A Reader's Guide to Cage Against the Machine

From the New York Post January 1952:

“Darling,” said a frosh to a coed, “they’re playing our song.” For the first time since a juke box has been installed in the Student Union of the University of Detroit, she heard him. The place was swinging way out to one of those new sides called “Three minutes of Silence.” That’s it—silence. The student puts his dime in and he takes his choice, either the 104 jump records on the big flashy juke box or on one of the three that play absolutely nothing, nothing but silence. It’s a new idea developed by Dick McCann, president of the Student Council, for the comfort of the silent types who’d just as soon not be blasted off their chairs by the rocking records. He’s refining it. “The new model,” he said, “will have a beep tone which will sound ever so gently every 15 seconds so that people will know the machine is playing.” …Besieged by other students around the country for copies of the silent records, McCann is quietly contemplating two new projects: Stereophonic silence and blank home movies.

As everyone in the world knows, this year's campaign to defeat the X-Factor's dominance of British pop charts is centered on the work of one Mr. John Cage. As you can imagine, I quite like the idea of 4'33" charting, whatever the reason, and I have dutifully bought the single from the British Amazon.com..

But as you can tell from the Post article, silence has a long history as a symbolic bulwark against mass culture. One of the famous inspirations for Cage's version of silence was the Muzak Corporation; four years before 4'33" he spoke of how it could be nice to sell a piece of silent music to Muzak to give its customers some brief sonic respite. He noted at the time that Muzak tracks were between three and a half to four and a half minutes in length, not coincidentally the length of your average pop single as well. As I argued in a dissertation chapter some years ago, the "target" of 4'33" is usually taken to be the classical music establishment generally, or perhaps more specifically the hyper-controlled modernism of his erstwhile friend Pierre Boulez. That's true, but at the same time popular music was squarely in his sights as well.

In a 1997 piece, Douglas Kahn provocatively asked us to consider not just which sounds are included in Cage's silence, but also which are excluded. So what is that Cage wished us not to hear? Well, let's see. The premiere of 4'33" was on August 12, 1952. The number one single of that week on the Billboard pop charts was the British singer Vera Lynn's classic "Auf Wiederseh'n Sweetheart."



Beautiful song, no? In some ways a bit of a throwback for its time, Vera Lynn having been strongly identified with the war effort thanks most especially of course to "We'll Meet Again." The strong nostalgism of "Aug Wiederseh'n" is indeed an omnipresent current on the post-war pop charts--Patti Page's "Tennessee Waltz" from 1949 being the most successful iteration--but in 1952 it was on the decline. The new vogue was often for the novelty hits of Mitch Miller's musical empire, as in two other big hits from 1952, Patti Page's "Doggie in the Window" and Rosemary Clooney's "Botch-a-me." And even in the downtempo hits, the nostalgia of Lynn was being replaced by a more emotive, youthful sentimentality as in Johnny Ray's "Cry."

But I digress. I don't know how aware Cage was of pop music of his time. We know his feelings about the more modernist wings of jazz (not a fan), but he did not leave behind much of a published record when it came to actually-popular culture. He probably didn't have much of an opinion about Vera Lynn versus Rosemary Clooney one way or another. But the point is, silence can often stand in for a disdain for corporatized mass culture, be it John Cage himself or aging British rockers.

Is that a good thing? It is a conundrum for me. As Kahn would perhaps put it, this isn't just silence, it's silencing, and we must therefore ask who is being silenced. On the one hand, my intuitive marxism cheers on the spectacle of throwing a wrench into the culture industry; I'm perfectly fine with silencing Simon Cowell. On the other hand, my inner pop fan hates the dismissive way that the organizers of Cage Against the Machine talk about pop culture, often speaking in condescending terms not just about its producers but about its audience as well. As my friend Steph Pennington pointed out, there is a rock vs. pop dialectic at work, and a gendered one at that. I'm not quite sure how I feel about my beloved Mr. Cage being used to such ends.

Then again, nobody really loses in this situation. If nothing else, the world gets to learn a bit more about John Cage, and I suspect that X Factor fans won't really be affected if the aforementioned aging British rockers say mean things about them. So, carry on Cage Against the Machine, and I hope you are planning for next year as well. Wagner Against the Machine, anyone?

Mabel is unimpressed

From the label:

Miles Davis' seminal Bitches Brew album was a game changer—a bold fusion of rock, funk, and jazz. To honor the 40th anniversary release, Dogfish Head has created a bold, dark beer that's a fusion of three threads imperial stout and one thread honey beer with gesho root. Like the album, this beer will age with the best of 'em.

Then and Now

Next week, one of my classes arrives at a unit on popular music studies. For these moments, I really like to get into the actually-popular wing of popular music, and assign as the listening whatever the current top singles are. If you were wondering, here is the iTunes Top 5 as of this morning. I choose iTunes rather than Billboard because it tends to be a little more stylistically diverse.

1. Glee Cast, "Teenage Dream"
2. Black Eyed Peas "The Time (Dirty Bit)"
3. Ke$ha, "We R Who We R"
4. Katy Perry, "Firework"
5. Rihanna Featuring Drake, "What's My Name?"

I had not yet seen the video for "Firework," which is quite...something. I'm actually kind of a Katy Perry fan; I bought her first album and although it has its ridiculous moments (most of the singles) as a musical whole it was surprisingly strong. Rihanna continues to bore me, the Black Eyed Peas continue to mystify me, and Ke$ha, well, what can you really say about Ke$ha that hasn't been said before. I'm glad, however, that we'll get an excuse to talk about Glee.

The first time I did this was in the August of 2006, teaching History of Rock and Roll as a summer course at UCLA. I looked up that Top 10 for curiosity's sake:

1. Gnarls Barkley, "Crazy"
2. Ashlee Simpson, "Invisible"
3. Nelly Furtado & Timbaland, "Promiscuous"
4. The Pussycat Dolls featuring Big Snoop Dogg, "Buttons"
5. Christina Aguilera, "Ain't No Other Man"
6. Jessica Simpson, "A Public Affair"
7. The Fray, "Over My Head (Cable Car)"
8. Cassie, "Me & U"
9. Shakira featuring Wyclef Jean, "Hips Don't Lie"
10. John Mayer, "Waiting on the World to Change"

Oh man, I forgot how much I hate the Fray. It kills me that I have that song in my iTunes, left over from teaching that class. I should just delete it while I'm thinking about it.

Done.

As I recall, this was the summer in which people (especially my students) really, really hated Ashlee Simpson post-SNL meltdown. The other notable thing about that 2006 Top 10 was how many of those songs pretty directly riffed off very specific older music. Sometimes it was direct rip-off: John Mayer making a near-exact copy of Curtis Mayfield's "People Get Ready," and Ashlee Simpson doing Madonna's "Holiday." Christina Aguilera's "Ain't No Other Man" came from her "big band" album Back to Basics, and of course Gnarls Barkley had made it into the public eye thanks to the reuse of Beatles's music in The Grey Album.

There's not nearly as much historicity in today's Top 5, with the exception of the Black Eyed Peas bizarre use of "(I've Had) The Time of Our Lives." Beyond that, I haven't had time to process, so we'll see what everyone has to say next week.

Was Beethoven Black?

Short answer: no, he wasn't. But that is assuming that by "black" you are referring to African American in the contemporary sense, and obviously Beethoven himself had little relationship to American racial discourse. But was Beethoven of African descent, or have dark skin? Possibly. His maternal ancestry is not firmly-established by scholars, and as Michael Broyles explained in a paper this morning, there have long (since at least 1907) been persistent rumors that Beethoven's family tree involved descendants of Spanish Moors who were once stationed in the Flemish region his family was from. So, the long answer is, maybe.

The paper Broyles gave this morning covered these biographical issues briefly, but was more concerned with how the trope of "Beethoven was black" was used in radical black politics in the 1960s. As with a number of other figures--Jesus probably being the more famous one--putatively white cultural touchstones were mobilized by some black nationalists as examples of a suppressed black cultural heritage. Broyles primarily looked at various writings by figures such as Amiri Baraka, and also noted examples of radio stations that used the phrase "Beethoven was black" as a call sign, the infamous Ujamaa House incident at Stanford, and the track "Beethoven" by the rap outfit Soulja Boyz.

