Happy Birthday Patti!

(h/t the data stream)

Really Playing with History

At the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NYC, Sting recently gave a concert of Christmas music through the ages, to support his new album If On a Winter's Night.... I suppose this is a good example of what Butt, Taruskin, et al call the romance of otherness in historically-informed performance, perhaps gone horribly wrong.

From Jon Pareles's review:

Sting looked like quite the 19th-century Victorian gentleman when he performed a concert of winter songs at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on Tuesday night. He wore a long frock coat, a white shirt and an antique-style tie. Much of the music originated from even earlier times: 15th-century carols, songs from Purcell operas, traditional English ballads. Sometimes Sting played a lute.

...

He delved into European early music, old carols and lullabies, odd crannies of church music, Schubert’s “Winterreise” and his own songs (to remake the melancholy “The Hounds of Winter”). He added lyrics to a Bach cello sarabande. And he ended up with a collection of songs that was somber verging on bleak: winter with the King of Pain.

The faith in the carols was humble and awestruck, not celebratory. From the 16th-century poet Robert Southwell, Sting chose the grim imagery of “The Burning Babe”; from Henry Purcell, whom Sting called “England’s first pop star,” he chose “The Cold Song,” about an unwilling resurrection: “Let me freeze again to death!” He pointed out the dire lyrics of lullabies, and he found a 20th-century composer, Peter Warlock, who brought chromatic anxieties into worshipful songs.

Weird. Although I will say that his outfit looks more seventeenth-century Puritan than Victorian, although the Puritans didn't allow beards as I recall. I don't know, I shouldn't be judgmental. We talked about Sting in my med/ren class last semester, apropos of John Dowland. The general consensus was that although his reverb-heavy approach to interpreting Dowland left something to be desired for my (newly educated about lute music) students, they were in favor of anything that brought the repertoire to a wider audience

I hope at the very least he makes a nice donation to the Revels.

Assigning Music

I have a question for the musicological internets: what would we think of using iTunes as a vehicle for our students acquiring required music for class?

Back when I was first taking music history courses as an undergraduate, my professor lo those many years ago carefully made cassette tape mixes which were available on reserve in the library. To be perfectly honest (sorry Peter!) I can't say that I often did the listening assignments. It was a pain to go to the library in the first place, and sitting on a hard wooden chair with headphones on is just not how I like to engage with the music. As an alternative, some of my courses made use of CD compilations associated with a textbook like Grout/Palisica, which we bought at the campus bookstore with the rest of our required books for the semester. These CDs were pricey, but then you could listen to them at home.

Since then, technology has obviously made great strides in making music available for required listening assignments. At UCLA, both the Music Library, and, separately, a Digital Humanities initiative thingy both had systems whereby recordings chosen by the professor were streamed via web pages. That way a student could listen at home, but copyrights weren't being violated, at least as much. The downside to that, I've found since leaving UCLA, is that creating systems like those take time and money, and I have yet to teach at another school that has made that investment. Another common option is that many of us put recordings on Blackboard sites, and students then just download the files. Totally illegal, of course, and the large files are unwieldy, but it does have the important advantage that students are much more likely to do their listening if it is available in a format that they can put on their iPod.

For standard survey courses there is often a CD compilation available, but they are super-expensive, and lock you into certain musical works that might not be ideal. And if you are doing anything outside of a standard survey--oh, let's say a course on American music during McCarthyism, hypothetically--that doesn't work.

Enter iTunes. If you click here, your iTunes store will open up to a sample iMix I made based on some music I recently assigned to my minimalism seminar. You make these by simply assembling a normal playlist in iTunes, and then choose "Create an iMix" under the "Store" menu. Apple thinks about it for a few hours--I'm not sure exactly what is happening, but it isn't instantaneous--and then spits out a link like that above. In assembling your mix, you theoretically aren't limited to tracks you purchased on iTunes originally. On this list, for example, I had bought Failing Kansas through the Amazon MP3 download store, and iTunes was smart enough to find the same album in their catalog.

Downsides:
1. I'm not entirely comfortable having everything go through one corporation, even a better one like Apple. Enterprising students can of course buy most of these recordings through Amazon or whoever else on their own, but I'm just not going to make the effort to assemble a similar mix through competing sellers.

2. Not everything is available on iTunes, and when it is, sometimes Apple has made it so that you have to buy an entire album just to get the track I want. I imagine that I will still have to put some tracks on reserve, and maybe alter the music I choose a little bit if it makes it easier to buy.

3. For a big survey course--I'm thinking using this system for my Music of the United States course in the spring--it's not entirely cheap. But at the same time, I think it is cheaper then a compilation, or at least comparable. The CD set for the Crawford textbook, for example, runs about $60. I will, however, probably still put CD mixes on reserve on the library in addition to using iTunes.

So what do you think? I'm inclined to give it a try this next semester. Copyright is not my most important concern as a teacher, but especially when it comes to contemporary music or smaller-scale performers and labels, I do care a bit. And more importantly, I do have a desire to instill an ethic in my students that listening to music takes some care. You need to think about what recordings you are listening to, not just find a YouTube video of the piece in question, or take whatever BitTorrent gives you. It's not so much about the money, but the idea that music matters enough to seek out a specific recording for its quality, and sometimes that requires money. At the same time, I want to use a method that works best with contemporary listening habits. So barring any unforeseen issues, I think using this iTunes iMix system, while still putting CD mixes on reserve in the library, is the way to go.

Stop Procrastinating

Why are you reading this? Shouldn't you be grading?

That's what I'm doing.

Monday Links and Bullets

• The academic blogosphere's two most famous fathers duke it out: Michael Bérubé versus Dean Dad on questions of tenure and academic freedom. So far Michael is winning the "sense of humor" points.
  
• Ah, so that's why Terry Teachout did a Louis Armstrong biography. I was wondering what his angle was going to be.
  
• I forgot to link this earlier, but Tamara Levitz's expanded commentary on the annual meeting program selection process is a fascinating read. Not to drag out and again beat a certain dead horse, but remember how one of Ilias "Will Never Work in This Field Again" Chrissochoidis's complaints about the annual meeting was that "Derrida, Bakhtin, and Adorno are topics more welcome than composers and their work"? I always found that statement particularly amusing, and even went to the trouble of doing a simple keyword search of the program booklets of the last three annual meetings. You'll be happy to know that the word "Derrida" does not appear once. Anyways, Tamara's commentary is very thought-provoking along some of these lines.
  
• An friend of mine was tasered during the protests of the UC Regents meeting last week. Tasered on the back, while sitting down. No link here, because there seems not to be much coverage. Just wanted to tell someone about it.
  
• I hear the SEM annual meeting in Mexico went well! Slim attendance, but to be expected with the way travel funding is these days. Kudos to SEM for crossing the border, and more valiantly then say, meeting in Quebec City or Ottawa.
  
• The Teh-Drinking Musicologist has a characteristically interesting and idiosyncratic take on the "Ecomusicology" study group session at AMS.
  
• A tale of copyright infringement gone wrong: Awhile back, I went to see the Frida Kahlo exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and in my report on the show I included a picture of Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Leon Trotsky chatting with each other. I had cheerfully scanned that photo myself out of the show's catalogue, no doubt breaking all sorts of copyright laws. And thus I seem to have invited karmic retribution. There is a horrible little web site called Conservapedia, which purports to counter the liberal bias of Wikipedia by offering a politically sanitized peer-edited encyclopedia to the world. (One of their more notorious projects includes attempting a new translation of the bible that leaves out any language that might imply Jesus was a liberal.) Well, somebody on that site has now stolen my stolen image (with attribution to me, to be fair), and is using it as an illustration on their articles about Trotskyism and Diego Rivera. Sigh.
  
  

And finally something to wake up on this dreary, rainy, Monday. I can't say it enough: God bless YouTube. I haven't seen Peter Greenaway's film since my first year in college, and here it is for free on the internets.

More on Music and Segregation

My, that was a busy conference! A good one, but busy. In what is probably a sign of getting older, I was busy enough schmoozing that I feel like I barely saw any papers. A few highlights however: David Paul looking at the politics of Ives reception, Chairman Bob on the Disney Concert Hall, Albin Zak on Mitch Miller, and of course my comrade on Sunday morning, Ryan Dohoney on Julius Eastman. I also very much enjoyed the amusicology cocktails, and the gigantic Saturday night schmoozathon. Best of all, of course, was catching up with my diasporic community of grad school friends who, our temple destroyed, now find ourselves in exile around the world. (We smuggle handwritten copies of Feminine Endings with us wherever we go.)

