Our Missed Opportunity

I feel like musicology should have something smart to say about Auto-Tune the News.



But I'm not sure what it is.

"No Immediate Survivors"

ETA: Please note Allan Kozinn's response in the comments! And see my more recent post here.

Just a few months ago I noted that Merce Cunningham and Pete Seeger were nearly exactly the same age, and, at age 90, were still going strong. Alas, the Times is reporting today that Merce has passed away. It's hard to imagine someone who lived a more satisfying life. I saw him in person only once, at a performance by his company in Los Angeles a few years ago. He came onstage afterwards, rather frail, to answer questions from the audience. I can't say I learned much; he told stories I had already read before, and stalled when pressed about specific points. But it's not often you get to bask in the presence of a legend like that, and it was thrilling just to be there.

The tributes are starting to flood in, and already, it is a pleasure to see how much things have changed since 1992, when John Cage passed away. What do I mean? Well, as we all know, the two were life-long lovers in various configurations from the 1930s until Cage's death. It was one of the most enduring partnerships in the history of the arts, bringing the idea of collaboration to new heights. Every single piece of music or dance either of them produced was done in the company of the other. Sure, not everything Cage wrote was to accompany a dance, but most of it was, and their lives and philosophies were so intertwined that you can't speak of one without speaking of the other. It's really kind of one of the great love stories of the twentieth century.

And yet, when Cage passed away, there was a great silence about Cunningham. Perhaps the most egregious example was Allan Kozinn's obituary for the oh-so-liberal New York Times. The essay is about 2800 words. I just did a little search, and the word "Cunningham" appears about eight times--and that overstates the quantity of the discussion. Kozinn simply mentions that Cage had been a "central influence" on Merce since the two had become "friends" at school. Later he mentions their "lifelong collaboration", and then finally at the very end, Kozinn gives a scant overview of Cage's personal life that is the only hint that he and Merce were more than "friends", even as he brutally dismisses the meaningfulness of their relationship:

Mr. Cage's marriage to Xenia Andreyevna Kashevaroff ended in divorce in 1945. From 1970 until his death, he lived with Mr. Cunningham.

There are no immediate survivors.

Shocking. One can only imagine how this obituary would be re-written if the two lovers and collaborators were a man and a woman. Sometimes I think my own scholarship on Cage is a little screechy, constantly pointing out that the man was in a same-sex relationship and that this might have affected his music. But you can see what I have to deal with! However, seventeen years later, appreciations of Merce are already doing a much better job of not cloaking his life with the veil of homophobia. Either that, or dance critics are better human beings than music critics, which might be the case.

It's true that Cage and Cunningham were reticent about their personal relationship. Cage's famous answer to such questions was, "I do the cooking, Merce does the dishes." And their music and dance is famously anti-expressionist, so it takes a little work to learn more about the men through their art. But, it's actually not that hard. I mean, just think about all of those early dances that Merce choreographed to John's music, back in the 1940s. Tamara Levitz has done the work to show intimate the relationship is between the music and the choreography, both Merce's and other choreographers--despite Cage's later disavowals, he followed the dance just as much as the other way around. As Tamara wrote, "he came to know their bodies as intimately as his own sounds."

Their relationship surfaced at other times too. One of my personal favorite moments was Cage's Sixty-two Mesostics Re Merce Cunningham, a spoken-word piece written in 1971. It is simply a set of mesostics read in succession. Each mesostic is based on either the word "Merce" or the word "Cunningham." Mesostics, as you know, are like acrostics, except that instead of aligning on the first letter of each line, the chosen word is aligned down the middle, and Cage further made a rule that the letter along the spine must not repeat until after the next letter. For these particular mesostics, Cage used chance procedures to choose words from Merce's own book Changes, and further subjected the words to fonts and sizes according to more chance procedures. So, for example, the third mesostic of the set:

This all might seem pedantic to the uninitiated, but Cage was obsessed with finding ways to speak that broke the prison house of language. "Syntax," Cage liked to quote from Buckminster Fuller, "is the sound of marching feet." From the performance directions to Sixty-two Mesostics:

Speaking without syntax, we notice that cadence, Dublinese or ministerial, takes over. (Looking out the rear window.) Therefore we tried whispering. Encouraged we began to chant. (The singer was sick.) ... To raise language's temperature we not only remove syntax: we give each letter undivided attention setting it in unique face and size; to read becomes the verb to sing.

