding who's getting published in JAMS, intellectual matters become political matters. Not any particular kind of politics, necessarily, not politics of the left or the right, but the principle of politics itself, which is power.

And it is here that the abstract and intransitive power of the blogosphere becomes a very great virtue. No-one can shut anyone else up, ideas can cross-pollinate unpredictably, and since the blogosphere is not a zero-sum enterprise, there is nothing forcing people to "take a side" with this or that school of thought. Those who gather around their shared faith in Academic Theory X might face questions from which they would otherwise be insulated by institutional mechanisms. And I suspect that this is something a few academics secretly resent and fear about blogs. They don't want someone who hasn't been properly housebroken asking cheeky questions, and they don't want to be denied the institutional authority to control the discourse.

People who complain about blogs, like those who complain about Wikipedia, ask why a medium that puts any random crank on the same footing as an expert should be taken seriously. Defenders of Wikipedia always point out that it's self-correcting: the damage that malicious and incompetent people cause is quickly undone by dedicated Wikipedians. Now, you can't quite say this about blogs. A stupid blog post stays stupid. But there is a kind of self-correction at work -- call it peer review. The freak who writes ihatealexross.com may get links, but this won't earn him a place in the minisphere of classical music bloggers. A geek show may get the same pull as a poetry reading, but it's not as if they have the same clientele: poets don't have to start biting the heads off chickens. And while one of the charms of blogging is that it allows you to post a long piece of serious writing one day and pictures of your cats the next, a clarinetist who only posts pictures of her cats isn't going to get any play, except from the crazy cat people. (And that's a whole different scene.) The classical music blogosphere and the smaller sphere of academic music bloggers are communities of interest, and while you can be an enormous hairbag, you also need to be an interesting, entertaining, and at least marginally relevant hairbag if you want anyone to read you. This kind of peer-review is non-binding, of course. It won't keep you from saying dumb things in public and getting denied tenure.* It is implemented only in blunt remarks in your comments section, rebuttals in other blogs, or ostracism, in the form of no links and no love. But again, there's no one person doing the ostracizing. Decisions are collective (if non-binding) and power flows (intransitively) from a decentralized structure enabled by the logic of the internet itself.

Which means that blogs have something in common with Wikipedia: they rely on what Yale law professor Yochai Benkler calls commons-based peer production (CBPP). Peer production means that knowledge (in the form of a Wiki, Project Gutenberg, Librivox, a piece of open-source software, or whatever) is being created by a widely distributed, non-hierarchical network of volunteers whose willingness to work on a shared project is their main qualification for doing so. Commons-based means that nothing created in this way is proprietary and no-one's doing it for money. The magic ingredient that makes it work is the internet, which allows for a decentralized peer review structure and which also permits a large number of people to make something huge (i.e., an ongoing self-sustaining intellectual conversation on music) by adding tiny pieces to it.** This is a model of production that now drives a good deal of software innovation, and something like it is beginning to happen in scholarship as well. The academic blogosphere is self-selected, ungoverned, and nonhierarchical; the knowledge it produces is generated collectively as ideas are passed along, argued, and transformed from one blog to another; and while individual blogs (including Dial M) might stipulate which rights they reserve on their own work, no-one can be said to own a conversation.

However, the problem with understanding the musicoloblogosphere as commons-based peer production is that the musicological commons is still very small: for reasons I've described, there just aren't a lot of music-academic blogs yet. But perhaps this is also a secret strength. There aren't enough music academics to sustain a conversation, but this means that those of us who are in the blogosphere end up spending a lot of time conversing with music people who aren't academics, or academics who aren't music people. And the best of them are brilliant: aforementioned critic Alex Ross, pianist Jeremy Denk, composer Matthew Guerrieri, and intellectual critic Scott McLemee, to name only four. And what happens when you spend a lot of time sharing space with these people is that you start to develop a lingua franca, a border language synthesized from the things you have in common. And as I've argued elsewhere, that common tongue has its own special characteristics. It is "cool," in the McLuhanesque sense: readers can profitably interact with it in a wider variety of ways than they can with more traditional forms of academic communication. Blog writing tends to be "porous," filled with open spaces that readers can fill with their own contributions. This kind of writing doesn't make the "hotter," denser kinds of academic writing obsolete, of course, but I would guess that as academic blogging continues to grow it will "cool down" academic discourse generally. Whether this is a good thing or not is a tough question, and maybe at this point an unanswerable one. I should blog about it some time. Or maybe someone else can. I'm looking at you, AMS.

