Dial "M" for Musicology

Why We Do Research, Why We Publish

I was recently requesting permission from various museums and music publishers for illustrations and musical examples that I am including in my forthcoming book Musical Exoticism: Images and Reflections.

One of the questions I was asked brought me up short: size of the print run.  I contacted the publisher  of my book, Cambridge University Press.  Answer: 600 copies, at least for the first printing.

My only previous monograph (in 1986), which was based on my dissertation, was published in an edition of 2000 copies (500 hardcover, 1500 paperback).  It's still available for purchase.  A book that I co-edited (in 1997) printed 1000 copies, sold out within perhaps four years, was (I believe) unavailable for a few years, but can now be read in electronic form by anybody who wishes to log on (no need for a subscription or password) at:

http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft838nb58v&chunk.id=0&doc.view=print

Does University of California Press get money every year from CDLib.org for renting them this book?  How does CDLib cover its operating costs if it makes its wares available for free?

The gradual emergence of online publication surely explains why Cambridge University Press now thinks that 600 copies might be a safe bet for the initial print-run of my forthcoming book.  A colleague pointed out to me that a number of recent musicological books have come out in hard and electronic form, either simultaneously or in very quick succession.  Two examples: Elizabeth LeGuin's book on Boccherini (UCalifornia Press) and Michael Pisani's on how Native America has been evoked in Western music (parlor song, Dvorak's Ninth, film music, etc.--Yale University Press).

But, getting back to permissions: the exchange I remember most vividly occurred back in the mid-90s, when I was trying to talk a permissions-giver (i.e., a recent college grad at a desk) into lowering a permission fee for a few measures of music to include in an article in a scholarly journal.  I pointed out that I was not going to earn anything for publishing the article.

"Then why did you write it?" the young employee asked--not in an unkind way, just truly puzzled.

It's a question I suppose we all think about at times: Why do we do research at all, and why sweat bullets trying to write it up effectively?  Should we make the argument elaborate and nuanced (for the few who care about all the details and evidence)?  Should we keep it streamlined (so as to hold the attention of the non-specialist)?  What different kinds of readers are likely to be consulting the book or article?...

In this regard, I just noticed an interesting personal statement on From Beyond the Stave, the music-book blog (of publisher Boydell and Brewer) that I mentioned in a post about Elgar's incomplete Third Symphony and the supposed New Musicology.  The post is by Martin Anderson, the publisher of Toccata Books (whose wares are now distributed by Boydell--something I hadn't realized).  He's writing here as a publisher, not an author, but he gives a good sense of what drives him to make high-level writing available on (in the case of Toccata Books) important composers who are not generally considered first-rank.

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"I started Toccata Press way back in 1981, basically because I got fed up waiting for other publishers to bring out the books I wanted to read: there was nothing published in English on Enescu, nothing on Franz Schmidt or Pfitzner or a host of other important composers."
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What a startling way to phrase it!: Write the book or article (or, in Martin Anderson's case, publish the book) that you wish you could read on the subject.

Is that why we write (or should write) about music, musical life, etc.?

I suppose there are all kinds of reasons for writing seriously about music.  But Martin Anderson's reason seems so simple and obvious that I wonder why it never occurred to me in quite this way before.

Would we musicologists find it stimulating (refreshing, challenging) to think more about what we ourselves find engaging and informative on the page?

Might this question help a musicologist decide what to explore next in his or her research . . . and how to write it up for the readers "out there," whether they hold our prose in their hands or click their way through it on their computer screen?

Quad guitar

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

Ha, you missed one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Warning: Ideas in Head Are Smaller Than They Appear

A 2004 cartoon from James Kochalka's wonderful sketchbook diary American Elf:

Kochalka is a cartoonist, rock musician, astronaut, and race car driver.* So he's in the business of having ideas, which he can execute in a number of different media. And re-reading the second anthology of American  Elf this morning with my coffee, I happened upon this cartoon and, not for the first time, felt a certain connection with Mr. Kochalka, despite the differences in our chosen media. We all need our big ideas, of course, but it's a mistake to think that they always come to us at full size. As J.R.R. Tolkien once said of The Lord of the Rings, sometimes the little tales grow in the telling.

