This Song Is Your Song

Since no one ever comes to office hours the first week, I may as well post some scattered thoughts. This summer I attended two music festivals. The first left me elated, the second self-conscious.

At the start of August I went to the Newport Folk Festival. The experience was nothing short of amazing, even though I spent 9 hours in the sun without suntan lotion (do not repeat, details involve a late connecting flight out of Newark, bans on flying with liquids, disliking checked luggage, and closed a CVS on Friday night/Saturday morning) and went solo. The impetus for going was to see The Decemberists, a band I've managed to just misalign schedules with, which is a shame since they're fantastic. They took a break from their current tour list (their new album, played straight through as something akin to a rock opera, or so I've heard) to mix in a variety of older and newer songs. Also high on my list were The Avett Brothers, an extremely engaging stage performance of punk-tinged bluegrass, the lush choral explosion of Fleet Foxes, the storytelling genius of Ramblin' Jack Elliott, the gut-grabbing power of Mavis Staples, the dreamy simplicity of Iron and Wine, and a variety of new talents including the laid-back and lushly textured textured clarinetfolkrock of Low Anthem (sort of combining the best of what I like about Fleet Foxes and Iron and Wine) and Ben Kweller's pop-country entry that marked the closest thing to pop (although much of the concert flirted with that genre pretty freely). And as I mentioned, the heartwarming magic of singing along with Pete Seeger.

The second festival was significantly smaller: The Kansas City Ethnic Enrichment Festival. There I saw some delicate and lovely thai instrumental music, amazing capoiera, familiarly catchy bulgarian dances (a couple of which I know I've done), some start-and-go Russian music. But throughout, I just felt unsure. The thai music was lovely, but I could barely hear it over the talking. The capoiera was easily the most crowd-pleasing. The Malaysian dancing was utterly confusing, as it all seemed to be done to muzaky, synthesized music with what I might consider oriental inflections. And through it all, the jokey, well-meaning emcee kept embarrassing me, about as much as the lame attempts by performers to engage the audience.

Part of it may be comfort zone, that the people at the folk festival really came to get what they expected and heard. A big part is probably the professionalism of stage presence, although Fleet Foxes had their share of awkward filling in the gaps with rambling stories. But there was such an air of community in the folk festival, singing along, listening, striking up conversations easily with those around you (even I of the closed mouth found it pretty easy to chat up others, regardless of age, gender, or attractiveness). At the KC festival, I just kept feeling out of place; whereas one seemed to draw us into commonness, this other emphasized difference in a lot of ways that made me uncomfortable. The emcee's jokes and stereotypes, the language barriers for some performers, the poor thai musician who didn't want to talk to the audience despite the constant goading of the emcee, and the fact that what seems like a good, well-intentioned idea didn't do much to enrich me. I saw a wide variety, but that's about it: the buffet is seldom as good as a well-cooked course. But it did make me reflect upon the variety at the folk festival, the interesting intersection of folk and popular genres, the diversity that goes perhaps more unseen precisely because you feel like you're bonding, and the diversity that isn't visible or maybe isn't there (e.g. politics). It struck me that the lyrics "This land is your land, this land is my land" are particularly great because they don't level out the differences--it's not merely reduced to "our" land--but something more complex, a land that is not only shared but unites different people together. That's more or less what this concert did for me. This music was my music, their music, your music.

Centennary

School begins, and I get to make a 100th post.

In lieu of anything substantial (because, well, nothing has really happened here yet), I'll relay to you the note someone left in my carrel:

Purpose for this research?

I think this bodes well.

We're walking, we're walking

I was just in Seattle, a city that has won my heart effortlessly through having ballroom dance lessons built into the sidewalks (you know, those feet with numbers and arrows?)! How can I resist?

But one of the things we did was take the Underground Tour, a tour with surprisingly little to look at. Like, almost nothing. And yet, it was great. And as I was going on the tour, I realized just how much teaching is like the process of tourguiding: adding just enough color to make things interesting, supplying deeper facts (but sometimes subtly), engaging the crowd, and keeping it moving. The tourguide we had was funny,a rticulate, knowledgeable, and seemingly unscripted. I really hate tours that just feel like a preprepared sheet that you'd get more out of reading yourself, or better yet, a book. But when guides are engaging, informed, and fun, it doesn't even matter if you're standing in a basement looking at a single dusty photo. That's what I want to be.

PhDon't?

As has been making the rounds recently, I thought Id weigh in briefly during my half hour here in the Denver airport, which sensibly has free wireless by the way, on the whole should I go to grad school thing.

I should begin by making my own perspective clear. I've been in my program for 4 years now, and still love it. By and large my friends are also in grad programs, though not exclusively, I know a lot of good, smart friends who don't know what they really want to do in a long-term sense, and I have two siblings who never went to college. The short answer is that I don't know, and I think the above posts do a good job of making some recommendations, which I almost whole-heartedly echo. I have no practical post-PhD experience. And there are a lot of bad reasons I've seen people get disenchanted with the process, though I want to stress that at some level, going may have been smart for some of these friends: it made them quickly decide what they actually wanted to do. And that's my little spiel here: you have to know the details of what you like, and build your decisions around them.

