ThoughtLights

Words on words and music

2011-07-16T23:42:00.002-04:00

I'm here in New York for the summer, chipping away at the dissertation and enjoying the panoply of free cultural events the city has to offer (a sampling: outdoor screening of Manhattan in Brooklyn Bridge Park, Brooklyn Rider's eclectic and invigorating concert of classical, Brazilian, bluegrass, Japanese, and Roma music, and dreamy atmospheric rock of Radio Dept. at sunset at the Seaport). Farmers markets have bountifully overfed me.

Life is good, so good in fact that I'm going to complain just for a change of mood. I haven't seen any Broadway yet (except Kelli O'Hara and Matthew Morrison's great performance at the Capitol Fourth concert (yeah, I know they had the cast of Million Dollar Quartet too, but that doesn't cut it at the moment)).

A few days ago, I came across this article in the Times, asking one of the perennial favorite musical quirky questions: what's the difference between musicals and opera? For my money, I'm still partial to Sondheim's distinction: if it's on stage by an opera company and the audience goes in expecting to see an opera, it's an opera. In other words, nothing is inherent in the work, it's all about expectations. Nevertheless, I think we all can identify common tropes in both the work and performance style, and so I looked forward to this take. For the record, I don't think a satifying single definition will ever be found—in fact, I don't think one even needs to be articulated—but as with any marker of genre, they can be useful.

Tommasini doesn't start well with a title asking us to "respect the difference." To me, this suggests snobbery from the start, and an implicit critique of ones that purport to borrow from or assimilate to the other. He begins by noting the common word "opera" appearing all over the place, and indeed suggesting that so manny efforts to cross the boundary are unsatisfying. He makes a few points I contest. For instance, I wouldn't peg Pagliacci as unrivaled in crowd-pleasing, and most importantly I wouldn't follow the conclusion he draws from A Minister's Wife, where, after praising the score insists it must be "pretentious musical theater or tame quasi-opera." I think there's space for a work like that, or if not we should make space.

Tomassini quickly dismisses highbrow/lowbrow, complexity, and spoken dialogue, all things that do not yield a strong division, but I think might be more fruitfully considered at length. Instead, he writes, "Here’s the difference: Both genres seek to combine words and music in dynamic, felicitous and, to invoke that all-purpose term, artistic ways. But in opera, music is the driving force; in musical theater, words come first."

There's something to this, performance-wise. The bain of crossover singers from opera doing showtunes is that the words get garbled, but I don't think that's the issue. I mean, I can recite the text by heart, but hearing Kiri Te Kanawa try a cockney accent in My Fair Lady is no match for Julie Andrews. There's a great bit too on José Carreras singing West Side Story where Bernstein continually stops rehearsal because he cannot sing "still" properly. Jerry Hadley has fared a little better with a brighter more natural sound. Dawn Upshaw, with her clarity comes close. (Renee Fleming surprised me, although her most recent crossover album of indie rock loses the operatic quality altogether but never really finds something to replace it and the result sounds just empty, boring). For my money, the only true cross-over artist is Audra MacDonald. I think there is something vital to not just the words, but how they're sung, their placement and clarity, their ease and naturalness. Musical theater does not, as opera does, repeat lines at least not verbatim. Although they do take more time to ease out their sentiments than a normal conversation.

But as his reasoning went on, I grew more skeptical of his theory. He draws on Cole Porter's lyrics to "Anything Goes," but says nothing about their setting. For opera, he turns to Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti. But this example is surely flawed, right, since the entire second act is lifted from a Broadway show, and the surrounding material is so self-consciously Serious Opera that it hardly illuminates anything. I'm not an expert on libretti, so perhaps someone could speak to how important the text is in opera studies, but I hesitate to put the music in the backseat when it comes to musicals. I think, "in olden days," the melody, the standalone work carried just as much importance as the text. And with a variety of scores inching toward the operatic- Bernstein's Candide and West Side Story, Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, Guettel's Light in the Piazza, the score carries the words more often than not. Now Tommasini grants that all these works are musically strong but that the words "do most of the heavy lifting." I'm not sure what that means. Does it mean that the music tells the story more effectively in opera? Because I don't think that's true—I think viewers rely on the action and/or the text just as much, and plenty of moments in musical theater tell a story through music. Does it mean that the story is more important to the musical? I think just the opposite is true, given the equally common practice of excerpting a tune from Broadway show and an aria from an opera and the interpolation of new songs into early musical theater (and Baroque opera).

In the end, I'm disappointed largely because the distinction feels unnuanced and ill-thought out. For instance, he attributes the importance of melody to opera, not musical theater. But also because Tommasini never provides a good reason why this distinction he's drawing matters and to whom. He writes that theatergoing audiences may not care about the divide. Well, if that's true, then why is this article being written? I think audiences do care, returning to Sondheim. When going to see the Glimmerglass production of Annie Get Your Gun, what will make the work a success? For those going because they love Deborah Voigt, their definitions will vary from those whose first love is Berlin's tunes (and lyrics).

When thinking about the differences—yes, I think it has to be plural—between these two, at the forefront should be our understanding of to whom and why. For listeners, words play a big part, performance style, production values, choreography, maybe even subject matter. For composers, it would look different. There's something interesting: why compose an opera or a musical theater piece. There, money, advertising, subject matter (again), prestige (probably again, though I didn't initially list it and now think twice), all matter there. We might also gain something out of the overlap. The opera-ness of many rock operas derives in part from near continuous underscoring. This is also what makes them often worse for the wear, because they lack any distinctness. So I'll end with a beginning of my own definition as an avid listener. Musical theater thrives on distinctness of moments: a choreographed number, a set number, even in the shows like Sweeney Todd's second act or Next to Normal (the best rock opera to date in my opinion). Opera produces a more fluid (not unified, necessarily) product that divides into longer scenes. Operatic excerpts always feel to me a little arbitrary and incomplete in the way they begin and end, perhaps because of this. But such a distinction alone is not satisfactory enough, it's just one piece of a complex question whose answers is a lot further than Tommasini would have us believe.

On (not) writing

2011-06-12T22:57:00.002-04:00

I took last summer off for a little perspective in terms, and also to refocus energies elsewhere. And coming back, I'm not sure either of those panned out in the ways I thought. There were several times I started writing something, but couldn't quite get it out in a way that made sense for me, or that I wanted to write something but just got busy. And these I suspect will be continuing problems for me, but for the mean time I'm back largely in part to a) my missing this and b) the feeling that it's worthwhile beyond me.

There's been a lot of discussion lately on the AMS listserv (and echoed nicely over at amusicology about the place of blogs. I don't imagine I get much draw outside of people I already know, but it's a way of disseminating even in small steps some thoughts. I could also be a better self-promoter, I suppose. But modest aims are fine, I think, for where I am. It's nice, honestly, to feel like I'm communicating more with these folks more than the once-or-twice-a-year conference or trip.

Instead, I think the broader goal for me is pedagogical, self and otherwise. Taking this teaching writing seminar underscored how much I value that sort of daily, low-stakes writing (an added bonus of where the free time went, I did more fiction reading, and intend to continue this trend!). It's hard to square the publicness with the lack of a really public readership, meaning that ideas occupy this nebulous space of inquisitive working through and digested and eloquent. I'm the kind of writer who likes a space to sort of see it on paper or hear myself talk it out, hence I'm back. But I've also seen a lot about blogs in the classroom. We had listening blogs in one class, but the class was too large (in my opinion) to really make it a space for much discussion to erupt and, in a fitting parallel to Ryan's post students managed to spread the rumor that they didn't need to actually do it and it was a losing battle. I like the idea of blogs though, as a space for working out ideas, sharing perspectives, continuing exchanges and collaboration beyond the classroom, and I expect to continue this in the fall when I teach freshman writing. Blogs are good for just practicing writing, doing it daily, letting students get feedback on their ideas, learn how to make and support arguments, how to provide commentary, and to realize that their ideas participate in a broader conversation.

All of this is to say that if we want to make musicology active in the public domain, keeping that in mind in the classroom is a good idea. We encounter students who will become musicians, medical researchers, administrators, psychologists, whatever- the people who will become potential readers of our words. But if the classroom is just a place to learn about musical form, concerts attended just so they can write 3 pages rehashing it, music and its teachers seemingly cut off from the modern world, they won't go into the world expecting to see musicologists playing an active role. They may very well appreciate what they learned, they may remember us fondly, but they won't see us as a missing part after they get their diploma. Which would be a shame, because what I love about my work and my colleagues is how they make me feel connected to a larger world, and hope that my presence in it will be of use to someone.

Mahlertia

2011-06-08T23:02:00.002-04:00

So, somehow my summer vacation away from blogging turned into a year. I've had a lot happen in the interim, but nothing terribly earth shattering. Some dissertation got written as well as a couple conference papers and a side project article that's in final editing before submitting it, I got to try my hand at teaching film, took a job applying prep seminar, and I think the biggest was taking a seminar on how to teach writing. This summer we're getting ready to teach freshman writing in the fall, and the new assignment is SYLLABUS. It's getting scarily concrete.

I'll write more on that and a few other topics that have been brewing (some, like this one, in response to AMS listserve activity). But I want to launch back into this on a more gut level topic, specifically being stirred by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's season-closing performance of Mahler 9. They were great about providing me with an apology pair of comp tickets after last year's concert replaced Nielsen 5 with Rachmaninov's 2nd symphony (which I'd just heard two weeks prior) without my being notified. I was disappointed (as a friend and I agreed, it's like being promised a ride in juiced up rare car only to get a ride in a really big minivan).

The concert was absolutely amazing. Bernard Haitink had a perfect rapport with all the musicians, who were actively into it, and just nuanced control of all the disparate parts. I'll also put this forward: Mahler 9 is my vote for favorite/best symphony. Here's some musings on what grabs me.

The first movement starts out in little fragments, a note here, a rocking motive in the harp that recalls immediately the adagietto of Mahler 5 (and less immediately "Beautiful" from Sunday in the Park With George), and ultimately reaches this lovely three-note motive that never resolves to the tonic. It just hangs there, but somehow inflects a gentler yearning than what I'd expect. Like it's content to rest there on the second degree, and so are we. It's hard to summarize this movement most of all; it's like reading a novel that covers so much territory without getting lost. The orchestra kicks into high gear with the brass charging forward in a heroic effort that again doesn't get resolved, the mood darkens, then sweetens as the opening motive comes back, building back up again. And here's the thing: this movement struggles on and on, it's quixotic, it's weird. The melodies end abruptly, the orchestration turns on a dime, the harmonies are muddy and indistinct. The concert sold out, but maybe it's the name because late Mahler isn't really an audience pleaser. 90 minutes of this without intermission. Anyway, the first movement has the most marvelous ending- everything sort of peters out into a sweet chamber music moment built around that opening motive that hangs on the second scale degree until a harp and flute resolve it in the upper register. It's like magic, really, not just fulfilling that which you've been striving for for so long, but exceeding it with sheer simplicity of that one note that feels both attained (at last!) and unearthly, out of reach. Perfection, held just long enough to stop your breath.

The second is just the opposite: silly, earthly, bizarre. A folk dance burbles up through the orchestra but only for so long. Soon another dance tune intercuts it, then another and another, like a comic traffic pile-up. Then Mahler has fun with this wealth of ideas: the tunes get chopped up. They start answering each other in wrong keys, sliding around like dizzying musical banter, or maybe even like a cream pie fight. And since I work on collage, that's what this is: a collage of these various dance tunes, remixed in ever-changing ways and positions. I find it interesting that the folk dance movement provides the impetus for Mahler's release like this- maybe there's something to the physicalness of dance that allows this sort of musical embodiment of spinning out of control, fumbling around. And intercut with the dances are moments of rest, these echoes of that first movement motive. And then it ends like the first movement, hanging unresolved, then resolving in this cute little ripple of notes- different effect, similar means. I half-stifled my giggle.

The third movement is something of a march that can't quite decide on its character. A little overly self-serious at times, chipperly dysfunctional at others. Haitink caught, I think, the perfect tempo- there's a danger of letting it run away with itself, which undercuts the pomposity of it. The middle section is another statement of what will become the opening 4th movement theme, presented at first half-formed, harmonized in and out of tune, starting to blossom into the tenderest moment yet once the strings take it up, but that thought is left hanging, and the theme simply asserts itself again inquisitively, plays around a bit, before the clarinet takes it up in a mocking tone a la Till Eulenspiegel and the march theme inserts itself in playful counterpoint. This is something I love- the themes get treated in practically every way. They're comic, they're sweet, they're bombastic, and Mahler nails every mood just right.

I love the fourth movement most of all. It's the only one that doesn't feel like it's fighting against itself. It's the most harmonically triadic and grounded. Also, we've been introduced to the themes in more parodic fashion in the third and second movements; what's surprising is how straightforward it is and how effective it is just to let them unfold. The tone is incredibly hard to pin down. It's happy, but in a sad, irrevocably lost way, or maybe it's sad in a warm, accepting sort of way. It yearns but it doesn't feel directional or unfulfilled. More like it's about yearning than it isyearning. There's a climactic moment where the tension builds until the opening unison string gesture bursts in and the horns solidly affirm the main motive. But then the ending enriches it by reducing the orchestra to just a few instruments, in quiet, uncertain, dark counterpoint. The two different impulses are never really resolved; what we get is a rich but intimate string texture at rest, very fragile stability: a tonic chord, but with oscillations up and down in the violas that threaten to break it at any moment but by the end haven't.

If I seem overly anthropomorphic here, it's only because I want to emphasize how this symphony feels natural. Music seems to unfold in a logical but free way. It makes sense in ways that make sense when you hear it. And you should hear it (live, if possible).

Too fool for school

2010-04-01T17:58:00.002-04:00

I hope today's weather is not a prank, because let me tell you, I don't want more snow after the beautiful t-shirt weather sunny day we've had. Plans to hold some of class outside were put aside because nobody did the reading, so I went outside for 15 minutes while they all read. Maybe sections tomorrow will go better.

There's a lot I've missed posting about—SAM certainly merits some attention, and our double-bill of speakers Tom Turino on Peircian semiotics and David Huron on musical emotion also left me reeling with ideas. But I can't really be bothered with that on a blissful day like today, so instead I'll share a brief observation: there's very little less satisfying to me than finding the perfect music to fit the weather and mood of a day. Today, serendipitously talking about film with my Australian friend, we turned to Picnic at Hanging Rock. And while the day was much hotter, and the clothes much stiffer, there, the slow movement of Beethoven's Emperor concerto winds its way through the suffocating heat like a hint of a cool breeze. It's almost palpable. And putting that on as I headed back to the library (ugh), dawdling outside until the concerto ended, made for a perfect diversion.

Enjoy yourselves.

PS: for another, uh, diversion, and appropriately for today enjoy this not-a-joke cover.

Best of 2009: Cinema

2010-03-07T12:49:00.003-05:00

Well, it's Oscar night day, and my mind is already looking forward to the baked brie I'll be making and enjoying the uncertainty of a number of my predictions. So it's a good day to talk about the best 2009 had to offer.

Let's start with what I'm hoping wins BP: The Hurt Locker. I just saw it a second time, and loved it even more. There's a lot to be said for its construction- 2.5 hours of grueling tension which almost never lets up. But a second viewing led me to pay much more attention to the nuances of character, the way they feel actually complex to the viewer. Twice one character considers killing another, but we're never sure of the reasons. The characters remain enigmatic to us the way they remain just as enigmatic to each other, and probably to themselves. I also caught more of a character arc in the main character, the way his defenses subtly break down over the course of the film. This was actually only one of several Iraq movies to emerge this year, including the equally unsettling, complex study of war's effects The Messenger, and the disarmingly sharp satire In the Loop. In both of those, the war is off-camera but strongly felt nonetheless.

On a related note, 2009 was a year of powerful violence at the cinema. Steve McQueen's Hunger, a visually rapturous, gut-wrenching film about the hunger strike of Bobby Sands is one of the more remarkable exercises in pure filmmaking but never feels overdone. Equally beautiful in its depictions of violence is Michael Haneke's austerely creepy The White Ribbon, in which a German town clings to tradition, order, and naivete as a number of unexplained acts of cruelty are unleashed. Haneke still proves the master of taut psychological suspense, but does so with increasingly subtle overtones here.

There were a few welcome romantic diversions. I prefered the looseness and performances of the under-appreciated Away We Go, with award worthy comic performances by the leads John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph, to the overly quirky but smartly observant 500 Days of Summer, both good doses of summer love with a sharp aftertaste. And the platonic romance between Maria, the camera, and the camera store owner in Everlasting Moments, one of the year's most beautifully crafted films, was perfect and small. And the first third of Up captured the year's best romance, one whose absence provides the balloon-buoyant film with its necessary heft. But the bulk of this year's best relationships were shared between two men. Goodbye Solo, a quiet, charming film slowly spins a tale of finely-etched friendship between a cab driver and a suicidal man. Humpday and Funny People, both with their flaws, worked their best because of the way easy camaraderie between two men resulted in honest, soulful revelations. Moon, an impeccable science fiction movie, mused on a friendship between two clones, with funny and very human results. The Hurt Locker and The Messenger also fit this bill quite well.

Family loss was at the center of two excellent foreign films. STill Walking, a Japanese film riffing on Ozu's Tokyo Story but finding very much its own voice as a family struggles with the loss of a brother many years earlier. And Summer Hours, a smart French film about the loss of a family's heritage and unity in a globalized world. Political and smart without hammering a moral across, and ending on the perfect grace note. That similar sense of loss is what anchored Spike Jonze's sober and virtuosic adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are.

There was fun to be had at Star Trek and Up and Harvard Beats Yale 29-29, but none moreso than at Tarantino's uproarious rewriting of history in Inglourious Basterds. But the year's best comedy was a tart-edged throwback to Preston Sturges, where social realism and commentary mixed with screwball humor. This, of course, was Up in the Air, a film of immaculate comic timing, three incomparable leads and a stellar supporting cast, the flim rises above its topicality to be the best American comedy since Lost in Translation.

And that leaves us with what I have sometimes called the year's best film, certainly its most underrated. In such a crowded field, Sugar has gone almost unnoticed, which is fitting. Whereas Avatar, The Blind Side, and Precious all deal with race in an ultimately glossy and unsatisfying way, Sugar nails the complexity of being an immigrant in America with pathos and a richness lacked by anything else this year. And the ending is a perfect mix of uplift and heartbreak. Rent it.

Top 10 of 2009:
10. Away We Go
9. Summer Hours
8. In the Loop
7. Inglourious Basterds
6. Hunger
5. The White Ribbon
4. The Messenger
Threeway tie for first at the moment
Up in the Air/The Hurt Locker/Sugar

In short, I'm rooting tonight for The Hurt Locker, Wallace and Gromit, and a probably misguided hope for Meryl Streep (although that category rightfully belongs to Carey Mulligan, just as Actor belongs to Colin Firth, but I am aware of reality).

Best of 2009: Music

2010-02-23T21:11:00.003-05:00

Less organized, but here are some of the better new albums, new songs, and rediscoveries.

Grizzly Bear: album, Veckatimest; song, Two Weeks
Marvelous blend of warmth and cold across their songs, vocal harmonies are lush but the backgrounds can be marvelously spare. Two Weeks has enough of a pop edge to keep it immediately catchy but its subtle in how it unfolds.

Avett Brothers: album, I and Love and You; song Heart Like a Kickdrum
Pure adrenaline in that song, but there's a wonderful immediacy to the music, being half bluegrass folk roots and simplicity, half screaming punky energy. Their album is full of its share of perfect, heartbreaking tender moments too.

Animal Collective: song, My Girls.
Catchy in a way that seems so weird to work, but it does.

Bon Iver: album, Blood Bank.
4 songs, rich and focused. I need to listen more to get under them, but it's been rewarding so far.

Various artists: song, Mashup from Glee: It's My Life/Confessions.
Pure power pop hooks, immaculately assembled.

Various Artists: album, Dark Was the Night
It doesn't quite hang together as an album for me, but the parts themselves are some of the best offerings from a variety of sources- Grizzly Bear, The Books covering Nick Drake, Beirut, Sufjan Stevens, a marvelous small gem of a song from Iron and Wine, and a long but meticulous song from the Decemberists. And more.

And the best song of the year, Phoenix: album, Woldgang Amadeus Phoenix; song, 1901.
The video for this song is hypnotic, a light show, and what's more it is fit so musically with the song itself. The song grows out of a sparse, electronic texture into a fairly masterful dance hit. Vocals, guitar riffs add in. Then around a minute in, it bursts into a high-octane version, sunnier in its orchestration and with adrenaline-filled sense of slow build. Then at 1:15 or so, it manages to build even higher with a siren, until the chorus erupts: a few fleeting moments of full gratification. But here's the kicker- that moment is backed by that initial soundscape, setting up a second cycle perfectly, never dropping you for a second.

And since rediscoveries are so great, here are five recommendations of CDs that languished too long until this year:

Gil Shaham, Barber and Korngold violin concertos
Neeme Jarvi, Nielsen Symphonies
Europa Galanta, Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione
Dawn Upshaw, I Wish It So
Radiohead, The Bends

Best of 2009: Performances

2010-02-17T21:53:00.002-05:00

Time for a late catch-up of favorites, in several parts. No time like the sick-on-the-couch present.

Best live performances of 2009.

10. Next to Normal. A tuneful rock musical, anchored by marvelous performances and a gut-wrenching story.

9. International Contemporary Ensemble's production of John Adams. Vibrant reminder of just how good Adams's music is and how many ways it's good, from the shimmering textures of Shaker Loops to the quirky humor and sweet nostalgia of his Gnarly Buttons, played with precision.

8. Finian's Rainbow. Marvelous score, one of the best, in a no-frills, consummate performance.

7. Andras Schiff, The last Beethoven sonatas. One of the more compelling renditions of Beethoven, unmatched in the intensity of the quietest moments. The silence that hung in the audience after the last sonata's gentle conclusion was perfect.

6. West Side Story, Broadway. This revival not only gives a powerful reminder of just how good that score is, but also manages to nail the awkward pain of young love perfectly.

5. Grizzly Bear. Thrilling new indie band in a low-key, high-quality, intimate stage performance. Being something of an ignorant fan, it was like confirmation of their promise, even if the format of a classical-style concert was odd.

4. Stile Antico. One of the most stunningly clear, intimate vocal ensembles, in a marvelous program of simple Tallis and extravagant Byrd.

3. St. Louis Symphony. A marvelous program (luminous Wagner, Adams's dark, compelling Guide to Strange Places, Zimmerman's hypnotically spare Canto di Speranza, soaring rendition of Sibelius 5), conducted with vitality by Robertson.

2. Newport Music Festival. Marvelous performances, from the intimate music of The Low Anthem and Iron and Wine to the sheer joy and tunefulness of The Decemberists to the unmissable singalong with Pete Seeger. Next time, bring sunblock.

1. Our Town, Off-Broadway. Rarely is theater this compelling, this emotional. David Cromer's minimalist reworking of Wilder's classic feels fresh, its nostalgic aspects retain all their power, particularly in the stage manager's simple, direct delivery makes it feel honest rather than applied, but the intimacy of the characters is so engrossing and human. Marvelous.

Pierre, Part II & Conversations

2010-02-03T23:33:00.000-05:00

Pierre Boulez gave a brilliant concert a couple weeks ago. The Ravel Tombeau de Couperin was marvelously clear, graceful, and warm. The Dalbavie flute concerto, an example of "spectralism," followed. This piece is generative, the flute will elaborate from little cells from the orchestra, and the melodic lines sort of ripple back and forth. This makes a fascinating pairing- two texturally active, technically precise works, but one sharp and cool, the other atmospheric and warm. The second half was the Bartok opera Bluebeard's Castle, the sort of work that makes you wish Bartok wrote for films (other than Kubrick). Musically, the work is an astonishing array of orchestral colors, coupled with knockout vocal performances, Dramatically, though, I personally feel that Judith had little business complaining that the first room, which revealed a torture chamber, was "horrible" with its blood. I mean, it's a torture chamber. They're not supposed to be spotless or bright. And, by the way, just wait until you see the kitchen. This guy's been a bachelor for quite some time.