And my paper went very well, and I'm very appreciative of all those who dragged themselves in to hear it early on a Sunday morning. In one of my rambling answers to a question I touched on the subject of what sort of music was important to the Civil Rights Movement in its early days, before Brown v. Board of Education. A few years ago I actually once spent some time looking at this issue, in some tangential research in the NAACP papers at the Library of Congress, and since I don't think I'll be publishing or presenting it any time soon, I thought I would sketch out what I found in a blog post.

As a matter of organizational support, the national office of the NAACP really only supported two kinds of music: traditional arrangements of spirituals, and African American classical musicians. The executive secretary of the NAACP from 1931-1955 was the rather patrician Walter White. White was personally a big fan of the conductor Dean Dixon, who as I mentioned earlier would later suffer some blacklisting. In the early 1940s, White was quite vigorous in using the NAACP name to promote Dixon's career, writing letters to people like Leopold Stokowski and Virgil Thomson to help arrange concerts and reviews. (Thomson gave him a favorable review, and wrote back to White "I do hope you will continue to bring to my notice interesting musical events in which colored people are involved.” White's support for Dixon lasted at least until 1952; I would be curious to know if the blacklisting brought it to an end.

The other official musical promotion was of spirituals. There may at one point have been an NAACP choir, and in 1949 the organization sponsored a benefit album organized around the tune "Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing" (which, incidentally, was originally written by an NAACP activist.) There seems to have been a disagreement over how best to record the song; Roy Wilkins wrote a letter agreeing that "the rendition should be one of dignity and thankfulness. It is not a protest hymn and cannot be made such no matter what a recording group does to it."

What about popular music? Well, it's pretty clear that for the most part the leadership of the NAACP could care less. Oscar Hammerstein and John Hammond were both on the board of the NAACP, and there might have been a brief attempt in 1948 to deal with the issue of record companies having "race" departments, but I didn't much evidence that they did anything about it. One interesting little incident came in 1949. The manager of the Ink Spots wrote to the NAACP basically asking for some sort of recognition from the group for having desegregated several night clubs in the south. The main office balked at this, and clearly didn't really know who the Ink Spots were or if it was appropriate for them to recognize them. Finally, in place of a more official proclamation that would need to be ratified by the board, White wrote a letter to the Ink Spots commending them for their work:

Please accept my heartiest congratulations upon your successful appearance in Miami Beach. By breaking the long-standing ban on Negro entertainers in this resort you have opened up new opportunities for the race and have contributed significantly to the whole struggle against racial barriers in any field. This is a valiant struggle which you share in common with freedom-loving Americans of all races, creeds and regions. Your demonstration in Miami Beach should facilitate the presentation of Negro entertainers in theaters and nightclubs in other southern cities heretofore closed to them. May you continue in this pioneer work of surmounting barriers while contributing to the gaiety of the nation through the high quality of the entertainment you offer.

The basic theme of the NAACP's work in the late 1940s and early 1950s was one of slow, painstaking activism. In addition to the epochal work being performed by Thurgood Marhsall's legal unit, the bulk of the organization's files from this period is dealing with the ramifications of McCarthyism. This meant expelling Commmunists from the organization and dealing with recalcitrant local chapters while putting out small fires around the country--White was kept busy writing letters to draft boards, universities, the military, and other institutions assuring them that the NAACP was not a Communist front, and that membership was not a sign of fellow-travelerdom. For this he was later castigated, but unlike many other progressive organizations of the period, the NAACP made it through McCarthyism alive, and with its basic mission intact.

The story of Walter White's complicated relationship with Paul Robeson is a whole other story, but I'll leave that for another time!

Crying in the Chapel on a Sunday Morning

Worried that this weekend's meeting of the American Musicological Society will interfere with your religious observance? I have a solution for you! This Sunday morning, instead of going to church you can come hear me talk about church, or at least, about somebody crying in a church.

Crying in the Chapel:
Religiosity and Masculinity in Early Doo-Wop
In the early 1950s, as a diverse assortment of African-American musical styles began to coalesce into the category of “rhythm and blues,” one small subset of this new genre began to strike into unusual terrain. Vocal groups, rooted in the pop quartet tradition of the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots but inflected with a new post-war sensibility that would later be called “doo-wop,” went through a short fad of singing on religious, or at least pseudo-religious, lyrical topics. The most famous such example was the Orioles’ “Crying in the Chapel,” which made it to number thirteen on the pop charts, but the Cadillacs, the Drifters, and many others contributed similar songs as well. It might be easy to associate this fad with the contemporaneous popularity of gospel quartet singing, but these R&B musicians were performing in avowedly secular context, and from their own perspective there was little confusion between gospel music and their own pop creations.

This paper therefore attempts to understand the popularity of religious subject matter in early doo-wop. I approach the question from two angles: first from the songs themselves, showing the important musical differences between these pop numbers and similar songs understood as being “actually” religious. Secondly, however, I look more broadly at one important market for this music, the so-called “black bourgeoisie” of the United States prior to desegregation. Examining magazines, fanzines, and oral histories, I argue that rather than a statement on religion—even in the heightened discourse of religiosity in the early Cold War—this use of spiritual topics was a means by which some African-American men constructed for themselves an alternative masculinity, differentiated from the more overt sexualization of others on the R&B charts.

Ultimately, I find that the use of religious topics in this early doo-wop is a precursor to a more well-known later fad—the adoption of de-sexualized lyrical subjects and increasingly younger singers as a means by which to counter public fears of African American masculinity. This topic is important not only in and of itself; it also address one of the major points of inquiry in post-war African-American music—the shifting duality of the secular and the sacred. It also provides insight into the relationship of music and politics in the early Cold War, and the complex cultural work behind the famous push for desegregation triggered by Brown v Board of Education in 1954.

This will be an an open and affirming presentation.

The Thinking Musicologist's Guide to Philly

I am not a Philadelphian, but I have spent the last three years observing their ways, and here is what I have learned. I'm sure the AMS has this all up online somewhere, but people keep asking me the following questions:

How Should I Get to the Conference Hotel from the Airport?

The R1 regional rail line runs from the airport to Suburban Station, which is about three blocks away from the conference hotel. It'll cost you $7 one way, which you will want to pay in cash on the train. And, you'll be happy to know, the regional rail system is NOT on strike, although you might want to bring a fire extinguisher.

How Should I Get to the Conference Hotel from the Train Station?

The 30th Street Station, where Amtrak lands, is about a mile away, and is a pleasant enough walk. It would also be a cheap cab ride, easily obtainable at the taxi stand outside. I wouldn't recommend trolley or subway, as you'll end up practically walking a mile anyways. Plus, they're on strike.

Where Should I Drink the Alcohol and Eat the Food?

The neighborhood immediately around the conference hotel is slightly dull, thanks to that whole City Beautiful thing. BUT, a mere ten minute walk due south will get you to the Walnut Street/Rittenhouse Square part of the city, where bars and nightlife abound. People in Philadelphia tend to think of this area as full of yuppies, but that's only true within the context of Philadelphia; if you are from somewhere else it's basically just kind of normal. OR, if you walk about four blocks east and then five blocks (or so) south, you will be in the heart of the Gayborhood, where there are, well, lots of gays. And the bars and restaurants appropriate to their kind. AND, if you walk about five blocks due east from the hotel, you're in Chinatown.

A few nearby places for a meal:

• Sabrina's (18th and Callowhill) I haven't been to this location, but the original is cozy and friendly, especially good for breakfast, and the new location comes recommended to me.
  
• Vietnam (11th between Race and Vine) Great Vietnamese food, and a surprisingly nice bar/lounge kind of thing, although only open until 9:30 on Thursday and 10 on the weekend. Yes, even the bar.
  
• Sakura (10th and Race) One of the better Chinese restaurants in Chinatown
  
• Tria (18th between Walnut and Chestnut) Popular wine/tapas place down near Rittenhouse Square.
  
• Reading Terminal (Filbert between 10th and 11th) Big indoor food market in a former railroad station with lots of little food stands and things, sort of like the Fairfax Farmer's Market in LA.

Philadelphia has lots of places for the drinking. It's what we do. You can't go too wrong. I'm not even going to try and make a list; feel free to make suggestions in the comments.

Where I Should I Not Drink the Alcohol or Eat the Food?