*But then, we're all grown-ups, aren't we? Grown-ups take responsibility for what they do and don't blame their bad decisions on the medium. It's not "the medium" making you post all those pictures of cats, it's you. 

**Benkler treats these conditions of commons-based peer production in "Coase's Penguin," the article where the term was first introduced. See also Benkler's book on the subject, The Wealth of Networks, which (of course) has a Wiki. Other things you should read that I didn't have space to mention in the main text: James Boyle's classic article on the "second enclosure" of the intellectual commons; the CHE forum "Can Blogging Derail Your Career?", and Alex Ross's recent New Yorker piece on classical music in the internet age.

Decay

Phil Ford

Back in the spring came a revolutionary moment in American culture whose full significance was not quite grasped at the time, although the event itself was widely seen and much commented-upon. I refer, of course, to Blake Lewis's performance of Bon Jovi's "You Give Love a Bad Name" on American Idol:

What Lewis did was to break the fourth wall of audio vérité, something no other AI contestant had ever done. He performed his own purpose -- freshening up an old favorite -- by miming the gestures of someone taking an old LP off the shelf, blowing off the dust, and cuing up the turntable. And (this is the important bit) he then imitated the hiss of a needle in a well-worn groove. The gesture of incorporating audio decay into one's own performance makes audible the passage of years: with this gesture, a song that lives in the eternal present of AOR radio is stripped of its appearance of living outside time. Lewis's performance insisted (gently) that the song lives in history (i.e., old song made new, etc.), and did so by representing it as something with a material existence subject to the ravages of time. Songs are embodied in objects (LPs, cassette tapes, eight-tracks, 45s) that decay, and the decay becomes part of the our hearing of the song: we hear it as the sign of passing time, of history. In truth, Blake wasn't doing anything that hiphop artists hadn't done for decades, but, as I said at the time, this marked the moment that hiphop, and certain of its underlying aesthetic elements, penetrated the widest possible sphere of American pop-cultural consciousness. 

What hiphop does is to make unignorable rock music's rejection of what Theodore Gracyk, in his excellent philosophical study Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetic of Rock, calls realism:

Needing a label for the position that performances always have ontological priority, let us call it recording realism. It is related to an established position concerning photography and cinema: the parent theme is that any mechanical recording is essentially the documentation of some independent reality. Although not himself a realist, William Moylan summarizes its basic aesthetic: "The recording medium is often called upon to be transparent. In these contexts, it is the function of the recording to capture the sound as accurately as possible, to capture the live performance without distortion." Ideally, recording is invisible and the audience should ignore contributions of the recording process.*

Or, one might add, the materiality of recordings. When you do pay attention to the contributions of the recording process, or to the "thinginess" or records, you see them as things in themselves and not simply auditory snapshots of some other, independent reality. They are things with a history, things in time, things that decay. Records are made out of records; records are about other records. Hiphop simply raises this notion to an overt and generally avowed aesthetic principle. (As Gracyk demonstrates, in rock it is overt but generally disavowed.)

Last week I read a paper for the IU musicology department that draws on some of these notions by looking at some very decayed sound recordings and thinking about how their decay is part of their presence. One of our graduate students, Amanda Sewell, told me about a film called Decasia: The State of Decay that does the same thing. Decasia is a wordless art film that sets very old and decayed silent film footage to the music of can-banger Michael Gordon. The film's website has two clips:

Clip 1
Clip 2

When the decay of an expressive object becomes its primary expression, what do we feel? Nostalgia, longing, melancholy, regret, desire, foreboding, fear?

*Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetic of Rock (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 39.

