Paper-Less Musicology

Kyle Gann's recent post on his paper-less teaching got me to thinking about how much technology has changed my teaching, even in these few short years I've been in the business. Musicology, like pornography, is often on the leading edge of technological developments. I still remember when, as a sophomore in an electronic music composition class, I was blown away when our professor had the clever idea that we could "burn" our pieces to a CD-ROM. There was one solitary CD burner in the music lab, and we all waited our turn each week the night before our assignments were due. Then in one of the first classes I was a TA for, I remember frantically burning and re-burning CDs for the professor to use each day. By the end of graduate school, many of the professors I TA'd for would simply use a laptop or iPod hooked directly into the sound system.

Today, like Kyle I lead a largely paper-less teaching existence. I do hand out a paper syllabus at the beginning, but gone are the days of keeping a stack of extras around for those who lose them. I don't use handouts, preferring to just project things off my laptop. If I am being organized (which is not that often), I will rip a clip from an opera and put it into a PowerPoint presentation so that I don't have to fiddle around with the DVD player. I think the one thing I would like to be do is play music off of iTunes while still showing a PowerPoint slide. I'm not quite smart enough to figure it out, so if I need to show a score or a text, I will play the music off my iPod while using my laptop for images or text. I suspect there is a better way to do this!

IMSLP, the open source score project, is also a godsend for me, as it is for Kyle. I'm teaching a symphonic literature seminar right now. Rather than require them to buy a bunch of Dover scores or make costly handouts, I can just tell them to have a score in class, and most of them will just bring in a laptop with the PDF file downloaded from IMSLP. The downside, or course, is that it is difficult to make notes on a PDF score, and I, with my romantic attachment to print culture, still buy scores myself, and lovingly annotate them with analytical gibberish and timings from recordings. But using PDF scores allows one to have a course based primarily around musical texts without having to worry about costs and the environment--definitely worth it in my book (so to speak).

The other problem, of course, is that pretty soon my symphonic lit class is going to leave the public domain era behind, and enter the twentieth century. Cage's Atlas Eclipticalis is certainly not on IMSLP! Which is actually too bad. In the 1950s, Cage explored quite seriously a project whereby public libraries in the United States could all have free copies of his works. In a letter to the New York Public Library, he wrote "I, personally, feel very strongly the obligation to get my own music out of my hands...Satie said somewhere that Beethoven was the first to give his music to a publisher. It would be a pleasure to establish another means appropriate to another time."

In the news...

I think just about every academic has had this recent NY Times article forwarded to them by a sympathetic family member or three. In essence, the Times delivers the surprising news that in this Tough Economic Climate, the job market is bad. The poor ABD grad student they interview applied only got two phone interviews! Shocking. (Read a better analysis at The Valve.)

On the other hand, according to the Chicago Tribune, college music programs are booming in this Tough Economic Climate.

Ergo, according to the traditional news media, we learn that only musicologists are going to get jobs in this Tough Economic Climate. Phew!

Clearly, this is because we have conquered Broadway. Jane Fonda: the best thing to hit musicology since Prince.

Also, the premiere of Carmen in 1875

In 1950, on this day, my mother and her twin brother were born in San Francisco.

Happy birthdays!

The Elite Humanities

Dean Dad noticed this NY Times piece a few days ago, and has already provided the appropriate excoriation. But it is just so outrageous, I feel the need to repeat his points.

It's an article claiming that because the economy is bad, nobody studies the humanities anymore. The evidence? Well...there isn't any. Literally. The author, a Ms. Patricia Cohen cites statistics that say that overall hiring academic is down. Okay... And also statistics that humanities degrees have been stable over the past two decades. There was a big decline in the 1970s, but it's been fine ever since. If anything, I found the actual statistics in this story comforting for my career prospects.

Maybe I'm just being picky; maybe it's only we humanists who care about such things as "evidence" to support your "argument."

But the kicker is this paragraph:

The humanities continue to thrive in elite liberal arts schools. But the divide between these private schools and others is widening. Some large state universities routinely turn away students who want to sign up for courses in the humanities, Francis C. Oakley, president emeritus and a professor of the history of ideas at Williams College, reported. At the University of Washington, for example, in recent years, as many as one-quarter of the students found they were unable to get into a humanities course.

As money tightens, the humanities may increasingly return to being what they were at the beginning of the last century, when only a minuscule portion of the population attended college: namely, the province of the wealthy.