The main nightlife part of Philly for tourists and annoying teenagers is "South Street," which refers to the easternmost ten blocks of South Street on the other end of the city. Not only is it full of tourists and annoying teenagers, but it is hard to get to on public transportation. Why bother? You can get better cheesesteaks elsewhere. And if you want to visit actual South Philly, which is quite an experience, walk down Broad Street below Washington. Well, take the orange line, it's a hike. Tell the dancers at the Dolphin I said hi. Just kidding. Or am I...

What should I do while people are droning on endlessly about things I don't care about?

• I'm a sucker for eighteenth-century touring as much as anyone, so knock yourself out. It's probably about a half hour walk to Independence Hall. You'll need to get a free-ish ticket, preferably in advance but you can also usually walk up. Seeing the Liberty Bell, on the other hand, requires airplane-style security screening, all to see, well, a bell.
  
• The former Wanamaker's department store on Broad Street now houses a Macy's, but they kept the in-store organ, all 28,250 pipes. There is a 45 minute recital every day at noon, and again at 7pm on Fridays and 5:30 on Saturdays. It is totally awesome.
  
• I've never been, but if you like looking at freakishly deformed things preserved in formaldehyde, the Mutter Museum is for you.
  
• I'm going to be honest: the Philadelphia Museum of Art is not very good, and definitely not worth the ridiculously high entrance price. But it is pretty to look at from the outside. And you can take your official picture on the Rocky steps without paying a thing. If you keep walking past the museum you get to the lovely walk by Boathouse Row and the Schuykill River.

If you all have any other suggestions, put 'em in the comments! I don't think we need two blogger meet-ups, so I'll hopefully see you all at the Amusicology party. With any luck we'll run into Jennifer Carroll.

And of course, at my paper--Sunday morning at 9am, so don't get too rowdy at the parties the night before.

The Morning After

Unlike California, it's hard to argue with the efforts of the pro-marriage campaign in Maine. Perhaps nouveau Mainer KG will chime in, but from a distance it looks like they did everything right: strongly grassroots, an emphasis on personalized, door-to-door activism, as much engagement with faith leaders as possible, the works. And in Maine you certainly can't blame the defeat on imaginary black homophobes!

Which makes the defeat all the more disheartening. It's one thing to find fault in your own activism, but it is actually much sadder to find fault in your fellow citizenry. Like everyone else I take some solace in the results of the youth vote, and in the fact that after all, almost half of the population voted affirmatively for gay marriage. Can you even have imagine such a thing five years ago? But as much solace as that is, it is not enough. I don't want to stop there. I don't actually want older people, and religious people, and even conservatives to be defeated at the polls. I want them to be on my side. And, because I'm greedy, I don't actually want to win equal rights because of a libertarian, live and let live attitude. Sure, I would appreciate the material political gains that can be made because of that attitude, but it's not enough; "live and let live" is another term for segregation. I don't just want toleration, I want full communion. Call me greedy, but why is it so radical to want that?

Where from here? Unlike some of my brethren on the left, I do actually think that the right to marriage is an important right, and worthy of our attention and work. But since find ourselves now at a lull in that battle, I would respectfully point out all the other battles that have been gathering dust these past few years. Like, what happened to ENDA? Last time it came up, it died a quiet death in the Senate. Now that we have a more solid majority, could it pass? I think it could, and in a rigorous, trans-inclusive form. The right not to be discriminated against in employment and in housing is just as fundamental as the right to marry, and in fact applies to a much wider cross-section of our community than marriage. And as Lisa Duggan pointed out in her important article from last summer on the fight for gay rights in Utah, this is an excellent moment for such legislation. After all, the anti-gay marriage people go out of their way to say that their position is just about the institution of marriage, not about civic equality. All right then, let's see them back that argument up by supporting the rest of the equality equation!

And on a similar note, I'll tell you what battle could use a queer voice--health care reform. The queer community needs health care reform just as much as everyone else, if not more so, from the disproportionate number of gay kids living homeless on the streets, to those unable to get insurance because of the inability to marry, to the special and very expensive medical needs of many transgendered people. True, robust health care reform is a cause that can build bridges even between the NGLTF and the Catholic Church, and we need as many bridges as we can get.

Silences

I doubt I will make it up there myself, but I hope Bostonians are seeing the Carpenter Center's exhibit Act Up New York: Activism, Art, and the AIDS Crisis, 1987-1993. (h/t to Signal Fire)

I had a throwaway line somewhere in my dissertation about how ACT-UP clearly had a different perspective on the meaning of "silence" then did John Cage. Different times call for different political aesthetics, duh.

After the Deluge

Having conquered Einstein--hey, the Einstein documentary is now available on DVD!--my minimalism seminar has arrived at that nebulous moment known as post-minimalism. This week we somehow are doing early John Adams, late John Luther Adams, and some Mikel Rouse. Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.


(Image "borrowed" from Mixed Meters.)

All Hallows' Eve

Mabel wishes you a very happy Halloween.

Revisions to OHWM

This is a few weeks late, but I just saw that Tim over at The Rambler noticed a significant revision to the paperback edition of Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music. Briefly, a few years ago Tim argued that Taruskin's discussion of Penderecki was rather flawed. Apparently, those flaws were fixed up in the new paper edition, with a citation for Tim and everything. A nice move on RT's part.

But it makes me wonder--how many other changes are there between the hardcover and paperback editions? Neither the Oxford site nor sales outlets like Amazon make any note of changes. Apparently an Oxford rep claimed in at least one instance that the editions are "essentially identical" with the exception of "stray typos and minor items" being corrected. I guess the Penderecki could be thought of as a minor item, but it makes one wonder.

This seems particularly apropos now that we're all being inundated with sales calls and emails from eager little Oxford representatives about the forthcoming one-volume textbook edition, which will no doubt be a formidable player on the textbook market when it comes out. I certainly would never fault Taruskin and his editors too much for problems like that noticed by Tim, given how much music history he dealt with. Nor do I have a problem with the erudition and utility of OHWM; like most of us working musicologists I use it all the time to help prepare for my teaching. When you're teaching a survey for the first time, especially material far outside of your own research interests, it's a great source for getting updated on the contemporary scholarly issues for a given time period.

But--and this is a big "but"--I do have great reservations with the project as a whole. I think one of the biggest challenges facing our discipline is our tendency towards monophony. We're a very small group of scholars, of startling uniformity of background, and for various historical reasons we operate under a tremendous amount of "discipline," in the Foucauldian sense. That is, attempts to introduce new methodologies and subject matter into musicology are tightly regulated and usually prevented full scale. Not by any one person or institution, of course, but by the manner in which power circulates in musicology. Just look at the experience of someone trying to introduce, oh, let's say, feminist criticism into musicology in the 1990s. Not exactly a radical proposition given that other scholarly fields had been doing feminist criticism for several decades, but we all know how that went over.

I worry that a project like OHWM only serve to discipline us even more, boiling what limited diversity of voices and opinions we have down to that of one man. I'm sure that is not Taruskin's intention at all, but I just don't think its existence augurs well for musicology.

A User's Guide to the Recent SFJ Column

Theoretically I have a degree and a day job that makes me an expert in dissecting the swirl of politics and performances that make up the intersection between"black music" and "white music." Indeed, I am giving a paper at AMS in less than a month on just this intersection, albeit in the early 1950s. But I find the idea of saying something new and different about Sasha Frere-Jones's recent New Yorker column on the end of hip-hop totally exhausting. And yet, musicologists should be following this discourse, so here are some links in lieu of analysis:

The original column by Sasha Frere-Jones, "Wrapping Up: A Genre Ages Out"

A few blog entries by SFJ on the subject, including an homage to Greil Marcus.

SFJ's infamous "Paler Shade of White" column from a few years back, and Wayne Marshall's discussion thereof.

An already widely-read response from the guys of Das Racist. (Who have previously quarreled with The New Yorker.

The Myspace page of Freddie Gibbs, SFJ's hip-hop savior.

Pardon me while this musicologist flees back to the security of discussing music written by people who are now mostly dead.

How Not to Go to College

It's a wild Saturday night here in Phoenixville. With Mary off working the 4-midnight shift, and my plans to go grocery shopping thwarted by local flash floods, I settled instead for baking chocolate chip cookies and watching TV, which turned out to be the trashy college comedy Accepted. Which, I had forgotten, stars a young future Serena Van der Woodsen, along with Justin Long and a memorable Lewis Black as a poor man's Paul Goodman.