The Gift of Hearing

Robin Wallace

When my wife, Barbara, suddenly lost her hearing four years ago, her life and that of our family changed irrevocably. From being a group of people who take hearing for granted, we became one for whom it is a tenuous gift. Barbara had been deaf in her right ear for three years already. She was packing some boxes for our move to Texas, suddenly felt dizzy, sat down, and couldn’t hear at all. No treatment—including agonizing injections into the inner ear—did any good. She was profoundly deaf, and for the next several months, every word I said to her had to be written down. Somehow we managed to drive across the country, buy a house, and settle into a new city where we knew next to nobody. In the process, I learned that being deaf is like being in prison, only worse. There is no reprieve, no exercise time, nothing but unremitting solitary confinement. A number of people remarked at the time on the irony that I, a Beethoven scholar, was put in the position of Beethoven’s close friends during his final years. I guess this was supposed to make me feel better. It made me feel for Beethoven. Three years ago I wrote on the ams-list about our experience, first, with the pocket talker—a kind of high-tech version of Beethoven’s ear trumpets—and then with a cochlear implant. Since then, Barbara has been implanted in the right ear as well, and she can now “hear” out of both, as long as she keeps changing the batteries (they last about six hours between charges). A microphone in front of her ear canal picks up sounds and transmits them to the processor behind her ear, which digitizes them and warps them in a variety of nearly incomprehensible ways. They are then transmitted to a magnet, which she attaches to her head opposite another magnet that has been implanted in her skull. The digitized sound impulses go from there to the implant, which relays them in the form of carefully spaced electronic impulses to 19 electrodes imbedded in her cochlea. The result registers on her auditory nerves as sound, although not in a very precise manner. She had to learn to recognize my voice—at first, I sounded like Mickey Mouse, then graduated to sounding like Michael Jackson—and those of our children, whom she still can’t always tell apart. She can talk on the phone to some extent, although even one-on-one conversation can still be a struggle, especially when there are distractions. And then there’s music. At first, we were hoping that she would eventually be able to return to singing in a choir with me. So far, that’s proved elusive. If she hears music she’s familiar with, she can usually recognize it. Occasionally, she can even learn a new tune, although that’s a rarity. So far, the choir is still hopeless, since other parts singing at the same time (she’s an alto) make her deaf to her own voice. When we go to a concert together, we feel elated if she is able to distinguish one instrument from another. Strangely, she can often hear the timbres even if she can’t hear the melody. The truth is, I can really only imagine what she’s hearing, and her patience in continuing to attend concerts with me (even if only occasionally) is astounding. We used to go all the time, but will probably never do so again. (There is hope, though. A new external processor has recently come out that, unlike the ones we have, is designed to help with music listening as well as with speech. So far, our insurance has refused to pay for it. Hearing music isn’t a “medical necessity.”) Listening, it turns out, really is hard work. After a day spent trying to figure out sounds that everybody else takes for granted, Barbara is mentally and physically exhausted. Then she takes off her “ears” for the night, and silence settles in. This has been a learning experience for all of us, of course, and often enough I do find the grace to be thankful for that part of it. I never knew the extent to which hearing skills could be learned, and it’s been an ear-opener. It has also made be profoundly grateful for something that most of us never think twice about: the symphony of noises, both wanted and unwanted, that barrages us day in and day out and that is our most powerful connection with the world and with each other. I’m leaving on vacation on the 27th, so this will be my last post for a while. I just wanted to take the chance to show that I can write about something other than you-know-what. Thanks for all the intellectual stimulation; I’ve enjoyed blogging with you

Technological determinism! RADICAL technological determinism!