The next day, he gave a charming conversation with Glenn Watkins. There was a lot of little musicological stuff, some poetically evasive answers about the future of music ("music is a series of accidents that become important"), some wry personal comments (his disgust at the thought of retiring was a high point), and best of all just wonderfully evocative comments about other composers- Stravinsky's instrumentation, Bartok's inventiveness with form, and his programming choices ("Why not?" was all he said about the Schumann Rhenish symphony).

Then various things happened in the mean time. They're probably not that exciting to you all, but they sure took up my week.

This past weekend, we held our graduate student conference. The papers came from a variety of places, and it was again nice to see a broad variety of quality work from several disciplines.

Ramon Satyendra led a wonderfully provocative workshop discussion about how we evaluate different types of musical/analytical arguments. What do you do with important things that don't fit your model? How helpful is being invested in your model? How do the historical contexts of the theories themselves shape our understandings? I still have real big problems with the Lehrdall scientific mathematical modeling approach (the idea that so much of the work is just shelved to focus on melodic and harmonic pull is ridiculous), but that's part of the fun. David Lewin's work on Schubert's Ihr Bild, on the other hand, is a marvel of insight.

Kofi Agawu gave one of the most direct, clear, and thoughtful keynote addresses I've seen. He talked about how tonality served as a colonizing force in Africa, how it accompanied certain acts of oppression, and how Africans have in various ways sought to reinvent, subvert, or move beyond its colonial work.

Cupcakes. Oh my god, they were so good.

Finally, one of the greatest compliments was given to us this year. One of the participants noted how the Michigan campus was one of the friendliest and most collegial environments. That's a large part of why I chose this program, something I love about SAM too, and nice to see that it extends to our colleagues. So, next year apply and come! I promise you these cupcakes are worth it.

Orchestra Summit

2010-01-28T00:29:00.002-05:00

If I may draw your attention to the flurry of blogging activity from our fair University, which is hosting an American Orchestras Summit this week.

I attended a bunch of the panels today, and there are a number of ideas bouncing around out there.

Of greatest impact for me was Barbara Haws of the NYPhil Archive about the need for dialogue between music and the other arts. I could not agree more. I can't count the number of times I've been deferred to simply because I'm supposedly an expert in this. When did this start, this silencing of people from expressing opinions, observations? Would more teaching of terminology help? Theory? How about more teaching of music production angles too? I think this would help. And for those of us on this side of the gap, we need to engage with the other arts. My colleague Nate Platte designed a film music class with plenty of modeling and readings from film studies- just the way it should be. My dissertation is delving into the visual arts through collage, and I'm still meeting with resistance on occasion, or at least pressure to keep that talk down. It's a musicology dissertation first and foremost, and perhaps with job markets in mind spending time discussing visual arts at length would be unwise, but shouldn't a scholar want to open it up more easily for other fields? Or perhaps this is a major difference between dissertation and book.

A second idea was the call by Evan Chambers and Ken Kiesler to get beyond the capitalist system of judging our success, something I''ve maddeningly been ambivalent about embracing. It's obviously full of merit, but also just as obviously full of impracticality. But what would this mean? Obviously money will continue to be part of the equation, but how else can we tangibly and meaningfully measure success (and wouldn't money eventually enter back in)? I can think of ways (artistic excellence, new collaborations, new audiences) but all of these things have been on the table for some time, and it seems to me that in order for post-capitalist ideas, what can be offered besides money? Advocacy perhaps, but that usually diverts back to money. And the various nonmonetary thrills gained, the surge of energy or memories, the community aspects, are already there at least for me.

Finally, I liked Michael Jensen's discussion of the perils of technology. There's undeniably something more powerful about live performance. But is there a way to harness this more fully? Is there, for example, a way to make the event of attending these just as much about attending as the music (akin to a dance, a sporting event, or something?) I like attending things with less good music if the environment is welcoming and fun, if there's another draw (my folk dancing is like this- even when the band is subpar, the crowd can make up for it). And if the music is top-notch, it's just an added layer. A while back, Lawrence Kramer had an editorial about making concert going more like museum going, but that parallel is unfortunately, I think, too fraught with disjunctures. Still, I like the idea of the symphony as a flexible space, something that allows multiple levels of artistic encounters. A second paradigm it seems worth drawing from is the live show of a popular band. Isn't classical music sort of like loving a band, knowing it in enough depth to rhapsodize about one recording over another (akin to alternate takes for a band or cover versions), wanting to see it live because you love it and know the experience will be different. Could there not be something more like music festivals, encores, surprises in the programs, audience participation, audience interaction? Maybe the space needs to open up more for these possibilities. I think part of what I love about the University of Michigan's collage concerts is that it starts to approximate some of these (not all).

And finally (I know, it's a long post and it's late and I'm teaching in the morning), there's no single model that has to be fully and exclusively adopted. I think sacrifice is key here- we have to be willing to lose somethings we love to gain other things. I am happy to see programming I don't like on a program for diversity sake. I don't need every concert I attend to be the best in terms of artistic quality, and as much as I love new music, I don't need it 24/7. And others don't really just need Beethoven. And still others can admit the populist stuff to the table too, right? An orchestra isn't your personal object, and yet the people who I think love it, maybe more than others, treat it like that. There's a certain inflexibility that creeps into the thinking- programming I want, formats I want, quiet and polite. But there's no reason that it has to either all get tossed out or perfectly preserved. It's nor yourchestra, its ourchestra.

And with that poorly made pun, I'm out.

Pierre, Part I

2010-01-25T00:13:00.002-05:00

Just back from a lovely, spur-of-the-moment weekend in Chicago to hear Pierre Boulez and the CSO rock their way through The Firebird, a Boulez piece Livre pour cordes, and Bartok's Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion. The Boulez, possibly the first I've heard live, was very engaging, well textured, little fragmentary ideas sort of eliding and coalescing into more solid bits. The Bartok is a very cool piece, it's not really improved by being a concerto over the sonata, but if that's what it takes to get it played, so be it. Very exacting, lively, and I love the last movement with its jaunty little melodies, and then the sweetest ending imaginable, a little throwaway cadence and the drums fading perfectly into nothingness. Finally, the Firebird gets me everytime in the final movement, but what really came out so well in this performance was the clarity of texture, especially in the phenomenal wind playing. There's such energy and vivacity to the score, but then moments of simplicity really come across as almost naive. My favorite moment may be the games of the princesses- everything bubbles, then the music is cut short, a bit savagely here, then out of this limbo comes that gorgeous oboe solo, the tension just evaporates as quickly as it set in. Boulez isn't one for sentimentality, everything happens in tempo, but that actually works to great effect here- it's what is played rather than how it's played that communicates everything, or at least a delicate balance between the two.

Also on the new music front, I went to the composer's forum. SOme very nice stuff, including a Michael Nymany quartet that got a lot of richness out of the ensemble, and a marvelous piano/violin duo. I didn't think much of the first few excerpts, but the final two numbers were amazing. The penultimate featured string glissandos and these wisps of arpeggios fragilely arranged, and the final one a static D major chord over which lines spun out in all directions. Gorgeous.

Bedtime approaches, but soon I'll get around to year in review things, as well as Pierre Parts II and III (CSO is doing Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle here with Ravel and Dalbavie, and then Boulez is giving a talk).

New year, same place.

2010-01-09T21:53:00.002-05:00

I have, as you may have noticed, not posted much. It's partly been in a moderately successful effort to gear myself to writing more of a dissertation, and more recently because I just wanted to step away from the musicology world and enjoy my break. Which I did. I enjoyed the company of family and friends, discovered I can make an omelet that doesn't fall apart (while making jokes about Anubis), can sleep just as little on break as during the school year, and I can recite from memory the entirety of the theme song for The Nanny.

You can all expect more movie reviews, top tens, and other year end bits, but I want to start just broadly. Academically, his has been the first year of really, truly writing a dissertation, a year without structure. It was the last academic class I will likely take- a film historiography class I loved. It was also my one shot class of teaching my own course. These are all big moments, ones I've learned from: I like teaching. I excel at using my own enthusiasm to structure something. I don't quite know where I want to fall in the easy/hard grading spectrum. I still struggle with getting momentum early on in classroom discussions, especially early in the semester. And I also struggle with consistent writing production and self-editing. That's been the biggest issue I've faced in 2009, and will continue to face in 2010. And here's where the standard resolution making comes into conflict for me: I don't really know what I want to resolve, or how.

Dissertationally, I'm still figuring out how to be more effective. Not necessarily either quality or quantity, but just feel more satisfied.

I also need to be doing more other projects, publishing, papers, and yes, blogging. Balance.

I also need to read more pleasure books, practice some piano maybe. I've also considered trying to do some fun, social sightsinging, without performing or perfecting. And of course, I'd like to revisit movies and do more pleasure reading.

But the one resolution I've made is to keep up more with current music. I think NPR's All Songs Considered is a good starting place. Other suggestions?

Bad news on the doorstep

2009-12-17T00:09:00.002-05:00

One of the perks of being done with grading is the ability to resume my role of moviewatcher, and last night's selection The Messenger is a marvelous, somber film with perfect pacing. While The Hurt Locker is sweeping up critics awards (and deservedly so), this makes something of a companion piece, viewing the current war with much-needed pathos and intelligence. The film follows two men, played by Ben Foster and Woody Harrelson, who are assigned the task of informing various people that their spouses, sons, and daughters have been killed. As you can expect, the film is pretty harrowing. The blows aren't softened, nor are they windows into deep thoughts; they simply spill out in raw emotion, and then we leave. These moments may make up the emotional core of the film, but they operate somewhat on the periphery. Actually, almost everything operates on the periphery of the story: a romance broken off, a romance begun with a widow played by the always superb Samantha Morton, and a subtly potent scene in which a welcome home party wanders irrevocably from joking into awkward silence, echoed later by a wedding toast that narrowly avoids disaster. Even the central relationship between Foster and Harrelson never feels like it commands attention. There are plenty of tears, and a rewarding number of laughs, but the film is governed by its silences, and that's I think its central achievement: a sound design that provides much of the drama that goes unspoken by the characters. In one scene, a father's Mozart and a daughter's rock and roll clash moments before the characters confront one another. The film makes prominent use of noise: loud, aggressive rock music, a method of blocking out the silence, aggressively loud phones ringing and talk radio ad television advertisement hosts practically assaulting the listener, and elsewhere equally loud silences. It's the attention the film pays to the details, and by that I include the personal details nailed by the film's performances and richly warm timing, that makes it so deeply affecting and deeply believable. I can't recommend this one enough.

2009-12-09T00:55:00.002-05:00

I can't believe it's only the first snow of the season! I'm nestled up on the couch with the blog, enjoying the peace and quiet before tomorrow's storm of grading begins. I also can't believe I've gone this long without blogging, although it's been a whirlwind of activity since AMS, including:

-Well, AMS. It was a fantastic, if crazy with all the people. There were people I never saw until they were checking out of the hotel. But those I did see were great. There was a variety of papers (more than I expected to go to)- Robert Fink's illuminating and provoking look at the design process of Disney Hall (how wonderful, really, to reach out into other fields (especially architecture and urban planning!)), Albin Zak's fascinating look at novelty records of the early 1950s (the best music of the weekend), the fantastic handout by John Howland tracing the path of orchestras in "luxe pop," a handout which beautifully captures not just ideas but the process of making them, and my advisor's rather successful look at Jimi Hendrix's versions with the national anthem. There was a fun evening spent with bloggers Phil and Ryan, tasty food at Sabrina's with fellow Michiganders, the horribly inefficient giant musicology party with everyone where I saw no one, and those great moments on the escalator or in the lobby, catching up. More of those please. Ottawa, people?

-Money, Writing, Grading. A large part of my craziness since returning has been the need to get out a second chapter, grade things, and in the course of a week, write a fellowship proposal I wasn't informed I had to do things for. I survived, but let's not speak of this again. On the upside, the chapter is coming together

-Writing. I just moderated a panel yesterday with Jim Wierzbicki, one of our great mentors here who's leaving for a job in Australia. Jim's role here is editor of MUSA, but he's also one of the most helpful and giving of his time for students. He wanted to organize a panel on publishing, which included two of our most published scholars, Judith Becker and Richard Crawford. Seriously, it was a delight to have these three there, eating pizza and sharing stories, offering great advice. There's a lot I could say, but two of the most revelatory moments were the advice to read fiction and poetry to get yourself accustomed to the art of writing well, and when doing interdisciplinary work, the key isn't the inter, it's the discipline (i.e. know the field you're entering as well as someone in it). I came out of it with new zeal, much of it directed to the drafts I've been reading of my students. Maybe we should start a book club, reading short stories and other bits? I can pass on a recommendation of the New Yorker this week, with a story by Ian McEwan of an interdisciplinary marriage, and Judith Becker's new article in Ethnomusicology about the process of interdisciplinary work in the sciences.

-I gave a lecture for the ethnomusicology class. It was on transcription and documentation and politics. The lecture itself felt rough and boring, but I really enjoyed section that week, in which I led students through the newspaper in search of photos that revealed more than just documentation. This week, it's test review.

-Thanksgiving. I made food for 25 people: a 24 pound turkey, squash stuffed with feta, rosemary, and cranberries, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, sweet potatoes and apples, sauteed mushrooms, garlic green beans, cranberry sauce, and 12 pies (pumpkin, sourcream apple, pecan oatmeal). Wine followed, work did not.

-Musical performances, movies, Glee, and assorted moments of fun. I will say the score to An Education is among the most buoyant musical bits this side of the Candide overture.

And now, it is time to head to bed in preparation of the piles of grading and maybe piles of snow! I will endeavor to be more active once again...

I'd rather be in Philadelphia

2009-11-12T08:25:00.002-05:00

and I am! Hours before AMS 2009 kicks off, I'm loving every minute of being back home (for certain definitions of home, I suppose). I'm happily staying on the fold-out couch of my good college friend Cameron, who lives in a long-walkable distance from the conference. I can also attend this conference guilt -free (and resume posting) since I finally got everything together and revised my chapter, sending it off to the committee last Monday. What else have I done?

-teaching and grading. I now need to turn my attention to the lecture I'm giving the freshmen music students next week (!) on documenting music and the issues involved with notation, recording, video, photography etc. Any suggestions are welcomed!

-dancing. i"ve been teaching a 6-week Scottish dance class in Ann Arbor that has come to a close. Theres an enormous amount of pride in seeing people learning, having fun, and making lots of noticeable progress. Very heartening. I've also gotten in a couple dances here, which is quite satisfying.

-food and friends, here and in New York. Tastiest adventure: making acorn squash stuffed with feta, rosemary, and dried cranberries and butternut squash with cinammon, brown sugar, and walnuts, with Scrabble while roasting. My mouth is already watering for the food to be had at AMS.

-research. Just a bit.

-musicals! I saw Finian's Rainbow and Next to Normal. An odd pairing to be sure: one is an classic bit of musical comedy, the other a contemporary musical which tends to mean serious drama and a pop rock score. In fact, one of the fun games you can play at either is to try to find someone under 35 at Finian's Rainbow and someone over 35 at Next to Normal. But both were excellent. It astounds me how good the score to Finian's Rainbow is, and how far good songs performed with extra care and not a hint of irony can go for taking a weird, schtick-loaded book to soaring heights. Oh, and the clever, clever lyrics still get me, written by a guy who came of age decades earlier. Delicious. And Next to Normal actually churns out a fair amount of variety and memorability in its score, with several nice turns of phrases, but the power of the show is in its astonishingly-acted book, drenched in emotion without losing much of its crispness. I may have more to say, but that will have to wait until after this conference. It's good to be back here and out east.

This Song Is Your Song

2009-09-11T11:22:00.002-04:00

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

2009-09-09T12:04:00.001-04:00

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

2009-09-04T12:45:00.002-04:00

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?

2009-08-31T13:20:00.002-04:00

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

2009-08-19T15:29:00.002-04:00

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

2009-08-17T10:56:00.002-04:00

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

2009-08-13T15:28:00.004-04:00

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.

Mostly Meowzart, Meow (re)Mix

2009-08-07T18:58:00.003-04:00

Greyhound now carries wireless. This is great for people like me who keep meaning to update but keep having things like life getting in the way. This lifestyle of spend all day in the archive because you only have a few days, and then spend all night playing pub trivia, or better yet contradancing and then swimming in Walden Pond with other contradancers and then having cider and cheesefries is proving quite bad for the option of writing. I'm certainly not getting any of the dissertation done, but neither am I updating here, until now. Sort of.

On the heels of cats performing Schonberg comes a cat concerto! ADORABLE!

So why post all this? I'm doing it oddly enough to seize upon Phil's idea that we ought to have something to say about the AutoTune the News. I can say that I love it, especially number 6, and that I actually went to college with Evan Gregory (and Andrew, but I knew Evan as a fellow music major and proud member of the college chorus's tenor section). And so I thought I'd take up the challenge.

It seems to me one could say a number of things. For a start, there's the obvious points about techn it's a good example of how technology has made music so much easier to create and distribute, although I stress that Evan at least has a bachelors training in all this stuff, so he's not clueless by any means. It might for some raise questions of whether autotuning or this sort of remixing really counts as talent, a relevant issue for my friend Josh Duchan who did his dissertation on collegiate a capella.

There's the second level, the notion of the sound bite has totally pervaded the culture; what I like about these is that it draws a nice link between soundbites and the musical equivalent of the hook: something that grabs your attention and is in some way the essence of the song. And that's where I think the AutoTune series is best. It's political commentary is smart, similar to the Daily Show in its seizing on the more ridiculous aspects of our 24-7 news coverage (a favorite topic of Stewart's), though certainly a bit more absurdist. But what impresses me about the evolution of the series is it goes from a clever idea and commentary to an increasingly good musical number. In the early bits, Katie Couric's highly inflected vocal delivery is perfect, but in the later bits, it's almost wall-to-wall hooks ("Biden's God Bless America in #5, Boehner's Hell No! and Freedom in number #6); and the repetition of the hook maps so sweetly onto the repetitiveness of these politicians' buzzwords. In these later episodes, they move from simply sampling to a certain artistry in the give and take between themselves and the soundbites--in short, from arranging to composing.

I guess where I'm going with this is that the technological and political aspects are interesting, but what it meant for me was just sheer enjoyment. The cleverness and humor (likewise, the cats) are something I feel are constantly in danger of being lost in analysis by musicologists, a shame since the goal for me is always to share what it is about the music I love with people who might love it similarly. Hooks are good like that, perfect for visceral, immediate pleasure. Better than, say, writing a dissertation.

Coming up soon(ish), a report on the Newport Folk Festival at 50.

Music at the Movies: 2009

2009-07-29T15:42:00.003-04:00

While home, I availed myself of the "dollar" theater ($2.50) to see The Soloist, a film I had been on the fence about way back when. While in Philadelphia, I decided to see Tetro, a film I can't really explain why I went to it (directorial starpower?).

But both of these rank really high on my film music side, if less high on my film side. Tetro's score is composed by none other than Oswaldo Golijov, and while the film's use of it isn't terribly inventive, the music is really quite marvelous on its own terms. Also, I admire the film's use of the Brahms first symphony, a work that always feels exhausting to listen to and is given a formidable presence, the operatic structures, and the use of dance (even though it looks fake and out-of-place in its final presentation). On the other hand, The Soloist is surprisingly good, tender and human without being sappy or formulaic, but what really grabbed me is how effective the film is at visualizing music. There's a synesthetic experience which goes on a little too long, but the poetry of the gliding cameras, the images and music somehow really works together in a way that is altogether rare, simple, and elegant. That's three hits for Joe Wright.

How to procrastinate, archive edition

2009-07-18T12:08:00.002-04:00

At the Library of Congress, I've been exceptionally productive (I'm in Philly airport now, heading down to North Carolina). The Antheil correspondence here is fascinating, doubly so for the comparisons of letters to a childhood friend and those to Mary Bok, who gave him money. Let's just say they don't always match up.

Yesterday I went to the National Archives 2 (I cannot avoid thinking about National Treasure 2 when I say or type this). Here's how you procrastinate there- it's very easy because they do it for you!
9:45 arrive, realize you'll miss the 10 am pulling of records, next pulling is at 11.
9:48 get through the metal detector.
9:50 get instructed to take a tutorial on the computers
9:51 realize that this is practically like reading the website, which, being the studious scholar you are, you have already done the night before.
9:55 still take that tutorial
10:00 go up, get told more info, get your picture taken
10:05 go put your things in a locker. This is hard but doable if you have a suitcase.
10:08 try to close the locker, fail. Fail repeatedly. Get your money back.
10:12 figure it out: there were two quarters blocking the mechanism. On the upside, you have 50 cents more!
10:15 go to with your computer to the entry desk, give them your card, have them ask you for a form you don't have
10:18 get said form
10:20 get through security
10: 25 register upstairs
10:30 wait for assistance
10:38 get a finding aid, proceed to start filling out forms
10:45 get told you did it wrong, fill them out again
10:50 get a new finding aid, get told to fill them out again
10:58 they come to collect for the 11 am pulling, ask the guy if everything is correct, get told yes.
10:59 turn them in phew!
10:59 get them returned with the comment that you neglected to fill in something
11:03 turn them in late, but the guy knows it wasn't really your fault and takes them back personally
11:09 discover there's no wireless; go eat a sandwich
11:13 discover checking out is more complicated than checking in, go upstairs to retrieve aforementioned form
11:19 check out, eat
11:35 check back in.
11:40 check to see if material is pulled; repeat every couple minutes until 11:58, when material is available.

After that, it's a lot like the LOC, except you get to take everything with you on a cart, and can make your own photocopies (after another complicated process I'm too hungry to get into).

Away We Go!

2009-07-11T23:32:00.003-04:00

The title, for those out of the loop, is a worthy summer comedy to take yourself and even a date too (not a first one though). It's funny how Sam Mendes, the dude who made some atrociously overwrought suburban dramas lets himself go into a breezy comedy with a real affecting lead couple. It's a treat.

As for me, I've taken off for the summer, Thursday flying to New York for a day before heading down here to Philly for a wedding (ironically, I had an unexpected layover in Philly). Getting on the plane, I picked up the first pleasure book in a long while, and had settled into my chair. The book is Devil in the White City, a well-recommended bit of pop nonfiction (a rarity for me) on the designing of the Chicago World's Exposition and the serial killer who stalked it. But as I started reading, I grew displeased. I mentally started criticizing the author's proclivity towards meandering sentences that dump factoids indiscriminantly, especially noting the ones that have nothing at all to do with the story. Worse still, he made all sorts of judgments about how he thought things went down with the serial killer. I was flipping to the back to check out the endnotes, and horrified to discover no citations for his revisions. And as I put the book down, switching to a podcast of This American Life, I paused, wondering whether all this dissertation research has ruined pleasure reading, or if these are valid criticisms. I honestly don't know, but was greatly relieved that This American Life still charms me more than just about anything.

Friday, I wandered over to Columbia to check out the George Antheil papers. Our university has a program with them, so getting a reader's card was super easy, and they have wireless you don't have to log into, and the staff is very friendly and the room quite attractive and spacious. My only complaint: handwriting. Roger Sessions needs to make his Ls bigger. Several other correspondents were even worse, and then we hit the ones in French. It's hard enough for me to read a language I half-know, but when you don't even know what half the words are, the context is completely shot. Perhaps I'll make photocopies and have a friend look at them, but considering this is a small part of only one chapter (although the dude is fascinating, especially when he talks about Hollywood), I probably will let it slide. I am resolved to insist upon handwriting samples before embarking upon future studies.