I was struck, however, by the portrayal of the college admissions process. Mind you, the whole point of the movie is that Justin Long doesn't get into college, which means that a good deal of the movie examines the college admission process, in some detail. And yet it manages to get nearly every detail wrong, starting with the premise: are we supposed to believe that the ambitious parents of the main character would not have paid any attention to their oldest son's college admission process until it was all over?

Things were even more egregious in last season's college admissions storyline on Gossip Girl. The Upper East Side denizens are falling over themselves to wine, dine, and blackmail wealthy alumni donors, admissions deans, college counselors, and the like for admission. Even better was that somehow Dan's ability "get into the Yale English department" (?!) hinged upon a professor reading his work and agreeing to write a letter of recommendation for him. I worked in admissions at a fairly elite northeast school, and I can say that all of this is ridiculous.

Nobody says that movies and TV shows are realistic, but the target audience for these things are high schoolers and twenty-somethings of the middle and upper-middle classes, kids who are intensely sophisticated about the college admission process. Wouldn't they find these weirdly unrealistic plot elements as distracting as I do? And I'm going to guess that the writers, directors, and producers of these shows are from the same sort of bourgeoise background as the target audience, and also went to college themselves, and thus presumably make these things knowing full well how wrong they are.

Anyways, back to the cookies.

Blacklisted Musicians

Although we tend to throw the term "blacklisting" around a lot, it's actually a hard term to define. During McCarthyism there was rarely a concrete "list" of people unfit for employment due to left-wing associations. Senator McCarthy's own list of Communists in the State Department famously fluctuated based on the time of day and how much he'd had to drink. We might think of blacklists as more of a threshold--the line at which mutterings about an individual's loyalties became a distraction to corporate sponsorships. And of course, anti-communist persecution took many other more insidious forms than simple blacklisting.

But in the entertainment industry, there was one concrete blacklist that was tremendously influential, and therefore tremendously damaging to the careers of those on it. Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television was published in 1950 by a group that called themselves the "American Business Consultants." Like many anti-communist groups during McCarthyism, the forces behind the publication were somewhat mysterious; it seems to have been made up of conservative industry executives based in New York, with the help of some former (and probably some current) FBI agents. It is simply a list of 151 names, job titles, and a list of the individual's transgressions, most of which took the form of having signed petitions or lent their names to honorary boards and the like. Unlike some attempts at such blacklists, this one was taken up with enthusiasm by Hearst newspapers, and was widely publicized.

You might be interested, as I was, in how many musicians were on the list. Here they are, together with their job titles as printed in the book. (Which can be amusing; Gypsy Rose Lee is listed officiously as a "Strip Teaser.") In this list I included performers like Zero Mostel and Martin Wolfson, who weren't necessarily known as musicians, per se, but who had successful careers in musical theater.

Larry Adler, Harmonica Player
Leonard Bernstein, Composer, Conductor
Marc Blitzstein, Playwright, Composer
Oscar Brand, Folk Singer. Master of Ceremonies on folk song program
Aaron Copland, Composer, Writer
Dean Dixon, Musician, Conductor
Olin Downes, Music Critic of NY Times
Alfred Drake, Actor, Singer, "Kiss Me Kate"
Richard Dyer-Bennett, Folk singer
Tom Glazer, Folk Singer and Song Writer
Morton Gould, Composer of popular music
Horace Grenell, Musician, Children's Record Guild. Formerly President of Young People's Records
E.Y. "Yip" Harburg, Composer--Stage, Screen
Lena Horne, Singer--Stage, Screen, Radio
Burl Ives, Folk Singer, Entertainer
Felix Knight, Singer--Radio, Opera
Tony Kraber, Guitar Player
John La Touche, Writer, Lyricist--Radio, Stage. Co-Author, "Ballad for Americans"
Ray Lev, Concert Pianist
Ella Logan, Singer--Radio, Stage
Alan (Allan) Lomax, Folk Singer--Composer--Author book, "Mister Jelly Roll"
Zero Mostel, Comedian
Lynn Murray, Choral Director, Radio Composer
Earl Robinson, Singer, Composer. Wrote score for "Ballad for Americans"; also for motion pictures "The Roosevelt Story" and "A Walk in the Sun"
Harold Rome, Composer
Hazel Scott, Pianist, Singer
Pete Seeger, Folk Singer
Artie Shaw, Orchestra Leader
Josh White, Singer of Folk Songs
Ireene Wicker, "The Singing Lady"
Martin Wolfson, Actor--Radio, TV, Stage--"South Pacific"

You'll have to wait for "the book" if you want the analysis! But I will say this--there are only 31 names on this list. Blacklisting in the music industry worked very differently then in Hollywood, or TV.

Music and Segregation

Nobody but me will care about this, but this is where Sonny Til, lead singer of the Orioles, grew up:



I've also just learned that in high school, Til was in a singing quartet with the school's music teacher, W. Llwellyn Wilson, a legendary figure in Baltimore's music scene. In addition to teaching music at Douglass High School (which served black students in West Baltimore) he was principal cellist and then conductor of the City Colored Orchestra, and music critic for the Baltimore Afro-American. One of the ambivalent facts of life before desegregation was that segregated black schools often had amazing faculty, with a startling percentage of teachers holding doctoral degrees. The music curricula at segregated schools in the urban northeast were often particularly noteworthy, featuring a level of training in music theory not to be found at many schools today. This was all due, of course, to the fact that talented and well-educated black teachers like Wilson were usually summarily rejected from university teaching positions, leaving segregated secondary schools as their only option.

But this is all to say, although Til always claimed not to have formal musical training, that story might actually be bit more complicated!

True Confessions of the AMS-L

My favorite genre of AMS-L discussions is the "hey, let's think of music about X" post, followed by thirty million bored musicologists chiming in with suggestions. Currently the obsession is representations of Satan. Past fun "topics" have included music about trains, music with lydian scales, five-movement piano sonatas, classical music used in films, films about composing, film music that uses other film music, "pre-1835 descriptive piano pieces"...you get the picture. I think it says something about our discipline that we seem to expend an awful amount of energy making lists.

My true confession: sometimes I am very tempted to spark one of these "discussions" with a nonsensical suggestion that would truly send us down the rabbit hole. Like, "Is there any music that references goats?" Or something ridiculously broad, like "what are some pieces of classical music that begin in D major?" I know our discipline, and you can bet that if I asked for pieces that began in D major, AMS-L would probably explode as hundreds of musicologists contributed their two cents.

If a phony-sounding email address asks such a question some day, don't tell on me!

Maybe This Time; or, Was Gluck Right?

I don't what you all think, but after this week's episode of Glee, it feels like the show's promise is finally coming through like a breath of fresh televised air. I certainly loved the pilot episode last summer, and enjoyed the first two episodes of the fall season. Lingering in the back of my mind, however, were two problems: first, was the show's play of high school stereotypes old and cliché, or a fresh working within-and-against sort of thing? And secondly, what about the music? The performance of "Don't Stop Believing" at the end of the pilot was awesome, but in the first two episodes, the music seemed secondary to the show, and this musicologist doesn't like that.

My first quandary was solved thanks to Jill Dolan's trenchant analysis. (Hey--she's at Princeton now? When did that happen?) And the second quandary has been resolved by this most recent episode. In the scene where Kristin Chenoweth and Lea Michele duel on "Maybe This Time" from Cabaret, I was totally sold. Two spectacular performances, cleverly cut together, presented so as to give us insight into the characters' interior lives, and all the while advancing the plot. Bravo. After suffering through American Idol year after year, it is so wonderful to hear professional musicians do their thing, you know, professionally. Is that too much to ask, American television?

Speaking of American television, thanks to the show's Wikipedia entry, I was directed to a Times interview in which the creator of Glee, Ryan Murphy, said this:

“I wanted to do a sort of postmodern musical,” he said. “Fox was not interested, and neither was I, in doing a show where people burst into song.” People do sing, of course, but there are rules: the singers will have to be onstage rehearsing or performing, or a song will come in the form of a fantasy in a character’s head. They are the type of rules that made “Chicago” such a successful film, he said. But “Glee” also draws on “American Idol.”

“We’ve learned some lessons about why that show works,” he said. “I think the key is to do songs that people know and interpret them in a different and unusual way.”

