Einstein on the Beach and Preemptive Nostalgia

I was intrigued by NY Times critic Zachary Woolfe's account of experiencing Einstein on the Beach live for the first time after many years of knowing only the music. Fresh off of admitting that he doesn't like Billy Budd all that much, Woolfe proceeds to deftly puncture the NYC music scene's nostalgia for the Downtown heyday of the mid-seventies, when Patti Smiths roamed wild in the streets and Philip Glass made extremely simple diatonicism revolutionary:

I was surprised to discover that for all those years I had been missing so little. The really important component of the opera turns out to be the music, the part that has always been with us, preserved on those recordings. The other, more evanescent elements — the eternally open horizons of Mr. Wilson’s blue-lighted backdrops; his twitchy movement vocabulary; Ms. Childs’s swirling dances — feel, in the final estimation, dazzling yet dispensable...

Actually, though, I suspect the part of Woolfe's piece that will cause the most heartburn for avant-gardists of a certain age is not his boredom with Wilson's staging, but rather his description at the beginning of how he has been listening to Einstein all these years:

I can’t count the number of times I have sat at my computer, opened YouTube and typed a strange phrase into the search box: “knee 1.”

Ouch! Yes, the nightmare scenario has come to pass: even the Times music critic, the last one standing apparently, consumes music much the way my undergraduates do. Not by carefully cultivating a collection of music, let alone CDs, let alone LPs, but through the vagaries of YouTube. In this music in the age of mechanical reproduction, the experience of Einstein goes something like this:

The first hit is actually a video about knee injuries. The second hit indeed gives us Knee Play 1, uploaded by some guy named "MountGoth." In the video, the 1993 recording is presented (without attribution or any credit to the performers or label) to a static picture of a lake in the mountains.

The second hit gives one a version accompanied by some other random guy's artistic interpretation of vaguely Einsteinian themes. The third hit, a picture of Philip Glass, and then we're back to knee injuries and something about the Battle of Wounded Knee.

As I say, I am aware that this is precisely how my students—currently born in the mid-1990s—consume the music I require them to listen to. Theoretically they are supposed to purchase these CD sets that come with our textbook, but it runs upwards of $150 to buy all three sets, and I completely understand that this seems ridiculous, especially when all they are going to do is rip the CDs into iTunes anyways. For the conscientious-but-thrifty students, I suspect they band together and purchase one set of CDs to be ripped to a dozen computers. For those who are just thrifty, I think most of them go onto YouTube to do their required listenings, a suspicious confirmed when they are deeply confused by issues of orchestration and tempo by the "official" recordings when I play them in class. Personally I am somewhat old-fashioned, and in the classroom I often try to instill in my students at least a small amount of affection for the material objects of sound recording. We pass around Edison cylinders, 78s, 45s, fragments of actual magnetic tape, and nowadays, compact discs. It's not a bad thing that music circulates differently today that it once did, I tell them, but it is indeed very different.

However—and this is a big however after all of the above—I totally appreciate Mr. Woolfe's perspective. Or rather, part of it; I haven't yet seen Einstein on the Beach. I was born four years after the original production, was still only twelve years old for the last one in 1992. I like to think I was a fairly precocious new music kid, but not that much. The Verges/Obennhaus documentary from '84 gives me a sense of the production, enough that I confidently (albeit polemically) tell my students every year that Einstein on the Beach might be the greatest opera in the twentieth century.

But I did by the end of my teenage years discover Philip Glass, first in a new music concert when I was 16 (the same in which I heard 4'33" for the first time, incidentally), and then more systematically in college, where as a freshman I did a class assignment that involved knocking around in the world of 1+1. Then in graduate school I was lucky enough to be immersed in an entire seminar on minimalist theater lead by the indomitable Robert Fink, and although Glass is not a subject I do active research on, it's been a regular part of my classroom ever since. And not that long ago, I saw the Sesame Street video that circulates occasionally on Facebook, in which Philip Glass's music provides the backdrop for a mesmerizing series of geometric abstractions. It first aired on Sesame Street in 1979, the year before I was born. In some ways, Philip Glass has been in my ears for my entire life. And Einstein on the Beach had better not disappoint me.