Unusual for a paper at AMS, there were some pointed critical comments afterwards. After one audience member described the paper as "wonderful," Guy Ramsey--the well-known scholar and practitioner of African American music at Penn--stood up to say that the paper might be cool, but it wasn't "wonderful." Ramsey mostly picked at the examples used, especially pointing out the diversity of black nationalism. A more provocative comment came from Richard Mook of Arizona State. He lit into the choice of the Soulja Boyz song, asking what this had to do with black nationalist appropriations of Beethoven's heritage. He didn't say this exactly, but I think he was suspecting that Broyles had simply found a random example of a black person listening to Beethoven--as Rick rightfully said, highly problematic. I would also point out that there was no ethnographic component to Broyles's paper; many of the people he discussed are alive, and rather than relying upon the bits of writings here or there, it would be interesting to actually ask them about it as well. If you're going to write about the recent racial past, it's best to, you know, actually talk to the people who were involved.

Another respondent whose name I didn't catch voiced what I had been thinking, that this wasn't really a paper about blackness. Rather, the idea of a "black Beethoven" forces us to name whiteness. If Beethoven wasn't black--and that's the reaction most have to the titular question--than you have to say what he was, which is to say, white. As my friend pointed out afterwards, many people like to believe in the universal appeal of Beethoven. If his music really was transcendently universal, than it wouldn't matter what race he was. And yet the visceral, violent reaction to the idea of a black Beethoven, a reaction disproportionate to the issue at hand, shows that for many people it is actually quite important for him to be white.

The interesting question here is not why black radicals in the 60s used Beethoven--I think that the cultural work being performed by that intellectual position is pretty obvious. One only need to look at the furious and overtly racist reactions from the 1960s to see how well it did its job of exposing covert rhetorics of white superiority. And to be perfectly honest, one might also look at the session itself: There were probably about 150 musicologists seeing this paper, and as with any session at AMS, those musicologists were overwhelmingly white. I think that might possibly explain one audience reaction to Broyles's paper that I found occasionally disconcerting: anytime he quoted one of the black nationalists claiming a black Beethoven, the audience responded with laughter. Whereas the threat of a black nationalist Beethoven was a very real one in the sixties, our contemporary audience was confident enough in the whiteness of Beethoven that we can find it amusing. I'm not sure that's progress!

Sarah Palin's Guide to AMS

Queer Sects and Royal Vets

Just finished the short paper I'm giving as part of the Cold War Study Group panel this AMS. As I've been apt to do recently, I look at the discourse of "anxiety" in the 1950s, in this case in a performance by the great Doris Day. You'll have to come to the paper to get the rest, but here's the famous moment from Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much where Doris saves the day by singing "Que Sera, Sera."


Little known fact #1: "Que Sera Sera" won the Oscar for Best Song in 1956. The shocking thing is that this is the only Academy Award ever won by a Hitchcock movie. He was awarded an Honorary Oscar at the end of his career, but this was the only real one.

Little known fact #2: the scene in Camden Town where Jimmy Stewart is walking down the street towards the taxidermist, and he hears omninous footsteps clattering behind him?



The row house at the end of the street behind him is where Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud lived together in 1873. That's what the trivia guides say, but re-watching the movie I recognized it instantly because also in the background you can see the edge of the Royal Veterinary College, where my wife went to school for five years--it's the more institutional-looking building behind a wall to the right of the row houses. I've retraced Jimmy Stewart's steps down that street a million times, as it is how you get to the Camden High Street.

Unclassifiable Piece of Information: There was a scene eventually cut from the movie, in which a British woman is telling Jimmy and Doris where to find somebody named Vassilly. One of the themes of the movie (Hitchcock's first after becoming an American citizen, incidentally) is the American's inability to recognize non-American accents, and so we get this bit of hilarity:

The landlady is not sentimental about Vassily. She always thought he would come to a sticky end. "Queer sex," she says darkly. "That was the trouble with him." Bob and Jill are baffled by this. But further questioning reveals that Vassily belonged to one of those queer religious sects.

Too Many Rings?

(I write this with that caveat that I haven't thought about it very much or very deeply.)

Is there such a thing as too many productions of the Ring? Look, I'm actually kind of a big Wagner fan. I'll be going to NYC to see at least one of the LePage productions, and watching the rest at my local cineplex. I own multiple video and audio recordings. I talk a little bit about the 1952 Furtwängler recording of Tristan in my book project. Heck, I took a graduate seminar just on the Ring! And so when I saw that Houston was planning to do a Ring cycle, my instinct was to begin musing about my whereabouts in 2014 and whether a trip through Texas could be involved.

But you know...these productions are expensive. Like, really expensive. The Melbourne end of things for the HGO version is estimated at $15 million, which seems low. The NY Met version has had estimates from $17 to $40 million, and I have to believe that if it involved refabricating the stage to support the enormous circus stage machinery, the money's got to come in on the high end of that. The money is all supposedly coming from a $30 million donation from the Ziff family, but think about how much great opera could be produced with $30 million! It reminds me a little of those people who donate $100 million to the arts Yale or Princeton—that's philanthropy to glory yourself, not to actually help the arts.

It's not that I don't think there should be new productions of the Ring; every generation should have its own Ring to argue about. And I'm okay with Wagner costing more to produce than your average opera. And new Ring productions should come from new and interesting places and not just NYC and Seattle.

But within about five years we've had what, the Met, San Francisco, LA, Houston...I dunno, it seems like a lot of the American operatic stage and the money behind it is going to be occupied with Wagner for the foreseeable future. And as much as I like him, there's a lot else out there I'd also like to see!

Living in the Wilderness

Over these past few weeks I've resisted blogging about the renewed attention given to suicides by queer kids. It's a question of not wanting to use this very-public blog to talk about a very personal subject, but also because it is just a hard subject to talk about. I have mixed feelings about Dan Savage's "It Gets Better" project, similar to those of Tavia's thoughtful post on the subject. And I do not in the least share the "string them up!" mentality some in the community have taken towards the so-called "bullies" at Rutgers, both because the facts are certainly not clear in that case and also because in my experience, retribution rarely makes you feel better. I have a similar discomfort with hate crimes legislation, along the lines of that voiced by the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. I could go on, but luckily Richard Kim (as usual!) knows exactly what to say, and I hope you'll read his piece in The Nation.

The personal experience here is that I have spent a lot of time working with queer kids on these issues, starting in the mid-1990s when I was one myself and continuing on through college. Our approach then was to lead workshops in high schools, with the goal not of training the homophobia out of straight students, but in hopes of letting the queer and proto-queer amongst them see the existence of role models out there in the world. Not so different from "It Get's Better," come to think of it, although the personal contact and attempt to find speakers rooted in the same community made it a little different. I hope we did good, although there were certainly tragedies along the way. I'm glad that there is renewed attention to the issue, but I also know that these few recent suicides are a drop in the bucket.

So what's a musicologist to do? I don't know. But I did find some comfort in class today. I was doing a brief unit on the English Reformation, and therefore on William Byrd. I'm not a specialist in this area, and so I tend to crib from the scholarship of others for teaching. In this case my source was Joseph Kerman's essay on Bryd and English Catholicism in Write All These Down. Byrd, as you know, was a recusant Catholic who straddled the line between great public success as a composer of Anglican church music and his own underground and highly-persecuted beliefs. One of Kerman's musical examples was the Ne Irascaris Domine from 1589:



The text, especially the second half, speaks to the feeling of being alone in a wilderness, in obvious metaphor for the situation in England for a Catholic like Byrd.

Be not angry, O Lord,
and remember our iniquity no more.
Behold, we are all your people.

Your holy city has become a wilderness.
Zion has become a wilderness,
Jerusalem has been made desolate.

