Notebooks

Alvin Lucier is retiring from from Wesleyan this spring after 41 years of teaching. There will be a big tribute conference this Fall, and at some point I want to write more, but the composer Nicolas Collins has uploaded a particularly interesting and moving homage: the notes he took when enrolled in Lucier's course "Introduction to Electronic Music" as a freshman in 1972.

Check them out.

I took essentially the same course from Lucier, twenty-seven years later, also a first year student who in the proper liberal arts fashion was casting his net widely for interesting things to study. (We also apparently lived in the same dorm, according to the cover of the notebook.) I've never been good at taking notes, so I'm loving being able to revisit this material. It's a tremendous document, giving an authoritative history of the American post-war avant-garde from an insider's perspective, and with a wealth of detailed insight. It's all the more astounding when you remember that this class was in 1972, well before there was an established narrative of this music--Nyman's book, which he assigned us in 1998, wouldn't be published for another two years, for example. For those of us interested in the historiography of experimental music, it's a must-read.

[via @soundblog via @wayneandwax ]

The City That Has Fallen

A strong sense of beauty somehow clung to the mental image of the town, even to one who, as I, had never seen the place, its glamour always had a sort of hidden foreboding in it. There was ever the same suggestion of lethal malefic genius behind all the story that was told of its curiously morbidezza, amorousness of the day, and its childlike desire to forget the night. It was too far, as it sometimes seemed, and in the glory in which it lay and in which it lingered in thought, there seemed something of a light that held a pale tone of bale back of all its bliss. Its people loved it with that intensity with which we love what we are likely to lose. William Marion Reedy (h/t)

Despite having adopted Philly in recent years, I am a San Franciscan in birth and heritage. I haven't been back very much since I went off to college in 1998, especially now that my parents live elsewhere, and whenever I do return the city grows less and less recognizable. In 1998 the internet boom had started but had not yet fully transformed the city; there was no Pac Bell Park or expensive farmers market in the Ferry Building. It was impossible to look at the waterfront and in your mind's eye not see the horrible Embarcadero Freeway rushing by. Traces of the 1989 earthquake were, in fact, still visible everywhere--scaffolding intermittently going up to do repairs, various operations to buttress sagging walls, and condemned buildings still pitting the city. I was back in the city for a wedding this fall, and it was as beautiful as ever, but I felt like a tourist. Certainly my parents could never afford to live there now, at least not in a two-bedroom apartment in the Marina they rented from a retired Italian barber for a ludicrously low price in the 1970s.

Something about the annual observance of the anniversary of the 1906 earthquake. Over a century later, the city still observes it, and I'm glad it does. I had family in the city back then; I think it was my great-great grandfather's generation? Something like that. Recent enough in the past that my grandmother knows stories about her grandfather (I think it was?) sitting on a hill at the Presidio watching the city burn down. That's the quintessential San Francisco experience, as Reedy says, loving something you know you are going to lose.

Life After Mahler

Oy.

"Let's face it. There are very few things left in Philadelphia that are still world class. The Philadelphia Orchestra tops the list," wrote Stuart E. Hirsch in a note to Worley and CEO Allison B. Vulgamore.

So yes, the news out of Broad Street is bad: the great Philadelphia Orchestra is declaring Chapter 11 so as to restructure its various obligations, although as Peter Dobrin points out, the obligations about which the board seems most concerned is the musicians' pension fund. The Orchestra in fact still has very substantial assets and no debt, but apparently annual operating expenses are out of whack, and they hope to work out something favorable with a bankruptcy court judge.

A lot of ink is going to be spilled on this issue for some time to come, most hinging on that anxiety voiced by Stuart Hirsch: how can Philadelphia, a relatively poor city by the standards of our East Coast neighbors (let alone international competitors), continue to maintain a world-class orchestra? I am disappointed, however, in the terms of the debate. Neither the board nor the musicians seem to be asking what I think is the more important question: what does it mean to be a world-class orchestra in the twenty-first century? Do I want Philly to have one? Hell yes! Do I think "world-class" should be equated with the ability to play Mahler better than anyone else? I really don't think so.