Interesting, right? You hear this sentiment a lot these days from those who work in latter-day musical theater. I can't cite off the top of my head, but I seem to recall Joss Whedon saying something similar about Once More with Feeling, and Stephen Trask with Hedwig. It's interesting that so many of these guys feel a need to define themselves against golden age Broadway musicals, which after all were kind of killed off three decades ago. In reality, what made this most recent Glee episode so effective is the same thing that made "Once More With Feeling" effective: it obeyed the old-fashioned rules of the musical, in that the music portrays inner emotions and advanced the plot. Just because they found a plot excuse to include singing doesn't actually change the narrative function. In fact, Robyn Stilwell has pointed out that musical numbers on recent television shows often actually imbibe the music with more seriousness and dramatic import, offering as an example those episodes of Scrubs where musical numbers can contain unexpected gravity.

In other words, I think Murphy has it backwards: there's nothing more postmodern than spontaneously bursting into meaningless song! For me, the strength of Glee comes from its old-fashioned gesamtkuntswerk, rather than the creator's attempts at ironic distance.

The end of the world as we know it

Now that fully one-half of traditionally-aged college students were born in the 1990s, I conducted one of my periodic unscientific classroom polls about music consumption. I asked my class of sixty upstanding young music historians yesterday when they had last purchased a physical CD, the actual piece of plastic.

As I expected it had been about two years since most of them had bought CDs regularly. There were a few romanticists, of course, and a few vinyl fans, but for the bulk of the class, the only CDs purchased in the past two years had been special for some reason: a memento of a concert, or a rare disc that is not available online even illegally.

That isn't the end of the world though. The end of the world is that one student had NEVER bought CDs in her life.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have crossed a threshold. For now it might be the young, and the technologically adept, but we are entering uncharted waters.

In B flat

One of my students recently showed me In Bb 2.0, "a collaborative music/spoken word project." I gather it has been around since the spring, and might be old news to some of you, but if not, check it out.

It's pretty awesome. The creator, Darren Solomon, noted that the flash-based video player used by YouTube and other video hosting services allows for multiple players to go at once, and this can sound pretty cool. After experimenting a bit, he invited people to submit YouTube videos of themselves playing different instruments in the key flat. There are some standard choices--a violin, muted trumpet, piano, etc--together with an e-bowed banjo, the KORG MS-10 emulator available on a Nintendo DS, and, most interestingly, one bit of spoken word performance. Solomon chose examples he liked, and puts them all on the one page. You, the user, can stop and start videos at will, adjusting levels easily.

My class had a fun time playing around with it, managing to get every single video going at one point. While there is obviously a lot of freedom on the part of the players, Solomon does specify that "simple, floating textures work best, with no tempo or groove," and that thick, low sounds don't work well. And since he gets to choose the videos, presumably he enforces that aesthetic. He does a good job. Just when the sound world threatens to veer into just a dull wash of sound, you stumble across a few modules that contain more discrete, articulated sounds--the spoken word, for example, and the DS-10, retained my interest for quite a long time.

The obvious musical ancestor, as Solomon notes and my class quickly saw, is In C. Or at least, both are made of discrete short modules that work well against each other in almost any combination. In each piece the modules can also be repeated at will, although the lack of a "loop" button on a flash video player makes repetition cumbersome, and Solomon recommends beginning and ending clips with ten or so seconds of silence. That fading in means you miss the exciting moments that can occur during In C when some polyrhythm suddenly pops up. And of course, the big difference is that the modules of In Bb (it seems better to hyperlink than italicize the name of the piece) can go in any order, rather than that prescribed by Terry Riley.

Coincidentally, another class I'm teaching just covered In C. Our study included doing our best to play through it. None of them are music majors, so we had an eclectic range of instruments: a sax, a guitar, two pianists, and about five people smacking music stands. I was the pulse, and I will be honest with you, we only made it up to about module 15 before falling apart. But I think everyone had a good time, and we reconvened near the end to finish things off. Got to hand it to In C--still has it after all of these years.

Whither Cultural Studies?

I blogged last week about Michael Bérubé's essay, "What's the Matter with Cultural Studies?" Now, I direct your attention to a more considered response from assembled members of the Cultural Studies program at UC Davis, posted at Bully Bloggers. As a matter of trivia, one of the authors of the response is an old college classmate of mine (hi abbie!), and in fact part of the "Sex Toys Not War Games" group I mentioned in my earlier post. Small world!

At the risk of appearing feckless, I think I actually agree with both arguments. Or rather, I should start by saying that I disagree with something both do, which is set themselves up in opposition to each other, making constructive discussion difficult. We're all on the same side, guys! The academic left in this country is a big and diverse world, and it's great to hash things out, but I think the Davis folks react rather harshly, and don't give Bérubé the benefit of a generous reading--which I think he deserves. That said, Bérubé himself does write in a somewhat snide tone that does little to encourage dialogue either.

But as to their arguments, each has some very important points. The Davis people are right that Bérubé's conception of Cultural Studies is limited. Yes, the British tradition of Cultural Studies has limited impact in this country, but we shouldn't be surprised that different theories and methodologies might be useful over here. Cultural Studies hasn't maybe had such a huge impact in sociology and political science disciplines here, but it pops up in lots of places where Bérubé might not be looking--performance studies, for example, and in the legion of interstitial academic centers and programs that might be called Women's Studies or American Studies or Ethnic Studies, but all owe a tremendous debt to Raymond Williams and company, and do tremendously important work. And the Davis people are totally right to call Bérubé on only speaking to a U.S.-U.K. conception of the discipline.

On the other hand, I think the Davis people fall into the very trap Bérubé rightly criticizes: their ultimate argument is that neoliberalism, and its attendant privatization of the university and delegitimation of the humanities is the real enemy of Cultural Studies. It's not that this isn't true, and not just for the various incarnations of Cultural Studies. It certainly is. But Bérubé is spot on, for me, when he points out that ascribing everything to base and superstructure leaves you powerless to change anything if you can't change everything.

The Davis letter doesn't address one of Bérubé's points that I found to be the most important, so let me highlight it again: whatever impact Cultural Studies has had on the academy and on a range of political movements, it has most definitely not had an impact on the the left's only ally in this country's electoral system: the Democratic Party. Electoral and legislative politics are not the only kinds of politics that matter, but neither are they irrelevant. From ENDA to the gay marriage "debate", or immigration "reform", or the new colonialism in the middle east, the Democratic Party is intellectually at sea. Would that Cultural Studies could somehow step into that gap.

One final point: I just want to point out that musicologists never talk about these issues. Am I wrong? Why not?

Edited to Add: I wrote this without realizing there was another response to Bérubé on Bully Bloggers. I don't find it particularly useful, but there is a very interesting discussion in the comments. And also, see Michael's response to the Davis people on his own blog.

Cut Time

Since every time I blog about John Cage I get lots of, uh, feedback, I'm going to try and get something useful out of that. So let's take a look at Williams Mix, Cage's epochal eight-channel tape piece from 1952. You can listen to it at the previous link, and here is the one little excerpt of the score that is widely known:

Although premiered in Illinois in 1953, most people first heard it thanks to its performance at his twenty-fifth anniversary retrospective concert in 1958, which was released on LP. Funny story: the LP was based on a live recording of the concert, so when you hear Williams Mix you also then get to hear the audience cheering and jeering afterwards. Douglas Kahn has noted that some textbook accounts of Williams Mix mistakenly think the applause was part of the piece!

For the uninitiated, Williams Mix is for eight-tracks of standard quarter-inch magnetic tape. The original sources of sounds are recorded previously, in six categories: city sounds, country sounds, electronic sounds, manually produced sounds, wind sounds, and amplified "small" sounds. Then using an elaborate score that Cage produced with almost a year of incessant I ching coin tossing, you cut and splice your source sounds along the patterns provided.

Texan composer Larry Austin has delved into Williams Mix probably more than any other human being. Working with digital copies of the original tape reels provided by the John Cage Trust, he has not only restored the original realization but also attempted his one realization based on his own sounds, Williams [re]mix[ed].

There is tons to be said about the piece. I, for one, have yet to go look at the full score that is kept at the New York Public Library, and which I hope will answer some of my questions. But one question that strikes me initially, as it strikes most people, is the following: was it ever possible to truly do a manual realization of this piece?

In the stories told by Cage and others who worked on the project (including Carolyn Brown's recent memoirs), the score was fiendishly difficult to follow. I mean, they spent months intricately cutting tiny little bits of plastic that would often float on the floor and get lost. There is that amusing story in Silence where they realize some ways in that Cage and Earle Brown were measuring differently because they were sighting their rulers differently. Most legendarily, there is one moment in the score that supposedly calls for three inches of tape to be cut into 1,097 different pieces and then spliced back together. Now again, I haven't yet seen the full score, so I have no idea if that is true or not, but it is a widely repeated story. And when pressed on this very point in interviews, Cage was quite clear that he indeed followed the score exactly at this moment.