One of the most affecting moments is the setting of "Zion has become a wilderness," which begins at about 6:10 in this YouTube video of the Hilliard Ensemble's performance. The polyphony stops in favor of a slow, homorhythmic passage that sets the words in what Kerman calls "unforgettably bleak and hollow" harmonies and textures. This is important in Kerman's argument because it is an early example of Byrd's expressive style that put him ahead of his English contemporaries. But listening to it with my class, I couldn't help but think of those who for various reasons find themselves alone in a desolate wilderness. Just last week, a high school classmate of mine killed herself. I hadn't been in touch with her since high school except as friends on Facebook, and it is continually heart-rending to see the wall posts in my newsfeed as people belatedly tell Jennie they love her and miss her.

Listening to a piece of music like Ne irascaris domine should theoretically be depressing. But the semi-mystical nature of performance makes it different, as we all know. This is performance as what Richard Schechner famously called "twice-behaved behavior," or in his more evocative words, "Performance means: never for the first time." Or, more simply, performance is knowing that at some point somebody else once felt the same way. That is comforting indeed.

But also: most of us who read this blog are educators, and I hope we'll remember Richard Kim's advice to love queer kids, even if it occasionally costs us something.

Music Criticism at the Movies

Stanley Fish has a fun online column up about literary criticism in movies. As he points out, there are lots of movies based on literary sources, or about literary figures, or even a few about literary critics, but few examples of literary criticism actually being performed by the movie. (His column focuses on the new movie Howl which does just that.)

So that gets me thinking: are there examples of movies that perform musicology, or at least music criticism? Let me brainstorm:

• Amadeus. I'd say this goes beyond just depiction of a musical figure, most obviously in the dictation of the Requiem at the end that shows how a piece of classical music is constructed. Also, however, the many plot points based around issues such comic versus serious opera, the language of the libretto, nationalism, etc.
  
• High Fidelity. Tons of pop music criticism being spoken in that movie, and so integrally to the plot that I think it qualifies!
  
• What's Up, Doc? I have never actually seen this Barbra Streisand movie, but Kay Shelemay reviewed it a few years back and it seems like it might fit.
  
• Fantasia. Not always the sort of musicology we approve of, but certainly lots going on!

Any other good examples of cinematic musicology or music criticism?

Your Daily Moment of Zen

Discuss:



Edit: Taken down! This was the Sesame Street appearance of Katy Perry, in which she sings "Hot and Cold" to Elmo. The lyrics were mildly changed, although the story--a boy who confusingly may or may not want to play with her--remains the same. Apparently, after filming and posting the video, Sesame Street belatedly realized that Perry wasn't wearing a whole lot of clothes in it. The pruriently curious can still see it at TMZ.

Detroit Breakdown

I rarely agree with Terry Teachout about anything other than the high quality of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, but I think he raised some good points in yesterday's WSJ piece "Disaster in Detroit."

I agree with those musicians who argue that cutting the average salary of a DSO player from $104,650 to $75,000 will transform the orchestra beyond recognition. The DSO will inevitably lose its best members and won't be able to attract replacements of comparable quality. But the players' decision to respond to the orchestra's financial crisis by voting to strike is a classic symptom of the cultural-entitlement mentality—the assumption that artists ought to be paid what they "deserve" to make, even when the community in which they live and work places a significantly lower value on their services. Any economist can tell you what has happened: In Detroit, being a classical instrumentalist is no longer an upper-middle-class job.

We like to think that great symphony orchestras and museums are permanent monuments to the enduring power and significance of art, but in the 21st century, we are going to learn the hard way that this is simply not true. Great high-culture institutions reflect the fundamental character of a city. In America, most of these institutions were founded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as manifestations of civic pride. But when a city's character undergoes profound changes, as has happened in Detroit, the institutions are bound to reflect that transformation. One way or another, they'll follow the money—and if there is no money to follow, they'll go out of business. The sad truth is that the Detroit Symphony is no more "permanent" than . . . well, your average auto company.

The liberal counterpoint to Teachout's laissez-faire argument might be something along the lines of, "well, in Europe, this is why the government steps in to support high culture institutions that couldn't survive otherwise." But I've never been particularly comfortable with that approach, and at any rate, in addition to limited direct support the federal government already subsidizes high-cult institutions by way of a tax code that makes no distinction between charitable giving to a homeless shelter and to the Metropolitan Opera. Classical music enthusiasts should count themselves fortunte for that; I'm not sure it would survive a popular vote!

Happy Hildegard Day!

For you church goin' types out there, September 17th is of course the feast day of Hildegard of Bingen.


One is reminded of Jennifer Bain's article on "Chant in the Marketplace." Bain argues that Hildegard's popularity in the marketplace negatively affected her popularity among scholars. While there is some truth to that, I think that's less true now than it was six years ago when that article came out. Judith Peraino, for example, has a great discussion in Listening to the Sirens that I teach with all the time. It is certainly true, however, that there are a lot of weird Hildegard videos out there on the internets!

A Philadelphia Composer

Every time I walk down Locust Street here in Philadelphia, it drives me slightly nuts to see this. Perhaps I am missing other signs--I have not actually made a study of this-- but as best I can tell, the main historical placard next to Curtis is this tribute to Vincent Persichetti. No offense to the man, but of the legions of people who have come through Curtis, many natives of the area, we give a plaque to someone famous for teaching at Juilliard?

My vote would be for Samuel Barber. Strictly speaking not a native, as he was from West Chester (where they are very proud of him), but studied at Curtis from a very early age. And while like Persichetti he spend most of his life elsewhere, there's something about his music--conservative, yes, but beautifully cosmopolitan--that strikes me as quintessentially Philadelphian. Last Friday I heard the Serafin Quartet, who are in residence at the University of Delaware this year, play Barber's Op. 11 quartet, famous of course for its Adagio. The first movement is a sophisticated exercise in Beethovenian development, quite attractive especially when placed up against the neo-medievalism of the second movement that is still, despite the hype, a great piece of music. Roy Harris's Third Symphony gets all of the press for this sound, so influential on Copland and others, but it's worth remembering the Barber did it first!

Adventures in Religious Tolerance

From the New York Times, July 28, 1879 [pdf].

When the residents of this aristocratic avenue discovered that they were in danger of seeing a Roman Catholic church spring up among them, with all that the establishment of such a church implied, they bestirred themselves to oppose the project. The wisest of the Roman Catholics here did not favor it, and St. Mary’s was induced to exchange the lot for as good a one in some other locality. A good lot was found, but just before the accomplishment of the transfer the worthy residents of the avenue came to the conclusion that it was too good a lot for the Roman Catholics, and they exchanged it for a poorer one, which they offered to the Pastor of St. Mary's. Knowing what they had done, he would not take it, and arrangements were made for the erection of a stone church on Hillsborough avenue.

The Fox News Times article ends by calling the church an "eyesore on the avenue" and predicted its quick descent into bankruptcy, but it is still there today!

Via dotCommonweal.

4'33" Playlist

Alex suggests that the 4'33" playlist should be an annual tradition. So, in honor of Mr. Cage's 98th birthday (getting close to the centennial!) and also because I just taught the piece today, here's my contribution. It's a good mixture I think, although the n-word seems to pop up with alarming frequency.

Utopian Thinking

It's been a summer of utopian reading here in the 2'23" household. First, in the endless process of editing of some of my Cage work, I revisited Jill Dolan's Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope in Theater. This is a great book that I was originally introduced to by my old roommate in LA, and which I had found very useful and inspiring; she had this great line about utopia being "the desire to be part of the intense present" that sums up quite well my own personal reaction to 4'33".

Then later in the summer I happened across the original utopian thinker, good ol' Thomas More, who makes an indelible appearance in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, which I finally got around to reading a year after it won the Booker Prize. More has traditionally gotten a pretty positive rap from history; certainly my impression of him growing up was as a saintly intellectual. I even read his Utopia at a fairly impressionable age, sometime in high school. I don't think I really understood any of it, but I liked the idea. But one of the many great things about Wolf Hall--and it is a great book if you haven't yet read it--is that it portrays him rather villainously, as a cruel and pretentious man bent on enforcing his own rigid orthodoxy as long as he was in power. "Not my period," as we historians say, so I have no idea of the historical truth of the situation, but there was something liberating about Mantel's re-telling of the famous story, and it was also a powerful reminder of the perilous forms sometimes assumed by utopian thinking.