The above statement should not be in any way reflective of my own hand writing and note taking. If I leave unfinished manuscripts, good luck.

Things our teenager selves loved

2009-07-02T22:33:00.003-04:00

I wasn't going to post anything about Michael Jackson, partly because of the everyone's-doing-it-so-I-can't (the same thing that sometimes prevents me from ordering the same thing as anyone else at the table), and partly because I didn't believe I really had much to say. Unlike every other person on the web, I can't remember when I first heard his music. From the current standpoint, there's no denying his impact on the pop music scene. I know I knew it growing up, and I know I never paid much close attention to pop music growing up. But it filtered in, and I think what Michael Jackson's death hammered into me was how quietly this music entwines itself with your life, even when you aren't looking. There's something unnamable about the music, something immediately likable about it (it's easy to see why it was such a sensation, even from those delightful Jackson 5 videos), something that leaves you saddened at the loss, a loss that began years before, and grateful that music is something that stays around. How fortunate a gift music is.

In the past few days, there have been tributes, there have been the awkward moments recalling the numerous Michael Jackson jokes that underscore that aura of sadness that enshrouded his most recent years, that misplaced idealism, the bizarre fixations on his face, the questions never answered, and most potent there has been his music, heard anew. I'm not sure whether it excuses or makes us forget the man himself, but it seems to have restored something of our faith in him. I've been tearing through the writings of Charles Ives in these days before the 4th of July. Ives has much to say about the character of man, about spiritual strength endowing music with substance. It's presented me with a conundrum, one which has been debated of late: what impact does/should a musician's personal life have on our appreciation of his or her music? Does Elia Kazan's naming of names affect how we receive his movies? It certainly did for years, as Karl Malden's death notices point out frequently. What of Wagner? It's a hard thing to reconcile, but I believe art is greater than a human's faults. Plenty of mediocre work is done by perfectly nice people. But whatever Michael Jackson's personal failings, the truth about which I'll never actually know, they don't take away the power his music, music that invites us to envision a world of closer unity, and even helps create it by sharing his music.

I'd love to close with a pithy line of Jackson's or Ives's, but all I can think of are the lyrics to Fame, actually. Even if he doesn't make it to heaven, he does light up the sky.

California Adventure

2009-06-10T22:53:00.002-04:00

I'm back from grey, rainy, chilly (man, was I unhappy about that) California, where I attended the IASPM Conference, giving my Weezer paper. It's probably my favorite paper to give, if only because everyone promptly tells me how much they love the Blue Album, how they haven't listened to it in years, and how they're putting it on when they get home. I remember writing the paper for a seminar, and enraging the people who came upon me watching music videos and having the gall to call that work. The conference itself was entirely delightful, despite only knowing a couple people (and not that well), but relaxed and friendly, populated with a nice variety of disciplines happy to meet new people. Elsewhere in California, I enjoyed brief jaunts to the Warner Brothers Archive at USC and Bernard Herrmann Papers at UCSB, both of which were more or less successful (I wasn't sure what I was looking for at USC, and they don't have a finding aid, so I really didn't know, and UCSB had the Vertigo score but nothing else), a delightful chamber music concert at the beautiful Disney Hall (Dvorak Piano QUintet and Schubert B-Flat Sonata, two of my favorite chamber pieces), the SFMOMA's excellent Robert Frank and William Kentridge exhibits, the Exploratorium (a blast), a walk along the Sutro Baths, and of primary importance the company of a number of good friends I hadn't seen in years. Business and pleasure.

In other news, I'm intrigued by this pair of posts from Greg Sandow, discussing meaning in classical music in China and Palestine. In the former, he sees a lack of political content:

Rock, again, has meaning. Which means it has content. Rock songs say something. ...Classical music, by contrast, has no such content. You can study Chopin, let's say, without much chance that you're going to explode on the scene playing his music in ways that threaten any government.

In the latter, he writes that the music gives Palestinians a sense of escape, as well as a connection outside:

Classical music thus takes on a political meaning, precisely -- what a paradox -- because otherwise it wouldn't have any. You rise above any stereotypes others might have of you (or at least in principle you could) , and take your place in a worldwide enterprise in which those stereotypes no longer make any sense.

I think there's something to be said about the contrasts in how the music is viewed across (and even within cultures), and I will readily make the caveat that I'm not an expert in either of these two cultures, but these posts feel oversimplified. The comments do a nice job of drawing out at least some of he complexities. To me, these seem less about whether classical music has content (it always does) or what it is for whom (it varies), but about the intersection between the two. Classical music is easily seen as apolitical (is in the China posting), or universal (as in the Palestine post), but these ideas trouble me, about as much as the ideas about classical music as escapism trouble Mr. Sandow. Might we ask what it means for a state to sanction classical music at large, or more intriguingly, only by certain people or in certain contexts? Or what it means for classical music to be "international"? Which is not to say we should deny that these myths are very powerful ones (about as powerful as the myth of authenticity in indie rock, to bring it back to my Weezer paper), but simply acknowledge them for what they are- and what they aren't.

The other IMF

2009-05-19T23:31:00.003-04:00

One of my other, nondissertation duties here is co-running the Interdisciplinary Music Forum. Most of the time, it's fairly small scale, things like organizing forums for students to share their work, inviting scholars to give talks, reading groups. But my favorite part is the two-day residency we hold with a scholar, and this year I was very very thrilled (as I think was everyone) to have Professor Philip Bohlman from Chicago.

Yesterday, he presented some new work and in conjunction with his highly-recommended book The Music of European Nationalism, opened up a discussion. His own work touched upon some fascinating bits including Jewish populations in Europe, parades, Herder's folk collections, and the Eurovision song contest. I know for me, it opened up some new windows of thought for my own dissertation. His distinction between national and nationalist musics strikes me as a rather important and undervalued one, and raises the question of how the national music is arrived at and how the idea of sameness is negotiated. I was also fond of the striking images Bohlman picks- the parade, the song contest, the Euro, the anthology. That's the art historian in me, which brings me to what Professor Bohlman's stressed at the very start: interdisciplinarity. The need for musicologists to engage with broader audiences, to realize that your dissertation isn't as narrow as you might think (actually he highly recommended writing your first book not on the dissertation). And Bohlman is a terrific role model for this. He is, after all, the author of one of the more foundational texts in my personal canon: Musicology as a Political Act. He also exposes the myth that there's some deep chasm in between historical and ethno musicology, between scholar and performer, between musicologist and anybody else. The only thing I'm not sure I'd want to emulate is his getting up before 7.

Oh, and the Norwegian winner of the Eurovision is adorable, the back up dancers are doing a halling and the song has been stuck in my head all day. See for yourself!

Fanboy

2009-05-13T00:29:00.002-04:00

While everyone else was out seeing the Star Trek movie, I was seeing something else at the local theater. But first, an admission: I love sports movies. I rarely watch sporting events, let alone follow them, but put a formula will-they-pull-off-the-victory screenplay in front of me, I will root tirelessly. So I can happily report that Harvard Beats Yale 29-29 is nothing short of supremely entertaining. There's not much to the film: clips of the game interspersed with reminiscing interviews with the members of each team. But amongst the name dropping and bizarre facts comes little snatches of the political and social upheavals (or not) from that time. And not least, the game itself: WOW!

In other cinema news, I can recommend Adventureland and I Love You Man if they're still playing. The former (from the director of Superbad) is another entry in the coming-of-age-post-college film, dropping the bizarre humor of the Superbad and opting for sincerity. Sometimes, the earnestness and quirky atmosphere becomes sort of suffocating, but the lead actors sell it well enough. And I Love You Man is another study in male relationships, and whatever it lacks in insight, it makes up for in Paul Rudd's incredibly funny and appealing naturalism.

Finally, I'll put in a plug for Hunger, one of the grimmest and yet most strikingly beautiful films I've ever seen. It tells the story of Bobby Sands and the hunger strike in Northern Ireland but avoids any clear political lines or easy sympathies. Rather than a sweeping epic, chock-full of social meaning, we have a carefully detailed, claustrophobic, and ultimately immensely personal study of violence. If the first third is stomach-churning in its violent, shit-smearing realism, the final third is equally disturbing in its austerity as the hunger strike wears on. Dividing these bookends is a lengthy discussion of morals between prisoner and priest that strikes the perfect tone and weight, intense and vital, the center around which the swirling events are anchored. The movie is directed by the video artist Steve McQueen, and shows in its aestheticism and asceticism. Beauty has never been so viscerally haunting.

Spring Returns

2009-05-08T01:52:00.002-04:00

In the past week, Ann Arbor has erupted into a verdant sea of nature, made twice as idyllic by the absence of tens of thousands of undergrads. And with that, I feel I should make my long-negligent return to the internet.

I have a lot to show for my absence. I wrote what will be my last academic class paper. This class, which I've probably raved about already, was fantastic. Ostensibly on film historiography, it presented a lot of theory and practice, dos and donts for any type of academic research. The class had 8 students, all of us with historiographic archival projects. Our penultimate and antepenultimate classes were devoted to workshopping our papers, and the last class to general musings about what else we'd like to learn, suggestions for the course, and good cheer- and it was held at a bar. This I approve. And I think the course helped me concretely, not to mention really pushed my research skills. The result, a 54 page paper. A paper I felt invested in, one I hope to convince my committee should be in my dissertation, and one that left me pondering what next. Writing and researching it was hell, hours and hours of microfilms, keeping track of over a hundred film reviews. But it's that energy, that feeling like your writing isn't just an exercise or the final step to dump whatever you've read but a process of continuing discovery.

Also, the end of the semester means grading. You know, I put on three Gene Kelly musicals, and just sat there grading essays until I finished. The exams are the sticking point here. I loved teaching, I loved the engagement with the students. We had plenty of great in-class discussions, and I felt like they not only grasped things, but could offer their own ideas and felt safe and encouraged to do so. That's a major victory. But the exams sink back to mediocrity- playing it safe by regurgitating ideas, convoluted and unengaged writing, and the occasional bizarre leap or interpretation that only builds my excitement for something daring but never delivered. And so I continue mulling over how to design an exam or paper that doesn't just challenge but encourages students to really engage personally. (Actually, I do like much of the exams and the papers, but it needs work as always).

But these things are past. It's spring, I can enjoy the weather. I had a lovely lunch today with three of my undergrad friends. And I'm making progress on my first chapter draft, which I started Monday and have found a nice, relaxed, productive pace to start the summer. Later there will be a conference, friends in distant cities, archival moments, and the usual. But for now, it's enough to enjoy that walk to the library through the green campus, and the satisfying walk back in the afternoon and put the computer and books away.

Musicology nice

2009-04-21T14:08:00.002-04:00

I've been thinking about Phil's recent post on the subject of politeness and the lack thereof in our field.

A lot of what he writes I don't doubt its veracity, but I haven't seen it. I'm thankfully a couple years and a dissertation away from being on the job market. I've gotten turned down a lot for conferences, but I'm not vindictive about it, just resigned to keep trying. There are some people whose papers I find not terribly well-delivered or clear or maybe I just disagree with the premise. There are some I disagree with politically. There are some who, frankly, annoy me. But that doesn't mean I can't chat with them in the book room or that I won't listen to what they have to say, or solicit or offer advise when it's desired. There's room.

And I expect the same, not because I'm a musicologist, but actually because I was born in the midwest. I think a lot of it is a cultural thing. Midwesterners, I've found, do put on a veneer of niceness and politeness at all costs, and it's hard to break that expectation. I like to think that in most occasions it is deeper than that though.

One thing Phil talks a lot about is the high-small-stakes competitiveness. I'm not very competitive. And one of the big reasons I chose Michigan over the other school I was accepted to was because of the student interaction (not that the other school was competitive per se, but because I didn't get a community sense). I like the idea that you're part of a larger community of scholars and friends and mentors, and that there's room for disagreements of all sorts, but that doesn't mean we don't care. Or at least that I don't. And over the years, I've been witnessed some tackier moments from friends. Once someone responded to someone's paper by asking what conference it was from, and upon learning said, "Oh, you mean the one I got rejected from?" Please. That's not getting your paper in, and that's not helping the other student. At the same time, my silence probably wasn't helping either, but neither would severing ties. This is actually part of why I like community- when someone makes a bad comment, you can feel slightly better that it's not ill-intended.

And I like Phil's suggestions. We should be willing to listen, to rethink, to question ourselves and each other. That's not beneath anyone. And I'll add one more- make sure whatever you do is helpful. Promoting fear isn't helpful. Pointing out weaknesses can be, but in order for it to be, you have to know that the person means well. That's where niceness, real niceness, goes a long way. There's no denying the arguments get heated because we care enough to actually do this for years and years. But we're people first, scholars second, and there's a difference between calling someone's work idiotic and getting personal. So the midwesterner in me says keep it nice, and the scholar in me says keep it honest. I don't think that's contradictory.

Click

2009-04-16T16:25:00.004-04:00

I've always been really bad at taking photos. I get too caught up in actually experiencing the moment to step back and want to preserve it. And as much as I like looking through photos which call to mind wonderful memories of a summer at dance camp, a house I used to live in, a pet I loved, a friend who moved away, a joke I shared with someone, there's also something captivating about looking at a stranger's photos. I do the thing at other people's houses where you look at their books (and music and movies) and judge them, but every now and then it's not half as attention-arresting as a candid photo. Oddly enough, photography exhibits intrigue me only to a certain point. No, there's a certain intimacy in photographs- personal memories that I think gets lost in most public photography.

This comes to mind, because I went to see Everlasting Moments last night. It's a wonderfully intimate film, anchored by an indelible performance by Maria Heiskanen, but I especially admire how well the film captures the alluring beauty of a photograph, equal parts affect and aesthetics. The movie is a sort of family history tale, of a family in Sweden at the turn of the century, of the father's love and drunken anger over work, infidelities hidden and assumed, the aspiriations of their children, but mostly about the mother and her discovery of a camera and what her forays into photography give her. The cinematography is lovely, spare, striking in its beautiful plainness, and the score is utterly effective, a fragile array of roughly-played strings and piano, as if Webern or Ligeti had arranged Hans Zimmer. Actually, if you know the O Albion movement from Thomas Adès's Arcadiana, it's similar to that.

I also really prefer the original title: Maria Larsson's Everlasting Moments. It really is her film, and these moments truly are hers, and the film respects that sort of intimacy and allows us to steal a peak at them. Broader themes impinge upon the story (the abusive husband, socialism, gender issues), but these scenes almost feel out of place when they threaten to tip the balance too much from the heart of the story, which is simply Maria's self-discoveries, small, quiet, but never insignificant.

There are two seasons in Michigan: winter and concert.

2009-04-09T15:52:00.003-04:00

The joy of this time of year (aside from the meteorological surprises- warm! snow! in April! warm!) is all the music that happens. The downside is all the work happens now too- in the next couple days I need to knock out a draft of this paper on the reception of Nashville, a project that gets more and more intriguing with every letter to the editor, article, and rewatching of the film. But I'm not slowing down my concertgoing.

At the beginning of the month (back when it was warm), I went to see the St. Louis Symphony. The NYTimes has a similarly glowing report and story, but I must say I found it riveting. Wagner's Good Friday music is straightforwardly soaring, but the high point was John Adams's work Guide to Strange Places. It's a sonic adventure, from its shimmering, churning beginning, peppered moments of sweetness, before things begin turning grotesque, ending with these outbursts of percussion punctuated by low brass growls. And the symphony played the hell out of it, nonstop fascination. I wish there was a recording out there (aside from the bootleg I acquired for my pre-concert talk). The second half had Zimmermann's hypnotic Canto di Speranza, a work that felt flat, but live acquired a certain quiet desperation that really succeeded in drawing me into to its little timbral, pointillist world. And then, as the NYT says, a brilliant SIbelius 5, soaring horns perfectly melded with translucent string parts (think Mendelssohn here, and actually it works quite well with Adams's orchestrations). And of course, Robertson was the perfect host, talking a little about the Adams, and even singing happy birthday to an audience member.

The talk itself was quite a lot of fun. About 30 high school students came, I talked about some ways to hear the music that you might not think of- the way time sort of blossoms in Sibelius 5, especially in the second movement where everything melts at its own pace, and the orchestrational marvels of the last movement; Adams's slow changes and textures, combined with an actual sense of a journey where things creep along the horizon and change as they grow nearer; Zimmermann's rather human-voice-like cello writing, yearning for something against a colder, unresponsive background. I'd like to think it was successful. I at least had a blast, and the teacher seemed to like it. And the students did have great questions.

And then I went to the DSO for two concerts: Brahms 4, nicely textured and fluid, Britten's Four Sea Interludes, which sounded a little uneven in the strings and winds for the first but gelled especially in a downright demonic Storm, and Berg's luminous violin concerto, one of my all-time favorite works. I can't get enough of it. An odder concert was the Messaien Colors of the Celestial City and Stravinsky's sharp, clear Movements for piano and orchestra (two rarely heard and worth getting), mixed with Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe Suite #2 (ravishing), and Bolero (I cannot stand this piece), and Bizet's Symphony in C. I know Bizet is French, but it's not a french-sounding piece. It's mostly charming, but everytime I listen to it, I feel like it's ripping off better composers—a bit of Schubert in the melodies, a bit of Beethoven in the cadences, a bit of Mendelssohn in the transitional material. And an odd piece amongst all the orchestral color, too long to be a palette cleanser, not weighty enough on its own. Still, they were free.

And a moment popped up after the Berg. I was there with some other students (non music majors) from another class a professor of mine is teaching (but I didn't know any of them). One of the women after the concert saw a group of young kids and struck up a conversation with a few of us, asking how we liked it and such. But before I could say anything she scoffed at the Berg (I know, right?), saying "Yeah, I bet can't sing anything from that last one, right?" And the other students laughed (I honestly don't know what they thought, except they tried to agree with both her and me). But I thought about how to respond. I mean, that's not really what we go to a symphony concert to do, right, come away whistling a melody? I mean, Beethoven symphonies often really don't have very memorable melodies, and we don't fault him for that. SO I tried to get at what exactly she meant, but she just sort of demurred. It's hard, you know, when someone doesn't like a piece that you love, and resists any attempt to like it. I resisted any urge to poke holes in her sing-a-long classics theory, though I'm sort of ambivalent about letting people enjoy music their own way (and accepting that people may not like something) versus trying to win them over. Sex, politics, religion, and now we can add Berg.

On the horizon: Andras Schiff tonight and Saturday in Beethoven's last 6 piano sonatas; Harry Potter the Musical this weekend; 42nd Street in a couple weekends; Takacz Quartet doing Haydn, Bartok, and the Schumann piano quintet (a rare Schumann piece that I love); and of course countless student performances. Though none, I imagine, will quite equal the hauntingly effective, sugary bitterness selections from Hanns Eisler's Hollywood Songbook.

Mile high, milestones

2009-03-25T23:55:00.002-04:00

This afternoon, I successfully defended my dissertation prospectus. It was, in fact, a rather nice process, with suggestions ranging from the specific/technical to the broader implications. This is, in a strange way, exciting. Let's see how many pages this excitement lasts through.

Some of the excitement is also residual from SAM. SAM was my first conference, and it's still my favorite. It's surprisingly accessible, friendly, inclusive, and thought-provoking. The papers all-around were excellent (it makes getting rejected better), and I had ample time to catch up with friends, make some new ones, and even had a few substantive academic moments (like interviewing Wayne SHirley, who turned out to be in the original production of Mass! Crazy!) Add to that incredible weather, a mostly well-designed downtown (excellent transit, lots of places to go, walkable, but the dumbest idea for a city plan: a grid for the downtown pasted on another grid that runs 45-derees to the central grid), and finishing my grading on the flight over, and it's a perfect time. I even had some time to meet up with a high school friend for lunch in Boulder (mountains are amazing!) after the conference and check out the art museum before it. The museum has a marvelous collection of native American art, a rather small and uninspiring assortment of western art (save some good modern stuff, but the layout is unflattering and pointlessly categorized by type), and I simply ran out of energy to look at more paintings of the American West. It turns out that every painting of the prairies and canyons looks like every other painting of the prairies and canyons. Also, they had iPods at one point, but they weren't in any way connected to the exhibit. I'm baffled by this. What, you just incorporate something new and technologically savvy, and pretend that its presence is enough to merit praise?

In summation: success.

High Class

2009-03-17T01:52:00.003-04:00

I'm off to SAM tomorrow for what I am planning to be a fun, relaxing, conference.

Packing to commence now that I am back from the University Symphony Orchestra concert. Honestly, nothing really complements the springtime weather like the Ravel Piano Concerto in G.

I also wanted to take a moment to reflect on The Class, which I saw this recommend and cannot recommend highly enough. It's an enriching and insightful glimpse into a modern, urban French school (though the lessons are far and wide-ranging, even for the GSIs here in Michigan). The wonder of the film is in the details, the quiet moments of discovery and pleasure, the sincerity of the tensions that evolve organically from the characters and contexts, and the unforced performances that anchor every moment. I also love the way real world problems are neither denied, nor forced into any sort of pre-formed moral. The film, which tracks a year in a French class, is really about the politics of multiculturalism and the dynamics between teacher and students. But the answers are never fully resolved, the lessons are never beaten into your mind, and the happy endings are never smeared on with the sort of glee that some films (like recent Best Picture winners) resort too.

As I said, it's recommended across the board, but as a future academic, it's especially striking for me. While we all have particularly memorable teachers, and Hollywood occasionally sees fit for another entry in the inspirational teacher category, The Class offers something more. It recognizes the very real limitations of a teacher’s power. There are boundaries to a teacher’s authority. Sometimes we cross them when we shouldn’t, but even more enlightening are the moments where we do not. Often we get the teacher-as-hero motif, in which we can enact real-world change through our efforts. I think it’s true, and the film is a call of sorts to heed the problems that enter in from outside the classroom walls (it’s here the French title Entre les murs, or Between the Walls, seems especially pertinent, because it invites us to ask what the walls really contain). In this context, the successes of both teacher and student, modest as they may be, really shine. I love the way students grow apart and together over the year, participate and withdraw, succeed at a project unexpectedly, surprise us with knowledge, insight, and imagination, or with anger and conflict. It shows, I think, that the film is based on a real teacher’s experiences (and indeed stars the teacher himself, along with several non-actors), in part because it simply observes the problems, addresses them, but resists answering them. And it resonates, and even inspires- the teacher in the film challenges his students, engages them in some surprising dialogues, and comes to terms with politics, both local and global. This is intelligence brought to life the way I wish every class I’ve taken and taught could be.

Bonaparte blown apart.

2009-03-12T16:26:00.003-04:00

Yet again, I went to go hear a new work only to have the program change at the last minute (this time, a piano quintet by Charles Wuorinen, whose music I don't know at all (and still don't)). That said, it was still a great concert thanks to the Brentano Quartet, who were also joined by Peter Serkin and Thomas Meglioranza for Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon.

Maybe it's due to McClary's lecture, but I was acutely aware of the bodily engagement of both Mr. Serkin, who opened the evening with 4 transcriptions of Renaissance pieces) and the Quartet. All things are not equal, as it turns out. I don't know why, but the I found the stomping, half-singing, and face shaking at odds with a good performance. I've thrilled to see other pianists engage similarly, and the recordings of Glenn Gould singing along I find sort of charming. But here, the music didn't really seem suited to that much gestural action. Perhaps more to the point, I left those pieces with the sense not so much that the music was passionate, but simply that the pianist was. And there's a difference between them, where the expressions on Mr. Serkin's face told me more than the music did about how I was supposed to feel. It's almost like a movie where the acting style and dialogue are out of synch with each other. The Schoenberg came off quite effectively, satirical with just the right amount of bitter and sweet. Listening to that piece, while the baritone oration is wonderful (and the baritone brought every word to life), the real star of the composition is the instruments, employing a shimmering array of textures and ideas. It's a piece that leaves me both satisfied by the performance and luring me to know it better.