But...really? If you were wondering, the width of an average razor blade is .009 inches, and so in theory you could only make about 333 razor-blade width cuts in three inches of tape without basically going over previous cuts. Which obviously must have happened. But...really? I'm certainly not one to take Cage the mythmaker at his word about everything, so maybe he was exaggerating for effect in his memories. But Cage circa 1952 was a pretty OCD guy, and I have the sinking feeling that he really did do it, probably to the detriment of his eyesight and mental health.

But how, exactly, is the question. My next step: acquire some old-fashioned magnetic tape, a razor blade, and some scotch tape.

[Editorial Note: In the interests of scholarly productivity, I am now only allowed to blog about topics related to my research. maybe teaching. and maybe Gossip Girl. Hey, they're off at college this season, so there's relevance. Speaking of which, what is up with Dan's new haircut, I ask you?!]

Man's Man's Man's

I meant to post this video in the wake of Michael Jackson's death, but just realized I never did. It's of a poor quality and is widely seen around the intertubes but still pretty amazing: a 1983 James Brown concert in which he invites up on stage not only Michael Jackson, but then Prince, both in their 1980s heyday. I think they are vaguely playing "It's a Man's Man's Man's World."



Amidst all the amazing things about the video, check out at about 00:32, where you catch a glimpse of James Brown's fabled total control over the band. The band is just sort of grooving along while Brown and Jackson walk to the center of the stage chatting, and suddenly Brown just makes a little hand gesture and boom--they instantly cut out.

If you don't have the time to read Anne Danielsen's justly-praised
Presence and Pleasure, there was a decent Rolling Stone profile of the Godfather written by Jonathan Lethem that talked about those hand signals:

Throughout these ruminations, the members of James Brown's band stand at readiness, their fingers on strings or mouths a few short inches from reeds and mouthpieces, in complete silence, only sometimes nodding to acknowledge a remark of particular emphasis. A given monologue may persist for an hour, no matter: At the slightest drop of a hand signal, these players are expected to be ready...

During the playback session, guitarist Keith leans in and whispers to me, "You've got to tell the truth about what goes on here. Nobody has any idea." I widen my eyes, sympathetic to his request. But what exactly does he mean?..."We're supposed to follow these hand signals," Keith explains. "We've got to watch him every minute, you never know when he's going to change something up. But his hand is like an eagle's claw -- he'll point with a curved finger, and it's like, 'Do you mean me, or him? Because you're looking at me but you're pointing at him.'"

Pop Face Off

Okay, so now that Kanye West is a presidentially-certified jackass, we are still left with the most important question: which video should have one for "Best Female Video" at the VMAs? (Side note: do videos have genders?)




There were of course other contenders as well: Katy Perry (oh dear god no), Kelly Clarkson (meh), Lady GaGa (as a friend on Facebook put it, she'd be better off in a Performance Studies department than on stage), and Pink (way too 2001. And I don't like people cutting down trees, even [especially?] to prove that one is a rock star.)

I carry two biases into this choice. Bias #1: I have a slight unironic affection for Taylor Swift because I really liked her duet on "Fifteen" with Miley Cyrus at the Grammys. (Really, I'm not being ironic. I thought it was great for what it was.) Bias #2: I'm not a huge Beyoncé fan. It's not like I have a huge problem with her or anything, but I've never been impressed with her singing. It's a stock point of mine so I've probably already blogged it before, but her voice is quite weak and insubstantial. That's why it took the supporting voices of a girl group for her to get her career going in the first place, and why her solo work is endlessly overdubbed.

Onto the videos: Beyoncé's video has the advantage of being utterly and thoroughly weird. I mean, it's really weird, isn't it? Weird. It looks a little bit like it was choreographed by a heterosexual Klaus Nomi with a pinch of Sun Ra. And yet, it caught the attention of people like few other videos did this year. Endlessly parodied and copied. Definitely wins the zeitgeist prize. The music is great, of course, even if I'm not sure it deserves MTV's claim of "female empowerment with a catchy hook." Or maybe it does. Who really knows what that song is about? I don't. Last semester I used this song for my usual "let's brainstorm ways to analyze music" exercise on the first day of class, and neither I nor thirty upstanding young students could figure it out.

Taylor's video, on the other hand, is supremely conventional, from the standard boy+girl narrative to the gratuitous use of the ugly-girls-wear-glasses trope. The song is not my favorite, despite it's overall competence. However, I am most definitely not its target audience, and therefore have little idea if it might be a worthy heir to the longstanding tradition of music aimed at (and often written by) teenage girls that offers a realistic and sympathetic portrayal of adolescence. I'm not a teenage girl, so I don't know. But from a distance, it doesn't read quite so true as some of Taylor's other work, like "Fifteen." Perhaps it is as simple as the story of "You Belong to Me," which is a girl telling a boy that his girlfriend is bad for him and that she, the narrator, would be better. There is certainly a long tradition of girls putting each other down to compete for a boy, but it's not a particularly uplifting tradition, and Taylor's version is uncritical. "Fifteen," on the other hand, mimics the swirl of teenage emotional confusion and yet manages to maintain an introspective distance.

So between Beyoncé's Afro-Futurism and Taylor Swift's reactionary stance, I'm afraid that I will have to pronounce in favor of Beyoncé. But here's hoping that Taylor's step backward is merely temporary--I'm optimistic, myself.

Any other opinions?

On Radicalism

The great Michael Bérubé has an excellent piece in this week's Chronicle Review about the failures of Cultural Studies. Entrenched as I am in one discipline I can't speak very well as to whether he is right or wrong overall, although within musicology, I think he is sadly quite right that the methods of Cultural Studies has become almost exclusively identified with popular music, and are all too rarely brought to bear upon the canon.

What struck me most about his essay, however, was a point made towards the end of the essay having to do with the relationship between the original British cultural studies folk and Thatcherism. In it he puts voice to a certain discomfort I feel with political discourse on the left these days. This paragraph, in which he heavily quotes the work of Stuart Hall, is key:

In an especially rich essay...Hall wrote: "The first thing to ask about an 'organic' ideology that, however unexpectedly, succeeds in organizing substantial sections of the masses and mobilizing them for political action, is not what is false about it but what is true." What, in other words, actively makes sense to people whose beliefs you do not share? Hall proposed that leftist intellectuals should not answer that question by assuming that working-class conservatives have succumbed to false consciousness: "It is a highly unstable theory about the world which has to assume that vast numbers of ordinary people, mentally equipped in much the same way as you or I, can simply be thoroughly and systematically duped into misrecognizing entirely where their real interests lie. Even less acceptable is the position that, whereas 'they'—the masses—are the dupes of history, 'we'—the privileged—are somehow without a trace of illusion and can see, transitively, right through into the truth, the essence, of a situation."

I find this particularly trenchant because sometimes it feels as if we on the left are spending most of our time complaining about how crazy and radical the right is. It is not that I don't agree that the right is crazy, and also wrong. They are both. Especially the wrong part. And although this might be a slightly heretical statement, I have the distinct impression that the endless chain of right-wing frenzies in these last eight months--teabagging, the birthers, Glenn Beck, Joe Wilson, etc--have been driven by left discourse as much as by right. I a nutshell, I think we are spending too much time convincing ourselves that the opposition is crazy, and not enough time either promoting our own agenda, or, in a true Cultural Studies fashion, considering what might be "right" about the opposition, and working within and against it.

For example: this weekend there was a big anti-Obama protest in DC. The left has had a field day with the overt racism of the event, not to mention its conceptual incoherence. Fair enough. But what good does it do to snicker, as one of the Daily Kos editors did on their main page, that most of the protestors were country folk who didn't know proper escalator protocol?

Lord knows I think those marchers were idiots. But you know, I've been to marches in DC, and in those marches have myself been on the radical fringe. For example, in April of 2002, I went to DC as part of a large protest against the invasion of Afghanistan, and preemptively against the stirrings of War in Iraq. To protest our country's (largely imaginary) retaliation against Afghanistan was, and still is, unthinkable in our current mainstream political discourse. And even within that already unthinkable position, I was part of a group that attempted to introduce a specifically-queer critique to the surrounding. We carried signs that said things like "Sex Toys Not War Games." It was college, we had a good time.