And then finally I've spent the last few weeks devouring José Muñoz's Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. It's an astonishingly cool book, and I'm not the only one with whom it has struck a chord--if you meander over to the Social Text site, you'll find an array of reactions from smart people, all similarly enchanted. (Not to mention an interpretive drawing by the legendary Vaginal Davis!) As you'll see from their comments, Cruising Utopia is a powerful and inspiring writerly performance. It dredges deep into some heavy-duty cultural theory, especially the work of Ernest Bloch, but also Heidegger, Marcuse, and Adorno.

Adorno, you might ask? However could Muñoz find witty, liberatory potential in the work of Adorno? Well, that's part of the joy of reading this book. As with an earlier discussion of Heidegger, Muñoz doesn't feel constrained by earlier, dreary readings of these theorists, and takes an attitude that is both playful but also kind of liberating. My favorite moment so far is when he has a detailed discussion of Bloch's and Adorno's views on utopia that segues neatly into an analysis of some of John Giorno's sexually-explicit autobiographical writing, e.g. "Here is another instance of Giorno doing what Adorno calls the casting of a picture: 'I unbuckled the kid's belt and he pulled down his pants..." I won't go further because this is a family blog, but if you've spent much time with Adorno--and most musicologists have--the idea of Adorno arguing for the utopian potential of anonymous sex at the Prince Street toilets is rather gleeful. But then you realize it's not wrong either. I think it's an example of Muñoz's fundamentally optimistic and, well, utopian approach to theory that he asks us to imagine Theodor Adorno the orgy enabler. Isn't that more fun that going on about how blah blah Adorno hates popular culture blah blah blah?

Anyways, I'm still reading, but if you're looking for some bedside reading to get you through the beginning of the semester, I highly recommend it. As I make my way through I'm going to be posting about it occasionally, and if any of you have read it, I'd love to hear your reactions.

Describing Slowing Down

It's been fun to watch the blog world try to put a finger on why Justin Bieber's hit song "U Smile" sounds so great when you slow it down by 800%:



(You can hear the original here; the slowdown was achieved by a 20 year old Floridian feeding the track through a free program called "Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch.")

Daniel over at Renewable Music put a precise finger on the situation, comparing it to La Monte Young's attempts to get "inside" the sound. That's what I had been thinking as well. It also reminds me a bit of Steve Reich, especially Different Trains. At any rate, as he and some of his commenters point out, the slowed-down Bieber makes use of techniques--and a mode of listening-- that have been part of experimental and electronic music for ages, and it's nice to hear so many people get into it.

However, when you spend a lot of time with interesting new music, one of the challenges is trying to describe the bizarre sounds being achieved. With canonical classical music one always recourse to technical vocabulary if needed, and there is certainly a lot of new music criticism that just holds still with a technical description of how the sounds are achieved, e.g., "This is the sound of Justin Bieber slowed down 800%" My first class in college was a survey of experimental music taught by the illustrious Alvin Lucier, and he repeatedly drilled into us that we should just describe the sounds we heard without recourse to metaphors or fancy-schmancy romantic adjectives.

But at some point it's nice to move beyond that level of description. And it becomes particularly amusing, and interesting, when it's not your typical new music critics doing so, but random pop culture bloggers out there trying to wrap their ears around a new sound:

"the climactic score to some kind of historical epic...It sounds like the ocean, but, like, in heaven." [Gawker]

"a monstrous but peace-loving ocean's surf as some all-encompassing ethereal chant hums in the language of the whales. Into your brain." [SF Gate]

"something that might be tacked onto the end of a Sigur Ros album or be on one of Enya's more experimental forays into noise." [MTV]

"like standing on the edge of some majestic cliff in the wilds of Ireland feels." [mashable]

"like the ambient soundtrack to an edgy indie film set either in outer space or underwater and helmed by a director who's high on magic mushrooms." [cnet]

"giving him sort of celestial-choirboy quality, while the music becomes almost ludicrously majestic and beautiful." [npr]

As our students all learn on Day 1, describing music is hard!

Bang on a Can in Philly

As a non-New Yorker, I officially disapprove of the provincial notion that you have to go up there for interesting new music. Who needs Bang on a Can, we have...uh, Relâche! They're great. And....Bowerbird! Always interesting. And...okay, well there's not a ton of other new music stuff going on here, but still.

But I have to admit, I'm thrilled to hear that Bang on a Can is for the first time doing one of their marathons here in Philly, as part of the Fringe Festival. It's going to be September 12 at World Cafe Live, and you will see me there! Maybe not for the whole ten hours, but for a good chunk of it.

The Schedule:

2pm:
So Percussion performing Drumming Part 1, composed by Steve Reich
SIGNAL conducted by Brad Lubman performing Shelter, composed by Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, with film by Bill Morrison and projections by Laurie Olinder
Asphalt Orchestra performing Carlton, composed by STEW & Heidi Rodewald, and The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers, composed by Charles Mingus
4pm:
Spoken Hand Percussion Orchestra - TBC, composed by Spoken Hand Percussion Orchestra
Todd Reynolds performing Lost Signals and Drifting Satellites, composed by Annie Gosfield
Bang on a Can All-Stars performing Music from Shadowbang, composed by Evan Ziporyn, and Stroking Piece #1, composed by Thurston Moore
The Crossing performing Epic Text & Statements, composed by Pelle Gudmunsen-Holmgreen and Villarosa Sarialdi, composed by Thomas Jennefelt
6pm:
Asphalt Orchestra performing Electric Red, composed by Meshuggah and Hyper Ballad, composed by Bjork
Uri Caine with Ralph Alessi & Jim Black, TBC, composed by Uri Caine
Normal Love performing I Heard You Can See Baltimore from up there*, and Electrolytes in the Brine*, composed by Normal Love
So Percussion performing Threads, composed by Paul Lansky
The Crossing performing Gloria (Everywhere), composed by Kamran Ince
8pm
Sun Ra Arkestra, TBC, composed by Sun Ra
Bang on a Can All-Stars performing Workers Union, composed by Louis Andriessen
Asphalt Orchestra performing Two Ships, composed by David Byrne/Annie Clark; Zomby Woof, composed by Frank Zappa, and Champagne, composed by Goran Bregovic
10pm
Keepers of the Chaos, TBC, composed by Jamaaldeen Tacuma/G. Calvin Weston
Matmos, TBC, composed by Matmos
Matmos & So Percussion , performing selections from Treasure State, composed by Matmos & So Percussion
Bang on a Can All-Stars & Kyaw Kyaw Naing performing selections from Bang on a Can Meets Kyaw Kyaw Naing, composed by Kyaw Kyaw Naing

FTM in Arizona

Kendra at Les Belles Dames sans Merci writes:

I saw a CFP recently for the Feminist Theory and Music 11: Looking Backward and Forward conference. FTM is an annual conference bringing together scholars from many areas to share their research and ideas. I’d love to go. However, the 2011 meeting is being held at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. This is a major problem. Arizona’s recent racist and unconstitutional laws on immigration and the treatment of its citizens make it impossible for me to support any events held in the state, as well as any groups that sponsor those events... [snip]

FTM 11 , I urge you to reconsider holding your next conference in a city where a significant portion of attendees risk discrimination and, as the General says, second-class treatment. Feminist theory has long grappled with race, class, status, and justice. Would you really discount all of that work to hold a meeting in Arizona?

I agree. I've never participated in FTM nor was I planning to this year so it's not like my opinion really matters, but I nevertheless encourage you to go read the entirety of Kendra's post. I'm not actually very knee-jerk on this subject; I generally find attempts to get scholarly organizations engaged in politics to be naive at best, and often very misguided. (Michael Bérubé has blogged more eloquently about this than I, but I can't find the particular link at the moment.) When it comes to conferences, there is at least some economic teeth to the political bite. I wish, for instance, that the American Historical Association had not gone ahead with holding their annual meeting at a hotel owned by an anti-gay activist. But generally, I think boycotts of geographic areas are the wrong approach. The issues are sometimes chosen rather arbitrarily (it would be hard to find a city or state not guilty of a some sin!), and even when quite valid, I usually think engagement works better.