I'm now at a point where I'm advising doctoral students in their dissertations, and I seem to keep coming back to this point. You start with a presentment of some large idea that will turn into a dissertation, but in a sense you don't totally know what the idea is until it's written down. (I don't think you ever really know what you think about something until you've given it some verbal shape, either written or spoken.) But then how do you start writing it down if you don't exactly know what it is? It's a conundrum sort of like the old hermeneutic circle thing: you can't understand the parts without a sense of the whole, but you can't grasp the whole without knowing its parts. I've always told myself a version of my Mom's line about thrift: watch the pennies and the dollars look after themselves. Start writing little ideas down and let the larger connections between them, the architecture of the Big Idea you're chasing, develop organically from the accumulation of details. And, first of all, have a place to write them down. I have a number of daybooks on my computer because I'm most comfortable sketching things in a word processor program, but everyone is different. There are still a lot of longhand diehards out there. (I suspect that there's some connection between thinking and the physical act of writing. I just like the feel of typing.) For that matter, one of the reasons I like blogging is that it gives me a low-hassle way of firing off little ideas, some of which become surprisingly valuable to me. And the funny thing is, I never have any way of telling whether a blog post will be valuable when I start writing it down. (This is why outlines never work for me, though I imagine I'm in the minority on this.)

Of course, there's a downside to the start-small-and-work-your-way-up strategy of dissertation writing, which is that you might end up with a bunch of short pieces on different sub-topics which add up to a shambling incoherent Frankenstein's Monster dissertation. And this, I will admit, is exactly what happened to my dissertation, which I now hate and wish would just disappear off the face of the planet. There are some decent ideas in it, and indeed a few ideas I've been tinkering with since I graduated, but while at the time I could see ways all these ideas connected into some larger totality, I didn't have enough of a grasp of the whole to find a good structure for those connections. As a result the thing reads like a huge desperate improvisation, which is basically what it was. At the time, though, I wasn't smart enough to figure out what to do about it.

*OK, no, only the first two, but it's always seemed to me so improbably cool that anyone could be both a rock star and a cartoonist that it seems as if he might also be a few more cool things as well. Those of you unfamiliar with Kochalka's music should immediately head on over to the Youtube and watch "Britney's Silver Can," a Hey-Jude-like anthem to Britney's one true love. The Sabbath-like rawk of "Wash Your Ass" is also an awe-inspiring thing to behold.

That's Rich

Commenter Wrongshore asks my opinion of Alan Rich’s opinion of Jay Greenberg, which I had not read.  So I found Rich’s Greenberg piece from the L.A. Weekly of August 23, 2006.

I don't read Rich regularly or know anything about him.  A quick scan around the net tells me that he's a dyspeptic 82-year-old critic—former music director of Pacifica station KPFA, music editor at New York Magazine, etc.—who writes in the tone of Pergolesi's Uberto, in a snit because the maid’s kept him waiting for his hot chocolate.  In this piece, Rich holds Greenberg responsible for the critical hype about him, both the predictable morning-show, personality-cult fawning and the awed statements from composition teachers who might better have refrained. 

Here is an example of what I mean:

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“For [Greenberg] it is 1904,” marvels one interviewer, “and anything is possible.”

Yes, 1904. Let’s see: The young Rachmaninoff pokes around in the trash bins for discarded melodic gambits. His countryman Rimsky-Korsakov collects bits of tinsel for his hootchy-kootch Oriental numbers. Jolly old Sir Edward Elgar and his dour colleague Jean Sibelius busily stir in the musical equivalent of cornstarch to darken and thicken the orchestration of their sonic landscapes; on the Continent, Max Reger’s fugues and canons accomplish the same. Little do any of these believe that, a century later, an earnest young New York schoolboy will still be constructing overtures and symphonies with the same melodic turgidity, building the same tottering musical structures out of counterpoints that ultimately self-strangle on their own complexity and collapse under the weight of their own fragility.  [End of quote]
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The aesthete is displeased!  Fetch the masseur and pastry-chef!

Rich also quotes writer Matthew Gurewitsch’s comment (in a piece for the Times) that Greenberg’s allegros “have the swashbuckling appeal of movie music,” adding, “The best movie music these days has moved far ahead of the swashbuckling glop that fills out most of this symphony.”  Zing!  Swashbuckling glop!  Quelle riposte!  He then tells us two films whose soundtracks he likes, though his short comments on each impart no information whatever.  I remember reading someone’s review of Gorecki’s famous Third Symphony that called it “a load of gloomy piffle”; “swashbuckling glop” seems to be the same kind of comment.  People might remember the comment, but not the narcissistic critic.  This kind of writing is like a Kick Me sign, or poison post-it: cheap, trivial, and for all that still potentially damaging, if readers get a label they can hang on.