Just this weekend, the Delaware Symphony Orchestra did Mahler 2, with none other than the illustrious University of Delaware choirs in support, and although I was unable to attend, I gather they did a credible job of it. Would the Philly Orchestra have done a better job? Probably, but does that make us world class? In my book, to be world class means being at the forefront of the musical scene. It means challenging and educating its audiences, it means building a broader base of support for musical culture. Frankly, it means making headlines with daring (and hopefully successful) programming choices. That's what world-class orchestras do. In the year 2011, it is simply not enough to just find the best musicians in the world and let them have at the greatest hits of 1890-1910.

I mean, look at the program for next season. I attend fairly regularly, and would like to be a subscriber, but I honestly have trouble finding enough interesting concerts to justify it. There are a few warhorses I wouldn't mind hearing, but the closest thing I see to a conversation starter is a concert version of Elektra next May. The only nods to contemporary music the entire season are one work by Higdon, another by Michael Torke, and then Esa Pekka is conducting his violin concerto. You want to be world-class? Try keeping up with the world.

And it's not an either-or proposition, a world-class orchestra should be able to branch out creatively and still do a great job with Mahler 2. SF and LA have long done it, NY has started to. Stowkowski and Ormandy were our heyday because they placed the Orchestra at the center of western musical cultural in the middle of the twentieth century. It's a losing proposition to try to put today's Orchestra in the center of western musical culture of...well, sixty years ago.

So the position of this Philadelphian is as follows: I believe the Philadelphia Orchestra needs to reorganize and restructure, and maybe Chapter 11 will allow for that to happen. But we need to put musical choices at the center of the discussion, and aim for the future not the past.

Virtual Oscar Pool 2011

What better way to get back into blogging than my annual Oscar predictions! Last year I got only five right out of the ten categories I predicted, which was not my best showing. Let's see how I do this year. As always, this is who I think will win, not who should win.

Best Actor: Colin Firth, obvs. I'm happy about this because I loved him so much in A Single Man, and over the years I've gotten comfortable with the whole "earn an Oscar for previous work" thing. Also, one of my childhood babysitters knows his parents, so I like to pretend I do too. Also, MR. DARCY!!!!

Supporting Actor: My big caveat this year is that I did not see The Fighter, which is obviously playing a big part in the acting categories. Here we've got Crazy Christian Bale versus frequent flyer Geoffrey Rush. I'm going with Rush.

Best Actress: I think Natalie Portman is going to win, unfortunately. Not that she was bad, I just wasn't into it.

Supporting Actress: So wide open that it seems silly to make a pick. My friend Ross is betting on a HBC upset; I think if there is an upset it might tilt towards Hailee. However, despite the craziness I think Leo is going to get it, for nothing else if because The Fighter needs to win something.

Animated Feature: Toy Story 3, as if I need to say it.

Cinematography: A bit of a crap shoot as always, this category, usually simply pointing towards Best Picture. Will Inception get a token sympathy vote? Probably not. I myself loved the purity and formalism of True Grit here...but I think I'm going to officially guess Social Network. Which is too bad.

Screenplay: King's Speech, by default. Has just one author (Academy likes that), who has a touching personal story (overcame a stutter himself), etc. Most importantly, it offends nobody.

Adapted Screenplay: I fear that I must predict Social Network here. This drives me nuts. It wasn't a bad movie, but actually the screenplay was the most problematic thing for me. I'm no fan of Mark Zuckerberg, but writing a movie about a real person, then fictionalizing one of the most important plot elements--the framing device of him wanting to get a girl--I find strangely creepy, and it makes me feel sympathetic towards Zuckerberg. Which I don't like feeling.

Score: I genuinely liked Trent Reznor's score, and hope it wins. However, the Academy often goes conservative when it comes to scoring. I think Hans Zimmer here--safe, but memorable.

Song: Randy Newman's to lose, as is always the case when he is nominated.

Directing and Best Picture: I think we might see a split this year. My thinking is that King's Speech will win Best Picture, mostly by default for lack of a strong single other competitor. But I sense a lingering sentiment out there that the Brit pic is old-fashioned. As James Franco said in a recent interview, it's a bit safe. That's hogwash; of course it's safe, so are most of the major contenders for Best Picture. But it's such an obvious type for this category that I think the Academy voters might branch out for director. But the typical Academy voter's idea of "daring" has nothing to do with actual daring filmmaking, and instead focuses on movies that are about hot topics, or at least what a typical voter (average age supposedly in the late 50s) thinks is a hot topic. So I predict best director will go to Fincher for his look at that new-fangled computer thingy the kids use, "the Facebook." Which was a hot topic about seven years ago, but whatever.

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.