The second half—Haydn and Beethoven—may have been nothing distinct on paper, but the quartet really made both pieces absolutely riveting. The Haydn Quartet (Op. 76, no. 5) engages in the typical Haydn wit, veering off from expected cadences, revelling in those rich string harmonies, and zipping away through some rather buoyant themes. And Beethoven's Grosse Fuge is one of those towering pieces, dense and exhausting despite its small size, both in terms of length and quartetness. But as I watched, the quartet's near-perfect blending and razor-sharp rhythms brought to my mind, at least, the idea that what I was watching was not merely a concert, but bordering on a drama unfolding. The Haydn made me think of Tom Stoppard, actually- the unexpected witty diversions from what should be a straight-forward plot, sometimes touching on the darker side but never dwelling. The fourth movement in particular has some nice musical clashes between conflicting pedals and keys. If Haydn resembles sharp, intelligent comedy, the Grosse Fuge felt like an evening of David Mamet in its bitter intensity (far more than Schonberg, in fact). This is the mutual result of a often dissonant and unrelenting work played with more bodily energy and edgy sound than I've ever encountered before. The performers stomped and bent over assertively. The fugal theme sizzles and shrieks as lunges from instrument to instrument, yet despite the density, every rhythm and syllable was delivered with stinging exactness. The brawl between instruments is fun to watch, but even better were the quieter moments, which were even more intense and unsettling with a sort of mock-sweetness while all the unresolved tension just raised are left thickly hanging overhead while "niceness" takes hold briefly. I fidgeted a lot, but not out of the usual culprit (boredom). Rather, I was enjoying every uncomfortable, sweaty minute of the musical mêlée unfolding before me.

Rites and Exhibitions

2009-03-09T01:58:00.003-04:00

Sunday marks an end to our festive weekend of hosting the prospective students for next year. I remember being in that place four years ago, the difficulty to maintain conversations (not to mention unflappable enthusiasm), which is why I'm impressed at how well so many of the students I meet from this side seem to carry it off. It's also one of the few times the entire department is together for a lecture, so it affords everyone a chance to check in as well as meet all the new students. This year, Susan McClary gave a rather beautifully wide-reaching discussion of music and the human body, though I've always felt that the lecture (given it's for a recruitment weekend) ought to be given by alums or something (to be fair, McClary has a surprisingly vast connection to our department, and it was great to get so many people beyond our department in attendance). Also this year, I was very happy the theorists joined us for the student party. It's a sign of health in the school.

This weekend also brought some other visitors to campus: The New York Philharmonic, who gave two concerts. Both felt oddly similar: somewhat disappointingly played favorite opener, inconsequential orchestral work, giant powerhouse in the second half. Last night they opened with a surprisingly not-together Midsummer Night's Dream overture, while tonight was a relatively restrained Roman Carnival Overture. Sad, because the RCO actually benefits from exuberance at the expense of clean lines. I like both pieces, and I'd forgotten how sweet the end of the Mendelssohn is, but neither performance was really revelatory. Last night, they followed with Schumann 4, tonight by Tchaikovsky's Suite #3. The Schumann was fluid and energetic, but it doesn't account for the fact that the composition sucks. Both pieces have a variety of ideas, but the Schumann makes you appreciate the details of composition. It's got some nice ideas, but it's so mechanical: theme, restate theme in a surprising key, accelerate, percussion, theme, etc. There's no architecture to the symphony, and as a result it just goes through its agitated motions. The Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, is quite nice, especially the diverse variations in the last minute- by turns magically shimmering, elegaic and schmaltzy, exuberant- one was a thrilling march with bizarre interjections of the Dies Irae (like a jokey omen of Rachmaninov), another brilliant fake baroque counterpoint. Tchaikovsky, like Schumann, is not a composer I really get into, but the performance of the Tchaikovsky really brought this little confection to life. As far as the powerhouses, tonight we got Rite of Spring, last night Pictures at an Exhibition. Rite was, uh, funny. I'm not quite sure what I thought of it- it all came across rather uniformly gritty, dark, heavy. It's effective at times, but it's wearing overall, and the effect is that those churning ostinato passages get layered on like thick swaths of paint. That said, the winds and brass are amazing in this orchestra, as is the timpanist, so the fault isn't in a lack of clarity of lines but in the overall direction. But all is forgiven by the brilliance that was last night's Pictures at an Exhibition. Clear and vibrant, especially in the wind-dominated passages. Inevitably I tear up in the last movement, but the rendition offered has to be among the more visceral reactions. In particular, the orchestra had a number of dramatic pauses that helped register the full effect of the orchestral grandeur, aided by the precision timing and balance of the group. Stunning.

Oh, and two things I love. Friday's weather was perfect, and combined with residual glee from Tati's Mon Oncle, I was positively giddy all day. Second, I just love encore pieces- 2 Hungarian Dances, Lohengrin Prelude to Act III, and Bizet's L'Arlessienne suite. It's nice to see these get played. I wish the previous use of these works as legitimate concert fare was still applicable.

Scholarship reactivated

2009-03-05T15:33:00.003-05:00

One of my favorite bits about finishing up my dissertation prospectus was just before the last meeting I had with my brilliant co-chairs, I attended a number of talks all of which started sending my mental gears whirring. Philip Auslander gave a talk about Benjamin's concept of reactivation, that a reproduction reactivates the original. And Auslander's comments about how recordings unfold simultaneously as an artifact of the inaccessible past and as a present event of hearing that music now perfectly captured something I'd been treading mostly around rather than into. (Matthew Guerriere has a similar post which propels the argument nicely into the effects of recordings. Also, we have been talking about digitizing of film archives in my historiography- more to add to the sea of ideas).

Right after Auslander, we hosted a graduate conference. I'm very pleased with how it turned out simply because so many of the papers had such fascinating implications across disciplines (a memorable paper on Second Life raised questions of online fieldwork methods, for instance). But many of the papers offered further thoughts- my friend Bryan Parkhurst gave a thoughtful examination of ontological versus phenomenological accounts of music akin, while Bertold Hoeckner's keynote address on film music talked about film (and music)-as-archive for memory, how music gains associations and triggers them, and film's impact on music history.

All of this is wonderful, if maddening to sort out on a timeline. Working through the very muddy waters of musical collage for the dissertation prospectus, it's encouraging to note that these broader issues are important. In a way, it feels like it's not just reproductions that reactivate originals, but the way my own scholarly interests get reactivated every time I read something, or hear an issue in a certain perspective. The original idea I had is still there, but it's like someone has been messing with the controls. The various reasons I like my topic, the examples, the broader issues, sort of ebb and flow. It's something I'm becoming more attuned to, and while it makes setting the ideas down on paper slightly harder (e.g. cutting something because it doesn't really fit even though it's supercool to you right now), I like it. I've always loved the part of research where you go to the library and open a bunch of books and just see, long before the ideas are fixed. It's like staying in a partial, perpetual state of initial research, always with something new to discover, even as you're committing words to page, committing yourself to those exact words.

I Break for Spring

2009-03-03T00:14:00.002-05:00

Man, spring break is great but the whole ending it with three days of nonstop dancing seems somewhat unwise. This past weekend was the Ann Arbor Dawn Dance, a favorite yearly event for me. This year, my friend Nora came, jammed with my friend Susie while I made pumpkin pancakes on Saturday morning (this is the other thing I love about break, getting to indulge my culinary domestic side). And of course, the dancing was fantastic, even if it meant I was left with a pile of homework, sore legs, and an exhausted mind. One of the reasons this year was so exciting was the music. This year, we had The Latter Day Lizards, a band whose strength is the versatility they employ in their sets, moving from an old-timey banjo and fiddle sound to a moody, slow jam, to my favorite- the jazzy, free-swinging sets. It's good to get out of the academic, brainy enthusiasm, and just throw the whole body into the music...until it's Sunday night and the muscles start to stiffen. These events make me wish I played music better, or more, or maybe just more socially. On the other hand, I love having talented friends to listen to while I cook or dance or just sit and listen.

I've got more to say about academic affairs, some good things I've read and thought about, but Ratatouille is over and I have class to teach tomorrow. I'll spare you my rapturous love of this movie (I've blogged about it before I know), and spare myself getting involved in anything academic, and instead bid you a good night.

Golden voices

2009-02-26T22:24:00.002-05:00

We're on break, and I've spent much of it crafting and drafting a dissertation prospectus (In a 24 hour period I sent off a draft, one of my chairs replied with changes, and I sent in another draft). It's good to be able to focus intently on it, and as a result I got the happy-with-it email from my chairs.

This frees me up to talk about The Oscars! As previously stated, the actual films nominated didn't grab me. I'm glad Man on Wire won, and Heath Ledger, and Sean Penn's win was equally well-deserved (even if I wanted Mickey Rourke (well, actually Richard Jenkins)). And it's nice to see Kate Winslet win, even if it's for one of the worst movies she's appeared in.

In terms of the production, I liked the arc of awards about how to make a film, and thought the multiple presenters were a nice touch, even if the speeches to the acting nominees were uneven and I miss the clips (though I don't dislike the replacement). Some nice funny presenters (Tina Fey and Steve Martin are brilliant), but mostly a lot more music which I was mixed on.

Queen Latifah's song during the in memoriam section was lovely, but I don't understand all the camera movement. Most of the time, I couldn't even see who was being honored. Can we just agree that the point of this section is to remember those who've died, not to look at Queen Latifah. Ugh.

A lot of musical talent- Beyonce, Hugh, Zac, and the lovely Anne Hathaway.

I'm a big fan of musical numbers, but I think the Oscars demonstrates the big problem with film musical numbers today (fitting that Baz Luhrmann's behind all this). Hugh Jackman proclaims that the musical is back, and so it would seem. But as this montage demonstrates, it's only casually back. Apparently we just don't have the patience for a musical, just for brief segments of songs. Or, when we actually get the film, we disguise the lack of choreography with non-stop MTV cutting and the lack of singers with cute faces and big names. In fact, everything in this show was a little too jump-cut, Baz Luhrmann style, from the musical numbers, to the montage tributes to the year in film, and, well, Slumdog Millionaire. It just feels more and more like mindless energy. I really do wish the musical (and I mean that in the full sense of the term) was back.

Gold-digging

2009-02-22T01:24:00.002-05:00

We're officially on break, and now that I'm fortified with groceries and books and the streets are fortified with snow, I will expect a productive week of work and baking. And blogging, including last weekend's graduate student conference we held, but I'm afraid there's something more pressing: OSCARS!

Yes, every year I get over my anger at whatever they've done, and refocus it on the awards. But this year, I'm having a hard time mustering up my usual energy since the year has been lacking in great movies, and the awards are even more middling. For best picture, we have 2 films that were good (Benjamin Button and Slumdog Millionaire) but ultimately simple in their strengths and quite problematic. Button takes an awfully long time to get going, and when it does, it's really just a tender love story. Slumdog is a love fantasy whose visual slickness undermines any deeper threads it so desperately tries to carry. And both are hampered by a conceit that proves distracting. Frost/Nixon is fine, but never really engaging. The Reader somehow does the miraculous by making sex and the Holocaust numbingly dull. And Milk is the only thing approaching great, a brilliant biopic that zips along with energy and emotion, occasionally coasting on standard, glossy biopic mode, but occasionally inspiring some truly great filmmaking (not to mention perfect performances). Too bad they missed yet another opportunity to recognize Pixar's brilliance, or a truly excellent blockbuster hit (The Dark Knight), not to mention the smaller films (Happy Go Lucky, Rachel Getting Married, The Visitor).

But whatever, we know it's in the bag for Slumdog. Ugh.

Acting, I'd love to see Sean Penn, Mickey Rourke, or Richard Jenkins take it. Jenkins is sadly out of the running, but my heart is pulling for Mickey's honestly moving portrayal of an ex-wrestler.

Actress still enrages me for leaving out the best performance of the year (the irrepressibly vivacious Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky), and while I love Kate Winslet, this movie was so bad (even if she's great). Especially because Meryl (always a hoot!), Anne Hathaway, and Melissa Leo (amazing work here- Frozen River is highly recommended) are all better. But alas, Kate wins for the one she shouldn't.

Supporting actor is Heath's make-up for the one he should have gotten in Brokeback Mountain. Well done.

Supporting Actress is where I know I should go for Penelope Cruz, but my gut says Viola Davis will win. Like Kate, it's for the wrong film, but she deserves it.

Otherwise, expect an evening of Slumdomination (except the sound categories I think, which will go to The Dark Knight), with Benjamin Button getting the effects and art direction, Milk gets a screenplay win, Man on Wire gets the well-deserved documentary, Waltz with Bashir gets the foreign film, and WALL-E gets the animated feature. And Duchess gets the costume award, because it's fancy.

I also saw the short films this year, and I loved La Maison en Petit Cubes, which I think has a shot. And I loved almost all the live actions. Two rules compete here: holocaust vs. cute kid. I'm going with cute kid (New Boy), though the film Manon sur le bitume is the best thing I've seen this year. 15 minutes of ravishing details akin to Amelie or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, utter perfection.

I'l post a best-of-the-year list in a bit after I get to see Waltz with Bashir and The Class here (so slow!). In the mean time, enjoy the Oscars. I know I will.

Vindication, sort of

2009-02-07T01:00:00.002-05:00

Remember the concert that failed to live up to its amazingness? Yeah.

Well, tonight I went to the symphony band concert. Following an unremarkable first half (a suprisingly stodgy Dvorak serenade all played at a moderate dynamic and tempo with sort of square, chunky melodies (is it just really hard to evoke the Baroque without sounding stale?) and the classic Holst Suite in E-Flat, which I find enthralling), the second half satisfied the longings set in place weeks ago. They played the Stravinsky (I'm happily awaiting that cheap box set Alex Ross mentioned), one of those pieces that's so nicely textured. It probably would have sounded crisper, unfortunately, with Salonen and CSO, but the performance came off decently. The concert closed with Bolcom's "Ninth," titled "First Symphony for Band" to avoid the death-knell, and what a delightful piece it is. The first movement carries out these hammerblows right out of Verdi's Dies Irae, mixes in some of that Mahlerian brass fanfares, and a sort of churning underbelly of harmonic tightness. The second movement bursts into a luxurious waltz that teeters sweetly on drunkenness, then on sourness with the low brass, and finally explodes into a giddy climax of brashly percussive orchestration. There's something marvelous about the screamingly dissonant chords in Bolcom, the way they get used for lightening, rather than darkening, exuberance rather than angst. The third movement was a dark scherzo, the fourth a brilliant collision of overly demanding marches and dance rhythms. How wonderful to have him here.

Oh, and on the bus ride, sudden Karaoke! Hooked on a Feeling is exactly what was needed to follow. I'd like to see the CSO crowd break into song upon exiting.

Waterfalls

2009-02-04T00:20:00.002-05:00

Touring the Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago, I came across a bizarre little note about the waterfall. The man who commissioned, upon its completion, insisted it was wrong and suggested to the engineer that he listen to Mendelssohn's "Spring Song." He did, and sure enough, was able to complete the waterfall perfectly.

I don't really think this is meant to be serious, that music can in fact convey precise engineering structures, but it got me thinking in conjunction with a previous post about what music means these days. Aside from the Elgar example in the post, Scott Spiegelberg notes from the AMS listserv:
ack to the American Musicology Society List (AMS-L), another (Canadian!) music historian (Jim Deaville) pointed out that Vincent Persichetti was commissioned to compose a work, Lincoln Address for Nixon's second inauguration. Persichetti set words from Lincoln's second inaugural address, including the reference to the Civil War as a "mighty scourge." The Presidential Inaugural Committee felt this could be interpreted as an allusion to the ongoing Vietnam War, and therefore replaced Lincoln Address with Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. So, replacing reference to one war with another war. Ah well.

As I commented in his blog, does no one think there's an irony about replacing a work because of Vietnam with a work that celebrates Russia's victory over the French when we're fighting them ostensibly on behalf of the French? This is even more perplexing than the use of it on 4th of July programs.

Basically, it comes down to how we hear this music. Is music just a sonic impact, where Elgar can underscore any sympathetic scene, and the victory of Tchaikovsky can be anyone's, where Mendelssohn can convey something so concrete so broadly. There's something pleasantly liberating about this, the freedom to own any sound as your own. It's especially tempting I think now, when music is so available. But the scholar in me rebels. Ultimately, the truth is more complex. For the unknowing audience, what's wrong with Elgar, with Tchaikovsky? The music simply works. But for the knowing, the result can be difficult, and more difficult for those who know and are affected by this find it unpalettable.

This is all stuff I'm dealing with as I move into dissertation territory. I find it interesting to examine, to play example-counterexample, but ultimately fear that there's no real answer here. I can't really ignore the cultural meaning alongside the musical, but I also can't ignore the musical meaning either.

Foss and other losses

2009-02-02T23:36:00.002-05:00

I was saddened to read this morning that Lukas Foss has passed away. I certainly can't top Matthew Guerrieri's remembrance, and in fact I realized reading his obituary in the paper that I really don't know his music. I certainly ought to, if not for pure edification, for dissertation work. I do remember the entrancing encounter I had with his Baroque Variations in college, a pure chance pick-the-LP-off-the-shelf decision in the music library at Swarthmore (oh, how I miss just random browsing there- now I have to go to the desk with a CD number). The piece has just such a giddy delight of sounds, old and new, washing up on the same shore.

And a few days ago, I read about Brandeis's decision to sell off their art museum. This is a stranger loss, because the works themselves will still be around. They will still end up in exhibitions, maybe some of them will end up more prominent places. And Boston has a number of museums, so I can't exactly claim that the city will necessarily feel it. But nonetheless, it's a significant loss for the school, and what's more, for all of us in a subtle way. My undergrad didn't have an art museum really, just a two-room gallery with rotating shows, occasionally supplemented by random bits of a permanent collection we supposedly had. But in truth, for all the hours I spent in those rooms, the only works that stay with me are ones where I was friends with the artist. So for me the idea of such a big collection at a school is a little strange. But this decision raises the broader question of the place of the arts in education, and more to the point, what that covers. I'd be angrier if they had cut the department and kept the museum, naturally. At Swarthmore, the music program had a number of student ensembles, but we also had a superb orchestra in residence (Orchestra 2001, which can basically be thanked for enlivening my interest in 20th century repetoire), and a range of visiting groups (I still remember a fantastic concert, ill-timed because of finals, by the Colorado String Quartet, with about 6 students in attendance). And to me, that was every bit as vital a part of it. Same for trips to the Philly orchestra, the frequent assignments for art history classes to go to the PMA, the radio station. Sure, the students will be able to head to the MFA or elsewhere (and should!) but I can't pretend it's not a blow. It's like journalism students losing the school paper, sports teams losing equipment. I can only hope the museum was truly appreciated in its time, and that the art program will be first in line when the time is right for increased funding. I don't think they'll ever truly recover, though.

It's not surprising to lose a venerated composer. It's very surprising to lose an even more venerated institution.

Less a-Pekka

2009-01-27T22:42:00.003-05:00

This past weekend I went down to Chicago for what promised to be an amazing concert: A new premiere of Esa-Pekka Salonen, himself conducting, sandwiched between three stellar twentieth-century masterworks: the perennial La Mer, the underplayed Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta, and Stravinsky's often ignored Symphonies of Wind Instruments. But the Stravinsky was dropped, and Salonen never finished the piece, instead presenting a new-ish work from Arvo Pärt. All in all, a disappointment for me.

Pärt's symphony (his fourth) is the sort of generic, muddled work that just sort of sits there. Pärt has a knack for plaintive, contemplative music, but half an hour of this ruins the effect. The music moves in string gestures at a lugubrious tempo, all in unison, with a smattering of chiming bells and sharp little xylophone clusters and harps. It's gauze, but so much of it that it feels suffocating. There are some nice moments that evoke the sort of shimmering, swelling gestures of Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme By Thomas Tallis. And a lot of Pärt's earlier music has a nice mastery of texture and shape, the lucid clarity of his vocal writing, the pulsing energy of Tabula Rasa. But this work is one where less would be more, like Morton Feldman, or more would be more, like John Adams. Instead, it's in a sort of purgatory, waiting.

It doesn't help its case that it came after the Bartok, another work scored for strings and percussion, but one that's far more effective at utilizing the orchestration. Hearing it live (I think for the first time!), it really comes out how brilliant the orchestration is, from the folksy strumming in the last movement to the piano four-hand segments, and of course the frequent "night music" idea that Bartok returned to so often, with those eerie tipmani glissandos.

By the time La Mer arrived, the orchestrations seemed almost decadent, but it makes for such a fine pairing with the Bartok, since both are so imaginative, rhythmically playful, with the taut construction of Bartok balancing the freer form of the Debussy. And the performance Salonen delivered was near perfection: crisp, clean layers of rhythm, beautifully shaped phrases, and again that orchestration. I especially love the third movement, when everything drops out except that high violin and the low bass, a sudden expansive stasis amidst the swirl of everything else.

One final thought- another person remarked to me that he loved the Pärt because he could see himself wanting to listen to it on repeat. Giving it some thought, that's exactly my problem: it already feels like it's looping the same ideas and gestures. I can't listen to music like that. He listens to songs obssessively. I mean, one song heard hundreds of time within a month. I like mulitple listenings, but I need space around them, space to contemplate them, and I can't constrain my listening like that. Actually, I prefer rediscovering pieces. Unless they suck.

Georges who?

2009-01-15T16:10:00.002-05:00

Office hours seems as good a time to blog as any (since I've finished my AMS abstract and reread the notable passages in Audiotopia, but still feel uncompelled to do real dissertation work). Pair that with a gray, snowy, freeze-your-face off day, the Brahms second piano concerto, leftover spiced pumpkin squares, and wireless, and there's little reason to leave anyway.

Continuing my look back at 2008, the highlight of the art museums was Europe. I'm sad I don't get to much here. I went gallery hopping in KC over the summer, I went to the National Portrait Gallery and Hirschorn museums in DC, and the Met in NYC, but there's little that has stuck with me.

Europe is a feast of architecture, certainly, and I thrive off that. My favorite stop, The Museum of Transport in London, kept me enthralled for hours with tales of early trains, angry letters about subway discomfort, failed plans, old advertisements and maps, and models to play with. The two Tates and the Art History museum in Vienna were packed with masterworks, and the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin had a Joseph Bueys exhibition, the sort that seriously turn me off (best example: a video of a man slicing sausage while a TV covered in felt plays. Yeah, okay, moving on), though some of it was sort of beautiful in its rusty bleakness but doesn't really sustain a full exhibition.

But my favorite was a small retrospective of Georges Braque. A colleague/competitor with Picasso, Braque helped to create cubism. His canvasses are a bit more orderly, there's a holdover from his pointillist days in the small designs he favored drawing. But whereas Picasso remains a fixture of art history, Braque disappears, despite the fact he painted through the 1960s. And you begin to see why. Picasso kept reinventing himself. Braque continued to work in a cubist mode, creating these paintings that looked like collages, with off angles, and an appealing pallette of colors that looked like once-bright-now-faded, olives, deep yellows, dusty peaches. It reminded me somewhat of another George, that from Act II of Sunday in the Park, the way the paintings seemed to rearrange ideas over and over again, but never really coming up with something new. And then, at the end of his career, two paintings. One a simple drawing of two birds, white and black, on pink and yellow, the other a pointillist drawing of an empty beach. Out of nowhere, a new direction, and a reminiscence of the old. And that's the end. It's the sort of fascinating one-man show, tracing a once-great artist's descent into mediocrity, and yet rescuing him somehow from obscurity. There is a haunting beauty to the elaborate collage-like paintings, an elegaic quality to the seemingly bright colors, and the feeling of familiarity that accumulates after all those canvases. Rarely does a retrospective feel that insightful or necessary.

