This About Sums Up the iPad

A friend sent me this screenshot of his Facebook feed:

Assigning Music: An Update

An update on my oh-so-fascinating post about the logistics of assigning music in class. There are some good comments to that post you should check out if you are interested. Among other things, Glenn reminded me that iTunes files are only playable on Apple players like the iPod or iPhone. The more I thought about that, the more it stuck in my craw. As prevalent as iPods are, I just didn't want to endorse such a closed system.

So instead, I've decided to use the Amazon MP3 store. There isn't a system for creating lists nearly as elegant as the iMix, but it was easy enough to create a series of links in my Blackboard site for the necessary tracks. Not everything was available, but I was surprised at how much was, even some of the random Americana I have assigned in my US Music survey. (My main regret was that they didn't have the recording of Gottschalk's The Banjo I wanted, the one by my old teacher Neely Bruce. Not available as an MP3 as best as I could tell.) A few things were available out there for free: George Gaskin's 1893 recording of "After the Ball," for example, is available from the UCSB Cylinder Preservation Project and I'm just going to go ahead and give them La Monte Young bootlegs, since, you know, they're bootlegs.

Now all of this is, I should say, just supplementary. A set of audio CDs will be on reserve in the library. I will let you all know, however, how many people end up buying music themselves. It would cost about $100 to download everything, so I don't kid myself that they'll buy all of it. And I'm sure there will be some judicious copying between classmates. You can't control everything, and I feel that by providing the option to buy, I've at least done my part.

And I should have asked this earlier: I know a number of my former students read this blog. If any of you feel like chiming in on how you like to have your music delivered to you, please feel free to leave a comment!

The Law of GaGa

Happy new year! My semester starts next week; time to get back on the blogging train, no?

One of the more interesting end-of-year/end-of-decade reviews was Ann Powers's piece "Authenticity Takes a Holiday." Her argument, with which I basically agree, is that unlike the 1990s (or at least the first half of the 90s), the 2000s were marked by a decline in the discourse of authenticity. For those of you who don't do pop music studies, this is the omnipresent discourse in which good music is music that is "real," that speaks truths about the one who makes it.

That's the philosophy behind the concept, at least. In practice, authenticity comes to mean very particular aesthetic judgments. When I have authenticity day in my classes, I try to tease it out by first brainstorm with the class a list of artists or songs they find "authentic." Working from that, we then try to figure out what musical qualities are shared by these songs, and often find that those qualities are remarkably similar in a lot of genres--simpler instrumentation, biographical details in the lyrics, "live-sounding recording" (which I put in scare quotes since the work of an authenticist like Steve Albini is just as much a creation of the studio, and what is really meant is a certain style of mic placement), etc.

Obviously these sonic traits can quite easily be separated from their context and used wily-nily. That's why certain self-consciously primitive recording approaches of the last decade--the White Stripes and Amy Winehouse come to mind--can be used in a manner that disrupts any sense of authenticity. The White Stripes might be recording bluesy stripped down rock (authentic!) on old-fashioned magnetic tape recorders (authentic!), but when you're doing it dressed only in red and white...well, Eric Clapton would not approve.

The persistent presence of authenticist effects, however, is why I think it is a little more useful to put the ideological opposition the way Phil Auslander does in his great book on such issues: an opposition between authenticity and "inauthentic authenticity," that is, a discourse that is aware and proud of its inauthenticity--David Bowie is Auslander's prime example. The counterexample would be Milli Vanilli, who attempted to mask, rather than revel in, their inauthenticity. Lost yet? And don't forget, this is very clearly about discursive formulations, not some ontological judgment about what is actually authentic.

Anyways, I definitely agree with Powers that in the past year we have started to see foment in this discourse. Unlike Powers, however, I think Lady GaGa is very much the beginning of a new wave. Sure, when "Just Dance" came out, it seemed like she was just another dance-pop diva in a vaguely Kylie Minogue-esque vain. But as her success grew, and presumably (hopefully?) she gained more creative control, GaGa started to move in fascinating and wonderful directions. There was the video for "Paparazzi" and subsequent performance at the VMAs, which is probably one of the more pleasurably-disturbing things I have seen on MTV this side of Jersey Shore.

Not for the faint of heart (and apologies for the preceding commercial):



So on the one hand you've got classic shock-the-bourgeois sort of thing going on. But the shock isn't of the titillating, ooh-let-me-kiss-Madonna variety we might expect from a pop diva, it's a pretty well-thought out spectacle of modernist primitivism, no? With the blood, and the crutches? Man, lots to say about that, but regardless there is some serious intellectual substance there. I mean, the woman doesn't just wear crazy clothes, she wears a hat designed by Frank Gehry! (And how much do you love the look on P. Diddy's face?!)

And the virtuosic provocation is paired with musical talents that while not perhaps incredibly virtuosic (not yet, at least) are nevertheless real: Lady GaGa is becoming more and more famous, and increasingly hailed, as the pop diva who actually sings live. And while there has always been space for pop divas with musical talent (c.f. Christina Aguilera), it has been fairly uncommon in recent years, and YouTube clips of her singing and accompanying herself on the piano have abounded. On the Ellen Degeneres show:



Pretty great, right? Did you see how she counted in her band with a snap? I don't mean to be too condescending, but literally there are not that many pop singers at the moment who have the musical confidence to count in other musicians. And GaGa isn't shy about her abilities either--when Ellen remarks upon her ability to "actually sing," GaGa responded in mock belief, "I always think that's funny...aren't we supposed to sing? Isn't that part of the gig?"

(It's a fascinating interview in many ways, including that she elaborates on her own experiences of difference. It would be worth teasing that out more, especially given her visible support for the rather assimilationist wings of contemporary gay politics.)

At the same time, the modernist provocations keep her out of the singer-songwriter category, and her phenomenal popularity keeps her out of the realm of a more subcultural sister like Amanda Palmer. GaGa is still pop, and gloriously so. Her proper company can be found with the other great pop singers of 2009 who like GaGa are playing with the boundaries of authenticity--Adam Lambert and Taylor Swift for instance.

Anyways, we're going to watch the "Paparazzi" video on the first day of my "Gender and Sexuality in Music" class next Thursday--stay tuned!

Hat tip to Kariann for telling me about the "Law of GaGa" pictured at top, and apologies to whoever made this image--I can't figure out who you are.

The Faces of American Music

I was looking for ideas for a banner image to put at the top of my Blackboard site for a survey course on American music I am teaching this semester. So I did a Google Image search for the term "American Music," and this was the first picture to come up:

Somewhere up there in the great musicological beyond, Oscar Sonneck is having spasms.

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!