This, of course, is what Woolfe is speaking to. Those of us too young to have experience the glory days and battles of New Music in the pre-John Adams era can't help but want to experience those thrills for ourselves. Not to sound like Woody Allen in Midnight in Paris, but there is a feeling that surely things were more alive back then. Woolfe:

With “Einstein,” the fantasy is the return to that bohemian, avant-garde New York, so full of excitement and possibility. Both those who were there and those of us who were not want badly, for our different reasons, to conjure an event, a moment, even an entire city that now exists only as a memory. It is Mr. Glass’s music that is more than that, and it remains as close as your computer.

This is an odd sort of nostalgia, but it is nevertheless nostalgia. Nostalgia usually implies personal association with the sentimentalized remembered pass, but it needn't necessarily. And as a form of nostalgia, you have to go the next step and think about what ideologies produce that nostalgia. As Melissa Harris-Perry famously said, "history understands where nostalgia obscures." As I wrote before, I think we need to be more open to nostalgia; it has potential to reveal good in addition to obscuring past evil. The nostalgia for Einstein's radical purity certainly obscures some basic facts of music history.  In the multi-racial, liberatory, free-wheeling world of the 60s and 70s avant-garde, it's not an accident that an opera with music written by a straight, white, Juilliard-trained man remains widely-heard four decades later, as does the music of...Steve Reich...John Adams...hmmm. Ask the ghost of Julius Eastman where avant-garde nostalgia has gotten him in the history textbooks.

And yet, Hilton Als reminds us in his fascinating New Yorker piece on Einstein that Robert Wilson's contribution, precisely what Woolfe did not care for, is by far the most critical and challenging part of the opera. Wilson's work confronts those very social issues that Glass tends to portray in abstraction. That abstraction is the source of Glass's longevity, it's why Glass's music works equally well circulating in mainstream movie soundtracks as it does when you're knocking out additive patterns on an amplified tabletop. But my own personal nostalgia is that it will be Wilson's vision that might reveal something about the avant-garde past that might be worth remembering, even in the gauzy, soft-focus light of nostalgia.

I've got tickets for the very last show, Sunday's matinee. Here's to hoping.

Nixonian Listening

Factoid of the day: Richard Nixon liked to work while listening to Richard Rodgers' (and Robert Russell Bennet') score for the early 50s television series Victory at Sea.

As I write in my chapter on performances that remembered the Pacific Front, Senator McCarthy was also fond of dressing up and playing soldier, a role he called "Tailgunner Joe." He even received a belated Distinguished Flying Cross in 1952, largely on the basis of falsified records. His famous war injury was actually, biographers believe, the result of a hazing ritual.

Rogin's McCarthyism

There's a lot to read about McCarthyism. When I was finishing my dissertation proposal circa 2006, I felt reasonably sure I'd read most everything out there, from old-fashioned catalogues of misdeeds like David Caute's The Great Fear to many studies on specific industries like Hollywood or academia or even the discipline of anthropology, to rigorous analyses of institutions like that of Ellen Schrecker, whose work is still the gold standard in my opinion. And there's the pro-McCarthy stuff, like M. Stanton Evan's revisionist biography of the man, or Ann Coulter's Treason. Of course, more stuff is always coming out at a rate that's hard to keep up with. In the "currently-on-my-bedside-table-waiting-to-be-finished" list there's Haynes Johnson's history that attempts to connect McCarthyism with the War on Terror, and David Everitt's very promising looking account of blacklisting in the broadcasting industry. I'm also trying to track down a copy of Richard Power's history of anticommunism, which I gather from reviews is sympathetic to the McCarthy cause.

What most of these works lack, however, is intelligent analysis of the big picture. The trend has definitely been to look at the small details, examining how blacklisting worked in particular contexts. That's fine as far as it goes, but it seems that many scholars have given up trying to explain why McCarthyism as a phenomenon happened the way it did, and when it did.

Perhaps part of the reason is that the early phase of McCarthy historiography dwelt a bit too heavily on the big picture, at the expense of reality. As early as 1954, a group of left-leaning (at the time; many would drift into neoconservatism) scholars convened a faculty seminar at Columbia to try to explain McCarthyism. Their responses were published in a book edited by Daniel Bell, The New American Right. Largely, their focus was on psychology, asking what it was about the psyche of the American people that lead to McCarthyism. In essence, they decided it was a combination of authoritarian personalities (borrowing from Adorno) and status anxiety on the part of newly-emboldened middle-class ethnics, revolting against the old WASP elite. In their telling, the old agrarian radical populist tradition was fundamentally transformed into a right-wing movement. The New American Right makes for juicy reading, and its authors went on to great prominence in political and academic worlds, but it's hard to take their analyses seriously today, especially after a critique launched at the book by the then-young scholar, the now-late Michael Rogin.