I hope in 2009 to see more art, to hit my favorite museums, and to see at least a couple shows, works, galleries, or something that I hadn't seen. And to learn something new from those I know.

Resolve!

2009-01-08T16:25:00.003-05:00

The term resolution is a funny one for the music geeks. Resolution is a point of rest, something already achieved, which makes the idea of a New Years resolution a little funny. I'm not exactly going to make resolutions this year, but I do appreciate a moment to take a look at where I am and where I am not.

Let's look ahead first:

This semester I'm back in front of students, and it's a nice feeling (well, not so much today since I'm battling a cold, and talking for an hour and a half on a poor night's sleep and runny nose isn't ideal). I'm teaching about 20 students in a seminar on Sondheim, and I'm anticipating a great semester. The challenge is dealing with a wide range of experiences, both in terms of repertoire knowledge and basic music knowledge. The less challenging part is that I'm not dealing with anyone who doesn't want to be taking the class. The class is also in a far-off and confusing building, but I'm managing. I went in this morning and got keys, saw things, and then went over my material again. I'd forgotten how fast it goes.

I'll also be taking a film historiography class. No comments as of yet.

And finally, I'll be continuing revisions on the dissertation proposal. In other words, continuing my attempts to woo my professors into going along with my ideas. What I'm liking most at this stage is the bigger thinking, formulating a take, listing arguments and counterarguments, questions and suppositions, then throwing it on the table for advisors to continue to examine. What I don't like is explaining it to my relatives, the heaviness of all those books, people who recall books I want, or the elusiveness of certain broad points I want to make (or at least the words with which to make them).

Other things to look forward to:
-summer, hopefully spent partly here, partly at dance camp

-SAM, my favorite conference. Denver this year, an airport I've not had luck with in the past. But hey, there's a hostel nearby for me (anyone else want in?)

-Local conference in February. Usually a good time. You've all applied, right?

-Hearing back from people to whom I have given abstracts. It would be nice to do at least one thing this year.

-Follies this weekend.

-Susan McClary's talk; dissertation workshops; all the other yet-to-come music talks. Free lunches, and usually something eye-opening, and possible socializing after.

-CSO concert in January: Salonen is conducting and has a new piece on the program. Also, the ever-rewarding La Mer, alongside two severely underperformed 20th century gems: Stravinsky's Symphonies of Wind Instruments and Bartok's Concerto For Orchestra.

-My first pre-concert talk, before the much-anticipated ST. Louis Symphony concert here: Sibelius 5, Wagner, Zimmerman, and Adams (the last one, Guide to Strange Places, is unfamiliar and not available. Not available, that is, unless you know people who used to work for Boosey and Hawkes. Sweet! Thanks Jack!). Several other UMS concerts too, including Andras Schiff's last couple Beethoven sonata concerts, NY Phil doing Rite of Spring and Pictures.

2009 looks good. I'll do a series of looking back at 2008 posts in the coming days.

Just hear those sleigh bells jinglin'

2008-12-26T02:18:00.004-05:00

The traditions are holding strong around here: family, friends, and enormous quantities of food forced upon me all day.

One of my favorites is Christmas movies (I mean, good any time of year, but especially good now). I've enjoyed Christmas movies all month. At the Michigan Theater: Elf, White Christmas, and The Bishop's Wife. At home, It's a Wonderful Life and last night while I wrapped presents at the last minute, Meet Me In St. Louis (which I argue isn't a Christmas movie, but I'll watch happily). They showed The Shop Around the Corner, but it was 2 am, and I had to go to sleep (a similar thing right now- I'm watching The African Queen, but all this eating has exhausted me!).

One thing I think is worth noting about these movies: so many of them place music centrally. There's plenty of song in the classic Christmas musicals. Singing is par for the course in the lives of the Smith Family and friends in Meet Me in St. Louis, and in Holiday Inn, and White Christmas. All about performers, but the biggest moments come in communal non-performance moments. At the end of White Christmas, the entire audience (in the film and in the theater) bursts out in the title song. And it's a spontaneous song that proves the most heartwarming in Meet Me in St. Louis, where the parents begin singing You and I, and everyone gathers. But even in the nonmusical films: when the community wants to help George, they sing. And as the lovely Zooey Baschenel learned so well: "The best way to spread Christmas cheer is singing loud for all to hear." There's something about the holidays that hammers this home: while the songs may come across as cheesy (and the movies), what matters is their familiarity. That everyone can join in, together. People complain about hearing the songs all the time, but does anyone complain about singing them?

Oscars 2008: Music edition

2008-12-12T00:00:00.002-05:00

This reveals some surprising sensibility. The Academy has reversed an earlier decision that ruled the score for The Dark Knight ineligible. The reason? Too many names listed. Apparently, the film listed the two (yes two) composers, Hans ZImmer and James Newton Howard, along with a music editor, sound designer, and arranger. It's about time people started realizing that the score is not just the non-diegetic music someone composes and maybe a song or two, it's the whole sonic backdrop. Of course, only the composers will be nominated, but it's nice to see a film recognizing the work.

On a side note, I find it interesting, this quote:
According to Zimmer, the "Dark Knight" score was the product of a singular vision. "It's very stylistically cohesive--it wasn't done by committee. James and I divided everything up. I thought the Joker character should have have a singular voice, so I [did the score] for him and James basically became the Harvey Dent character and did his score."

How does this make it cohesive to divvy up the characters? Now I want to listen to the movie again and see what they mean.

But anyway, the only score that's seized me this year is WALL-E, and there it's not so much a typical "score" so much as a brilliant soundscape of silence, electronics, music, and a beautiful use of older songs woven in.

In other movie news, the New Yorker review of Baz Luhrmann's Australia is not only hilariously pointed (as they tend to be), but comments on something that I found equally distracting in Lust, Caution: the use of Elgar's Nimrod Variation. I know it's sweepingly lovely, but it doesn't work in contexts where you want to cast the English Empire/West as the bad guy.

Lesson: Hollywood should employ me.

Known Unknowns

2008-12-09T23:42:00.002-05:00

I have just returned from the university orchestra, to which I can say the following:
-The Lutoslawski Concerto for Orchestra is amazing. You had me at brass ostinatos. Really, I'm a big fan of sweeping, sinuous melodies layered over ostinatos or arpeggios (like the end of Prokofiev Five, or his the end of the the first movement of the piano concerto, with that crunching low brass melody over the piano runs).
-Dvorak's Carnaval Overture is pure fun. It's like listening to a really good storyteller, effortlessly engrossing without anything too extravagant.
-Malcolm Arnold's Tam-O-Shanter reminds me that we need to have more drunk orchestra pieces.
-Vaughan Williams does folksy, slow-moving music. Two on one concert is sort of unfulfilling.
-Mendelssohn's Hebrides Overture can start a concert.

Today, I read the Time Magazine's top ten lists. A bit of a time sink, but it's good to keep up with contemporary pop music. Among the great finds are Kanye West's brilliantly stark new CD, MGMT's atmospheric lushness (and one of them is a cousin of a friend of mine here!), Greg Gillis's mashup genius work, Vampire Weekend's dorkiness, and Fleet Foxes' catchy-haunting song White Winter Hymnal. Good stuff, recommended for its thoughtful commentary and blend of immediate gratification (e.g. Jonas Brothers) and subtler pieces.

Also today, I started writing my film theory paper (well, one page). This was, in all honesty, one of the better classes I've taken here. The final class we had was an excellent case of why not knowing can be even better. Having made (and admitted) the mistake of assigning the hardest reading on the last day (Deleuze), it proved surprisingly liberating. The professor admitted his own difficulties with the material, and what ensued was less a dense untangling of the prose as you might expect, but a sort of free association, like flying above a tangled landscape rather than walking through. We weren't worried about reconstructing arguments and preconditions, but just about what issues it raised through confusions, less theory and more riffing. I don't know how movement gets beyond movement to the particle, except that I offered that maybe it's like light, which is a wave and a particle. "Could you elaborate?" asked the professor. "No." How nice to be honest.

I always loved those moments in undergrad, where you'd struggle with a hard reading for a week, discuss in class, and suddenly make a connection or understand a point or hear just the right words, and have everything fall just into place. I should be so lucky to give that feeling to others. There was none of that this week, but it's also nice to not know something, and just smile at it.

That's a Tuesday.

Study carols

2008-12-04T00:55:00.002-05:00

My holiday spirit has been climbing, as I start humming Christmas carols, and the Michigan Theater shows a number of holiday films (last week: The Bishop's Wife, one of my favorites; this week: White Christmas!). But this set of three articles from Brian Eno, Robert Fulghum, and Joan Tower caught my holiday-sensitive attention.

Reading these articles, my first thought was the summer camp I attend for folk dancing, where singing, dancing, and living are blended into a continuous communal activity for a week. It's a beautiful thing, feeling that bond through the voice, the hand, the smile, knowing you're among friends.

But it's also a crucial part of my holidays. I love caroling. I didn't do it last year. My friends Mary and Evan held a caroling event the first two years here, where we wandered around Ann Arbor, rang doorbells, and just sang. Sometimes, it angered the person, or maybe just bored them. But those moments of sudden connection, of their memories and our new-made ones made it worthwhile. Ruth and Emlen Cresson hold a carol party every year in Philadelphia. Now in their late 80s, these long time staples of the Philadelphia dance community have had to stop dancing due to health reasons. A couple years ago, I made it back for their party, where people call out their favorites, and we just sing. Who knew so much feeling could come out of a simple act? Last year--after the annual New Years Scottish dance (all 6 hours of it!), there's a pot-luck get together for hanging out--the jam session turned into a spontaneous carol sing. Even a week after Christmas, it feels just as warm and fresh. Yes, and necessary.

It's nice to be reminded out of the blue, in the middle of paper-writing season, of the whole reason I'm in this, namely that music is a passion of mine, but it's a passion I can share. I can't sing all that well, and am barely proficient at piano, and even the writing about it gets called into question now and then. But what I do have is that love, and most importantly, friends to share it with.

Stuffing

2008-11-26T21:14:00.003-05:00

Tomorrow, I'll be cooking food for about 30 people. I love grocery shopping, and I love cooking even more (and eating more than that)! It will be a nice break from school, working with my hands, a blend of recipes and improvising. Yum. And to aid with the digestion, I've checked out a slew of screwball comedies suitable for couch-parking with leftovers and friends.

In other news, I can be thankful for the syllabus I've finished up for next semester on Sondheim, and thankful for the enthusiastic students I've heard from so far. That's the nice thing about teaching this class—nobody is going to sign up for the class accidentally. It's sort of self-weeding. The only problems lie in trying to guess the students' familiarity with music and in the scant materials sometime that are accessible yet provocative.

I can be thankful for the great company I have in my life, both academic and not. I was sad to miss AMS this year, but I'm looking forward to SAM (and to the day I get something accepted to one of these conferences). I'm waiting to hear back on my dissertation proposal, but for now I'm happy to believe that no news is aphoristically accurate.

Happy Thanksgiving one and all!

Victory lap.

2008-11-05T11:06:00.003-05:00

Between the Phillies and Obama, I couldn't be much happier. And I'm about to take off for two weeks of travelling around Europe free of academicness. Life here, for the moment, is good (comments about dissertation proposal draft 2 are imminent upon return).

There are other good signs out there.

In film theory class we had a good laugh about going as "the signified" on Halloween, just by taking your picture around with you. It's not the usual humor, but it has a place, and that place is 10 am on Halloween. I also like the professor's idea that Halloween should be more Brechtian.

This article gives a wonderful little glimpse into a great idea. Chamber music in a bar/cabaret setting. I particularly like Tommasini's comment that it doesn't matter that the audience doesn't know about Xenakis's theories, what matters is they're listening to it. As I set about trying to write program notes, this makes me realize it's a funny job. The notes may help explain things, offer some insight, amuse, intrigue, etc. But they're not pivotal to enjoying the music. So perhaps what I should be thinking about is not "how to make you understand the piece" but how I can get people to come back again, to be excited about it.

And I do know what it's like to feel excited. Oh yes.

Dancertation

2008-10-31T00:55:00.002-04:00

Sorry for the lack of posts. I've been writing and then rewriting the dissertation proposal, on a strict self-imposed deadline. But it's good, and better for the reduction, in part because I'm curbing my own tendencies to reference things I feel I a) should in order to be a successful musicologist and b) want to because I put the effort into reading them and I like what they have to say.

A couple weeks ago, I headed out to London (Ontario) for a weekend workshop on calling English country dances. This has been a long-term hobby, but it was also my first introduction into teaching. And while I focus pretty heavily on academic life to the demise of my folk dancing life, I'm finding much of what we talked about to be surprisingly helpful. Some thoughts:

- We talked a lot about the basics of good teaching- nonverbal teaching, being concise, choosing words carefully. In dance, words just delay the dancing, and talk over the music. But too little leaves the dancers confused, and they can't listen to the music, because they're too busy trying to figure out what to do. I encounter the same problems with audio examples- too much talking turns it into a boring exercise, but too little leaves them listening without a sense of why. I'm still tweaking both, trying to find enough words to whet the appetite and make it productive, but it's so nice as a dancer or a listener to do it and diiscover something without being told to.

- Practice, practice, practice. Actually, more like just do it. Because no matter how much you prepare, something unexpected will happen. Calling has taught me more about being quick on my feet and looking calm than anything.

- If you say something and it doesn't work, repeating it likely isn't going to improve the situation, not even if you say it with more volume. Which leads to my final point:

- The most advanced skill we worked on was how to teach advanced dancers, especially in a mixed crowd. GSI-ing is pretty tame: all the students are at the same level, they're all in the same course, and the one-size-fits-all model, while not perfect, is close to what I use. Chances are with most terms either everyone knows it or no one does. But the prospect of teaching mixed classes (as I will likely be doing next semester) or upper level courses still scares me. How to teach in a way so as to neither bore the advanced students nor lose the beginners? In dancing, beginners can learn on the fly, by doing it, and with floor support. I don't expect much of that in the classroom.

It's nice when hobbies don't just give you release but help put your work in perspective (and nicer when you have time to actually pursue them!). Unfortunately, I haven't figured out how this helps with dissertating yet.

PS: GO PHILLIES! I wish I could be there to enjoy it with my Philly friends, but it's a good feeling nonetheless to watch something you love get what they wanted for so long. And it didn't happen while I had class!

Open books, open ears

2008-10-16T01:42:00.000-04:00

I've just submitted my first draft of a dissertation proposal, which is a significant relief. It's a funny little process. In one way, it's a summation of your work so far—I drew on books I've read for class, books I read in undergrad, books I felt I had to read, books I read for art history classes. It has a way of nicely tying together several of the strands I've been pondering for a good time. But at the same time, it opens up all these new roads. And while it's satisfying to feel like ideas have come together and spur more speculation, it's also a little scary. As it stands, I haven't nailed down the layout. I have too many ideas, so that's the next step.

But having something concrete, I'm resurfacing here. In other news...

I'm still enthralled with musical color. I've had the treat of hearing Brahms's rich, shimmering clarinet quintet and Bartok's 5th Quartet, with those gorgeous transcendent slow movements, little insect noises, eerily displaced howls, and calm triads. And the orchestra played Petrouschka the next day, which on rehearing seems like the perfect blend of Rite's churning ostinatos and the dorky tunes of his neoclassical stuff.

These concerts may not get the dissertation written, but it's a similar tale revisiting favorite musics and some beloved texts. The problem is with listening, my mind is freer to wander, to find new things. The dissertation (as much as I'd like sometime) probably shouldn't wander as much as my post-concert conversations tend to. And therein lies, I think, the hardest part: how to rein in the wandering without losing the energy I feel after hearing a good performance (or reading a good piece of writing).

First steps

2008-09-22T23:43:00.003-04:00

The problem of starting the writing (for me) is that there's so much literature out there. And every time I think about formulating a comment, I wonder what others have to say about it. So, libraries yield up their enormous riches, and my floor disappears in discrete rectangles. And the research is interesting, eye-opening, and frankly easier to make myself do than write. But at some point the fear of what you haven't said outweighs the fear of what you haven't read, right?

So today, I wrote two paragraphs. Not much, but it's very rewarding to actually have started it. More to come?

Syllabus Shuffle

2008-09-18T23:29:00.003-04:00

So, I was attending the local production of Into the Woods (which is, oddly enough, one I've never managed to get to see), when I discovered they'll be doing Follies in January. This is amazing for many reasons, not least because that's a heck of a show for community theater to do. It will be another of the Sondheim canon to cross off my list, but more exciting is its coinciding with my Sondheim class that I'll be teaching next term. This is twice as good because it's a key Sondheim work, and one without a proper video recording (the closest is a rather impressive concert production that has some good behind-the-scenes info, and stellar performances across the board). The problem is it goes up the second week of class. This means having to teach a complicated work before we even get to his early stuff (West Side Story, Gypsy (which incidentally is I think crucial to understanding Follies)). So now I have to go about rethinking how to approach it, whether to return to it later, but all this pales in comparison to my own excitement to see it and talk about it.

I miss teaching this semester.

Academia Out of Bounds

2008-09-10T09:56:00.002-04:00

Thinking a little bit about my last post, I realized something. I think it puts too much stock in the classroom. While it would be great to have the chance to just talk about how we listen and why we like certain things, the classroom isn't the only place to do it. It's just a convenient place, because we're all there, charged with the task of being good listeners. I feel like arts organizations have tried to capitalize on this idea, offering happy hours, but part of the problem is a) it's often more comfortable to talk about these things with people you haven't just met and b) I think most of the events happen before the concert, not after. There ought to be something like a book club, yeah? Where people select pieces to hear, get together and talk about it.

And on a related to this title note, academia is more fun when unleashed into the broader world. Consider ye this resounding endorsement.

Camp stories

2008-09-07T23:42:00.002-04:00

50 posts. To celebrate I give you an inexplicably bizarre ad for the arts. I remember back in college coming up with a fake ad for Berli-Os ("They're Fantastique!"). But this is even better, in part because it's a) memorable and b) gets the point across without being preachy.

In other news, I'm back. Physically at least. Mentally, I'm still latching onto my one week of true vacation, spent in the backwoods of Massachusetts doing what I love: folk dancing. And returning is kind of like waking up. The possibility that you could stay up all night contra dancing and playing games and stargazing and listening to jam sessions go late into the night with a bunch of friends seems more absurd when in the library, and I find myself struggling to remember it all, just the way you would a dream.

The lessons of folk dance camp are surprisingly salient to life as a graduate student in musicology:

- You really do need sleep, but it's kind of nice when you really don't want it.
- I still want to learn the accordion/ I wish I played piano better
- Classics remain favorites for a reason
- Music/Dance is more fun when you do it with friends

This last point seems particularly key. I find it sadly rare to experience music as I really enjoy it: as a collective activity. Studying music is a solo activity. Earlier posts on Kyle Gann's site disassemble the idea of the audience into individuals. Even talking about it music is rare. In the classroom, I'm either teaching it and having trouble eliciting responses or feeling pressure to spend the time only on exam material, or I'm a student and spend most of the time absorbing what other people say, and the concern that what you say about the piece has to be supported by evidence (or sometimes simply agree with the professor's viewpoint).

One day, I brought in the Elgar first symphony. No real academic reason. I just wanted to share with my students the magic of this piece. The fourth movement features an ominous theme which quickly becomes martial in character. But about halfway in, the theme returns in the most lush, heartbreaking manner possible. It's easy to miss that it's the same theme, but once you hear it, it's magical. And the students smiled. And I wished I had time to just have them bring in more examples, to have them teach me how to listen to something.

And so every summer, I return to this sylvan place. It's an escape from work, from everything outside the forested walls. And I wish there was a way to bring that feeling more easily into my scholarship, the feeling when the only thing that matters is the music and who you share it with.

Value by example

2008-08-04T23:56:00.002-04:00

I was intrigued by this article in the NY Times. It seems one man has come upon the idea that value might be suggested by the repeated use of the images in textbooks.

There are of course many ways to determine value, and all of them I think fail to be satisfactory. Actually the very question feels fishy to me. But this is not to say that his study is without its merit. It is, I think, wise for those of us in academia to keep track of the canon, to see what notions of quality we're reinforcing through examples and facts. And it's also good to see how these examples change (I wonder, for instance, if the author weights examples at all based on readership or currentness of textbook). But it's also wise to note that a textbook should strive for more than simply reproducing the most valuable images. They should encapsulate what the history is showing, they should be diverse, and they should be clear and engaging.

Picasso will turn up more in a textbook more than Matisse simply because the man changed his style more frequently. It would be unwise to fill the pages with multiple examples of one sort at the expense of another, but so too would it be wise to dismiss Matisse's influence, or even value if you want to call it that, from this standpoint.

In the Listen textbook we use with the nonmajors, they select Haydn's Symphony 95. It's not, in my opinion, his most clever or engaging, nor his most beautiful, nor his most performed. But it does the job, possibly better than the alternatives. And there we may come to see the value in this work.

R&R

2008-08-02T17:58:00.002-04:00

I'm off on "vacation," so posts may be spotty. The quotation marks are because this week is relaxing time at home, followed by two weeks of archival work, followed by a blissful end to the summer at Pinewoods, where I will folk dance and listen and play at all hours of the day in the backwoods on Eastern Massachusetts.

The other R's I'm talking about are two of the three, reading and writing ('rithmethic will have to wait its turn). While the folks at Dial M discuss the difficulties, I can blissfully avoid starting the writing process of my dissertation while I'm on vacation. I like to write, but I inevitably have trouble with the big picture. Points will be made beautifully, and then lost by the end. Things fall apart, as one poet may have put it, the thesis cannot hold. The ideas I'm proud of, the execution is almost inevitably a victim of the time crunch at the end of the semester. There are the bright moments in everything, of course; having my Weezer paper's analytical section compared to the artful Alex Ross by my professor was no small source of mid-winter warmth. But the real problem is the curse of deadlines, which both inspire me to actually get it together, and prevent further stages of rewriting, papers on Honneger and Sondheim and Brahms and Nyman languishing in the "good enough" stage. We'll see how the dissertation fairs in the next few months and years.

But one of the real joys of vacation is putting down the books from the library, and picking up something for pleasure (I'm about halfway through Middlesex, and loving every page). Skimming for facts, noting the notes, mentally critiquing as you go is efficient, but I'm learning recently one of the overlooked lessons. Reading for style as well as substance. I love when Phil posts about Auden or Brent about poetry. That's what makes me want to spend the time rewriting—reading a Michael Chabon novel or a Yeats poem, knowing how beautifully sentences stand out. Here's one of my favorites, from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay:

Later, after the world had been torn in half, and the Amazing Cavalieri and his blue tuxedo were to be found only in the gilt-edged pages of deluxe photo albums on the coffee tables of the Upper West Side, Joe would sometimes find himself thinking about the pale-blue envelope from Prague. He would try to imagine its contents, wondering what news or sentiments or instructions it might have contained. It was at these times that he began to understand, after all those years of study and performance, of feats and wonders and surprises, the nature of magic. The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this boken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.

But it's seldom I see people writing about sholarship in similar ways. I don't have it on hand, but Aaron Fox's Real Country opened my eyes to the power of academic language. Before that, I remember reading The Girl With a Pearl Earring in my Art History seminar, talking about how art history is really an act of storytelling. Our scholarship tells stories of the artist, of the world, of ourselves. I've tried to keep one eye on content, and another on how the story is told, how the arguments are made, how the music is brought to life, and how the author figures into the story, as narrator, as character, as creator.