However--and it's a big "however"--the case in Arizona is different. This isn't about using the mighty weight of the FTM Local Arrangements Committee to show Arizona who's boss. Rather, it's the very concrete reality that some people who might wish to come to the conference will feel unsafe doing so because of their race/ethnicity or immigration status. That's a fundamental problem that for me trumps other (important) concerns. Perhaps the organizers can find some more elegant solution than simply moving the conference to a different location, but it's an issue that needs to be addressed somehow.

Harvey Fuqua

I can't believe I missed the news that Harvey Fuqua passed away last month. Fuqua is probably the most important figure in the development of R&B that you've never heard of. Not only as a singer and producer, although the fact that his career was bookend with "Sincerely" (1954) and "Sexual Healing" (1982) is pretty astounding on its own. But at every step in the glorious history of R&B, Fuqua served as a connecting thread between generations. For example, Fuqua began his career in the sweet vocal harmony style popularized by the Ink Spots (of whom one was his uncle). Later critics would start to call this music "doo-wop", but in the early 1950s it was still produced and consumed almost entirely within urban African American communities. Fuqua wasn't the only one who introduced that style into the (much larger and more commercially successful) world of rock n' roll, but his alliance with Alan Freed (whose nickname "Moondog" was the source of the name "Moonglows") was a major moment in that story.

And it goes on from there. Fuqua discovered Marvin Gaye, and then moved on to Detroit to join the Gordy family business, becoming one of the bridges between doo-wop and Motown. And so on and so on, touching everyone from Sylvester (the man produced "You Make Me Feel", for goodness sake!) and then famously Marvin Gaye's last album. They don't make 'em like that anymore.

Another nice tribute here.

The Case Against Gay Marriage

A reminder of why I find Andrew Sullivan generally despicable, no matter how enthusiastically he voted for Obama last year. In the course of making his typically-conservative argument in favor of gay marriage:

If you have total gay freedom and no gay institutions that can channel love and desire into commitment and support, you end up in San Francisco in the 1970s. That way of life - however benignly expressed, however defensible as the pent-up unleashed liberation of a finally free people - helped kill 300,000 young human beings in this country in our lifetime.

Actually, Andrew, the absence of gay marriage in this country did not cause the AIDS crisis. Nor did "total gay freedom." It was caused by a virus, as you well know. And its effects were magnified thanks to the fine public health efforts of a Republican government you strongly supported. Well, that and Sullivan's own "consummate hypocrisy," as Richard Kim once put it. As Kim pointed out back then, Sullivan is despicable not so much for the obvious hypocrisy--read Kim's piece for the overview of Sullivan's own sex life--but because his politics are devoted to keeping power in the hands of the already-powerful. Just because he favors allowing the powerful to be gay doesn't alter the fundamental equation he promotes.

Civil marriage is nothing more than a series of benefits, mostly financial, that the government affords certain citizens. Should those benefits not be given to those who live in non-traditional family arrangements that still won't be covered by "gay marriage"? To those who simply choose to be single? To those who don't choose to be single, but are nevertheless? What exactly is the reasoning behind these policies? My ideal government would not expand the financial benefits of marriage to a slightly larger group of people, it would do away with them all together. If we want to provide financial assistance for child rearing, shouldn't that assistance be more directly linked to the having of children? I'm a pragmatist so I'm strongly in favor of legalizing gay marriage today, but I'm not going to pretend that it's going to solve many social ills, and in the hands of Andrew Sullivan I worry that it will actually create more.

Now, you might ask yourself, aren't you married yourself, Professor Gentry? Why yes, I am. I think there is a lot of good to be found in the ritualized union of individuals.* I think well enough of that concept to even consider it something of a sacrament, went so far as to have celebrated my own in a church. And that's exactly why I think the state has no place inregulating consensual relationships at all; render under Ceaser and all that.

And it's before my time, but I hear that San Francisco in the 1970s could be a pretty wonderful place.

Vegas Figaro

Speaking of smaller music institutions, my sister and a friend have founded a new opera company here in Philadelphia, Poor Richard's Opera. Their debut production will take place in September as part of the Philly Fringe Festival, and is called The Marriage of Figaro: The Las Vegas Version. Here's the official blurb:

Move over Count Almaviva, make way for Ol' Blue Eyes. Ever wonder how Mozart would do in 1960s Las Vegas? Even if you haven't, you need to find out! Opera goes groovy in the Philadelphia premiere of DC writers Elizabeth Pringle's and Bari Biern's original libretto and lyrics matched with Mozart's timeless music of love, betrayal and forgiveness.

Poor Richard's Opera, Philadelphia's newest opera company, announces its premier production, The Marriage of Figaro: The Las Vegas Version, as part of the 2010 Philadelphia Fringe Festival at the Moonstone Arts Center, 110A S. 13th Street, on Saturday September 11 and Sunday September 12 at 7:30 PM.

"Part opera, part zany spoof, [The Marriage of Figaro: The Las Vegas Version] moves in and out of Mozart's frame so comfortably, so smoothly and entirely without an attempt to simply recreate his wonderful opera." (The Washington Post)

The Count - Paul Corujo
The Countess - Katy Gentry
Figaro - Ben Williams
Susanna - Sydney de Lapeyrouse
Cherubino - Alyssa Marshall
Marcellina - Annie Gill
Bartolo/Antonio - Matthew Fisher
Basilio - Aaron Spencer
Pianist - Yoonhak Baek

Tickets - $20, available at the door or here.

One More Orchestra Post

I promise I'm really not one of those "future of the orchestra" people who gets stressed out by the future of performing arts organizations like the Philadelphia Orchestra. As I wrote before, I think we overestimate the role these behemoths play in the actual musical life of our communities. And as a historian, I'm most interested in how cultural change happens over time, and much less in how best to drag my heels kicking and screaming. You know Raymond Williams's old (1958 I believe!) formulation of how that change happens? He posits that at given time there are three forms of culture: residual, dominant, and emergent. You can probably figure out what those terms mean, and where an institution like the Philadelphia Orchestra fits in.

That said, I can't resist a few links. Not just commentary, however, but also commentary on the commentary.

• Peter Dobrin in the Inquirer on the problems faced by the Orchestra. Lots of interesting information, but I especially direct your attention to the article comments. You should know that the Inquirer comment sections are usually swirling tornadoes of incivility; these comments are remarkably thoughtful.
  
• The well-known liberal blogger Atrios is a subscriber to the Orchestra, and often provides a thoughtful, neutral vantage point. Again, the comments to his post are often intriguing.
  
• Yelp Reviews of the Kimmel Center.

I find all of this anonymous internet discussion fascinating. There is a lot of resentment about perceived elitism in some quarters, although in the Inquirer comments it is interesting that it's sometimes resentment of the stuffiness of the Orchestra, and other times resentment that the local moneyed elites aren't contributing enough money. But along with the resentment there is a lot of positive commentary as well. I particularly found the Yelp reviews interesting. I don't mean this condescendingly, but it is refreshing to read the the responses of wide-eyed newcomers to classical music.

The Bechdel Test

I thought everyone knew about the Bechdel Test, but when I posted a link on Facebook, I got enough of a reaction that I guess that isn't true! The video below gives a succinct explanation, but the test--named after a classic strip by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel--involves asking yourself three questions about any movie you've seen:

1. Are there more than two women in it?
2. Do they talk to each other?
3. About something other than men?

You'll be hard pressed to think of examples that meet all three criteria. Let me test it on the movies I've seen this summer, limiting myself to just the ones I saw in the theater. (On DVD, I just watched Die Hard and Funny People, both of which fail hardcore!)