You get that? The humanities thrive in elite liberal arts schools. Unlike at big state schools, where...humanities courses are so widely popular they oversubscribe. Therefore, the humanities are now only for the elite.

ARRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHH.

I'm going to guess Ms. Cohen did not major in the humanities; I sure hope not.

The sweet sound hits me...

As the older brother of an aspiring opera singer, I found the recent New Yorker profile of Natalie Dessay fascinating. What a weird world, opera. But the profile came out at a handy time, as I just showed one of my classes the YouTube video of Dessay singing the Lucia Mad scene.

I am not an opera buff, by any measure. I know enough to teach it in a history survey, and to appreciate what my sister does. The only corners of the operatic repertoire about which I have a more intimate knowledge are certain twentieth-century works (particularly Berg, Britten, Adams, Glass), and also Wagner. The latter is the result of a grad school seminar, and also a certain amount of cultural inheritance from a Wagnerian grandfather. I can't say that I like Wagner; indeed, I often feel revulsion. And yet, when it comes time to teach Wagner this semester, I have three different versions of Tristan in my personal DVD collection to choose between. So, yeah.

So there

I guess I'm safe in my profession for the time being! I'm curious to know if others really don't hear it--the high-pitched squeal was pretty loud and annoying to me.

The Tridentine YouTube

It's no secret that YouTube is endlessly useful for teaching purposes, whether it be obscure television shows, documentary footage, or simply opera clips when you are too lazy to find the video.

One more possible use: I think we would all agree that when you're teaching that part of a music history sequence that involves medieval plainchant, and you have to explain the structure of Roman Catholic Mass (the Proper, the Ordinary, etc.), it is pretty hard to make a dynamic presentation. There are lots of Latin terms, for one, and it seems like there are lots of arbitrary rules that don't make sense.

Enter YouTube! Just before teaching this stuff myself, I realized that one can find all sorts of videos of the traditional Tridentine Mass in Latin. With a video of the Mass, suddenly everything makes a lot more sense, and you get a sense of how all these seemingly random chants work in practice.

I ended up using this one, recorded in 1941 with a proper all-male choir. It's even subtitled, which makes it easy to find sections. (Sometimes the titles are a bit off, so be careful.) The downsides are that it is in black and white, is a bit fuzzy, and the musical settings of the Ordinary are, as the description delicately puts it, "of its time."

If you want full color and better quality, there is a contemporary video done by a conservative parish in Paris. I went with the older one because it seemed a little more, well, medieval, but either would work well.


These videos are, of course, somewhat propagandist, produced by organizations opposed to Vatican II liturgical revisions. The comments sections and some of the narration involved with these videos are fascinating, especially to a non-Catholic such as myself. One could easily ignore these in class, but I actually tried to use it as a teaching moment: in the wake of Summorum Pontificum, there is a lot of impassioned discussion of the liturgy out there, and it can be a good window into how the Roman Mass got to be the way it is.

A week in the life of...

Monday: The standardization of chant, early nineteenth-century art song.
Tuesday: Lisztian piano virtuosity (twice)
Wednesday: chant notation, Schumann's piano music
Thursday: Italian opera (twice), Haydn 104
Friday: modes and hexachords, Berlioz

The hard part of teaching five classes, with four preps, is not the amount of time it takes to teach and grade 135 students by yourself, but keeping it all straight in your head from class to class!

But so far, so good.

The Church of Cage

Just in case you are not, as I am, a subscriber to Silence-l, the John Cage email discussion group, you will be amused to know that its members are currently discussing, with some seriousness, the feasibility of building a church or other some such memorial to the great man.

Awesome. That's all I have to say about that.

Complete Stravinsky on the Cheap

Remember Alex Ross's little tip that you can get the complete works of Stravinsky on CD for about thirty dollars via Amazon UK? Like many others, I took advantage of it, and my set arrive today. Verdict? Totally worth it. As Alex says, it is a 22 CD set on Sony Classical, mostly recordings conducted by Stravinsky or Craft in the 1950s and 1960s. Obviously, those of us immersed in the world of twentieth-century modernism will not be satisfied by the package alone; the serious musicologist will still need his/her's six different recordings of Le Sacre. But you know, the man wrote a lot of music, and this is a great way to have all those obscure etudes and sacred pieces that wouldn't really be worth buying separately, but are nice to have on hand for the odd passing research question or teaching moment.

And the best part is that it only took about a week to arrive, and the total bill for me including shipping was $36.92.

P.S. Why wasn't the exchange rate this good when my wife was going to school in England for five years?