For me, I had three years off working an increasingly frustrating arts admin job and a filler year at a music publisher. I quickly discovered that I missed using the part of my brain that dealt above the practical side, that I hated budgets and loved the promotional aspects, in short, the aspects that allowed me to indulge complex arguments and the music itself, and where I failed was the practicality angle, being decisive about things I wanted to treat with more nuance. I also missed the general atmosphere of school, and realized that it was that kick that propelled me to work (this is not to say I was lazy in my work, but that the effort was increasingly noticeable). And so thanks to my years off, I vowed to enter into grad school only focusing on the parts I loved: the discussions, the self-propelled knowledge, the music itself, and the camaraderie. The parts I found more tedious (testing, politics), I've only applied myself as much as was necessary, and once done, let that go. Teaching, once I tried it, confirmed that I loved doing it, but that was a big big question mark.

My flight is boarding, but here's to enjoying not only what you do, but learning what you enjoy and how to enjoy them even more!

Naive and Sentimental Music

This weekend in New York brought not only humidity, but the respite in air-conditioned musical opportunities (the real perk of summers in NYC is the abundance of this stuff when everywhere else takes the summer off).

Monday night, I caught the International Contemporary Ensemble (even their acronym is pleasing in this heat!) performing a delightful array of John Adams chamber music. Shaker Loops, his breakthrough piece, still holds attention with its crisp energy, pulsing through its harmonic trajectory. While the shimmering fast bits sound perhaps the most characteristic sound, the slow movements really shine with snatches of melody unravelling, always leaving you wanting more. After the more minimal style of Shaker Loops, we got the more pop-infused style of Gnarly Buttons, Adams's clarinet concerto of sorts, making a rather nice bookending of his styles. I really love this piece; the sort of spinning out of lines from a single idea in the first movement and the colorful minimalist Hoedown that really does evoke the clippity-clop plunking rhtyhm and delicate orchestration of the Copland without direct quotation. But the prize for me is the hauntingness of the last movement, inspired in part by his father's battle with Alzheimers, as this plaintive melodic phrase (to which the words "Put Your Loving Arms Around Me" could be set) echoes over a held chord in the piano, with little additions But the even the simplest phrase slips away pretty early, and the music becomes increasingly agitated and aggressive, only to return ever so briefly to the hint of what was lost. After the break, they played Son of Chamber Symphony, a work I didn't know going in, but really enjoyed hearing it in the context of both styles, catching both the hypermelody of the later styles with the first movement and the sort of throwback rhythms and chords of the final movement (inspired by but not rehashing the News aria from Nixon in China).

A different kind of sentimental and naive music came on Saturday night when my lottery luck continued, getting us two front row tickets to West Side Story (aka the greatest Broadway score ever written). It really astonishes me just how amazing that music is. What normally would be a vamp or a throwaway introductory refrain before a song here is just as richly satisfying as the songs themselves. You almost wish it was underscored throughout. The standout was the Dance at the Gym, where the music has aged much better than the 1950s lingo, the brash jazzy chords reined in just enough to match the dancing on stage (oh, what dancing!), but as soon as I settle on that, I want to throw in so many other moments. The blisteringly funny Gee, Officer Krupke. The swooning on the balcony as they sing Tonight. Anita's fire in practically everything. The Somewhere ballet's ravishing simplicity. And going through the score, it's just as impossible to choose a favorite. I'm not even going to try, but I will tell you the moment that comes at the end of One Hand, One Heart, where the two lovers suddenly turn a mixture of shameful and fearful at the mock-wedding they've just conducted is one of the most unforgettably potent I've witnessed on stage to date. Highly recommended.

Daily Art

At the Yale museum, they were installing some stuff, with two pulleys resting on wood blooks, a half-hoisted scrim in the background. I asked the desk if it was construction or art, and they told me it was the former although they'd been trying to come up with a title. But there's I think a case where modern art, with all its seeming lack of artistry has sort of paid off, if it encourages us to enjoy the beauty in daily landscapes (photography has done this too). Walking through the Highline Park, I marvelled at how quietly nice the place was, the undulating concrete strips giving rise to benches, the tracks and wheels integrated into the landscaping, the views of the lower west side. A lovely night, nowhere in particular.

Lunch break

Finishing up here at Yale, I spent a nice leisurely lunch strolling through the two art museums. There's something so arresting about those Turner and Constable landscapes, that tension between the canvas's subject matter and abstraction, swamped entirely by color and light, the warmth even in those turbulent cloud scenes. And there were two exhibits, one of Dalou's women sculptures, and one of conservation. The latter was more interesting in theory than practice. It raises a number of usually hidden choices museums make—how to display something, how to treat functional objects as nonfunctional, how varnish affects a painting (especially interesting in the case of the Hopper painting, to which Hopper took the unusual step of varnishing the work himself), but there was too many words, to much vagueness about what it really meant, and worst of all, no real basis for the viewer to sort of have an opinion based on what was there. It read more like just a case for the defense. The former, a small exhibit centers 5 sculptures, beautiful, intimate scenes of women absorbed in quiet activities (books and babies), with some drawings from other French artists in England and contemporaries. The problem with it is that these bookended rooms with the sketches were difficult to reconcile with such a specific collection of works; they seldom had the same subject matter or expressive style, which may have been the point, that Dalou was radical in a certain way, but it seemed more disorganized. Still, I could marvel at those all day, but unfortunately Ives's handwriting needed some more deciphering.