With all that can be said about mesostics, it can easy to forget that these ones in particular are in essence love poems. Filtered through layer after layer of modernist pretensions, but love poems at their heart. Like many of their generation, Cage and Cunningham saw no need to display their relationship to the world, but it wasn't simply a matter of the closet. Often, it was an attempt to build something even more powerful.

It's Like I Waited My Whole Life

See, the wonderful thing about Pop music (by which I mean, music which is actually popular, not Bob Dylan) is that sometimes there can be a horrible song, a most dreadful insipid creation, originally written for a chewing gum commercial, that stalks you all year long like the abusive jerk who wrote it...and...suddenly, when witnessing the enjoyment someone else gets out of it, that song can miraculously be transformed.



h/t to like every single person I know on Facebook.

From the Plastic to the Magnetic

This post is in the "looking for advice" category:

One of my projects this month is to put all of my classical CDs into iTunes. I've long avoided this move, partly because the iTunes interface for classical music is not the most intuitive, but mostly because, well, I don't have enough hard disc space. It's not a large collection by musicological standards (we're talking roughly 260 discs), but by my math that's roughly 18 gigabytes or so, and I don't have that kind of space on my little laptop. (I've long since put all of my popular music on my laptop, so that's not at issue here.)

Well, a year of full-time teaching, and I think I need to do it. When I teach I do so off of iTunes usually, and it's been a pain to remember to rip the necessary files at home before class. And there have been countless times that in the middle of a lecture I've wished I could quickly bring up some obscure piece that I know I own, but is sitting at home on a piece of plastic. And finally, since I'm dividing my time between Virginia and Pennsylvania this year, the less I need to lug back and forth the better.

So let me run my plan by the brilliant minds that read this blog. I'm going to buy an external hard drive, probably one of those USB ones that don't need their own power supply. (any recommendations?) Then, as I understand it, you can create a new iTunes library that can be stored on another drive. With that in place, I'll cheerfully start ripping. I can keep the external drive in my office down in Virginia, and it will be easy enough to bring to the classroom with me each day.

One problem I forsee is that external hard drives are not always entirely reliable, so I need to have at least a rudimentary backup system in place. The external hard drives I currently use for backing up have enough space for that, and it's not like I'll need to back up too often--it's not like I buy tons of music very often, so once I have my basic collection ripped and then backed up, it will be mostly unchanging. So that should be okay, I think.

Any issues I'm not thinking about? It's a little weird, I realize, to keep popular music on my computer's hard drive, and classical on an external drive. After all, critiquing that duality is something I do a lot in my research and teaching! But to be honest, in the ways in which I use music in my daily life, I think it should fine. When I say "classical music," I'm referring mostly to common period canonical music that I trot out for teaching, and don't listen to (or work on) much on my own.

Ol' Man River

For those who might not read it, over at Musicology/Matters we're hosting a colloquium on Michael Jackson. I reposted my own earlier entry, my friend Marianna has contributed something, and we're waiting on several posts by a range of friends who are lending their expertise.

But in other news, my little family has settled itself in a new home, literally alongside the banks of the Schuylkill river near Valley Forge, or to more accurate the Scuylkill canal. It's an idyllic existence, where the choice of where to walk the dog in the morning consists of, "up the canal, or down the canal." If we wanted to do, we could launch a canoe out of our backyard, paddle downstream about a mile, tie up at a local pub, have a drink, then paddle back. That's pretty cool. Phoenixville itself is a quirkly little town. The home of the historic Phoenix Iron Works (among other things, they supposedly made the iron for the Eiffel Tower), the town has managed to avoid to desolate fate of other industrial river towns along the Schuylkill. The main street is full of hip restaurants and bookstores, and there is a restored 1913 movie theater that was a filming location of The Blob. Next weekend is the annual reenactment of the scene in The Blob where everyone runs screaming out of the movie theater.

