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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
There was an interesting article in the Philadelphia Inquirer today. One of the old Italian neighorhoods of North Philly is having a reunion. Up to six hundred old denizens, mostly Italian members of the now-defunct parish of Our Lady of Pompei who fled to the suburbs in the 1970s, are expected to come back to their old stomping groups. Most of them now live in Northeast Philly, or even further out in the suburbs, and were apparently itching for the chance to reconnect and reminisce.
One of the things I talk about in my research is the process by which various immigrant communities in the United States have slowly been assimilated into the category of "white," with all the political and cultural power that entails. This is obviously a process that has been going for a very long time; books like David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness and Noel Ignatiev's How the Irish Became White trace that history especially amongst working-class Irish immigrants in the early 19th century. The latter book has always been particularly fascinating for me, both because it examines my adopted home of Philadelphia, and also because it was the rare work of critical race studies that actually crossed over into a mainstream market. It was widely discussed when it came out, and I seem to recall that supposedly Bill Clinton read it avidly.
The 1950s, which is of course my own area of interest, saw another surge in assimilation. There were many factors involved in this, but the one particularly highlighted by this reunion was the geographic mobility created by World War II. Cultural coherence requires spatial coherence; it's a lot easier to maintain traditions if you live in one neighborhood, where your church, community center, social club, local newspaper and radio station, and all sorts of other institutions can cater to your language and traditions. As soon as the massive migration to the suburbs began, those institutions became to difficult to maintain--just by way of example, the percentage of radio stations broadcasting in a language other than English declined by 40% between 1942 and 1948.
And all of this happened in dialogue with academia and politics. The period after World War II was when the mainstream social science consensus began to use the term "ethnicity" rather than "race," that is, privileging culture over biology. This was a move made with liberal intentions, although certain categories of human beings--especially African Americans and Asian immigrants--were still subsumed under the idea of "race" rather than "ethnicity." This tension over who counts as biologically different as to who counts as merely culturally different was especially reflected in McCarran-Walter Immigration Act of 1952, which substantially liberalized immigration for those coming from Europe, while maintaining strict quotas for those from other parts of the world. This was accomplished by pinning immigration to the 1920 census: each European country was given an annual quota equal to one-sixth of one percent of the citizenry in 1920 descended from that country. Effectively dismissing immigration from the previous three decades, the Act had the effect of encouraging more immigration from Ireland and Germany, and less from Eastern Europe. The rest of the world, however, was treated not along ethnic lines, but the racial: immigrants from Asian countries were counted together as one block, rather than individual countries. And if you were, say, a Brit of Asian descent, you were counted as Asian rather than British, and had to fight for one of the 2,000 slots allowed from Asia.
As the country yet again begins to discuss immigration reform, it's always good to remember these past engagements. Purely racial arguments are rarely made in mainstream political discourse anymore; we more often hear arguments having to do with culture. Language, obviously, but as one defendant of the proposed Arizona anti-immigration law puts it, also fashion, even shoes. When someone starts spouting nonsense like this, it's a good guess that there is a racial logic underneath!
Rep. Bilbray: They will look at the kind of dress you wear, there’s different type of attire, there’s different type of—right down to the shoes, right down to the clothes. But mostly by behavior it’s mostly behavior, just as the law enforcement people here in Washington, DC does it based on certain criminal activity there is behavior things that professionals are trained in across the board and this group shouldn’t be exempt from those observations as much as anybody else.