Rogin's doctoral dissertation, later published as Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical Spectre was a full-throated takedown of the New York intellectuals work, crucially coming from a leftist perspective. Rather than admit McCarthyism's success as a social movement, he showed (in painstaking empirical detail) that there was no continuity between previous radical populist traditions and McCarthy, nor was there genuine mass-based support. Rather, McCarthyism was pushed by the same right-wing elites who have always existed, aided both by a timid liberal press and a Republican Party savvy enough to use McCarthyism to win the 1952 election, and then dump it as soon as he encroached upon conservative elite institutions such as the Army and the Executive branch. In other words, McCarthyism was not a genuine social movement, but rather a manipulation upon the part of conservative elites to create the impression of one. The New American Right authors took McCarthyism as an excuse to reject overheated populism, and started their slide towards Humphrey-Nixonism; Rogin showed that it wasn't democracy that was the problem, but its perversion by center-right and center-left.

Rogin on McCarthyism is not as fun and sexy as his later work, but it's still quite relevant today, especially since the right wing in this country has very successfully claimed the mantle of agrarian populism: in the conservative evangelical movements of the 70s and 80s, in the red state-blue state binary of the 2000s, and in the Tea Party today. One of the depressing things about reading early Rogin, however, is how much has changed since he wrote the book in the early 1960s. As much as we talk about astro-turfing in the Tea Party today, I don't know of many who would say that right-wing populism isn't a real thing, a genuine social movement. A wrong-headed and dangerous one, but one that has a considerable amount of staying-power and traction amongst a large chunk of this country's population. I think Rogin was very right that McCarthyism did not fall into that category, but, depressingly, I do think that by the 1970s the conservative elite had their way, and a right-wing mass-based social movement was born, and, so far, here to stay.

Reboot; and, The Investigator

[yeah yeah yeah, apologies for long blog absence, grovel grovel grovel]

Other projects have kept me away from my book this past year, but as the summer comes to an end I'm finally turning back to it. Large chunks are written, and with a slightly less trying teaching schedule this year, I think if I can focus (always difficult for me!) and buckle down, having a complete draft by the end of next summer is not unreasonable. So as I try to think of ways in which this blog space might be useful for me, it seems like rather than providing an outlet for procastination, it could actually help me narrow and focus my writerly energies a bit. So, blog readers (if any be left), keep me honest: I'm going to post regular updates on my writing progress, and keep the content focused on the subject of my book: music and the cultural politics of McCarthyism. If I write anything here about music after 1954, slap me in the face, electronically or literally depending on your geographic distance. Okay? Alright.

So let me start off with my current task: re-writing the introduction. In addition to doing the usual literary maneuvers of an introduction--a snappy beginning, a discussion of theoretical apparatus, an overview of the chapters, etc.--one of the things my introduction needs to do is talk about "actual" music and McCarthyism. The scare quotes are there because not a whole lot of my work is actually about McCarthyism, per se, in the sense of discussing blacklisting of composers, or musical representations of McCarthyism, or heck, Joseph McCarthy's own personal musical taste. (I've never found any biographical discussion of the last point, but boy would I like to know more.) I'm not going to go into the lengthy discussion in this space of why that is (short version: it's not very interesting), but I do feel a bit obligated to cover some of that stuff in the intro. I talk a little bit about blacklisting in popular music, but also about this amazing artifact:

There is very, very little music that is literally "about" McCarthyism, in the way that the film and theater world very quickly responded to the situation. But here is one! To a point--it is actually a radio play, although it does have an original score. It was written by Reuben Ship, a leftie writer from Canada who was deported out of the US in the early 50s for working to unionize the television industry. His response was The Investigator, a very thinly-veiled portrait of McCarthy, broadcast by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1954. Although never broadcast in the US at the time, an LP was released, and I bought a copy on eBay. For more, including the complete recording, see Gerald Gross's short article, or this very thorough Wikipedia entry. Or, read my book someday!