Phil Ford

But I don't have an internet connection at home, so I'm having to write this from the IU music library. If you're trying to get in touch with me and wonder why you haven't heard anything, that's why. Moving is the never-ending headache it always is, although I always forget just how bad it's going to be. I've heard it said that women experience a kind of amnesia about childbirth, even start remembering it as sort of pleasant, so they can imagine having more kids after a while. Good for the perpetuation of the species. Something similar happens with moving. You think it'll be better this time, but you don't count on the little things that always bite your ankles -- like, for example, enduring a weary day of driving and keeping yourself encouraged with the thought of a nice cold beer to go with your (probably otherwise indifferent) dinner, and then realizing you've pulled into a dry county. I spent my dinner making surly remarks about Arkansas and being shushed by my wife.* I'm all in favor of community self-determination and everything, but, as the Austin Lounge Lizards put it in their song "100 Miles of Dry," this is taking democracy too far. It's nice to be back in Bloomington. I dig this place. It's nice to be in a town with a good classical radio station, for one thing. I lived in the Twin Cities from 1993 to 2003, during the time Minnesota Public Radio became a public-radio behemoth (if that's not a contradiction in terms) and, at the same time (maybe paradoxically, maybe not), ruined their classical programming. They took away the ability of their announcers to make programming decisions and instead installed this evil technocratic system whereby they would round up focus-test audiences and play little snippets of music for them and the results of their preferences got enshrined in some sort of computer algorithm that would dictate the music most calculated to appeal to some hypothetical audience of people who don't really like classical music but might not turn it off if it is made sufficiently inoffensive. The clips played for the focus-group audiences were just a few seconds in length and were not intended to establish complete melodies, much less formal sections or any general narrative arc. As I understand it, they were supposed to mimic the experience of pressing the scan button on the radio and hearing a few seconds of some general texture and timbre. You see, some genius figured out that people make listening decisions on their associations with those aspects of sound that can be gleaned from the few seconds of attention they give to a radio station when when're looking for something to listen to. This actually makes a lot of sense. When my students hate some kind of music -- hiphop and country, often -- it's usually on the generalized level of sound. Someone who hates country only has to hear a bent note on a steel guitar to lunge for the scan button -- he's not going to stick around to find out whether it's Patsy Cline or Toby Keith. Sort of like the way I only need a glimpse of faux-walnut simulated wood-grain panelling on the side of a cheap toaster oven to plunge me into despair. It's a basic emotional response to a tactile experience, and MPR's radio programming was plotted at the tactile level. Which meant no vocal music (people don't like the sound of a trained classical voice with vibrato), no music with organ (perhaps an association with church?), not a lot of dissonance, obviously, nothing too long, clear and uncluttered texture, not a lot of changes in texture, tempo, and volume. Which meant a lot of 18th-century kleinmeisters (or, as my Dad liked to call it, "that rinky-dink Baroque shit"), but not Bach, who, like Mozart, has too many notes. And lots of Dvorak. That should have been a clue. Dvorak, that most mediocre of composers, Brahms for dummies, the simulated wood grain of classical music, is the very embodiment and avatar of lowest-common-denominator classical programming. If Dvorak had never existed, MPR would have had to invent him. Maybe MPR has gotten better, who knows; I haven't lived in Minnesota for four years. But when I did live there is was a source of constant irritation, watching MPR raking in money from their legacies, licencing, and corporate donations, grabbing up radio stations, and then two or three times a year putting on their noble-poverty act and managing to shake down credulous Minnesotans, who would donate money so that MPR could continue to play Dvorak and Tartini every goddam day. A month or so ago David Brooks wrote an annoying op-ed in the New York Times about Al Gore's new book, The Assault on Reason. I haven't read that book and don't really care one way or the other about it, but what annoyed me was that Brooks called Gore a "radical technological determinist." This is how you write when you're the house intellectual for a ruling cabal of obscurantists. An example:

[Gore] writes that ''the idea of self-government became feasible after the printing press.'' With this machine, people suddenly had the ability to use the printed word to debate ideas and proceed logically to democratic conclusions. As Gore writes in his best graduate school manner, ''The eighteenth century witnessed more and more ordinary citizens able to use knowledge as a source of power to mediate between wealth and privilege.''

Is this a radical thought? Don't worry your pretty little head; Mr. Brooks has read many important books so you don't have to. Trust him: it's a RADICAL idea. Brooks knows enough to be right that Gore's arguments are technologically deterministic, but dishonest enough to use the old politician's trick of sticking the word "radical" in there to discredit what is actually a pretty sound idea. Technological determinism is not, on its own, all that radical. Technology really does determine how people think and act. MPR bet on the power of the radio scan button, and won: their listening audience ballooned when they started feeding it a Dvorak-intensive diet. Examples can be multiplied. I recommend Mark Katz's book, Capturing Sound, for its elegant inventory of "phonographic effects" and its discussion of how the way we listen to music has changed over a hundred years of recorded sound. *"Think of it as a cultural experience." "I could have had this particular cultural experience in Saudi Arabia." Etc.