-Coco and Igor
-Inception
-Eclipse
-Get Him to the Greek
-Iron Man 2
-Shrek Forever After
-Killers

(Parenthetical remark: wow, I've seen a lot of trash this summer. This was the consequence of living near a suburban multiplex until just recently.)

Quick scan and....no, I don't think any of these make it. Coco and Igor had two women, but they talked to each other about Stravinsky. Inception had two women, and they did have a brief conversation, but as I recall it was revolving around Leo. Get Him to the Greek--ha! Eclipse? I don't recall every moment of the sodden and poorly-acted dialogue between Kristen Stewart and the various vampire ladies, but I'm going to guess that it fails as well. Lord knows that for a movie putatively about a girl, said girl is defined completely by her relationship with boys. Does Bella have any personality or character trait not related to interactions with boys?

I often bring up the Bedchel test as a counterpoint to the inevitable post-feministry that we find in our classrooms these days. It's not that a movie that fails the test is a bad movie. It's not even the case that all feminist movies pass the test. But if gender inequality is no longer a problem, why is it so hard for Hollywood to make a movie about anything other than boys and their issues?

Next: can we come up with a similar test for popular music?

Coco and Igor

Are you a fan of the True Blood series on HBO? If you are, then you are probably familiar with the moment a few weeks ago where vampires Bill and Lorena have what Entertainment Weekly called "the most disturbing sex scene of all time," horrifying for both plot reasons and also because during it, vampire Bill...well, just describing what happens gives me the shivers. I won't link, but the prurient can find clips online. I put this image into your mind because actually, the horror of that image has been receding, ever since last night when I saw the French film Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky. Because watching vampires do their thing is nothing compared to having to watch Igor Stravinsky have sex. It's just not....right. Particularly when he is being played by a Bond villain. As a musicologist who has spent a lot of time teaching and thinking about Stravinsky, my sentiment was not probably not shared by the rest of the audience, but I found the sex scenes just excrutiating.

The film, directed by Jan Kounen, tells the story of the brief affair between Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky. It begins with a staging of the Rite Riot (sounds like a Clash song!); more on that in a moment. But the bulk of the movie takes place in 1920, when Igor took his family to live at Chanel's villa outside of Paris. The historical record being portrayed isn't bad, and best not to fuss too much about historical accuracy, 'cause, whatever, it's a movie. A slow and kind of boring one, but I don't really care that much if they get every single detail right.

Upon first watching the movie, I was wondering why in 1920 Igor was still working on the Rite at Chanel's house, but I reminded myself of his biography today and he did indeed do a revision for a new production that year, so it makes sense. But focusing so much of the movie on the Rite has its perils, not the least of which is that the director constantly uses the Part 2 Introduction as moody accompaniment, and that is of course the same music that John Williams ripped off for Star Wars. So, that's awkward. But I will say that the movie makes for a fairly intelligent portrait of the moment where Stravinsky is about to move towards neo-classicism, with Mavra just a year away. The director's biographical argument, I imagine, would be something about this affair being the height of Stravinsky's crazy Paris years, full of excess and passion, to be soon replaced with restraint and objectivism. Whether you buy it or not, that's a reasonable argument, although I don't know if the average moviegoer will quite get what's going on with the larger narrative of Stravinsky's life. It's interesting to think about who the director imagined the audience for the film to be. He seemed to have assumed a passing familiarity with music history; there's a really awkward line at the beginning where a dancer introduces characters by shouting “Stop it, Nijinsky! Tell him, Diaghilev!” The audience at my theater consisted of a few elderly couples and a large contingent of Russian-speaking twenty-somethings in cocktail dresses, so I'm not sure what to make of that.

Every musicologist should probably see this movie. I'm debating whether I will use it in classes, especially the staging of the Rite Riot. Like most of us, I usually show the Joffrey performance of the Hodson reconstruction, and before the credits rolled at the end, I assumed that the director was using that same choreography. But it turns out the choreography is by Dominique Brun. I hesitate to say much more authoritatively here, because I'm not qualified to speak on dance matters; I don't know who who Brun is. Best as I can tell, she's part of a dance group, the Albert Knust Quartet, that has done a lot of interesting work with Nijinsky's legacy. In an interview, the director of the film says that she "knew" Nijinsky, which seems highly unlikely!

But at any rate, showing the ten-minute opening sequence of this film, in which the ballet and riot is staged, strikes me as a good introduction to the overall myth-and-reality of the famous premiere. It was filmed largely on location at the theater, the costumes and scenery look authentic, and most importantly, the cinematic experience is much more powerful than the clumsy camerawork of the Joffrey production. Frankly, it would be interesting to juxtapose the two. My teaching of the Rite has been greatly informed by Tamara Levitz's essay "The Chosen One's Choice," which among other things talks about how different performances of the role of the sacrificial virgin can make powerful arguments about the meaning of the work as a whole--does she willingly and blindly submit herself to the community, or does she make a powerful and individualistic statement?

Which does actually bring me to one last criticism. The movie gives us a lot of insight, right or wrong, into Stravinsky's personality, but not nearly enough into that of Chanel. And there is a very odd sequence of images at the end which trivialize the whole film, including a very weird image of Chanel on stage as the Chosen One. A bit much, I think.

Photo: Stravinsky in 1911, from the Royal College of Music Center for Performance History collection.

Happy Birthday, Blog.

This week marks the fifth year of my blogging career. The first half of that time was somewhat pseudonymous, but with an odd gap here and there it's been pretty continuous blogging for the past half of a decade. That's a long time! When I started, I was in graduate school, still in coursework, just beginning to study for my special fields exam (the topic was "American Modernism" if you want to know), living in Los Angeles with a roommate and two cats, and visiting my girlfriend in London as much as I could. Almost hard to recognize that life as mine at this point, so much has changed. Not the least of which was Phil Ford adding me to the Dial M blogroll, which suddenly propelled this space out into public. In a good way!

Anyways, happy birthday, blog. Here's to another five.

Philly Music Revisited

I was typing out an epic-length comment in response to some of those on the previous post, but since it's my blog, I thought I should just turn it into a new post!

The Orchestra definitely does a lot of outreach. (and, as Ralph knows but others might not, the person in charge of those efforts is a card-carrying musicologist, and a good one.) Certainly better than our other big classical music institution, Curtis, whose efforts pale in comparison to Juilliard or Eastman, even when accounting for its small size. But I guess I think that the fundamental outlook of the orchestra is the Valhalla approach, in which the Orchestra is hard to differentiate from the city's art museum, standing on top of a hill approached by an enormous staircase. There's a lot of value in trying to draw a new and diverse audience through outreach and education, letting Rocky climb the stairs, as it were, but I don't think it's going to structurally change the relationship between orchestra and city.

Also, I don't mean to give the impression that the city is declining, in the same sort of declining narrative that faces the rust belt cities and orchestras. Definitely less relative money than there once was a century ago, but a lot more money than there was thirty years ago, and, I would further argue, less segregated than it used to be, when the wealthy suburbs controlled institutions like the Orchestra and the Art Museum, and the city itself remained largely working class. But the old-fashioned Main Line suburbs are much less starkly class stratified than they used to be. Some money is moving even further out in the suburbs, other money (in the form of evil gentrifiers such as myself) is moving into the city, and the suburbs are getting more diverse themselves. As I say, it's an extremely vibrant place these days, and it's not that there is no market for sophisticated high culture.

So what I wish is that the Orchestra was actually more sophisticated, in a contemporary sense. This is a much milder critique of the orchestra than it probably is coming off as. I love the Philadelphia Museum of Art because despite all odds it fits in surprisingly well into the city's urban life. Admittedly this is partly because of Rocky. But it's also because its longtime director, the late Anne d'Harnoncourt, invested heavily in contemporary American art, and also in the works of Duchamp--Philly has by far the world's greatest collection of Duchamp, just about any piece of his that you've heard of is here. Not exactly what one would predict from the stuffy surroundings, and it makes for a wonderful art experience. (Side note: if Bruce Nauman's Days is still installed there, you must go see it right now--beautiful and devastating.)