This is all to say, I've been that crazy holding a weird sign on the lawn in front of the Capitol building. And I therefore have an appreciation for that particular kind of inchoate political anger. Sure, those people out there on the Mall last Saturday were having their anger channelled and shaped by Dick Armey and Glenn Beck, but frankly, ours back in 2002 was shaped, largely against our will, by ANSWER. And despite that, and despite the utter failure of those anti-war marches to achieve their goal, marching against the war was a very affirming experience. It plugged us into a wider world of activists; it built community.

I hope the anti-Obama protestors fail in their goals. But I suspect that at the very least they will feel that sense of community. And if we on the left really want to make permanent change, really want to change people's lives, then we have got to respect their passions to the extent we can. And even less than that, I just don't see what it good it does to put all this work into convincing ourselves that they are crazy. Really, all we are doing when we complain about the marchers, or Joe Wilson shouting "You Lie," is register an appeal to the centrist political discourse for a judgment in our favor--"Look, they are out of bounds! Choose us!" I hate to break it to us, but in a world where mild government subsidies for health care is the "radical left" position, the center is never going to rule in our favor. Best to do without their help.

What we learn from Cultural Studies is that indeed, the corporate-produced media works in its own interest above all else. But the rejoinder is that no matter what the corporate media--read capitalism at large--produces, it is a big mistake to believe that those interests are automatically injected into those who consume it. If it is that simple, then we should just give up and go home. In reality, we know over and over again from cultural studies that people consume that media so as to produce a multiplicity of often divergent meanings, and towards divergent ends.

How then, should we best respond to the anti-Obama protesters? I certainly don't mean to suggest we validate their feelings and give them hugs. But I think there are more subversive ways to criticize; I rather liked the approach of a cousin-in-law of mine, who with his friend went to Saturday's march holding fake signs. (His read: "Gee, There Sure Are a Lot of White People Here.)

But as usual, there is no real substitute for engagement, and for emphasizing commonalities over difference. Sometimes the best political action of all is conversation. And in the meantime, let's get this goddamn middling health care reform passed, alright?

The Case of the Missing Church

The weather has taken a turn for the better down here in Virginia. We've gone from the sort of heat that probably would have killed a few dozen colonials back in the day to a more reasonable damp, but not suffocating, warmth. At the height of the heat, Mabel and I would try to keep our walks for the mornings and evenings, and even then criss-crossing back and forth tracking shady bits of sidewalk. Also trying to avoid the horses and sheep. Mabel's never really met a sheep before, and I suspect that meeting one for the first time in the midst of the tourist throng of Colonial Williamsburg would not be a good idea.

I can't deny that it is slightly odd to be teaching in colonial Disneyland. The campus and the theme park are actually surprisingly separate; the part of Colonial Williamsburg nearest the college is "Merchant's Square," where there is a Williams-Sonoma and the like, and although the historic part of William & Mary adjacent to this is actually the oldest and best preserved part of Williamsburg, it's not as swarming with tourists as you might think. But if you venture a few blocks east, you start to run into the aforementioned sheep, as well as the costumed actors who want to tell you about blacksmithing or making wagon wheels or whatever. To their credit, many of them also carry dog biscuits.

The whole scene is irresistible for a historian. Not so much the colonial aspect, as those of us who actually do history professionally are somewhat bemused by Mr. Rockefeller's folly. But it is impossible not to be fascinated by the many layers of history here, and the sometimes surprising negotiations that have gone into creating them. For example: alongside the road I travel to get to school is this big empty green spot.


According to the plaque, this empty lot is the former site of the First Baptist Church of Williamsburg, an early African American congregation that formed in the eighteenth century largely because they were unwelcome at the Bruton Parish Church now at the center of the Colonial theme park. There were several iterations of this church, but in 1856 the congregation was able to build a proper brick church that looked like this:



Being a curious sort, I've been trying to figure out what exactly happened to the 1856 church, as both the plaque and information on the official web site are decidedly fuzzy. Sure I could probably ask somebody, but this being a blogging enterprise, I decided to see what I could find just with my handy Google Toolbar. Best as I can tell, in 1956, the congregation sold the church to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation for $130,000, and used the proceeds to build a new, larger church elsewhere in town. CW then proceeded to raze the church to the ground.

Now lest I throw random accusations out there, let me make clear what I do not know: I don't know the circumstances of the sale, or why the church was razed, or what the congregation thought about it. Maybe it was their idea. I have no idea, I just moved here two weeks ago. But I do know the historical context, and I therefore know that there is a possibility that a small southern town in 1956 might not have been overly interested in preserving the historical heritage of certain people. And I know that Colonial Williamsburg has torn down or altered many nineteenth-century buildings for not being appropriate to the colonial setting, and a church built in 1856, even one on a somewhat secluded side street, doesn't have the right historical vibes. But the real story awaits proper research.

So, a digression: One of the most influential concepts for dealing with history in performance studies is Joseph Roach's idea of "surrogation." In Cities of the Dead, describing how "culture reproduces and re-creates itself," Roach writes

In the life of a community, the process of surrogation does not begin or end but continues as actual or perceived vacanies occur in the network of relations that constitutes the social fabric. Into the cavities created by loss through death or other forms of departure, I hypothesize, survivors attempt to fit satisfactory alternates.

Being a smart guy and all, Roach of course doesn't romanticize this process, and indeed points out that it is the failures of surrogation, the "mildly incontinent sentimentalism to raging paranoia" that make the process interesting.

This a very useful way to think about the missing church in Colonial Williamsburg. The actual warm bodies and ritual traditions of First Baptist moved a few blocks north. But what surrogate stepped into the vacant lot on Frances Street? In terms of buildings, Colonial Williamsburg has gone the route of historical literalism: across the street from the vacant lot lies a reconstructed carriage house enclosing a small museum, marking the spot where the congregation met in the eighteenth century before building a permanent home. You can even meet Gowan Pamphlet, the preacher and former slave who founded First Baptist.

These efforts, however, are more recent. It wasn't until the 1970s that Colonial Williamsburg started more thorough efforts to include African American life, culminating in what is now a "Department of African American Interpretations and Presentations." What filled in the gap in the 1950s and 60s? Interestingly, it was music. Four years after the destruction of the First Baptist Church, CW made a movie called The Music of Williamsburg, and hired Alan Lomax to provide the music. Well-known African American singers from around the south were brought to town to perform self-consciously "historic" black music, old spirituals and work songs and the like. I only know about this because Carol Oja, now at Harvard but formerly at William & Mary, once taught a seminar in which her students did a historical ethnography of the making of that movie. She wrote it up in an article for the ISAM newsletter, and there are many fascinating implications not just for the history of Colonial Williamsburg but for how our knowledge of antebellum black music has been passed down to us. But it also shows it shows us that music can sometimes do an unfortunately good job at maintaining the color line from a safe distance. Colonial Williamsburg in 1960 wanted the music, but not the actual people making it. The performers brought in from out of town were not allowed to stay in the segregated hotels of the town, and had to be housed with local black families.

Luckily, the failures of surrogation can still force their way through. One of the most touching stories from this episode was the experience of Bessie Jones [MP3], the great gospel singer, who was one of the musicians hired for the film, and who showed how the historical record is sometimes more true in performance than in buildings. Oja tells the moving story, drawn from Jones's memoirs, of how the singer was invited to a party hosted by a white family. Asked to sing for the crowd, she couldn't help but telling the assembled interracial audience of her family's history in this town: her grandfather had lived in Williamsburg, as a slave. As she put it later, "Wasn’t a soul saying a word but me, and I just told them like it was.”

Blogging by Bullet Points

• If you haven't seen it yet, in a Julie & Julia hommage two musicology grad students are blogging their way through the Taruskin behemouth, 10 pages a day for a year. Check it out: The Taruskin Challenge.
  
  
• If you were one of the millions charmed by the news that Roxanne of "Roxanne's Revenge" forced Warner Music to pay for a Ph.D. from Cornell University, and were then crushed to learn that it (maybe) never actually happened, be sure to read the excellent discussion of the case by Wayne Marshall and Jeff Chang.
  
  
• New to the blogroll: The Boydell & Brewer blog From Beyond the Stave featuring the incomparable Ralph Locke, musicologist Elizabeth Morgan's new site for San Franciso music reviews, undergraduate ethnomusicologist Meredith at Ear to the Ground, Texan musicology at Polyphonic Musings. Any blogs that I am not thinking of that should be there?
  