But for now, I'm enjoying being a reader and listener. I can only hope to await my next page of what I write with the same hunger that I await the next page of what I read.

What's good?

2008-07-28T02:17:00.002-04:00

The world seems to be abuzz with questions of who should assign quality and how. First, we had the stream of critiquing the critics. Sandow's latest post is about the question not of quality exactly, but the relevance of classical music. Fair enough. But for every Gilda and Butterfly, there's a Tosca too, a Rosina, etc. And part of the beauty of many of these works is they leave room for interpretation, not just for performers but for listeners too. And if Motown can still have a place for modern listeners, why not classical music. I do agree that we have to open ourselves up to new ways of listening, but it's not simply a relic to be admired (more on that in a second).

Next we have this excellent summary and cautionary tale about modern music from Kyle Gann, namely that the circles of good music and difficult music are neithger mutually exclusive, nor the same. Impressive, and well worth the read. I find that the biggest problem in modern music for me is finding a hook to latch on and follow. It can be melodic, it can orchestral color, it can be atmospheric, but the best pieces feel like they have something to follow, rather than a smattering of ideas thrown out at the listener.

Finally, I'll offer up this interesting article from the Times about reading. And reading this, I found my mind going in two directions. Fundamentally, I do think reading is important. In reading you learn language, expressiveness, history, character, fiction and nonfiction alike impart at least a basic lesson of the evocative power of words. And reading classics easily render history in vivid tones. Would integration be as fully understood without To Kill a Mockingbird? Victorian England without Hardy and Dickens?

But there's a tone that creeps into the arguments for print text, a tone that smacks of the same school that says your babies will be smarter because they listen to Mozart. The argument that reveres things just because they're old, or culturally valued, without understanding anything, just accepting that this is culture because it is. And just as these great books (and they are great) or pieces have something to say about the past, they can also say something about the present, whether it's through contrast or unexpected similarities. But we should be in touch with our own cultural landmarks, our own books, our pop music, our news, our lives. I thank Sandow for raising the consciousness about our pop landscape. But the voices of the classics also have something to say, voices which should neither be confined to the same dusty script, nor to a distant silence. Even if he's long-winded, hear Dickens and Gilda out.

Musicology for Art's Sake

2008-07-25T17:23:00.003-04:00

Last weekend brought to Ann Arbor the annual Art Fair. For locals, it's an excuse to leave. For me, it was an excuse to take a different path to work, although Friday morning I took an alternate alternate path through the art fair, before the heat and crowds arrived. It was quite enjoyable. I always love looking at pottery and glassware, mobiles, and photographs. Paintings depend on the style; this year, I found myself drawn toward the sparsely abstract variety. But like when I go to museums, it rekindles the path I didn't take, the path where I would have gone into art history.

But as was reading through these books the other day on collage, I got even more absorbed, specifically by a collection of essays on Picasso's collages. I'd read at least two of them—the Robert Rosenblum and the Rosalind Krauss—in undergrad, and that memory brought back what fun those classes were, especially the modern art seminar. The joy of looking at something and unravelling it, and rereading these articles, it helps clarify my own work, that each of these isn't a right or wrong way to read the paintings, but another piece of the puzzle. The formalists argue that collage was meant to emphasize the flatness of the canvas while acknowledging precisely what was wrong with painting, that it could no longer pretend to be an illusion of something else. Rosenblum points out the puns in Picasso's stenciled letters, Patricia Leighten looks at the content of the newspapers clipped out (fascinating it took so long to pay attention to something right there), while Christine Poggi prefers to look at the newspapers more symbolically as the opposite of high culture, something interchangeable and disposable, unlike art. The infamous question of authorial intent inevitably creeps in. But when Poggi points to it as an attack on art, prefiguring the Dadaists, does it really matter if Picasso intended it? No. The Dadaists were inspired by it, perhaps, and began their own movement.

In music, I've always been amused by Schumann's role in the absolute music's camp, amidst the attention Anthony Newcomb and others have given him as someone interested in literary programs and theories of narrativity. Neither side invalidates the other, but each side has a point in that Schumann was an important man in both movements. To deny this is bad musicology.

So, these art history articles have gotten me fired up about my work, but rather than fire up my what ifs, they've fired up my current path. It may have taken me a while to figure this out as clearly as I have now, but what I learned in art history can and should influence my work as a musicologist. I should read more art history, I should keep up with current happenings. If Schumann and Picasso can be read and understood in multiple ways without contradicting, it's time I understand myself that way. To quote my man Sondheim:

And without any guide,
You know what your decision is,
Which is not to decide.
You'll leave him a clue:
For example, a shoe

Note to self: include shoe in dissertation.

Do not go gentle into that Dark Knight

2008-07-21T23:56:00.002-04:00

Christopher Nolan's follow up to his Batman Begins is confirmation that his is the smartest and most darkly prescient. The action sequences are fewer than one might expect, but rewarding, and something of a miracle these days, the scenes in between are almost as electrifying. The first Batman film was a moral quandary on justice, revenge, and fear, but of a highly personal sort. The Darl Knight tackles the same themes but on a richer plane, and crafts a film that is deeper, scarier, and in many ways far subtler. Batman's task of cleaning up Gotham is well underway at the start, with the addition of Aaron Eckhart's smarmy political crusader who complicates Batman's night job, if not his day job as playboy. Enter Heath Ledger as the joker, a villain of such brilliant comic grotesquery, a pantomime of neurotic ticks and anarchistic fantasy. The sides are murky: the Joker is one step ahead of the various other crime kingpins in the city, but it's not about money or even power, but some sadistically twisted need for disorder. Batman, Gary Oldman's indie cop, and Eckhart's by-the-books DA battle each other while battling crime. But the real clincher is the public, whether in terms of opinion, vigilante justice, or in an inspiredly tense scene involving two groups on boats, the power of the public voice is where the heart of the film's message and discomfort lies. The story is a complex battle of egos and fists, fighting crime and the clock, with enough wit and cleverness in the characters to keep it snappy and reassuring. The cast is impeccable; aside from Ledger's psychosis, Bale proves himself impressively versatile once again, Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman exude wit and class, Eckhart and Oldham are perfect in their vintage roles, and Maggie Gyllenhall does her best with the thankless task of the girlfriend, but improves much over Katie Holmes (no wonder). More than just your summer blockbuster, The Dark Knight provides darkly glittering entertainment, and an escape into the problems of the modern world, rather than away from it.

Pixar Wisdom

2008-07-18T15:13:00.003-04:00

On the heels of my last post, two points and quotations to offer.

Alex Ross, among others, tells of more art criticism cuts. And amidst the furor over at Greg Sandow's page on pop/classical criticism, it's perhaps time to think about the function of critics in general. It seems to me the most important role is to engender an interest in the arts in society at large, not to flaunt one's educated position, but to use that to educate in the most sincere way. Every critic will have their own opinions, they will disagree with each other, with artists, with the general populace (one need only compare the Box office and Rotten Tomatoes if you don't believe me). Is the box office success of a critically panned CD or movie going to kill the arts? Hardly.

So what how does a critic straddle this divide? If you praise it without believing it, there's no point. If you pan it in a way that only makes people believe you're attacking them for seeing it, there's not much point there either. You're certainly not going to win over readers. And there's no point in saying what the audience already knows. Perhaps the solution is less product-driven? That is, don't just throw out reviews of individual products, heap praise on a work that many would pass off as meaningless, because your words aren't going to bring society around by themselves, most likely. I'd like to see more critics tackle not just the work they're reviewing, but broader issues in which that work figures. Movie genres, concert series, events, civic awareness, all that might draw in readers and get them thinking.

I don't really know, and it's frustrating. But maybe Pixar has the answer. The end of Ratatouille is perhaps the best defense of a critic's role, while the film itself finds the artistry in the everyday, blending the popular and the artistic in the best ways. I quote:

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations, the new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new, an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere. It is difficult to imagine more humble origins than those of the genius now cooking at Gusteau's, who is, in this critic's opinion, nothing less than the finest chef in France. I will be returning to Gusteau's soon, hungry for more.

My second bit of Pixar is a quote from Leonard Bernstein, who wraps up precisely the issue subtly under the heart of WALL-E, the necessity of art. It factors into the need for intelligent arts criticism, people who can write not just about the art that matters to them, but why it matters to everyone.

I’m pretty sure that if a complete evolution were possible, and every problem were solved, and man found ways of rectifying everything that was wrong—of supplying all his needs by varying capsules and rays and electronic means—that he might very well not need art anymore. Can you conceive of what a world that would be? Is that a world you’d like to live in? Doesn’t it sound rather sterile?

Amen.

[EDIT: This is, of course, not to say I don't love reading reviews. I love it, both as a researcher of reception history, and as a general audience member. I especially love scathing reviews.]

Define Hoedown

2008-07-13T23:58:00.002-04:00

Pixar's latest entry, WALL-E, only further cements their status as the most reliable and smartly entertaining filmmakers around. Like last year's superb Ratatouille, this film succeeds particularly in both its new levels of cinematic animation and visual astonishment and its nuanced depths of story telling. The nuance is not in its social critique, a frighteningly grim portrayal of an Earth devoid of life. The excesses of megacorporations have taken their toll, humans have been living on a roboticized space ship for centuries, and the only thing left on Earth is WALL-E a trash compacting robot, and his cockroach friend. WALL-E is a robot, but humanized through a particularly affecting form of curiosity which feels to the audience like nostalgia. Various artifacts are dutifully collected and marvelled at by him, none moreso than a copy of Hello Dolly. But none of these matter in comparison with Eve, a robot searching for life, and finds in WALL-E if not life, then love. Eve and WALL-E collect a plant, return to the spaceship, which is then set for a showdown between the captain who wants to return, and the robots who control the ship.

If this sounds like a rehash of 2001, it is an homage, from the dialogueless opening, to this plot, to a well-timed use of Richard Strauss. It touches on a variety of other cultural landmarks as well, but always with a keen knowledge of what the film is doing. Pixar is a master of detail, crafting a love story out of two creatures who can cumulatively only speak three words, two names and "directive." Other robots have personalities, while the humans have been lulled into a subservient, brainless life of virtual reality, one which is fissured by the end of the film.

While there is no disputing the comic genius and cleverness, the sweet and difficult romance than left me teary more than once, or the visual sweep of the film, what struck me was the lasting impact of its earnest message. On its surface, the film seems to be another eco-parable, but under it lies a recognition of the value of art. The waste discarded on earth becomes art through WALL-E's touch, from trash skyscrapers, to the individual items he plucks from the junkpiles, finding the beauty in everyday objects. The music he listens to, Hello Dolly and Louis Armstrong is like rediscovering a forgotten favorite album. Hello Dolly is a fascinating choice, since the film practically ruined Hollywood (opening the door for indie directors) and thus is pointedly complex in its point about big industry, that they can falter, but they can also produce things of beauty. And the ending credits demonstrate the rebirth of the planet not through technology or people, but through the history of art, implying that art is what makes our planet inhabitable (technicalities aside). Alongside Ratatouille, another film that so persuasively and tenderly argued for realizing the power of art and the artist (and the critic), Pixar makes its case for how it makes the world a better place. The arts are not for escaping the real world, they are for building it.

America the Musicful

2008-07-07T23:40:00.002-04:00

The 4th seems to inspire in several of my friends an amount of personal self-searching about nationalism and what it means to be American and patriotic. For me this year it was a little different; I've wondered what it means for me to be an Americanist.

I don't put a whole lot of stock in labels. I don't consider myself fixed into historical musicology, finding ethnomusicology has a lot to offer my work and experience. I don't limit my musical experience to just American music. That would be silly. And yet I do readily consider my primary interest to be American music, in a way that strikes me as similar to my identifying as an American. There's a part that finds it pure chance. I grew up here, with this music, and that's just what happens to grab my interest most. But it goes beyond that. My main investment in these categories is one of duty. Both are collective groups of which I am a part, and feel that I should contribute my opinions and actions toward their improvement. Both can provoke healthy, enlightening debates. And that is what I choose to celebrate.

All this comes on the heels of an intriguing post at Dial M and my own dissertation digging on the subject of nationalism. Locke's post raises an interesting conundrum. Taruskin's article does indeed call the bluff on the claim of German universalism, but the Florida case does an even greater service by noting how fraught with divisiveness any attempt and nationalism is. The act of musical performance is especially intriguing, as the meaning can shift depending on context: composition, performance, and reception all factor in, and it's rare that all three will coalesce into the perfect union one might conjure up from the word "nationalism." There's too much assumption these days in the word that it means unity, when it can also mean power imbalances, struggles, change. And Locke is absolutely right in guessing that our pop music says something about us and in hoping that we can have these discussions. And I will add my hopes: that my own work and voice will contribute something to not just to my discipline, but to the public at large. Responsible citizenship is an essential part of responsible musicology, or at least it is for me.

Concert Season Finale

2008-07-02T00:01:00.003-04:00

So what does a midwestern boy do when he makes it to the big city? That's right. He gets himself some culture.

First, the Broadway sort. Failing to procure tickets to South Pacific and Gypsy, I lucked out getting the second to last available lottery ticket to In the Heights. Which I can, without qualification, say that I loved. This show and Spring Awakening have given me hope that the vernacular music of today can, in fact, be used to craft a dramatically satisfying show, rather than just try to capitalize on popularity and leave the show behind. The reviews have uniformly praised the star, who is phenomenal, and I think probably makes the show. But they've also hammered the book as airbrushed, comfortable, and unrealistic portrayal of life in Washington Heights. Perhaps. But when's the last time we demanded realism from Broadway? Oklahoma certainly didn't portray the grueling life of farming. And that's what I particularly like here. The music is modern, but the show itself is on par with the films of Frank Capra. Every Christmas I endure litanies of complaints whenever I seek company to watch It's a Wonderful Life. But the naysayers don't interfere with my loving every popcorn filled minute of it.

I also have been to two modern music concerts, and they offer some interesting points of discussion. In NYC, I went to hear the American Symphony Orchetsra perform a variety of seldom-heard works. Takemitsu's Cassiopeia and Panufnik's Sinfonia di sfere. Both of these offer examples of what I find lacking in a lot of more contemporary music, which is to say cohesion. The Takemitsu is one of his less engaging works, a litany of percussion against a orchestra that has little to do but noodle in the background. The Panufnik offered some nice dialogic exchanges between orchestral sections, but they stand out against a sea of nondescript orchestral writing. The Langgaard Music of the Spheres came closer, though it's overlong and strays a little too much into overly bland romanticism. But there's a freshness of sonority in some parts, echoes of Beethoven 6 in a watercolor, delicate and sweet and ethereal. The highlight were the Ligeti selections: Appartitions a spirited, brief was of fragmented ideas swirling around the stage, and the marvelously effective Atmosphères, diffuse and grand. I can't hear it without thinking of 2001.

The second concert was in Detroit: Rachmaninoff's Paganini Variations and Messaien's Turangalila Symphony (I'll give you one guess what the draw was for me). Both were well-played, the Rachmaninoff slightly muddy to start, but warming to a rich, athletic performance. The Messaien kaleidoscopic, but always vivid and enchanting. But this concert failed in the more important sense. The audience steadily trickled out over the course of the Messaien (entirely older folks), and the first 12 people to stand at the end of the concert were probably under 35. What went wrong?

-This was a long concert. They gave extensive talky intros to the pieces, and we're already looking at a 75 minute work tacked on after a sizable piece and intermission. Maybe they were tired. The NYC concert, on the other hand, was an array of shorter works, more easily digested.

-There were no program notes. The NYC concert had extensive, fascinating, and quite explanative notes in a large booklet (easier to read).

-The on stage intro was thoroughly unhelpful. There was an extensive talk about Paganini before the Rhapsody, and several examples, which were nice but not necessary (especially given the long concert). The Messaien was preceeded by amusing tales of Messaien's synesthesia and religiosity, and a ten minute explanation/demonstration of the ondes martinot. Ten minutes? Really? Informative, yes. Helpful for understanding the piece? Well, maybe, but not on its own terms. And yes, the piece is about love, but when you say that to an audience, it does not prepare them for what's coming. The examples they played were brief melodic/harmonic fragments to point out the cyclical nature of the themes. Not a word about orchestral color, dance rhythms, or any of the lushness which is the primary appeal. Botstein in NYC wasn't the best speaker, but he had a sincerity, not to mention a knack for getting to the point about a piece.

-The pairing strikes me as bizarre, except that they're both exercises in contrast. The Messaien is equally complicated for the pianist, but less theatrically so. The Rachmaninoff is perfunctory whereas the Messaien is vast. Most bizarre of all, the endings. The Rachmaninoff ends with the orchestra working itself into a fury with the dies irae, only to shrug it off with a simple cadence at the end. The Messaien builds and builds, unleashing the full force in a shimmering F# major chord that makes Mahler look subtle by comparison.

I'm thrilled to experience this piece live, but I see why it's done so infrequently, because I can see the next board meeting. "You see? We tried to program something challenging. We even talked beforehand to help them into it, and they still walked out. Let's face it. People just don't want to hear this music."

This is why when I got an email asking about the concert, I decided not to fill out their form, and not to delete it, but to send them a letter thanking them for offering it, and expressing my concerns. I hope they stick around to listen.

Re/searching for an audience

2008-06-26T00:52:00.002-04:00

Catching up, I was pleased to notice these two posts. Ralph Locke at Dial M asks the pertinent question "Why do we do research?" (which echoes previous posts elsewhere about why we blog, right?). The answer may be here.

Jeremy Denk writes about the urge to share our musical experiences and the difficulty therein. I think that's precisely why we do this research. First it has to engage us enough to make it worth the effort, but more importantly, we cling to the hope that there's someone out there who shares this interest. Someone you could sit down with and talk to for hours. And maybe you will. But until you make it known where your passions lie, how are you going to find them? It's like opening up the conversation, and for that I appreciate scholarship that poses questions, not just answers, that makes an attempt to communicate beyond whatever frame, not to mention drawing you in with evocative writing. I've always said the best conference papers and articles are the ones that make me want to go listen to music, and the best performances are the ones that make me want to talk about them or write about them.

I have some such performances, but that will come another day.

Back(b)log

2008-06-22T23:46:00.002-04:00

I'm back from my research trip, a success both in terms of getting some clarity and direction in my dissertation and in terms of taking a break from everything, visiting friends. There's really nowhere I'd prefer to be than sitting around, chatting late into the evening with my Swarthmore friends. Music is great, but those are the real moments that set my brain going.

There's a lot of things that have collected up in my mind that will trickle out in the next few days. Some concerts, some responses, some other things.

For starters, there's this article, another mixed uplift and worrisome article from the times (most notable is one about Amtrak's rise in popularity and inability to fix up their infrastructure). I like the way this article approaches the question of how to get new audiences. It focuses on an important part of the solution that often gets ignored, the performer. It's a good goal, and I like that it acknowledges at the end the difference between professional performers and music school educators, but each of them learns something (I'd actually like to know more about what the school teacher learned).

I think we all have a role to play in this. Look at how curious the students were when she arrived. How do we harness that natural curiosity? I think the key is flexibility. So the Carnegie Hall concert didn't go over. Don't stop there. Find other concerts, other ways to make the music tangible. Nothing worried me more in this article than this:

Erin Lynch, the dean of students, delivered a stern warning to the auditorium. No talking, no hoods, no gum chewing. “I want you to listen and enjoy,” she barked in a bullhorn voice.

You can't command enjoyment, you can't expect one concert to draw in every student. If you want audiences, you're going to have to open up the floor, expand your own notion of what music can mean, and maybe they'll expand theirs.

Conferring

2008-05-31T00:54:00.003-04:00

I presented my paper on Vertigo this afternoon at the Music and the Moving Image conference here in lovely NYC (a beautiful day spent inside in the dark, but interesting at least). If you want to see any of it (including me!), you can see it online for a limited time: http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/music/scoring/conference/video

The hot button topic this year is diegetic and non-diegetic. I heard two excellent and thoughtful papers on the subject. Jeff Smith's keynote wanted to expand the idea of diegetic, noting how directors stylize mise-en-scene, like colors, light, dialogue, or even the set itself in Dogville, but one never doubts the diegeticness of these elements, and that music is similarly shifted temporally or spacially in ways that serve the narrative function. David Neumeyer had an excellent response, centering on Atonement, exploring the ways in which diegetic and nondiegetic interact, and ways in which they're grounded. For me, it seems like the issue is one that approaches will vary with each film. Consider another way I've thought about this: a diegetic musical cue that is at odds with the scene, ironic contrast between a song on the radio and the action you see. That lack of cohesion is bound to call attention to the artifice, artifice which would render that otherwise perfectly diegetic music into the world of nondiegetic, as imposed upon the scene. It's a fascinating topic, with plenty of shall we say passion directed at the subject, but ultimately one that I feel will resist one paradigm, settling instead on different ways to understand the differences.

My talk was on the prelude to Vertigo, and I'm pleased to say I got a couple interesting and helpful sources, and many appreciated compliments on the paper. But afterwards, I got the one question I always fear in part because it's a valid question, and in part because there's no answer. The question of whether any of this was intended. And certainly Herrmann was no novice at music, and I'm sure several of the large scale things were deliberate choices. But the dilemma is that when you interpret it, you'll never know. And to deny anything you can't be sure of is to paralyze musicology. And there's certainly something to the issue of reception, that it's at least as valuable as authorial intent. But there is that desire, lurking underneath, to have the two match up, to faithfully find what was put there on purpose, and to know that it means something. It's like getting in on the in-joke. But the joy isn't really in knowing, it's in the finding, the uncovering of the music. I'd much rather discover the intent after discovering the music. Discovering the intent without the music is meaningless, discovering the music is everything.

Visiting

2008-05-22T00:46:00.002-04:00

And off I'm going to Philly for a bit of friend-seeing before embarking on the more acadmically justifiable trips to NYC (conference and the NYPL) and to DC (Library of Congress). Anything I'm forgetting?

In other news, I'm officially a candidate, paperwork pending. I just enjoyed my first night out to a movie in quite some time (expect more soon), and quite enjoyed The Visitor. Like Tom McCarthy's other film The Station Agent, it's a film that revolves slowly around a central friendship tentatively established through circumstance. Richard Jenkins, in a perfectly nuanced and understated performance, plays Walter, a college professor coasting along distractedly and impassionately, presumably until retirement. He works on his book, he teaches his classes, he practices piano, the instrument his wife played. But even the piano never seems to bring about emotion. And this is part of the beauty. Like The Accidental Tourist, it's a film about thawing, and the reason it works as well as it does is precisely because Walter is a character who is fascinatingly ordinary. He's not bitter, he's not frustrated, he's not grieving over his dead wife, he's just there, doing the same thing as always. This changes when he's sent to a conference, and finds his apartment has been the home of illegal immigrants, who've been renting it from some other guy. Tarek is a drummer, his wife Zainab makes and sells jewelry (featuring one of the more hilariously awkward moments with a "hip" mother shopping there). What's beautiful about the movie is how the turns in the narrative feel natural, unexpected, and wholly uncontrived, because McCarthy settles into a breezy, comfortable pacing led by the characters. Tarek teaches Walter to drum, Zainab remains more cautiously distant. The characters learn to live with another, and Walter actually simply learns how to live.