My slowly-unfolding analogy to the Orchestra is that I wish their model was the west coast orchestras, not the NY Phil. The SF and LA bands made heavy investments in contemporary music over the past few decades, and in my hometown of San Francisco, I gather that they've been rewarded with a young and enthusiastic audience base that likes exciting new music in addition to the canon. I don't know any numbers, but that was my sense when I was living in the Bay Area. Philly doesn't have as many financial resources as SF, but I think that if they stepped up their contemporary programming, and positioned themselves as part of a dynamic, cosmopolitan arts scene rather than just an educational museum, they might be surprised at the possibilities.

Welcome to Philly

The big music news 'round these parts today is the selection of 35 year-old Yannick Nézet-Séguin as the next director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. The Inqy's Peter Dobrin has the full story here. I like this headshot they're circulating of Yannick; the short hair is a definite improvement over the longer spikier thing he's usually seen in.

The Orchestra has been in rough shape these past few years, with severe financial problems. Philly is not a wealthy town, and it's hard to support an expensive band like this one. The press release I got about the appointment tried mightily to sound as excited as possible about Yannick, clearly trying to draw parallels to Dudamel-mania. And who knows, maybe having a good-looking young Canadian at the helm will help things.

May I be blunt, however? The real problem with the Philadelphia Orchestra is an institutional culture of snobbery and conservatism. I say this knowing plenty of great people who work and play on Broad Street. It's not the fault of any one person, even the recent music directors. But you frequently hear complaints about disrespectful treatment of concertgoers, especially if one is involved in student rush or any low-priced ticket situations; I've experienced that myself. The repertoire that gets played is invariably stodgy, even the new commissions, and the moldy oldies are often pretty moldy. I still mentally fall asleep everytime I remember hearing Eschenbach do Le Sacre a few years back. Granted I'm spoiled from having grown up with the San Francisco Symphony as my hometown orchestra, and then spent four years in LA during the Esa-Pekka reign.

Why the stodgery in Philadelphia? I think part of the answer to that question lies in the city's own deeply institutionalized snobbery. Philadelphia was the height of this country's high culture for a very long time, and it never really came to grips with the end of that era. The wealthy suburbs of the Main Line are beautiful and quaint, but the dirty secret is that there isn't actually that much money in them compared to NYC, DC, or Boston, let alone the West Coast. I have a lawyer friend moving here from California, and he quickly realized that there wasn't a single corporate law firm in the city as big or prestigious as where he's coming from. Native Philadelphians (I am obviously not one myself) are always quick to brag about having the nation's first public library, first zoo, first stock exchange, etc. But that all happened a long time ago. The Philadelphia Story would never be set here today.

This produces a situation in which Philadelphia clings rather desperately to its now faded icons of high culture, and in a sad tautology therefore enforces upon those icons a conservatism that actually bleeds them of their vitality. High art institutions in NYC, and especially in SF and LA, don't have that kind of insecurity, and are therefore able to experiment and push boundaries.

So I hope that Yannick is able to take a stab at this problem, at least in his corner of the Kimmel Center. But I also don't care that much. I think Philadelphia would be surprised at how little we'd miss the Orchestra if it disappeared. All of that fading high culture actually produces a really great city to live in. The arts scene here is tremendously vibrant, spurred on by housing and living costs that are much cheaper than the other big east coast cities. Mary and I are moving next month into the most desirable neighborhood in the city, and you would not believe how cheap it is. There are fabulous restaurants, a great music scene, tons of artists running around, lots of cozy little neighborhood bars with local beers, what's not to love. There are lots of schools, great chamber ensembles, community choruses, everything you could want. Who needs an expensive storage facility for Mahler? Not me.*


*Obviously I would miss the steady employment for a bunch of the world's best orchestral musicians and then the trickle-down effect of that on the city's musical economy. But allow me some rhetorical excess here.

MIA in Links

I really like Sady Doyle's discussion of the Times profile of MIA at Tiger Beatdown (hat tip to JMR on Facebook!). I like MIA's music a lot, and find her politics very intriguing--not that I necessarily always agree with them, or think she is free of hypocrisy (who isn't!), but they are always provocative. If you haven't seen her now notorious video for "Born Free," be sure to give it a whirl. Not for the faint of heart, but in this Age of Arpaio I personally find it quite powerful. There is no shortage of commentary about this video out there, but the musicologically-inclined might appreciate that Steve Waksman was interviewed about that video and others for a Metro feature on "Girls Gone Wild" in recent pop music--his expert commentary there is a breath of fresh air.

Roots

The ironic thing is that the Gentrys come from this area originally. Sometime in the 1680s, two brothers from Essex, Samuel and Nicholas, settled along the Totopotomoy Creek in New Kent County, near where the college and then capital at Williamsburg Plantation would be built twenty years later. Back then it was part of St. Peter's Parish (where George and Martha got married, incidentally), and the Jacobean church that presumably my ancestors helped build in 1701 is still there today.

This is all ironic because I seriously have no idea how my illustrious forefathers and foremothers survived this miserable, miserable weather. Without air-conditioning, no less. Philly gets pretty grim in the summer too, but nothing like this. How do you southerners do it? How did a bunch of pale Englishmen in the 17th century do it? Whatever fortitude they possessed seems to have leaked out of their genetic material in the last three centuries. Or maybe it's the fault of my mother's side.

Only a few more weeks of summer session left, however, and then back up north permanently. Next year I'm taking a position at the University of Delaware. Not tenure-track, but full-time. I adjuncted there a year ago and greatly enjoyed my time there, so I'm thrilled to be coming back. UD is a hidden gem of education on the east coast. Thanks to its low tuition the school attracts a surprisingly cosmopolitan student body from around the country, with a particularly large and thriving music department. Plus, it is just south of Philadelphia, so Mary and I will be able to live together (!) in the city and commute to our respective jobs. So yay for that.

On the other hand, I've had a lovely year at William & Mary. The music department is extremely warm and welcoming to its visiting faculty, and the students were simply tremendous. I won't miss the heat, or Ken Cuccinelli, but it's been a great year.

Remembering the Wars

In honor of Memorial Day, a medley from the fabulous 2008 revival of South Pacific, as performed at that year's Tonys.


I don't mean this lightly; both my grandfathers served on the Pacific Front during World War II, one in the navy and one on the ground in mainland China. Remembering wars is always a tricky business.There's long been a sentiment that most commemorations of WWII have focused on the European theater; part of the stated impetus of the HBO mini-series The Pacific is to address that perceived problem. But while it might be true, it's worth remembering that South Pacific premiered on Broadway in 1949, a mere four years after Hiroshima. Part of the central tension of the musical, I think, is negotiating the transition from wartime patriotic glorification of war to the post-war slow, laborius process of deciding how exactly the war was going to be remembered. Which parts were worthy of commemoration, and which parts needed to be forgotten? What knowledge did we as a country learn from those four years? There were a lot of lessons, and it took a long time to process.

Europe, of course, does not celebrate Memorial Day, instead focusing their attentions on Armistice Day in November. Remembering the Great War of earlier in the century, the lessons of Armistice Day are unambiguous: war is horrific violence. When you remember on Armistice Day, you are remembering the lost lives. Memorial Day is a little more ambiguous: it great out of commemorations of the Civil War, and the process of knitting the country back together. So in addition to an outlet for grief, there is an element of nation-building built into the ceremony.