A bunch of my Facebook friends have been making academic summer to-do lists, and so am I, in hopes of accountability:

*Find a place to live in Williamsburg.

*Organize two syllabi: a one-semester Western music survey, and an upper-level seminar on Minimalism.

*Research: luckily I have useful confluence of events. I'm giving an early doo-wop paper at AMS this fall, and the sample chapter of the book proposal I'm putting together is also on early doo-wop. Slightly different topics, actually, but close enough that working on one is useful for the other. I'm quite enjoying the process of revising the dissertation, re-reading the old sources and giving myself the leisure to spin out ideas into a longer format.

*Move to Williamsburg.

I think this is all do-able, if I don't get too distracted by watching the ducks float down the canal.

Science Across America

On a completely non-musicological note, I wish to direct your attention to a blog. It's written by my cousin-in-law Nick Russell, and his girlfriend Lizzie Wade. He's a photographer and she's a writer, and the two of them are driving around the country this summer "visiting sites related to the past, present and possible futures of American high energy physics research." This means places like Fermilab, Lawrence Livermore, the former planned site of the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas, and so on. The bulk of their work is directed towards various publishing and art projects for later, but their snapshots and brief thoughts about the trip are fascinating.

I direct you to: Summer of Science.

Rage in his Feet

One thing I've noticed about reactions to Michael Jackson's death, at least among children of the 1980s such as myself, has been the desire to recount one's initial introduction to his music. It's kind of like the opposite of the baby-boomer obsession with recounting where you were when JFK was shot. For them, the death of a president, for us the birth of the King of Pop.

My story is that I was about five years old, I think, so about 1985 or so, and I was at a neighbor's house, hanging out with my best friend. He had, presumably through his parents, a cassette tape of Thriller, and we listened to it together. The song that most stuck out for me at the time was "Beat It," Jackson's groundbreaking collaboration with Eddie Van Halen. Little five-year-old Phil went toddling around singing "Don't wanna see no blood, don't be a macho man, just beat it" for weeks afterward.

If you're the sort of person who cares about "periodicity," the study of how we organize history into culturally thematic lengths of time, or periods, a fairly simple argument to make is that Michael Jackson was one of the first great postmodern musicians in popular music. At least, that's true in the sense of postmodernism most often used in musicology, where it is largely characterized by mixing different stylistic characteristics and historical periods. Michael Jackson's work in the early 1980s took the always-already postmodernism of 1970s soul and added heavy metal, horror movies, and science fiction fantasy.

There might also, in Jackson's work, be what Fredric Jameson influentially called a "waning of affect," or a decline of the "aesthetic of expression." I don't mean this in a bad way at all. It's not that there is no expression in Jackson's music, it's that there is too much of it, so much that emotions are presented over-simplified, almost parodied, and iterated to the point of exhaustion. For example, if you or I were to grab our crotch while dancing, that gesture would most likely be read as having some sort of sexual meaning. But when Michael Jackson grabbed his crotch, the grab was so fluid and stylized, and repeated so often, that it ceased to have meaning. Or, to go back to Jameson, consider Jackson's last great hit, the 1995 duet with his little sister, "Scream."



(The video is still the most expensive music video of all time; they don't call it late capitalism for nothing.)

Consider Jameson's description of Edward Munch's Scream:

"a canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alientation, anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolate, a virtually programmatic emblem of what used to be called the age of anxiety. It will here be read as an embodiment not merely of hte expression of that kind of affect but, even more, as a virtual deconstruction of the very aesthetic of expression itself, which seems to have dominated much of what we call high modernism but to have vanished away—for both practical and theoretical reasons—in the world of the postmodern."

That's a fair description of the Jackson/Jackson scream as well, I'd say.

On the other hand: I was watching the endless loop of Michael Jackson commentary on the BBC today, and one random news anchor related a quote from Fred Astaire regarding Jackson I had never heard before. Jackson, Astaire supposedly said, danced with "rage in his feet."