One of the things I want to point out to all the academics is just how well this film captures the professorial Walter. At one point, he makes a remark about finding it difficult to talk about his work with nonwriters, a remark that carries a surprising amount of resonance in the film and with me. Academia has a tendency to wall itself off. Walter ends up seeming the odd one out, enjoying the drumming in the park rather than schmoozing. And the result of academia is frighteningly portrayed here, complete lack of outside contact leaves Walter unable to really find what interests him in his work. There's the grand realization is not something about globalization (what he studies) or immigration or politics or humanity, but a simple personal revelation that he's forgotten so much over his years teaching the same course, writing books out of necessity. If anything, this film is a reminder not just how important life outside academia is and for finding a way to make your work really yours, but also the fact that music is something that has bearing outside academia. On the subway, in the home, in the classroom. You can love it anywhere, but you have to love it.

It all comes back again

2008-05-19T00:43:00.002-04:00

In several ways. First, I've been catching up on all the posting. But it's hard, with several other things vying for my attention:
*I cooked dinner for the co-op today. The cake literally took over an hour and a half in the oven. But it was tasty.
*I have to give my run-through of my Vertigo paper for the Music and the Moving Image Conference tomorrow. Next time I decide to do a heavy analytical pitch-class tonal trajectorty nonsense paper project, remind me not too. Sibelius and I have gotten re-acquainted.
*I've started my part-time summer job working with the Robert Altman archives here. This stuff is great! I'm starting with just getting my hands around the stuff, but even just reading the descriptions of the boxes (which I will have to rearrange all 800-something of) has told me several things about what he did or didn't do. I'm excited for this. And library research in a week or two.
*Planning for my research (and friend visiting, show seeing) trip to the East coast. Philly, NYC, and DC. Still working out logistics about housing, which is driving me slightly nuts. Only slightly though.
*The satisfying end-of-semester paper toss. Everything must go! Also some books I have no idea how I ended up with, but won't read.
*Reading for fun. At the moment, Nicholas Baker's bizarrely miscellaneous The Mezzanine. Cute.

So, I'm a busy boy, but there's one thing that I grabbed my fancy as I was catching up. Greg Sandow had a recent posting responding to some comment about why we return to familiar music. He's certainly right that one shouldn't only bask in the familiar, though I'm not sold that anything like that is in danger of happening. And basking isn't a simple replication or not; good performances have the ability to render the familiar fresh and surprising again, bad ones can disappoint. So why do we return to familiar music? I think the flaw here is in the question and answers both, it treats all music the same. Sandow has a rather gloomy opinion of basking: The classical music business, as we know it today, is among much else a glorious basking pool. We can love that, if we want, but we shouldn't confuse this with art. Art should have a broad definition. It should include basking, it should include challenges. I agree wholly with Sandow when he says these new films can hit us where we live, because they mesh with the world we live in. But old films do that too, and I think that is closer to why we return to them, because they can still have that impact. To reborrow the cliché, no you can't step in the same river twice, but hey, if you like getting wet, that shouldn't stop you.

Newsrollin'

2008-05-14T17:40:00.004-04:00

Personal news first. I took my special field exam, and feel pretty good about it (thanks in large part to the sizable chunk of musical theater in the listening portion). The essays seemed rather, uh, vast—one on whether nationalism is an effective theory for a musicologist, one on how form has been manipulated in twentieth century music (this question required examples in classical, musical theater, film, and popular, covering the entire twentieth century).

I can happily attest that I can recognize "One Song Glory" from Rent from the first three notes, as I was asked by my professor during the test whether the CD player worked. I have no real shame about that either.

And then after the test, I joined my friend Jesse, who defended his dissertation the same day, and others for a celebratory drink. Quite pleasant.

In more somber news, Robert Rauschenberg has passed away. I remember the daunting and fascinating task of choosing his Estate(1963) for a paper in Art History. The interpretive possibilities set the mind reeling, and that for me is what I love about Rauschenberg. His works are immediately inviting, fascinating juxtapositions, familiar and yet wholly original, unpretentious but without settling to give you an easy or obvious answer. I don't know the details (and I want to) about his relationship with John Cage, but they both seem to capture that post-war spirit, the fascination with technology, with everyday images and objects, but Rauschenberg I think succeeds in giving it more of that visceral energy. The old becomes new and exciting again.

Also in the news, the Tony nominations are out. I've only seen the revival of Sunday, which was marvelous and ought to win something for its set. I hope to catch Gypsy, South Pacific, and In the Heights while I'm out east this summer. But what excites me is this larger trend in Broadway. The revivals of Sondheim, if they're any indication, manage to be incredibly inventive without sacrificing dramatic or musical choices. They give you a reason not just to content yourself with the original cast recording. And if In the Heights is anything like Spring Awakening, it may not the legitimization of rock musicals, not as simply a way to attract audiences and sell songs, but to make the language of the vernacular a vehicle for insightful drama and social messages. The history of musical theater is a history of national sentiment, really, from Berlin and Rodgers and Hart and Hammerstein to Sondheim and Kander and Ebb. It just makes me sad when the best we can seem to muster these days is to take movies as they are and slap some pop-style songs on them or a collection of already popular songs and string them together.

Procrastinatory miscellany

2008-05-10T23:57:00.002-04:00

Time is running out before the exam, which means that so is procrastination time.

Things that are making me smile (sunny weather I can't enjoy properly aside):

Tom Riis was here for our annual MASG residency. Every year, we have a scholar visit, and this year was especially exciting to me, both because Tom has a lot of energy, and he studies musical theater. The professional development section and the one-on-one time were especially helpful just on the details of how to do this thing, and the rest of the visit was peppered with all sorts of interesting topics and stories. Fantastic.

Dinosaur comics scores two points for the English language. Thanks T-Rex!

The roller skating scene from Shall We Dance. Actually, the whole movie. Also, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

New Inspiration for teaching

And the moments I get to go walking outside. Not just for the weather, but because when I walk, I get to listen to my iPod. That means freedom from my listening list (although I will admit an increasing obsession with Bernstein in preparation for my research).

I'll return after the exam, probably with comments about it. Oh, how I look forward to going out again.

Writing, good

2008-05-06T01:05:00.003-04:00

One week left until the special field exam, so expect intermittent posting. However, I thought I'd share some of my favorites from the period. In the past week, I've pushed my way through 23 books, skimming except for the parts that seemed especially pertinent for my work. Each of these books wins points not only for being clear and informative, but also beautifully written, sometimes to the detriment of my time management plann of skimming.

Ingrid Monson's Freedom Sounds. A fascinating journey into jazz in the 1950s and 1960s. Always insightful angles, loaded with pertinent and colorful detail, and clearly loving every minute of music.

Tricia Rose's Black Noise. It's sort of the work on hip hop, and you couldn't ask for a more culturally rich, musically aware introduction.

Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow. Fascinating glimpse of the 19th century's shift in cultural values. Several people have quibbloed about details and whether he overstates his case, but if so he overstates it so irresistably. These sorts of stories I just find so appealing, almost like a good historical novel (and I mean that in a good way, not dismissive).

Joseph Horowitz's Classical Music in America. Like the Levine, detailed history of broad cultural change made fresh and alive.

Peter Burkholder's All Made of Tunes. I'm seriously in awe of that much work. And his edited collection of essays Charles Ives and his World is an excellent companion piece.

Bernard Gendron's Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club. A look at the ways in which music crosses from art to pop or the other way. Compelling stuff, especially with the masterful way all these narratives end up intertwining and echoing.

Finally, two stand out. The first is Michael Broyles's Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music. I'm not sure what impresses me most, but it's probably the fact that he's able to get so much in the book, to make his examples concise and yet perfectly clear in their function. But he's also mastered the art of the subtly directed narrative the book. It never fails to be relevant and interesting or lacking in direction. And beautifully written. Well worth a look if you have interest in this music.

Jason Tanz's Other People's Property is the last book I read, an examination of hip hop's role in white America, and it raised an interesting tangential question I want to end with. I didn't take a lot of notes from the book, since it isn't as clearly in line with my studying task at hand, but I read it front to back nonstop. It was that kind of book, the kind you don't expect to be on a shelf with the other Library of Congress nonfiction books. It's not as theoretical or musical in its focus, which may account for my lack of notes on it. But also to that end, as I was reading I found it all too easy to slip from thinking of it as a scholarly work to simple a masterful story.

And here I'm torn on two accounts. Is the writing style working against it? Are we more likely to trust an author who cites more theory, has more footnotes? The second gets down to a simple question of musicological versus ethnomusicological priorities. Historical musicologists like sources, footnotes, in short, evidence. If it comes from an archive, somehow it's more reliable that one person's experience. And I have problems with that, although I found myself (involuntarily) less willing to think of this ethnography as that kind of evidence. Aaron Fox's Real Country was also riveting and a well-told story, but also more theoretical, and somehow I didn't have this issue reading that (quite the opposite, as it ranks among the best scholarly books I've ever read). So why should this book's even broader accessibility render it (in my mind at least) somehow less trustworthy as a scholar? Certainly the details he gives are exact and applicable, the conclusions he draws well supported, and so forth. The upside, I suppose, is that all this school still hasn't killed off my love of reading a well-written book. I just wish it didn't make me so damn skeptical.

Writing, bad

2008-05-01T00:58:00.002-04:00

PMG summed up my feelings about the Pulitzer for feature writing rather nicely. I actually went back to read it and found, in fact, that it was worse than I had remembered. I do think part of the blame lies with the readers for taking the discussion in the wrong directions. I for one wanted to know why it is that classical music remains so wedded to the idea of the composition to the point where I feel the performers are all marginalized. Beethoven is Beethoven. Other corners of music inspire much more passion much more consistently about covers, which performance you're listening to, live albums, etc.

Anyway, I'm not writing to complain about a story from last year, but rather one from last week (hence my recalling the post and rereading the article). Like the Joshua Bell article, it has such an interesting premise, and then dashes any hope of actual substance, and this one's even worse. It's an article on young gay marraiges. And it's the most vapid bit of journalism, with equal bits Cosmo gossipiness and pretentiously swank name-brand dropping. Enjoy these choice passages:

"It was a cozy, festive affair, complete with some 20 guests and a large sushi spread where you might have expected the chips and salsa to be. “I beg of you — please eat a tuna roll!” Joshua barked, circulating around the spacious apartment in a blue blazer, slim-fitting corduroys and a pair of royal blue house slippers with his initials. “The fish is not going to eat itself!”
Spotting me alone by a window seat decorated with Tibetan pillows, Joshua, who by that point had a few drinks in him, grabbed my arm and led me toward a handful of young men huddled around an antique Asian “lion’s head” chair. “Are you single? Have you met the gays?”

I realize it's exposition, but it just sounds like you're doing everything to point out how fantastically materialistic these people are. And it only gets worse.

Several couples lamented the fact that they had never met another young gay married couple. This left them without a model to help them shape or understand their own relationship, and it seemingly left them without anyone who could relate to their unique circumstance.

Wait, I can understand wanting a community, but do people really need a model? I don't think I've ever heard anyone claim that their marriage was modeled on something. That seems, actually, like a terrible idea. He continues...

“They see other married people like them everywhere. We don’t. It would be great to have young gay married couples who we could hang out with.”
“I actually met one the other day,” Daniel, who sat by Anthony on the couch in their apartment in Brookline, said matter-of-factly.
“You did?!” Anthony said, nearly spilling his glass of wine. “Did you get their number?”
Daniel hadn’t. This momentarily crushed Anthony, who seemed to yearn to interact with other gay people — single or married — more than Daniel did. (Anthony joined Boston’s gay flag-football league the previous fall, partly in an effort to meet other gay people.)
Other couples, like Joshua and Benjamin, had an abundance of gay friends of all ages and clearly reveled in having their cake (marriage) and eating it too (a social life that rivaled that of many of their young single gay friends). It was hard to keep track of the many social engagements the couple invited me to.

Good, we can safely dodge the issue by noting the glass of wine (I wonder what kind) and the bountiful social life. It makes it hard to take this seriously.

When I finally did hear from Marc and Vassili in February, they had good news. They had filled out the requisite forms at City Hall and were just waiting the three state-mandated days before collecting their marriage license. In the meantime, they were celebrating by luxuriating for a night at an upscale Boston hotel. They invited me to drop by.

Oh goody. Don't worry, what follows is precisely what you expect, and again a genuinely interesting point about conventionality is swept humorously away.

When the clerk finished typing up the marriage license, she walked back to the counter. “Are you going upstairs?” she asked the couple.
“What’s upstairs?” Marc asked.
“The city clerk. She can marry you.”
“Does she like gay people?” Marc said.
“She loves gay people,” the woman assured them. She looked at the document in her hand.
“Is that our marriage license?” Vassili asked excitedly.
“Yes, it is. Do you want it?” She started to hand it to him and then stopped, toying with him. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, please!” he said.
“Wait!” Marc said dramatically. “I think I’m having second thoughts.”
The woman froze.
“He’s kidding,” Vassili said.
“Totally kidding!” Marc assured her.
The woman laughed, handed Vassili the license and wished the couple well. As we walked away from the counter, Marc, who had tried to mask his nervousness with humor, looked as if he might pass out. “I need to go to the bathroom,” he said. “I’m feeling lightheaded. Don’t get me wrong — this is very cool. But it’s actually happening. I’m actually getting married — to a man!”

Does she like gay people? That was the point at which I decided I could not let this pass. So consider me one up should this ever win a Pulitzer.

Pictures, Take II

2008-04-27T07:55:00.002-04:00

Several folks out there have been blogging about why they blog. My sense is that for me it changes. In part, it's my own exercise, getting a chance to write more freely, a chance to start forcing myself to think through things and phrase themcoherently, something to do when you wake up as I have at 7:30 on a Sunday. But I think the main reason I blog is the same reason I read blogs, because it reminds me what I'm, passionate about. Especially in graduate school, it's easy to start to only focus on the short term goals (which I grant you are important), but all those interests and thoughts you end up sweeping aside (for now) merit some attention. And when I read about things, like Michael's post about music images it rekindles those, and it's so satisfying to feel like you have something to say. And even more satisfying is to rethink, since I had not spent much time thinking about how to visualize a piece of music in one take (the closest I think was marvelling at the score of Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles, all that white on the page perfectly captures that delicate, translucent sound somehow). And so I blog to engage with myself and with others. My thoughts may be poorly thought out, incomplete, or unwieldy, but it's nice to give them the attention I want, and to be reminded that musicology is something that can be shared, looked at in so many ways, just like that Degas.

Thinking about this stuff reminded me this morning of an New York Times article from Larry Kramer from about a year ago about museums. I'm a staunch fan of expanding the ideas of concerts, from clapping in between movements to innovative programming to encores. But something about Kramer's article bugged me at the time, and it still does, and I'm still not entirely sure what exactly. But something Michael said that distills the difference between music and image helped bring it more into focus: the viewer has much more freedom to decide in what directions to focus. There's no getting around that. In a concert, you can choose to focus on an instrument or a melody, harmony, percussive effect, the person next to you, your program notes, the architecture, the conductor, etc. But that seems peripheral, or at the very least doesn't get away from the fact above. And music only gives you the big picture after the whole thing is done, whereas an image allows it at any time. And I think what unsettled me about the Kramer article was precisely that, that as well as museums are doing, there's a limit to how much the concert can copy them. And I'm torn as to whether the concert hall should be taking its cues from the museum, or trying to figure out how the concert hall is unique and exploiting (for lack of a better term, though I don't want to sound like it's cheapening the process, quite the opposite) its own unique abilities for maximum effect. Several of the key points in the article are about individual freedom, the freedom to linger, to focus, and so on, all things that the image is far more suited to than music.

But I really like Kramer's overall goals, which seem to include a more inviting and flexible concert experience, as well as leading the listener in. Maybe it's not so much museums as museum tours we could think about, the act of leading a single group of people places, and giving them the tools and knowledge to come to the works and take something away as individuals through a collective experience. And I've long felt that there's a strong connection between museum exhibitions (another aspect of art that I feel gets too often neglected, that how art is placed among other pieces can drastically change the impression one takes away) and concert programming. At their best, both should offer up new and old in a way that fosters learning something about each. Familiar works should be given a fresh outlook in their new context, and the new introduced in a way that makes them more vital. A program or exhibition that simply relies on the starpower of the work itself, even if the work can handle the burden, leaves me without the desire to come back and revisit it the next time.

Picture this

2008-04-25T15:49:00.005-04:00

I'm returning from self-imposed exile known as "no, seriously, you need to finish this paper." And I can happily report that the paper was, in fact, completed, and I may now return to avoiding studying for my special field exams through blogging and attending countless end-of-year barbecues. Mmm.

Anyway, there's a topic that's weighed on me ever since Michael Monroe brought it up a week ago, the relationship between visual art and music. I actualy started on this path initially in graduate school, arriving with BAs in both art history and music, and that desire to explore this n depth has never gone away. It will factor into my dissertation on collage, certainly gets involved in film music, and has crept in to various other side projects. But Michael's post is far more general and deserving of a serious inquiry. He writes:

There's a long history of comparing art to music, whether it's Debussy/Monet, Picasso/Stravinsky, Schoenberg/Munch, Duchamp/Cage, Rothko/Feldman, etc.. While these comparisons are useful, they're often presented in a way that glosses over an important difference: music is experienced as a series of events over time, while still images are taken in all at once. I'm not saying we can't still find lots of common undercurrents in such disparate media, but I guess I want tighter, more direct connections.

I want thos connections too, but I think part of it comes from what exactly we want to say. I find the practise of throwing a couple pictures into a powerpoint and just covering the general style rather unsatisfying. Yes, both Debussy and Monet like blurring of forms. But is that really all there is to say? I think the real root of the problem is the lack of skill musicologists have when it comes to dealing with paintings (the parallel that hits me is the use of classical music on audio tours, which too often simply acts like a marker of culture, but never offering something to the viewer/listener beyond pleasant background, like those benches you can sit down on an rest). Part of the power in understanding a painting, just as in music, comes from the use of and abuse of traditions. Just as when Jonathan Bellman writes about trying to communicate the edginess of Mozart, we have to communicate the edginess of Monet. There's a disconnest in using familiar images seen on calendars, tote bags, dorm room walls, and claiming they're like music that students find challenging (how modern art has attained an air of accessablility and familiarity is worthy of its own discussion).

But another part of the connection is knowing how we approach a painting. Michael is right in acknowledging the difference between hearing and viewing. The listener at a concert has the work laid out in a single line, whereas the viewer of a painting is free to linger as long as he or she likes, return to parts, etc. But even in the act of listening, one can focus on certain parts, or have a sngle impression after the piece has concluded. And in art, I think Michael and plenty of others are wrong in the assumption that a painting is taken in all at once. Look at this painting by Degas:

There are a number of ways in which to view the painting. For me, my eye goes first to the pink bow, emphasized by the vertical line of the wall right abover it and the way the arched back is echoed in the arch of the skirts directly above the bow. From therethe eye could o up to the yellow bow, then immediately to the foreground where the yellow is repeated, or to the yellow wall in the background, and follow the line of dancers to the foreground. It pauses in the lower right, amid the intense reds and pinks, and the dancers who face us more directly. And of course the staircase has its own self-contained world. But each of these parts of the painting are taken in on their own time, in the order the viewer chooses or is directed. Other paintings literally tell a narrative by directing your eye across the canvas from one scene to another. Pollock's paintings allow you to follow the process. I don't think it's just musicians who see movement within images. The point is that while it is easier to glean an overall sense (such as the triangular composition of the Rubens, the act of encountering a painting is more involved than a singular moment. The Rothko/Feldman comparison works because Rothko takes time. You get up close to the canvas and the complexities of shades, colors beneath colors start to come out slowly, the same way Feldman's music subsumes you into a soundscape, and the details become heightened in that stage. And for me there's something wonderful about the intricacies of the simplicity.

I'm not sure how best to translate this into teaching, aside from either teaching in a museum or doing a cross-disciplanary class (which I would love to do someday). But the effort may start with giving art a few more seconds, allowing the students to really look at the art, to see the art evolve alongside the music, or to realize that these works have their own stories. If you're going to use art (and I certainly encourage it), use it responsibly. Maybe students will learn something unexpected.

O Tod, wie wohl tust du!

2008-04-18T22:53:00.002-04:00

And so Brahms has reached his end, and I have reached mine. Today I took what may in fact be the last final I shall ever take. 20 listening, and one essay on Brahms's late style (minor gripe: if you give us the essay topic in advance and tell us to choose any four pieces to write about, please do not change this and add restrictions in the actual test. My strategy was to ignore the restriction and argue my points as they were). But I want to take a moment to reflect on this class, the last of my requirement-fulfilling classes, because it was an odd way of teaching.

There were no readings. None. Not even suggested. Instead, we listened to a piece (or several songs/smaller pieces) each week, and the professor gave a detailed explanation of the music. This ranged everywhere from formal patterns to subtextual issues to stylistic comparisons to psychoanlaysis. On the one hand, I really did enjoy the depth of focus, getting to know music intimately. I remember Gerry Levinson's 20th century class at Swarthmore barely got beyond 1920, but I came out knowing Debussy and Stravinsky intensely well and developing an appreciation for it. But at this stage, I must be more cynical. I'll listen, I'll take notes, I'll even repeat it on the exam, but I know that this is not my professor's primary area, and I'd rather hold off my judgments until I read further about Brahms.

It's such a sharp turn away from the standard musicology course I expect. Readings to be synthesized and discussed, musical examples to supplement. I've come to the decision this course offers something important, a reversal to focus on the music most of all. Also, sometimes, you want to just soak up a senior faculty member's knowledge. In Judith Becker's world music class, the Indonesian sections were the best because she had all this information to impart. It may feel lazy at first, but it's valuable learning, and in the wake of Prof. Becker's retirement, you come to realize how lucky you are to have that wealth of information right there.

Words wouldn't come in an easy way

2008-04-15T01:03:00.003-04:00

I'm reporting from a rather unspringly Ann Arbor, following a dissapointing withdrawal from a conference, due to American Airlines. So instead I spent the weekend grading and getting sick. But that's not the point I want to make (though sympathy is in short supply in grad school). I want to talk about my Sunday, the day that redeemed an otherwise crappy weekend.

Carousel. There aren't too many musicals greater than this one. Not only does it grapple with issues like economic status and domestic abuse, but the music is fantastically bittersweet, moreso than any other musical from the time. When people try to award West Side Story as the musical that changed the face of Broadway and made it an art, I always wonder if they had seen Carousel and why that didn't register.
-The overture. A whole tableau plays out before the audience, set to waltzes that are too pungent to really be realistically carousel tunes. The opening bars are disjunctly out of tune; right from the start, you know something's not right. And while the sweeping, swirling music enraptures you, it has a way of pulling back just before it carries you too far.
-"If I Loved You," one of the finest love songs of all time. The lyrics are so tentative, but the music says it all. This is love, and it's hard. But just as it reaches its peak, it pulls back, and suddenly the love becomes conditional, fictional, and all the sweetness evaporates. Even worse is the way the song reprises in the second act, as if their shyness was to blame for all the tragedy to come.
-Soliloquy. A long musing in which Billy starts fantasizing about his son (and later daughter) he's going to have. It shouldn't really work as a set—it's stream of consciousness, there's no action, and as an end to the first act it defies pretty much all the rules. But it's so powerful thanks to the music that matches every turn. And it's this moment that ends the first act so well; a first act that glides on fantasy and planning, the second deals with reality in brutal terms.
-I love dance, and all the choreographed choruses made me grin. But the ballet in the second act is so stirring for the way it melds humor and fear into the daughter's life. I can't stand it when they cut the ballet out of this and Oklahoma! because you lose the inner workings of the characters.
-The ending. Sure "You'll Never Walk Alone" is a crowd pleaser. But the ending's not about the song, it's about the actions behind it. Here Billy finally makes good, and how does he do it? Simply by speaking some positive words about believing to his daughter and saying "I love you" to his wife. It's not actions here, it's words, and it;s the simplest words that have been so lacking. Fantasy is restored, but now as a goal, rather than as an illusion.

