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!