There is indeed so much rage in Jackson's music, dance, and imagery. So much so that it threatens to spill out of its neat postmodern boxes. What is its source, and what does it mean? It has to do with Jackson's own body, I'd say, which more than any other performer I can think of has always been the source of constant speculation and analysis. It's hard to say anything new about it, but I do think it is fair to say that Jackson had an unusually visible relationship with his own body. Many have called it a case of body dysmorphic disorder (the same diagnosis often given transpeople, by well-meaning-or-not psychiatrists.) I couldn't say if that's true or not, or if that Jackson's situation is even particularly unusual; who doesn't have body issues? But Jackson did have a fairly spectacular response to whatever issues might have been there. There was on the one hand the constant sculpting and re-sculpting of the flesh itself: surgery, chemicals, dieting, working out, who knows what else. And then there was that dancing. Invariably described as "fluid," it articulates a vision of the human body unlike anything else I have seen. It's not Merce Cunningham, who uses a rigid anti-expressionism to force the body into new situations. A move like the moonwalk takes a recognizable element of coporeal vocabulary, and transforms it as if mechanically produced. And yet, of course, it wasn't, it's still just Michael Jackson on stage with a pair of shoes. I'm not very sophisticated at dance criticism, so I don't even know what to say beyond that. But it blows my mind, and although it might not be a product of the aesthetic of expression, I wouldn't go so far as to say that it is missing an affect.

After all, bodies, and performances, have been at the heart of many critiques of Fredric Jameson's work on postmodernism. Mandy Merck, for example, has pointed out the unnecessary binary between "real" and "artificial" that underlies much of his essay, especially when offering up the famous Van Gogh versus Warhol comparison. Judith Halberstam goes so far as to call Jameson's approach homophobic for its implicit privileging of modernism/materialism/heterosexuality over Warhol's critique. I don't agree all the way with Halberstam (and I like Jameson a lot as you can probably tell), but I do think he underestimates the potential of the performing human body, if he reads it at all.

What I admired most about Jackson was his sense of agency, at least at the height of his career. He made his body do what he wanted it to do,and that's no easy task under postmodernism. The sadness I feel now is that ultimately, he lost that agency, just as it looked like he might have been on the verge of taking it back.

A brief break

I would apologize for not blogging these past few weeks, but I have good excuses: it was the end of the semester, I'm in the middle of moving house, and, well, it was the end of the semester. But more importantly, Mary and I are on our honeymoon. No, we didn't renew our vows or anything, this was just the first free week we've had since we got married a year and a half ago.

If you need to reach me, I'm on this beach.

Looking Good at 90

How interesting is it that Merce Cunningham and Pete Seeger are almost exactly the same age. Both were born in 1919, Merce on April 16th and Pete on May 3. Both still going strong!

I Survived Swine '09

Okay, this post is mostly an excuse to include my favorite recent Times photo, the above tasty Hungarian hairy pigs.

But also, you might have read that the University of Delaware has recently been infested with the flu of the swine. Or H1N1 flu as we're now supposed to call it, so that no more countries accidentally order all of their pigs slaughtered. (And I guess it is better than "Mexican flu.") My students seem to be taking it in stride. Attendance is down a little bit, and the janitorial staff are having trouble keeping enough soap in the bathrooms, but the mood is largely one of resigned humor. One enterprising student is selling "Swine '09" t-shirts; I really hope I can get one.

Luckily the flu does not seem to have struck the music department. Thank goodness, because the teaching of music tends to involve more physical proximity than most subjects. Lots of sitting in enclosed studios, lots of sharing instruments, lots of spit on the ground. If one music major gets it, I fear we are all doomed.

The one sad thing is that all public events have been cancelled, including the semester's opera performance, Pirates of Penzance. We all know how much work goes into these college operas. It's the first major role for many of the singers, and everyone's been rehearsing all semester. The show is hopefully going to be rescheduled for a later date, but it's a rough time of year to find a free evening. So far the various student recitals for the weekend are a go; cross your fingers.