So this is Rich on Greenberg.  He has no interest, here, beyond his own cleverness, and at 82 years of age he ought to be a hell of a lot more clever than he is.  For all his glibness about Greenberg’s putative lack of originality, Rich’s statements about Rachmaninov, Rimsky, Elgar et al. are no more than the snide and superficial repetitions of the critical commonplaces of fifty years ago.  The remark about Rimsky seems borrowed, at least in tone, from Joseph Kerman (whose 1956 Opera as Drama is one of the loci classici of critical self-indulgence, whatever else it offers), and the rest sounds like the jealous ranting of a neglected fourth-string academic serialist. 

Ultimately we learn nothing about the music under discussion beyond that the author considers it beneath him—and he seems happy to project an image of himself as the worst pop-culture satire of The Critic: a preening, malignant scribbler who has never produced anything other than bilious insults.  Whether this is truly Rich or not I don’t know, but I do know that I don’t intend to read anything else of his.  It is unworthy, and makes no contribution. 

Best to avoid both Heipmeister  and hit men and listen to Greenberg’s music yourself.  For Alan Rich, some Metamucil and a one-way trip out to pasture.  Or the knacker’s.

How's It Going?

My sabbatical semester is drawing to a close, and every day I’m more conscious of the passage of time, the shrinking window of freedom in which I’m trying to complete my book draft. The fantasy is that I’ll send it in to the publisher before classes startbut I’m not really sure if this is realistic or not. I had two and a half chapters written before August; they have been thoroughly rewritten and the rest of the draft (seven chapters in all) completed. I am now in rewriting mode: for me this consists of repeated passes through chapters, filling in lacunæ, cursing my propensity to repeat the same five words every sentence, moving chunks of stuff where they belong instead of where, for whatever reason, I wrote them, and in general remarking to myself—more or less constantly—how hard this is. Fr. Dr. Finale-Genius is doing the musical examples, and she’s moving quickly through them. I’m writing constantly; I feel like laughing with manic glee when she says something like, “Well, YOU start the holiday letter and I’ll add my two cents after.” Cool. I was hoping to do a little writing, for a change. Got any shopping lists I can do, also?

People ask, “How’s the book going?” Either I don’t know, or I’m too close to it to have any real sense of the big picture. I suppose it’s going well, though it’s a frustrating, stop-and-start business, and (being human) I do not at every moment exemplify the excellent organizational habits and focused discipline I so earnestly advocate in A Short Guide to Writing About Music. I suspect that I may have started writing when I should have spent more time outlining, specifically outlining in more detail. But, see, I had several fairly decent ideas in the course of the writing process; I found stuff, things fell into place. Maybe the wrong place, but I know enough to know that when you’ve got the fever, the wild hair up your tail and wrath of hell behind you, that is the time to WRITE, goddammit, not the time to question your organization, sit placidly staring at an outline, rearrange the notes and the stacks of books and scores on your work table. The old saying “Strike while the iron is hot!” was coined for writers. Writing a first draft—pulling an entire book’s worth/nearly twenty years of research and reflection out of the air and onto the (virtual) page—requires a special kind of doggedness. It’s not solid writing, no. You’re checking stuff in your books, on the internet, in the score library; you’re getting stuff from the library, from your office. You’re trying to stay focused, and sometimes you fail, and daydream. Then when it’s going well, you doubt what happened before and curse your weak flesh. Turn again! That way madness lies. One bloody, frostbitten foot after the other, like at Valley Forge.

There are those good moments, though. Amidst all the cursing and self-doubt, I will find myself thinking, “Oh, that’s a rather nice point. I’d forgotten that occurred to me” or “Oh, right, I forgot I came up with all this.” I find it almost impossible to keep an entire book—even one of my own—in my mind as some kind of magical holographic unity; there are parts that are closer and more distant from the foreground of my consciousness. So there are pleasant surprises when I discover a thought or line of reasoning that I like.

A nice moment happened today, over coffee with a friend. He asked how it was going, and I said that I finally won the battle with Chapter 3, but Chapter 4 wasn’t going down easy either… (more mumbled complaints). He said, “But you’ve completed an entire book draft, right?” I said, oh yeah, I’m nearing halfway through the rewrite, I’d still like to send it in early January; of course, you never know what revisions will be necessary once the publisher and readers get a hold of it. Pause. “Well, I think you’ve just raised the bar on us,” he said.

It’s going pretty well, I guess.