End of a Nostalgia

From the NY Times:

CLIFTON, N.J. — The end is near for Ronnie I’s Clifton Music after 40 years on Main Avenue — yet another victim of the Internet, the economy, and changing tastes in music and shopping. But this time it is not just a store that is dying, four years after its founder did, but perhaps a whole genre of music as well. For the aging fans of the group harmony of the Harptones and the Heartbeats, the Orioles and the Ravens, the Five Keys and the Five Satins, the passing of Clifton Music is a reminder that rock ’n’ roll may never die, but one hyperbolic sect, the fading kingdom of doo-wop, just might.

The closing of this store really is the end of an era. There are few musical scenes that have had as devoted a following as doo-wop; you could make a strong argument that doo-wop fans in the 1950s invented the pop music connoisseurship many of us practice today. As best as I know (and I would love to stand corrected!), that history began with the first "oldies" compilation album of early doo-wop tracks, released in 1959, and the concurrent growth of stores like Ronnie's and especially the Slim Rose subway arcade shop in New York City. As I recall Phil Ford once saying in a paper, there have been few decades as strikingly and immediately self-reflexive as the "Fifties."

These early fans of retro doo-wop were mostly white, and yet largely listened to music produced by African American youth and distributed through the pre-rock and roll R&B independent labels. But as I've argued elsewhere, this is not the cliché story of white theft of black music. It is a reminder of an era in the northeast when segregation occurred block by block rather than city by city, and when radio stations like New York's WOV played, I'm told, both R&B and traditional Italian music side by side. There was never much money in this scene; for the most part the transformation of African American R&B vocal harmony into Italian American doo-wop was the result of love, not theft.

But anyways, the real reminder in this Times story is that connoisseurship and nostalgia have a history, and thus not only a beginning but an end. This is a bit of a sequel to what I once said about authenticity. These things have histories, and like many scholars these days I'm thinking a lot about the limits of those histories. Unlike Melissa-Perry-Harris I don't think nostalgia is always a malignant force, but she is right that nostalgia, like connoisseurship and authenticity, are cultural tropes that we need to come to terms with in a more critical way.

A Question of When

When I interviewed every friend and every neighbor I asked them one question which never appears in the piece, which is, "Do you think this could happen again? And do you think it could happen again in New York?" and everyone said, "Do I think it could happen again? It's not a question of it, it's a question of when!
- Steve Reich

I'm still thinking a lot about Steven Reich's WTC 9/11, which I wrote about in July. Now that I've had more time to digest the music itself I want to elaborate a little bit more on those arguments, especially now that it easy to listen to the whole thing on the NPR web site and there has been a flurry of well-timed publicity. As I wrote in the earlier post, the central question for me is this: what is this act of remembrance and mourning trying to accomplish? The more I get a sense of what he is trying to accomplish, I don't think I like it.

The obvious structuring element of WTC 9/11 are the sampled voices, what Reich calls "documentary materials." The first movement features recordings of voices, including elements from the attack itself—air traffic controllers, fire department radio communications. The second features interviews with friends and neighbors. The third hinges upon latter-day recordings of women who sat shemira for the unidentified bodies.

All ove this is set against a very typical-sounding (I have to hedge a little bit, because I don't have a score) Reichian pulse. As in Different Trains, instruments imitate the melodic contours of those snippets. There are some new techniques as well. The second movement features a technique that Reich explains in his Guardian interview. Phonemes from certain words are digitally extended into a long drone, so that for example the "n" sound at the end of "plane" becomes a humming sound, the "s" sound at the end of "chaos" becomes a long sibilance. In the interview Reich seems pleased to have invented this, but fans of the avant-garde will immediately think of Robert Ashley's 1967 sonic portrait of alienation "She Was a Visitor," which achieved the same effect with a choir rather than a computer. In both Ashley and Reich, the sound of a droning phoneme is unsettling and foreboding.

In a NY Times video interview, Reich explains why he used prerecorded voices. It would be "vulgar," he says, to write a 9/11 "musical fantasy" that consisted only of his own perspectives. He claims a kind of documentary impulse, just recording what happened. Just the facts, ma'am.



In that Guardian interview, which I very much recommend listening to, Reich doubles down on this kind of rhetoric, explicitly connecting it to his 1960s tape works like Come Out, where the musical story is about the voices of real people without composerly intervention. And he goes further with a somewhat mystic appeal to the musical characteristics of their speech as some kind of repository of truth. (paging Wagner!)