Side note: Is there appropriate internet etiquette for tipping one's hat to the source of an interesting link if that link came from Facebook friends? Like these?

Philly Meetup?

Attention leading lights of the m u s i c o l o g i c a l blogging sphere. (I'm sure I missed a bunch there.) It's a little ways off, and it's a little 2007, but regardless: any desire out there to have a blogger meetup at AMS this fall? Perhaps outside of the hotel at a local drinking establishment? I think it could be fun.

The Unwilling Survivor

As a follow-up to my Cage/Cunningham post a few weeks ago, I've had an interesting exchange with Allan Kozinn, the Times critic who wrote Cage's 1994 obituary--and who I, ah, somewhat excoriated for not giving proper credit to the relationship between John and Merce. Allan gently commented that in fact, he had wanted to say the proper things about their relationship, but Cunningham's people made it clear that Merce did not want to be listed as Cage's survivor, and the editors decided to honor their wishes. I offer my apologies to Allan!

And of course, it comes as no real surprise. Part of what makes their relationship so interesting and special was exactly this reluctance to identify it as such, and Merce was always particularly private. Mine might be a minority viewpoint, but I actually don't think secrecy or a post-Stonewall idea of the "closet" is the main reason for this reluctance. It was an aesthetic position, a well-known renunciation of any kind of expressionism--let alone an expression of love. I have little doubt Cage and Cunningham would have been just as silent had one been a woman.

But that doesn't mean we need to follow suit. While that might have been there aesthetic viewpoint, it doesn't have to be ours. I don't think it's violating their privacy to speculate on their relationship, since I don't think privacy is at stake. If one wants to figure out the Cage/Cunningham aesthetic, it is our job as historians and critics to look at what made these men think the way they did, and not be afraid to look beyond their often superficial public statements. As musicologists we are already constantly delving into interior worlds and private emotions, and we shouldn't be afraid to go farther. Merce himself put it well, in a letter from the summer of 1953:

When I phoned you, I couldn’t say endearments because of groups around, but I say them now, and miss you very much, and send you all my best love, and great kisses.

A Guide to a Good Marriage

You know that I've been blogging for four years now? Cripes. I think that entitles me to repost something from my old pseudonymous blog, especially because one my more favored musicologists is getting married today, and she, like most of us, could use some advice from Patti Page on the subject. This is from her amazing 1960 self-help book for teenage girls Once Upon a Dream. There are explanations after each of these tips, a few snippets of which I have included.

How to Be Married and Still Live Happily Ever After

1. Be feminine
("I read somewhere that sixty per cent of American husbands get their own breakfasts while their wives stay in bed. To me, this is a sign of trouble.")

2. Don't protest if your husband takes you for granted.
("I don't know why so many women take this as an insult. All it means is that your husband is comfortable with you, trusts you and never questions your loyalty to you...personally, I think it's one of the highest compliments a man can pay a woman.")

3. Don't meet your husband at the door each night with the story of YOUR day.

4. Control your jealousy.
("The one way to get a man to come home every night and want to stay there is simply to make your home the place where he enjoys himself the most.")

5. Don't be too interesting.
("I think you'll find, when you're married, that it isn't nearly so important for you to be interesting as it is to make your husband feel that he's interesting.)

6. Share something bigger than yourself with your husband.
("It's essential that you share some interest, hobby, career--anything to give you a common objective. Usually, of course, that something bigger than yourselves is children.")

Well this is cool

Via Gawker, of all places, I learn that Google News has been engaged in digitizing a variety of historic newspapers, including the early days of the Village Voice. Sort of like Proquest Historical Newspapers, but free. I'm still figuring out how to use it, but it seems to search not only the papers Google archived themselves, but also the archives of of papers like the NY Times that operate their own fee-based archives, as well as free ones like Time magazine.

Interesting. I've long been a fan of the Proquest version of historic newspapers, which started with the NY Times and then included the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal. Actually, this summer I've discovered that they have expanded to a whole range of papers, including back issues of the Baltimore Afro-American I would love to delve into. Unfortunately, none of the four academic institutions I steal database access from seems to subscribe to that service. Sigh. The great advantage of ProQuest is that you are dealing with PDF copies of the actual papers, ads and all, and not just plain-text articles yanked out of their physical context.

Now we just need someone to digitize all of Billboard and we're all set!

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ETA: Commenter Mike points out that it is! Glory be!

Biographies and Biographers

I was reading the obituaries in the Times the other day, and the name Eleanor Perenyi popped up. She was apparently a "writer and deliciously opinionated amateur gardener" who wrote the gardening cult classic (who knew there were such things) Green Thoughts. The name sounded familiar, and sure enough, it was mentioned in passing that she wrote a biography of Liszt that was a finalist for the National Book Award.
[This book is so out of print I couldn't find an image of the cover online; I had to scan in my own copy. Funny, her obituary doesn't have the accent aigu.]

Biographies are a strange scholarly beast. For most civilians, the only musicology they are ever going to read are biographies of composers. If you go into your average Barnes & Noble, the music section will be full of biographies. Biographies get reviewed in the NYRB and The New Yorker. And yet, very few of them are written by professional, college-teachin', Ph.D.-holdin', embittered actual musicologists. Many biographies are written by journalists. Some are written by super-fans, others seemingly by random people on the street. Perenyi is an excellent example. She was the child of a WASP-y military family, who ended up marrying a Hungarian baron and then fleeing the Nazis before retiring to a life of genteel gardening in Manhattan and Connecticut.

Perenyi did have the advantage of living in Hungary, where a lot of Liszt archives still are, and knowing the language. Her great flaw, however, was that she took a somewhat crazed view of the women in Liszt's life, especially the Countess Marie d'Agoult. One of my first papers in graduate school was centered on reading d'Agout's fictionalized account of her relationship with Liszt, published under the pen name Daniel Stern. (Funny story: I signed up to write this paper not realizing the book wasn't translated into English. I theoretically read French, but that was a rude shock the night before I was due to give a presentation.) So I can tell you that Nélida is a fascinating and sensitive portrayal of Liszt and his world, and that d'Agoult was one of his greatest champions. Perenyi, however, had this to say about it:

Nélida’s hero-villain dies but in the meantime he has already suffered a symbolic castration in the loss of his artistic gift when his mistress leaves him...It had always been obvious that [Marie d'Agoult] hated Liszt’s music partly because she made the primitive association with his sexual potency. The loss of one would entail the loss of the other. Nélida shows that she willed this to happen.

Creepy, right? But I'm not pointing this out to make a point about non-musicologists invading our turf; after all, some of our best biographies are written by those who aren't professional musicologists in the traditional teaching-for-a-living sense (c.f. Maynard Solomon), and some of our worst are written by the tenured crowd. (c.f. no names named.) In fact actually every Liszt biographer has this weird problem with Liszt's women, something Allan Keiler, my professor in that way-back-when seminar, pointed out in a review essay of Alan Walker's authoritative three-volume biography of Liszt. Walker is absolutely psychotic about Liszt's women, devoting an entire chapter to ripping apart Nélida, and many more to Marie d'Agoult's various imagined shortcomings. He has to dig deep, of course. At one point he sniffily complains that d'Agoult's published writings never mention Liszt's "highly ethical achievements in behalf of the Beethoven Memorial Fund." (oh, well then!)

I imagine that the problem with so many biographies is that that the author spends so much time doing research that they don't actually think about their overall arguments. After all, just because the subject's life is providing the basic shape for your work, it nevertheless is still your story to tell.

But, there is hope: I think that one of the most salutary trends in our discipline at the moment is a renewed attention to biography. After all, it's a matter of agency--there are real people sitting out there in history, and to think we understand them merely through the musical texts they produced is disrespectful if nothing else. The intentional-fallacy fallacy, if you will. For me, that's been the influence of Performance Studies, which since the 1960s has been trying to re-insert the presence of actual living-and-breathing people into our logocentric world. I think for others the impulse has come from the close (or at least, closer) attention ethnomusicologists pay to ethical issues--it's silly how many people write about music written by living people without ever taking the trouble to try and get in touch with them. And heck, I seem to recall somewhere in Taruskin's monster an argument that was something along the lines of, "musical forms don't 'do' things, it's the people that write them that 'do' stuff." (He says it better.)

Perhaps this all won't result in a flurry of musicological biographies of single individuals, but with any luck, more of us will at least leave open the possibility of thinking biographically.


Postscript: Nélida is now available in an English translation!