All Thumbs Down

The Chopin Manuscript, marketed as “The Thriller Event of the Year,” is a multi-author mystery available on audible.com. The conceit, which apparently makes it “the literary event of the year,” is that the main author, Jeffery Deaver, wrote a chapter, then passed it off to another mystery author, who did the same, and so forth, until Deaver gets it back and writes the last two, chapters 16 and 17. Each author got full control, and if (for example) a character is killed off, that’s it. Any plot twists that transpire stay, and are part of the inheritance of future authors. Another aspect to this is that it was released two chapters per week, serial fashion, so those of us who subscribed had to swallow the suspense for a week until the next installments. It’s a dream team of thriller authors, according to the, ah, publisher’s publicity—Lisa Scottolini, Lee Child, Peter Spiegelman etc.

So the literary event of the year is, apparently, the mystery equivalent of the Yellow River Concerto, the famous high-Romantic and utterly forgettable concerto written by committee in Communist China.

It’s a murder mystery: there’s Eastern Europe, there’s America, there are personal angles etc. The central item is, unsurprisingly, a Chopin manuscript smuggled out of Europe—is it an unknown work? A forgery? etc. etc. I’m not going to give anything away, for those who like murder mysteries. I’ll also say that almost all the musical discussion is in the first, and primarily the last two chapters, thus all by the main author.

And here’s the question. How is it that mystery authors can know the ins and outs (seemingly; to be fair, I certainly wouldn’t know the difference) of firearm operation, surveillance technology, political operations of several different countries, law enforcement protocols, military history, paramilitary history and so much more…and the musical knowledge is so godawful? Sentimental glop for the descriptions of music-making (and its inspirations), really unpersuasive discussions of the music manuscripts, and a couple of blunders relating to the composers in question that, in the mind of any musician who happens to be listening, falls to the ground with a loud clank. At least one such problem was the doing of one of the subsequent authors, which had to be papered over at the last minute, but still. Do these people not actually do any research? Take Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon books; isn’t the art history stuff for the art restorer/Shin Bet operative pretty good? I mean, it’s been about ten books’ worth, I think. So if they’re going to write about classical music, are we wrong to expect them to have done a bit of background work so the entire thing doesn’t suddenly get embarrassingly implausible whenever music is discussed?

This is not a case of, “just loosen up, Jon…relax, let it go” as I do hear from time to time, including from administrative superiors. This is bad. In The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum, at least for me, Umberto Eco’s broad learning really accounted for the plausibility; he clearly did his homework (or, equally possibly, he simply Knows Everything Already). In any case, much of the joy of those yarns lay in the thick-context layering. It’s like eating a wonderfully rich, nourishing, and satisfying meal.

The Chopin Manuscript is the very opposite: formulaic, undistinguished, and weakest in the area in which its supposed uniqueness is based. All thumbs down!

Right now, Norman Mailer is punching a chump in heaven

Norman Mailer has died, and I'm feeling sadder about it than I would have thought . . .  sadder than I usually feel when an old and successful artist dies. Mailer represented an ideal of the irresponsible writer at a time when the obligation to be responsible -- to be sensitive, to mind our manners, to watch what we say, to strike the right tone, to pay all the necessary obeisances to the institutions and leaders that administer Our Interests, whatever they may be -- has become the duty of all. Mailer believed that a writer's obligations were to the free, articulate, individual intelligence alone, and however inconsistent he may have been throughout his life, he remained consistent in this. He was the great American existentialist, at all times aware of the individual's freedom and willing to meet his own freedom with the fullest possible assertion of will. Which meant that he could be an egoist, a pig, a clown, and a poseur. But he was always irresponsible, and the world would be a better place if we had a few more people like him. A great many things can be said against irresponsibility, but its seeming opposite -- what we now mean by "responsibility" -- means only a sad, bovine timidity that makes strong writing and thought impossible. George Orwell once commented that real literature can only be written by people who aren't afraid. Norman Mailer was never afraid.

Better Inside Shooting Out

In the October 22 issue of The New Republic, Richard Taruskin has a lengthy review article on three books (by Julian Johnson, Joshua Fineberg, and Lawrence Kramer) that address, one way or another, conserving the classical tradition. Taruskin opens his article by raging at the Joshua Bell busking experiment, which well deserved his ire. Those already familiar with Taruskin are rightly wondering whether they should cluster about the authors for support or simply bolt for cover. It’s the latter; Taruskin is at his hilarious, blistering best here, because nothing—so far as one can tell—infuriates him like sacralization and its attendant ossification.