I'm a big fan of Reich's music. He's always appealed to my inner classicist, the part of me that really gets into the aggro-aesthetic autonomy of Music for Eighteen Musicians or indeed the Mallet Quartet included on the Nonesuch release. I don't seriously buy that claim of aesthetic autonomy, but doing so at least fits into a certain kind of tradition. However, it's just bizarre how he's trying to do the same thing for something like WTC.

Of course these voices are not just neutral facts. Reich chose them; he even specially recorded some of them. And having chose them, he set them musically so as to reflect his own point of view. It shouldn't bug me this much, but it annoys me how he evades responsibility for what his own music does. Because it's not hard to figure out. Sumanth Gopinath has written brilliantly on the cultural politics of Reich's music, and I draw on him here to point out Reich's political transformation from radical artist of the 1960s, to professionalized composer of the 1970s, to his current position. The most obvious aspect of his music of the past few decades is his exploration of Jewish themes, but as Gopinath points out there is also an ever-present concern with apocalyptic thinking: the Holocaust, Islamic fundamentalism, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, nuclear bombs, and now the second WTC attack.

This compositional voice is relentlessly pessimistic and negative. Just to take one example, my former student Ben Norris wrote a great paper about Desert Music, in which Reich takes the poem of William Carlos Williams—an ambivalent but not-pessimistic mediation on the possibility of renewal after the nuclear desert—and turns it into a nightmare of sirens and impending doom. And this is of course also what happens in WTC 9/11. He uses these documentary materials and the various techniques of musical anxiety because he wants us to return the listener to the fear and anxiety of that day.

Which he actually makes quite clear in that NPR interview, quoted at the top of this entry. It's the invisible logic behind the piece—as he says, never appearing in the work itself. For Reich terrorism is imminent, and the lesson of 9/11 is the need for vigilance. That is, of course, exactly the sort of mourning promoted so effectively by the Bush administration in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It's a kind of mourning that calls for a fundamental transformation of country into one governed by paranoia and a permanent state of war. As many, many people have pointed out, it entails a radical reaction against those "American values" supposedly being defended. Which Reich seems quite content with. As he said recently, "I've actually come to dislike all cities and particularly New York." What a turn of events there! Terrorism might indeed strike New York again, but Reich isn't going down with that sinking ship.

Let me just end with a quote from a much wiser composer, Aaron Copland's famous speech at the 1949 Waldorf-Astoria peace conference. It's a famous quote from the dawn of the Cold War, and one that I discuss at length in my own scholarship on American music during McCarthyism. Different era, but it seems to me a very relevant warning:

Artists, by definition, hate all wars—hot or cold. But lately I’ve been thinking that the cold war is almost worse for art than the real thing—for it permeates the atmosphere with fear and anxiety. An artist can function at his best only in a vital and healthy environment for the simple reason that the very act of creation is an affirmative gesture. An artist fighting in a war for a cause he holds just has something affirmative he can believe in. That artist, if he can stay alive, can create art. But throw him into a mood of suspicion, ill-will, and dread that typifies the cold war attitude and he’ll create nothing.

h/t Kendra for the Deutsche Welle interview.

"Doris Day"

The phrase “Doris Day” today evokes not so much individuated person as type, or more specifically, phenotype. It is difficult to imagine any discussion of “Doris Day” proceeding without there occurring some reference to “blonde” and “blue-eyed.” Together with that blondeness and blue-eyed-ness comes a certain actorly character: perky, righteous, virginal. Some know her best from the Rock Hudson comedies of the late 1965s and early 1960s, others know her better from her television show that ran from 1968–1973. Those born later, such as myself, know her not at all, except as blonde simulacrum. Those of this later generation became familiar with the Doris Day parody first, the actual image later. I saw the 2003 film Down with Love, heard the Sly and the Family Stone version of “Que Sera, Sera,” and even, if memory serves, witnessed a drag queen portrayal of Doris—they are regrettably rare, but they do occur—all before I had seen a single Doris Day film. And yet I knew enough of the Doris Day type to recognize these performances as the parodies they were.

Mourning and Violence

I'm sure you were dying to know what the crack blogging team here at 2'23" thought about the cover for the Nonesuch recording of Steve Reich's WTC 9/11, the one that is causing such controversy on the social network of your choice.