World War II never had its holiday, perhaps because the war never really ended: it melded seamlessly into the various conflicts of the Cold War. Maybe that's why it took so long for the war itself to be commemorated with its own memorial in DC. Instead, isolated moments of glory were lifted out of the war and put on a pedestal, not to remember the dead, but to serve as an example of heroic conquest:


Felix de Wheldon's sculpture for the Marine Corps Memorial outside of DC has stood in for an actual national WWII memorial for forty years; its status as such owes more to the politics of its erection in 1951 than it does to the war itself; war is not about the dead, it is about planting the flag. We finally left the Cold War behind in the 1990s, but it's worth noting that the memory of war as glorious conquest stays with us; I drive by the Marine Corps Museum every week as I travel between Virginia and Philadelphia. It looms out of the woods along I-95 like some monstrous folly. It wasn't until looking for a picture to display here that I saw that the base of the building replaces the soldiers and pedestal of the original with an enormous fortress:

The memories of war in South Pacific also do not dwell in the enormity of loss in human life. The death of the lieutenant at the end of the show (sorry for the spoiler!) hits hard, but it is not the main story of the musical. Instead, it is a forward-looking analysis of the other legacy of war in the Pacific: the tremendous intercultural mixing, as farm boys and girls as corny as Kansas in August encounter cultural differences beyond the scope of their imaginations. That's the other untold story of the Pacific Front, and one that served particularly potent lessons through wars in Korea, Vietnam, and now perhaps Iraq and Afghanistan. The fantasy of the Iwo Jima monument is that the US can just invade and conquer a foreign enemy and plant the American flag on top of now-empty ground, the same way white Americans conquered their own continent. South Pacific tried, in its earnestly-liberal way, to warn us that things will be much more complicated.

So I try to spend my own Memorial Day remembering these things, and thinking about the danger faced by my friends and family members who are in Afghanistan right now, and also thinking about those overseas who have suffered from almost a decade of seemingly random American aggression across the region. And also remembering the kid I met at a wedding last year who was home on leave to be with his girlfriend. They had only been together a little while, but he spent the whole evening telling me how in love he was with her. Two months later he was injured in the CIA base bombing, suffering severe brain damage. He's recuperating surprisingly well, and I hope the same for everyone else.

I Got (1) Feeling.

I've long struggled to figure out the Black-Eyed Peas. It's the kind of music where so much information is pumped into you at such an immense pace that effective criticism is hard to accomplish. Their tourette's aesthetic means that you never know what's important and what's just pure random; sounds, catchphrases, grooves, and snippets of melody spark out at you with haphazard ferociousness. Take "I Got a Feeling." (I cut out the actual video, since we're just talking about the music here.)



Around 3:15 is I think the purest example of that aesthetic. will.i.am is singing a repetition of the lines "Fill up my cup / Mazel Tov / Look at her dancing / Just take it off." Fergie responds to each line with some electronified stream-of-consciousness retort. Listen to it, it's just so...random.

But the randomness isn't just random, it's a choice by will.i.am, who I gather is the musical brains behind this outfit. And as I listen to this song in particular, I notice that it results from his very unique approach to structure. "I Got a Feeling" is, like most of their material, a dance tune. As such, it draws upon the usual formal devices of post-disco dance music. It has the accretionary beginning, where the feeling of getting ready for a party is evoked by a gradual building up of instruments and voices, and then the buildup of tension to be released at particularly ecstatic moments. The sort of stuff Chairman Bob writes about. And yet, it does this very perfunctorily. The initial buildup ends when the beat comes in at the one minute mark, and it's distinctly underwhelming. Probably the best such release is the one at 3:46, but again, it's nothing so spectacular. I think the biggest problem is that the harmonic movement at the end of each repetition, going from C to G, is quite flaccid. That's the spot in the progression most often aligned with a movement of release, and it's hard to care that much about a perfect fourth.

So I was pleased to read in a recent issue of Rolling Stone an interview with Will.i.Am that talked a little bit about his musical logic. Unfortunately, it's behind a paywall so you can't read it without a subscription. But in it, will.i.am says quite forthrightly that he is not interested in the usual structural mechanics of either a pop song or a longer electronic dance music set. Instead, he argues for what he somewhat amorphously calls a "unique sound" to a song, instantly recognizable on the radio. That doesn't seem all that different from any musician trying to find their sound, but I sense that he means this actually quite structurally: his goal with these songs is to make sure that if you happen to tune onto a station playing "I Got a Feeling", you have have 99% chance that you will be listening to this unique sound--not some a bridge, not some varying material, but just the unique, recognizable sound. There is no musical development over the course of the song, because development requires an old-fashioned way of listening where you actually listen to the song from beginning to the end. In shades of Michael Fried, will.i.am wants you to apprehend and absorb the totality of the pop tune in one instant.

He admits in the interview, forthrightly and apologetically, that his model here is the music of television commercials, where you similarly need to create a musical impression in a compressed amount of time, and where any formal structure in the original song will be chopped up beyond recognition. That's why, he says, the Black-Eyed Peas have been so successful in placing their music in commercials; it's working purposefully for that aesthetic. Late capitalism, yadda yadda yadda.

Interesting, I thought! And whatever you think of that compositional approach, I think it helps to explain the rather aleatoric aspects of their music that confound me so--as any composer will tell you, when you don't have a clear structure in the music to orient yourself to, any musical choice (that doesn't take away from the overall sound) does indeed become quite random.

Hunting Babbitts

Image courtesy of my student Charlie Heyer, who was inspired while studying for my final. For the record, and somewhat against type, I'm actually kind of a fan of Babbitt, especially after reading Babbitt's collected essays, and also Fred Maus's thought-provoking article "Sexual and Musical Categories," in which at one point he briefly compares Babbitt to Michael Musto. I'll let you read the article to see how he arrives at that juxtaposition.

Teaching Authenticity

For those of us who teach courses in popular music, one inevitably arrives at the "authenticity" moment. Perhaps it is part of the syllabus, a unit of thinking about the methodology of pop music studies. Perhaps it arises more organically, say in a class discussion when someone offhandedly uses Miley Cyrus as an example of the decline of western civilization--the actual word "authentic" is rarely used, but that ideology is usually in the background of complaints about auto-tuning and controlling manager/fathers or whatever. However it happens, I think most of us have a usual schtick for this topic. I like to do a little brainstorming, first coming up with a list of pop artists that the class things is "real"--this tends to include the likes of Bob Dylan and Jay-Z, depending on the relative level of snobbery in the local student population--and then from that, extrapolate a list of characteristics, musical and otherwise, that link those artists they find most real. The point of the brainstorming is that we eventually hopefully realize as a class that the ideology of "authenticity" is usually a means to promote our own arbitrary aesthetic interests.

So, fine. That's some good teachin'. However, the other day I was musing aloud in class about Green Day. As you may know, last year Green Day collaborated with Berkeley Rep to produce a musical theater version of their 2004 hit album American Idiot, and this production is now on Broadway itself, garnering positive reviews. The whole thing is, of course, shocking for those of us who had some part of our musical consciousness formed by punk rock. I grew up in the East Bay, where Green Day is from, and although as a teenager I was absolutely nowhere cool enough to have been part of the Gilman punk scene that gave birth to Green Day, Rancid, etc. in the 1990s, I did know people who were, and I remember the community horror that greeted Green Day's decision to sign with a major label and release Dookie. The term "sell-out" was widely used, with no irony intended; it was as if Green Day had singlehandedly destroyed DIY punk rock. And now...they are doing a Broadway musical?!

I have enough academic distance from that scene to realize the ideology of authenticity at work. (And of course, the boundaries between punk and the camp theater of glam rock were never exactly distinct to begin with.) But anyways, the whole point of this post is that in musing aloud about this on different occasions, in the presence of students who grew up not in the 1990s but after the turn of the millennium, I realized that not everyone was registering my mock-pretend outrage at the idea of a punk rock musical. To be sure, some understood why the whole thing was funny. But for many, my uncomfortable realization was that they saw no problem with that concept. There are rock musicals, hip-hop musicals, why not a punk musical?

And that's when it hits me: there are many people out there who, rather than needing to be taught to deconstruct authenticity, actually need to be taught what authenticity is in the first place. For if you grew up over the turn of the millennium, authenticity was never really part of the game. I feel like I've been trying to disrupt my student's commitment to authenticity for years now, only to find that now I need to figure out how to teach it. For you can't really understand a number of musical trends of the past fifty years without--the weird commitment of English guitarists to the blues, say, or the backlash against disco--without understanding the idea of authenticity. It's the fundamental building block of a great deal of music criticism; heck, you could say that the discourse of authenticity is a fundamental building block of American popular music itself.

I certainly don't miss it now that it's gone--and I exaggerate for effect here, of course--but as a teacher I'm going to need to make some adjustments.