The first order of business is to demolish Julian Johnson’s neo-Adornian screed, which is presented as equal parts aesthetic superciliousness and appallingly arrogant dismissals of popular music. He proceeds to Fineberg, with whom he initially shows more patience but then dismisses with a wave of his hand when he is discovered pitching spectralism, which seems to be more cause—or dare I say pose—than technique or aesthetic or approach or anything else that can be usefully described. He has more time for Larry Kramer, yet still bounces phrases like “Nor is Kramer’s account entirely devoid of vainglory and invidiousness,” “Kramer makes his only—inevitably, ignorant and prejudiced—comparisons between the classical and the popular,” and the rather more direct “this is balderdash” in Kramer’s direction. This is the book he takes the most seriously of the three, and far kinder observations are made, but still—one almost feels the whip-crack. As a friend once said to me, “If no one’s gunning for you, cowboy, you really ain’t nobody.” Cold comfort, but I suppose true. By the time Taruskin described Johnson’s book as “a sort of Beyond the Fringe parody of a parish sermon in some Anglican backwater” …Debbie had to tell me to shut up and stop reading choice phrases so she could work.

The fact is that his turns of phrase make me mad with jealousy. I laughed aloud for five minutes at “The idea that in popular culture production equals consumption was already a canard when it was first handed down from Adorno’s delphic armchair.” Delphic armchair?! I could write for a century and never come up with something that wickedly pithy. The knockout punch follows almost immediately: “That [Adorno’s] followers still parrot him only shows how utterly ideology trumps observation in the world of ‘critical theory,’ of all academic approaches the least critical by far.” Unimprovable, and something I’ve wanted to say for twenty years. Twenty-eight words.

(Tonight my fourteen-year-old son happened to ask about postmodernism, having overheard us mention it in conversation, and he observed that my tone of voice was the one usually I usually reserve for Fundamentalism. I said, “Fundamentalists believe there is absolutely one clear and incontrovertible truth, and they believe it rigidly, dogmatically, and unquestioningly. Postmodernists believe there are no incontrovertible truths, and they believe it rigidly, dogmatically, and unquestioningly.” See what I mean? Lame by comparison: sad, thin gruel.)

I don’t agree with Taruskin’s whole article, by any means. Taruskin is free to dismiss Norman Lebrecht as “a sloppy but entertaining British muckraker” if he wishes (I think Lebrecht’s Song of Names deserves better), but surely Blair Tindall, narcissistic ex-oboist who can’t decide if she’s an oboist, a crusading journalist, or a Bad Girl With A Pen (Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music), merits the same unflinching treatment? Taruskin accords her “the smartest and most constructive take on the situation.” Her book struck me, to the contrary, as an exhibitionistic tell-all (Sex and drugs in surprising locales among musicians! Stop the presses!) by someone boundlessly resentful that whatever myths she internalized as a young person—and there is no indication that some healthy cynicism at a young age wouldn’t have enabled her to prepare more intelligently for artistic life—turned out not to be true. The stew of whiny resentment and confessional titillation had me running for the vomitorium. I never made it past halfway through.

Perhaps the article was so amusing for me because I am in sympathy with the anti-sacralist sentiment: the composers were living, breathing human beings; contemporary musicians of whatever flavor are not only living, breathing human beings but tend to be howlers at the moon and spitters of fire, and no musician I know enjoys the smug, moralizing, clueless blue-hair who pays some bills but insists on dictating, participating, commenting, orating. As a longtime Rock fan, I also share the disgust at those who look down on it while putting classical (or Jazz, or the pop from another [their] era) on a pedestal.

Ultimately, though, this doesn’t take me very far; these are all fairly cheap shots. If the traditional appreesh gambit and eat-your-broccoli approach to classical music is demonstrably counter-, or at best un-, productive, what to do? Of course, that is not the business of Taruskin’s piece, and he doesn’t seem to want to go beyond “keep listening”—not his gig. It’s a subject I continue to think a lot about, though, in measure because of the kind of institution I teach at, in some measure because of my atypical training and route to musicology, and in some measure because what I think is most evident and apparent and interesting, the front door to art music after which you discover everything else, is precisely what very few or nobody at all discuss in terms of music education or appreciation or however you want to put it. So: next blog I’ll try to offer a thought or two of a practical nature, because deep down I don’t think that “just keep listening” answers the call, either, when we are discussing musical repertories a century and more old.