Well, I'm glad you asked.

As a matter of marketing, I think it is basically in poor taste, and kind of a cheap trick. But it does sharpen our focus on the cultural politics of the work, and other 9/11 pieces like John Adams On the Transmigration of Souls.* For me, the essential question to ask of any of these works is that asked by Judith Butler in her wonderful book Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. She writes

That we can be injuired, that others can be injured, that we are subject to death at the whim of another, are all reasons for both fear and grief. What is less certain, however, is whether the experiences of vulnerability and loss have to lead straightaway to military violence and retribution. There are other passages. If we are interested in arrested cycles of violence to produce less violent outcomes, it is no doubt important to ask what, politically, might be made of grief besides a cry for war.

That about sums up my reaction: okay, so these pieces are about mourning an act of terrorism. What sort of mourning is it, and what is it supposed to accomplish? I don't think it is intended to be a triumphalist sort of mourning. Both works take their cue from the style of mourning popularized by Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial, in which the traditional man-on-horse sculpture is replaced by stark absence and a cut into the earth, filled only with names. As good children of the sixties, I think that's the model in mind for both Reich and Adams, hence the use of pre-recorded tape fragments filled with seemly mundane details, the equivalent of soldiers's names to the black granite gash of the score. The use of the famous image of the smoking towers about to be hit by a second plane indeed puts one in the correct state of mind for this kind of mourning. It's not an image of resilience, of some politician triumphantly sitting on top of smoking rubble.

However, my favorite chapter of Butler's book (and again, if the only Butler you have read is Gender Trouble, check it out) is that titled "Violence, Mourning, Politics." The essay begins by asking a simple question: what makes for a grievable life? That is, why do we mourn some lives and not others? Why did the deaths in New York City (and, to a interestingly lesser extent, the Pentagon) that day strike many people so hard, even those with no connection to the city. Why grieve those lives, and not the many other tragic deaths around the world? The simple answer to that question probably has something to do with cultural proximity and the various ways we have imagined connections to others inhabitants of this nation. I remember feeling that way, two hours up the coast in Connecticut, the brief and in hindsight ridiculous feeling that morning that perhaps we were next, and the more lasting feeling that we must know somebody there.

Adams and Reich both trade on that familiarity, emphasizing the quotidian details like the busy phone signal that allow us to correlate our lives with theirs. Butler, however, sees that as exactly the problem. Mourning, she points out, becomes attached to familiarity. We only mourn the familiar, not the unfamiliar lives ended every day around the world, not even those of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan whose lives were taken to fulfill the particularly violent form of mourning the Bush administration (and many a Democrat) put into place after 9/11. Or more bluntly, as Butler puts it those lives are not grieved because our discourse (or an absence of it) has successfully dehumanized them. We could never build a Maya Lin-style memorial to the innocent victims of our wars because we don't even know their names. Eventually, mourning the unfamiliar is not just rare, but impossible, in our contemporary discourse.

Butler's point expresses something of my unease with these works, especially Reich--Adams has at least dealt more explicitly with these issues before, in Klinghoffer. Musical mourning can be extremely powerful when it is intensely personalized and emotional, but it is not easy to separate mourning from violence. I don't think I can do better than to quote what Butler writes about Daniel Pearl, who of course is the subject of one of Reich's most beautiful post-9/11 works, the Daniel Variations:

We should surely continue to grieve for Daniel Pearl, even though he is so much more easily humanized for most United States citizens than the nameless Afghans obliterated by United States and European violence. But we have to consider how the norm governing who will be a grievable human is circumscribed and produced in these acts of permissible and celebrated public grieving, how they sometimes operate in tandem with a prohibition on the public grieving of others' lives, and how this differential allocation of grief serves the derealizing aims of military violence.

So can you mourn something like 9/11 at all? Butler's answer is yes, of course we should; we just need to take it as an opportunity to expose our vulnerability, to recognize the extent of privilege in not facing such violence on a daily basis, and the corporeal commonality we share we others around the world. Ironically, this makes me appreciate the cover image more, for it shows a moment of extreme fragility and doom to the extent that I prefer not to look at it. But the music contained does not, to my ears at least, follow through.



*the neurotic musicologist in me knows that there have been a number of conference papers about this subject, but I didn't see them. So, apologies if this has all been said already.

Photo by Rob Crawley

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.