Implies Clear Thought

[Postcard from the guestroom, which is doubling this semester as my study: laptop set up, chaotic piles of books and papers, etc.]

Here is a beautiful essay on writing.

Never is the old English Teachers’ adage “clear writing implies clear thought” more relevant than when one is writing an academic book. No matter how clear your outline, how deeply you believe what you wish to say or how certain you are that a major part of it is absolutely new, much of your time is spent beneath the surface, not writing but outlining and re-outlining and re-outlining: fixing this, changing your mind where to put that, then there was the whole argument about the other. Maybe I can just slip that in at the beginning of chapter X, where it will set up the main argument.

Good! That seemed to work. Got a lot done today! I’ll look it over tomorrow before I start the new chapter. Rollin’ along!

[Interlude: The Sleep of the Just.]

[Then, with a paltry cup of coffee for my sole company:] Please tell me I didn’t write this. Not only is it the wrong place for that argument, it was written long ago and thrown in a file for future use—and the way it reads is sub-high school: imprecise, overheated and accusatory (Bellman, was X ever rude to you? Step ahead of you in line? Why are you being this way about his work, fool? Is disagreement without confrontation not in your life experience? [Well, not until I left home, really, that’s still no excuse…]) Start a new chapter? Not today, Jack. We’re not talking first aid, but major reconstructive surgery.

Several re-writes and re-reads later: well, better now, and I can go on. Except for wondering where I should put Z argument/subject…maybe if I start the chapter with it…

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

It is hard, for me at least (it’s not just the cobwebs of age; this was true in my mid-30s when I was writing my first book), to keep everything straight, mentally, and all the building blocks in order. My work tends to bring in a lot of different stuff from all directions—different musical traditions, past history (both music history and our recension of it), cultural and historical stuff, obscure quotes and facts and references…and so whatever I’m trying to say depends on the coherent presentation of bushels of stuff, making a pretty complex picture. [Funny; I never noted until just this minute what this book has in common with my first one, though the musical subject is completely different.]

I’m sure that all academic authors think, perhaps regularly, “Am I really smart enough for this?” OK, maybe all except Richard Taruskin. But you have the contract already, and the ideas won’t go away, so… On to chapter four, of seven. If you’re not smart enough, act like you are. If you diligently practice those octaves, repeated notes, or (thinking about my favorite trumpet player and his Haydn concerto) those high notes, they come eventually, and then they’re yours. Just fix today’s chapter, or small part of one. Just (to quote a favorite Sprichwort) do the little things well; then will come the great things begging to be done.

A sabbatical to write a book is a gift, the most wonderful opportunity imaginable. Like practicing the piano, though, the process constitutes an agonizing and ongoing stare-down in the mirror of one’s bad habits, procrastinations, methodological insufficiencies, and various sorts of laziness. Too late to turn back, though—“Sworn word may strengthen quaking heart,” said Gimli the Dwarf—so the only way is forward.

Plagiarism Explain'd

Just a head’s-up: there is a wonderful new book out, a small hardcover, under ten bucks according to the Amazon. This is Richard Posner’s The Little Book of Plagiarism (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007). As always when I read writers who have both supreme intellectual gifts and great lucidity of style, I am torn between mad jealousy and a sort of finger-licking gourmet enjoyment: oh, perfect! That’s exactly the issue! If only I could explain it this thoroughly and well! The distinction and the various consequences are now perfectly clear! Wonderful! Because it is also gloriously concise and inexpensive, I’m pushing to make it required reading for our first-year graduate students. I’m even considering the ultimate act of love: to outline the book for myself. What’s wrong with me?

The book is invaluable for people interested in writing, particularly those academics who both write and evaluate student writing and research. Posner’s treatments of intellectual fraud, copyright infringement, and plagiarism as separate but related, plus the explanations of who is mislead and damaged by each, are especially welcome in an environment where “oh, who cares anyway” is a common shoulder-shrug of a disclaimer. A substantial percentage of our graduate students are foreign, and many are performers, so their native cultural mores (yes, I am defining the performance world as a discrete culture) are somewhat different from those of more traditional researchin’, readin’, and writin’ academics. This book is a splendid little reminder that certain supposedly “victimless crimes” are certainly crimes, and certainly not victimless.

That Posner is not sitting on the Supreme Court is both proof of the fallacy of a belief in meritocracy and a flaming indictment of recent American political leadership. No surprise on either count. Jonathan says: highly recommended!