And following that, I went to see Sunrise with live accompaniment. It's a grand film, and I'm astonished at a) how beautiful and inventive it is, and how it hasn't dated a bit, and b) how much Murnau packs in there. The first third is gothically frightening. The second is a sparkling romantic comedy. The final third is epic tragedy. But Murnau is a master at pacing, allowing things to build in their own way. The impending crime of the first third builds so tensely, and the love story rediscovered in the middle is so human, tentative, and vulnerable. And then the events come swiftly and suddenly toward the end with such a fury, it's dizzying. Boundlessly entertaining, in every way imaginable.

Ann Arbor, Spring of 2008

2008-04-08T01:27:00.002-04:00

It has become that time of ~~evening~~ the semester when people sit on there porches, but really ought to be sitting inside with their laptops writing.

The weather this weekend has been unproductivemaking. And I am pleased. And while papers are nearing deadlines and losing interest, and grading grows increasingly tiresome, I turn to springtime frolicking. (On the upside, I've been on a power-reading kick ever since starting Michael Broyles's book on American mavericks, which proved inspirational and has sent me looking at things for dissertation readings, research projects, and the like. That's something to commend myself on.)

This weekend, the frolicking took the route of reading outside in the sun and overloads of concerts.

Friday: Brad Mehldau trio. They're amazing, and there's something about live performances of great jazz that make it come alive, the leave you wanting to savor every little moment and gesture, note every interaction, and marvel at the rarity of the experience that only comes that once. The highlight was a painstakingly, hauntingly soft performance of My Ship, though I also liked an untitled one that seemed to start off like John Adams, minimalist gestures, pulsing harmonies in arresting rhythms, and growing into a broader statement by the end. Followed by a party at which I ran into 3 people who went to my undergrad.

Saturday: Detroit Symphony (ticket gotten last minute at Brad Mehldau from a friend). Berlioz Roman Carnival, super-snappy, and the effervescent Mendelssohn Italian Symphony in the first half. I was also pleased that the first movement of the Mendelssohn got a healthy round of applause. It's buoyant enough to merit it, and the orchestra gave it not just energy but attitude. Most memorable though was the UM band joining the orchestra for John Corigliano's Circus Maximus, a jubilant (and by jubilant I mean INCREDIBLY LOUD) work for musicians on stage, in the audience, in the aisles, and a marching band thrown in for good measure. The loud parts are pure visceral energy, but the quieter moments are also quite exquisite to balance. The first night music episode evokes a desert, with evocative coyote howls in the french horns, but also the low brass and sparse bells and piano texture hovering above it is just as powerful as the loudest parts, creating a mood of vast darkness and delicate infinity. The work is concertgoing to the extreme, sheer theatricality excess, at times savage and others radiant. No middle ground here, only the sublime extremities. I came back to an experimental music concert which was hilarious, but sometimes quite moving to my surprise.

Sunday: Pops. I love the pops here. They may not hit the right notes always, but they completely sweep you into the concert experience, from the conductors dueling on light sabers to the sheer aural pleasure of music from the James Bond films, I was never less than entertained and happy to be right where I was.

Today: Daniel Bernard Romain attended class and gave a fantastic lecture to the students on making a career in music. Throw in some shimmering examples of virtuoso violin playing, a recital that included Debussy's Baudelaire songs and Dichterliebe, and the game, and you have yourself an excellent reason to put off grading until tomorrow.

Listening, Talking, and the Comfort Zone

2008-04-03T13:33:00.002-04:00

One of the things that has been attracting my attention is balancing your comfort zone with everything else. This semester I'm right at home teaching American music, but it lacks the spark of when I was teaching the world music last semester. That was great because of its challenge for me as well as for the students. I had to work harder to master things, but I also felt more comfortable not knowing things. I could draw connections to more familiar things, placing emphasis on the concepts and encouraging everyone to approach music with curiosity. This semester, it's harder for all the unexpected reasons.

This past weekend I presented some research I've done on Weezer (yes, Weezer) at the midwest Ethnomusicology meeting. I was certainly among the few historical musicologists there, but I didn't feel as much like an impostor as I'd thought. Several papers were fantastic and compelling, and it was fairly easy to find common ground to talk about. I tried to mix musical analysis with some theory, and I think it came of successfully, although it's not hard to feel like a success when you show music videos with adorable animals. But most of all, I enjoyed the experience of opening up the doors of research, of getting to explore different nuances of the same work. In many departments (ourselves included at times), there's a rift between historical musicology and ethnomusicology. It's nice to know how easy and welcome crossing that line is. And maybe the lines between performance and musicology and theory are similarly easily crossed, if only I could figure out a way to get it out of the classroom and into the coffee shop.

Having finished up that talk (I'll be re-doing it in Austin, but on the upside I don't think I need to change all that much!), I need to start on the talk I'm giving tomorrow here. Ostensibly I'm talking about my dissertation to come, but at this stage I know nothing. But my hope is that in not just listening outside my comfort zone but by having to talk about things I may not know, I'll think more about what I want to know. Maybe someone else will know something useful. Maybe I'll even realise I do know something. I like to think of my dissertation as a comfort zone I'm breaking in, slowly, safely at this stage, feeling around for the perfect spots.

Movie Musicals

2008-04-01T00:21:00.002-04:00

There's a trend these days, a trend to make movies into musicals. I've only seen three, but it already makes it clear the problem in this.

Tarzan...uh, let;s not go there. Ever.

Legally Blonde I saw on MTV. I must say I loved this movie, but the musical failed it on several levels. It replaced the subtle charm of the film with a less subtle sugar rush, which makes everything less convincing. The songs also don't really add any depth or character, just sort of serve to keep perking up the mood, which only goes so far.

But the one that really baffles me is the one I saw the other week. I really enjoyed this movie, and the musical has a lot of the same charm. The problem is that the charm doesn't feel any different than the movie. The film also supplies a fairly convincing level of emotion, which is precisely what's missing here. In fact, the attempt to infuse it here feels awkward. too indebted to the film, and too unwilling to deviate. There are scenes in which incredible emotional heft is short-changed. Case in point, one scene where two characters almost kiss, then discover that one's grandmother is dead. The scene takes about 45 seconds, and is somewhat carelessly dropped into the middle of the story with no lead up or follow up. And that's the show's problem. In a film, cuts are easy and unobtrusive. On the stage, though, cuts are distracting because of the dead time while the scene changes, and to have a scene enter and leave within the span of a minute feels just plain silly. The emotions are injected in almost formulaicly, but there's been a sever miscalculation, turning a finely nuanced movie into a sitcom-ish attempt for serious issues. The show also does a nice job of showing the pros and cons of a pop score. it works well during the crowd-pleasing numbers, of which there are several (the big ass rock song and Life With Harold come immediately to mind). But the pop score also can't quite carry the more emotional parts of the film.

Perhaps the biggest problem of all with these movie musicals is just that it saps the inspiration process out of it. Musicals like Nine and A Little Night Music use the movie as a launch point, crafting ingenious scores that add so much depth to the movie—a pastiche in the former, a suite in the latter. But here, it's like a bad DVD transfer where everything becomes jumpier, more washed out, and leaves you with the sneaking suspicion that maybe the movie wasn't as funny as you remembered. Don't worry, it was.

Campaign trailing, campaign teaching

2008-03-23T12:10:00.002-04:00

Two things about me: I try to keep up with politics, and I'm fairly stoic in my disposition. It surprises people, I think, when I have strong opinions because I'm not the overly vocal type. In fact, Im usually torn between promoting my stance and feeling like I shouldn't foist opinions on other people.

In the classroom, it becomes harder, because of the power dynamic. But I think it's important. Two of my favorite professors here have successfully brought politics into the class. In Chuck Garrett's course this semester on U.S. music and national identity, we looked at Obama's speech (I was surprised I was the only one who'd watched it in the class-the general readership here is encouraged to find it and read it) and talked about his vision of national identity. And Christi-Anne Castro's music of Asia class last year regularly looked at these cultures from a contemporary politics/world events in a way that was both enriching and fascinating.

This week, I tried to talk about race and music in response to white rock and roll covers, and last week's day on the Harlem Renaissance. I can't tell if it was successful or not, but I hope it raised some issues. And next week the GSI union (GEO) is preparing for a two-day work stoppage. I brought it up, I welcome student support, but again I don't want to abuse my position of authority by encouraging students to join us too strongly.

I've always been impressed with professors who engage in politics and other touchy subjects in ways that provoke discussion, but don't divulge too much about their views. And I've always been impressed by students who take an active interest and follow up these things. At this stage in the game, I'm finding it not only hard to be both, but necessary.

Weekend concert wrap up

2008-03-17T12:03:00.002-04:00

Most smile inducing: Michael Tilson Thomas. The SFS came to Ann Arbor with a hefty concert of Sibelius 7 and Beethoven 3. The first smile was the most sincere--MTT gave a fantastic talk before the Sibelius about thinking of it as a study of time, ever-shifting tempos, music that seems to move backwards, forwards, or just hover. It's very gratifying to see conductors who have a skill at explaining music in an engaging way that is both accessible and useful for the listener, any listener. And he was right. It's a gorgeous, fluid piece. I always think of Sibelius as a man of contrasting sonorities: chorale-like brass, hazy, scurrying strings, and more dance-like winds. But the symphony in one movement has a certain fluidity and structure he brought out nicely. Beethoven 3 needed no introduction, and it had a wonderful energy, especially the charming third movement coming after the very moderate tempo he took the second movement at. I'm also amazed at his ability to get two separate sounds from the orchestra for the two pieces. And the final smile of the night, two encores. A graceful, quiet Schubert piece from Rosemunde, and then a rousing version of Hail to the Victors (I don't know the words, but I adapted "Hail, Michael Tilson Thomas.")

Most intimate: my friend Jeanine's recital dress rehearsal directly after the concert. She sounded great, especially on the Harrison concerto. It's guite amazing how well he creates a lush, melodic sound out of a percussion ensemble, in a way that really complements the virtuosic but subtly so violin writing. Reich's Violin Phase, I have to say, requires more patience than I have at 1 am.

Most nautical: The Met broadcast of Peter Grimes. I'm still reveling over this. I love this opera, it's one of my all time favorites. The performances were spectacular, especially Patricia Recette's sensitive Ellen. Anthony Dean Griffey's Peter is appropriately moody, but also surprisingly tender in the more lyrical moments. And the crowd scenes, especially the Act 3 one were positively terrifying (I can only imagine it live). But the real winner here was the orchestra, which was appropriately terrifying in its sterner moments, but also beautifully create that shimmering quality in Britten's writing perfectly. My favorite of the interludes, Moonlight, was particularly good becuase of the long pauses between phrases, making what typically sounds simply radiant feel eerily darker. I'm torn on Doyle's production with the big wall of windows. It's highly effective at many points, such as the opening where everyone literally looks down on Peter, and the quartet for Ellen, Auntie, and the nieces, where each are in their little window. But the wall when it's closed is drab and unappealing, and not the eerie blue light behind the silhouettes is a brilliant contrast but not enough to excuse for me the long stretches of action in front of a big wooden wall. The end, in which the walls recede to create an empty, backlit stage is visually arresting, but too sharp a shift (although it's the perfect image for the way Britten ends the opera with an unsettling dawn).

Most nautical, unexpected: The carillon's playing Sloop John B. Thanks for that.

Most inexplicable programming: the UPO concert. My friend Abby's piece was being premiered. it's a good piece, tripartite with a gorgeous wind-dominated rhapsodic slow middle bound by energetic rippling figurations, that chrystalize in the end to a terrifying rhythmic unison pounding away. It opened the second half. The first half was also opened by a recent work, Michael Abels's Global Warming, a throwaway type piece that left me rather uninspired. It's purportedly about warming between cultures, but the effect is a sort of buffet style, with a large helping of celtic melody, with some samplings of African and Indian rhythms and Arabic modal violin music. The portions are off-balance and decidedly avoid mixing, which results in an audience-friendly, lively , and melodic piece I don't need seconds of. The first half ended with the by contrast weighty Elgar cello concerto. It's a great piece, and well played beyond some intonation issues. I especially like the way in which the first movement ends inconclusively and the introspective, somber theme returns echoed in pizzicatto strokes in the cello, interrupted with little scherzo figures. Its shadow haunts the movement, which is short and frantic, followed by a third movement which is rapturous, but still clearly under the spell of the first movement. And the final movement, a rousing rally whose climax is a reprise of the third movement and then the opening, finally resolved and released. The concert ended inexplicably with a Potslavian Dance from Prince Igor. It's one of those pieces I can happily add to my list of pieces I really don't care to hear again loud and bombastic, which seems to serve as a substitute for having anything of melodic interest to say. But what grabbed me about the concert is the programming, which didn't make any sense to me. Ending the first half with a weighty, serious piece and the second half with a pops-style, short and flashy piece, makes no sense to me, and neither fit at all with the Abels (Abby's probably wasn't done early enough to have much bearing).

Filmstallations

2008-03-15T19:19:00.002-04:00

Phil's comment on the last post made me think about video instillations in museums. As it happens, I have two sort of viewpoints on these.

1. Museums occasionally hold film nights, the way they hold concerts. But is there a way in which museums can further integrate things like film into their holdings? I've been pleased by recent exhibitions of things, like graphic design at the SF MOMA last spring, things that succeed in both challenging notions of art and the everyday, but without any chilly distance or irony of dadaist works. Maybe Phil's on to something here.

2. Museums can't handle video installiations. They're awkwardly in dark rooms off to the side, there's frequently no place to sit (sometimes, it's hard to figure out where to stand even), and they prevent any sort of invitation to engage with the rest of the museum. One aspect I like about museums is the layout, which pieces are paired along a wall. The best are non-obvious, but intuitive and informative. Films, on the other hand, close off the rest of the museum to focus on the work, and the transition in and out never feels right for me. I'd like to see museum design take this into account, and video artists think about this when they work.

Enough pontificating. I have a concert to attend.

Recommended? Yes?

2008-03-11T11:50:00.002-04:00

Usually it's it's easy to recommend something or not, even with qualifications. But I'm now stuck with a movie I have no idea what to with. That movie is The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

The rather cumbersome title sort of gives it away, but you won't want to watch this movie for the actions that happen. You won't even want to watch it for the characters, who are pretty opaque and it's often kind of confusing what's going on. In fact, we can go ahead and rule out the dialogue which wanders far too frequently from the poetic to the pretentiously absurd.

But the cinematography is incredibly gorgeous. Light, time, and color all infuse the frame with a certain nostalgic glow more effective at mood crafting than any film since Northfork (a film I highly recommend). The music is a hypnotic, austere minimalist score (cowritten by Nick Cave, which I didn't know until the credits), and augments without distracting that feeling of emptiness and beauty.

But is pure aesthetics enough to recommend a movie (especially one at over two and a half hours)? The things we recommend just on aesthetics often are small- a painting, a poem, a miniature piece by Webern. This requires time, but I think it's time amply rewarded if you pay attention. It's a haunting film, one that left me thinking about its beauty and its flaws. The last fifteen minutes or so, a post-assassination look at Robert Ford's future is certainly the strongest part of the film and ends up refracting the empty landscapes and bleak winter light into a his life.

Everything you read about this film is probably true, good and bad. But for anyone who has thought that something beautiful was over all too quickly, here's your wish.

Behold the future today!

2008-03-10T12:06:00.002-04:00

We've just finished our admitted students weekend. I'll give you the leading up events before I threw myself into the department.

Wednesday night I went to a chamber music concert, David Krakauer and the Orion Quartet. Haydn and Beethoven, performed the the dirt-kicking energy that I find rather invigorating. Two new-ish works, a Golijov piece, suprisingly modest with its static, plaintive harmonies and wailing clarinet figures, and a Del Tredici work that underscored the fine line between cleverness and blandly derivitive by freely crossing it throughout. It's funny how modernist music can sound just as derivitive or uninspired as quotations, and that Beethoven can sound fresh when played with a certain disregard for the chamber aesthetic. The Del Tredici also had some of the most lush writing for quartet I've heard.

Thursday afternoon I went to a talk in the English department about Wicked and queer relationships and girl bonding. Interesting, and often very persuasive. I also enjoyed the chance to be of genuine use, when I pointed out that the ending of the show is taken directly from West Side Story, which scored me a nice little chat with the presenter afterwards. Her first words were, "So I take it you're a musicologist." Apparently it shows, and apparently it has purpose outside our department

Friday afternoon was the opening event, a lecture given by Bonnie Wade on contemporary Japanese composing, which I will say is one of the best talks I've ever attended. Not only is she bright and engaging, but her work was not just fascinating, but relevant on so many levels. It spoke to issues of whether Western music is Japanese (it is, she says, since they grow up with it), to whether traditional can be modern (it can), to intersections of industry, politics, and music in funding, in short, the perfect way to open a weekend about musicology and ethnomusicolgy (I was glad to see a couple composer friends of mine in the audience too).

Now, on to the weekend. It's always a bizarre sort of thing. I remember distinctly the almost surreal string of trying to answer the same questions in subtly different ways, of trying to mark myself off as engaging, bright, grounded, serious, personable, and unique-but-not-in-a-bad-way. It's hard. And the fact that the weekend is so centered around their future, interests, and the same old questions makes me wonder how much of the real them I'm starting to see, and how much of a school trying to sell itself they're getting. That said, when we had the Friday night, post-lecture grad student party, I was immensely happy. We joked, laughed, shouted at each other, and gave what may be the most real moment. The unguarded camaraderie is one of the strengths of the students here, the fact that I really do feel like we bond well, enjoy each other, laugh, and get to know people outside of class. It struck me as bizarrely real in the middle of a cautiously crafted weekend (on both sides). Thinking back to my own time, I remember my best moments were with the other recruits, talking about non-music things. We weren't impressing or being impressed, we were just talking. That's what I try to keep in mind at conferences, in class, around campus, that musicology is what we all do, but it's not all we do, or all of who we are. And when it becomes everything, it gets strangely impersonal and uninvolving.

I Break For Music

2008-03-04T23:45:00.003-05:00

Last week was our spring break (for the record, we're getting lots of snow today, so something is wrong here). Some of my colleagues enjoyed trips here and there, and several went to the Society for American Music meaning down in San Antonio, I stuck it out in wintry Ann Arbor, prepping for my special field exam. What this means is I spent hours upon hours in the music library, with CDs and the Grove Dictionary of Music. I learned that Leonard Bernstein, at the tender age of 27, conducted the premiere of Peter Grimes. I heard music I've meant to hear but have somehow avoided until now (like Roger Sessions).

But I learned something else about music, or at least was reminded. By the end of the week, it was easy to start feeling like this was just a rote exercise: listen for the general details, remember a few things, and move on. Friday night I came home from the week, and went off to the Dawn Dance, Ann Arbor's annual folk dance weekend. And the music was fantastic, the sort that makes an entire room simultaneously wake up. Sitting around, listening to this music on headphones and trying to take notes in a certain way is just missing the music, the cliff-notes version. It's the same reason I hate reading on a schedule; you miss the words in the search for the point. And so I closed the week re-remembering what I may have forgotten. The reason I'm doing this is those moments where the music takes over, and there's nothing else to take away from it. You can't even relive it, the only option is to keep listening for that next moment.

2007: Two Extremes

2008-02-23T19:45:00.001-05:00

Oscars are coming, and I realize I have yet to relay to you my top ten for the year. My initial reaction is that it was an odd year of particularly good summer movies, high on entertainment, and a strangely bleak and less-inspired fall. Anyway, here they are:

10. Waitress. A charming yet complex tale of imperfect love. Equal parts sweetness and tartness, fantasy and reality, Adrienne Shelly's comic tale of a woman trapped in a relationship, an affair, and a diner yearning for something more hits all the right notes. I especially love the way what could be another clichéd relationship problem is actually fodder for deeper questions about love, freedom, and commitments.

9. Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days. Another grippingly realistic Romanian film, following the course of Otilia as she helps her friend Gabita procure an illegal abortion. Gut-wrenchingly intense and fantastically paced, it never stoops to moral grandstanding nor sentimentality, but pursues an unflinching truth to the characters and realities they face. Chillingly executed.

8. The Bourne Ultimatum. One of the better action films of recent memory, Paul Greengrass's installment of part three features some of the most satisfyingly involving chase sequences. Trimmed down to its basics, the film is never less than superb entertainment, and the rooftop climax is stunning.

7. Away From Her. A mature, deeply sensitive dramatization of Alice Munro's The Bear Went Over The Mountain, Sarah Polley's directorial debut stars a luminous Julie Christie as a woman with Alzheimer's and Gordon Pinsent as her husband. Acted with subtlety and passion, the effect is starkly beautiful and, quite simply, heartbreaking.

6. No Country For Old Men. The best film since their, the Coen brothers deliver an engrossing, brutal morality tale. Beautifully shot and cleverly filmed, it's bloody and brilliant with indelibly stark performances.

5. Knocked Up. Not only the year's funniest movie, but perhaps the year's smartest. Judd Apatow's tale of a surprise pregnancy delivers the most insightful look at men and women and their differences since High Fidelity. A perfect marriage of male and female comedies.

4. No End in Sight. Charles Ferguson's clear-eyed look at the war in Iraq is the perfect documentary for right now. Side-stepping the spin and smugness of other documentaries, it offers in plain words and painful images the history of the war. He's collected the words of many sources, from scholars to soldiers, and assembled them into an effective, damning, and sobering essay.

3. Ratatouille. Brad Bird has teamed back up with Pixar to deliver one of their best films yet. It offers eye-poppingly clever animation along with a modest yet boundlessly effective tale that delights on so many levels. Reaching beyond the simply clever, Bird hits upon some of the most profound statements to be made by popular art.

2. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Julian Schnabel does the impossible in crafting a sensually gorgeous biopic about a man paralyzed. Schnabel has made not simply a movie, but a genuine work of art, poetic and beautiful, seemingly liberated from the mundane world of the possible. In encountering the near-death, film is made freshly alive.

1. There Will Be Blood. Paul Thomas Anderson's epic examination of American greed and obsession fuses everything into a darkly satisfying whole. Amidst the bleak landscapes, the film fills them with large characters and large ideas, recalling the sprawling masterpieces of great cinema past.

It's interesting I think that my top two offer two divergent ideas of greatness, one outwardly expansive the other interior, one wildly new and the other classic.

Ten films I also want to recommend:
The year offered a number of great moments. Several foreign films offered dark realism, including the biting, modest comedy 12:08 East of Bucharest and Ken Loach's insightful look at the Irish fight for independence and internal violence The Wind That Shakes The Barley. In America, I enjoyed the gritty honesty and moral heft of Gone, Baby, Gone and the intelligent hunt for a serial killer in Zodiac. On the lighter end, Juno and Lars and the Real Girl surprised me with their touching charm and originality. Paprika and The Simpsons Movie exemplified the entertaining power of animation, the first to offer a wildly vivid spectacle and the second to induce more laughs than almost any other film this year. And finally, a nod to the clever musicals Enchanted, with its clever reaffirmation-through-satire of love through song and Once, for its extraordinarily simple yet moving tale of music's importance to people.

Five films to avoid:
Becoming Jane. It's sort of a lukewarm casserole of Jane Austen leftovers. It's technically filling, but nowhere near as good as the first servings.
Death at a Funeral. Completely unfunny and predictable. I'll avoid the obvious uses of the word death here.
I'm Not There. I wasn't there either. An intriguing failure, beautiful and devoid of anything resembling a point.
Lust, Caution. A waste of talent, smothered in atmosphere and clichés to stiltifying effect.
Rocket Science. Wildly uneven, a sort of "winning little comedy" that loses.

The choice may have been mistaken, the choo-choo-choosing was not

2008-02-19T14:22:00.000-05:00

I've just returned from New Jersey where I participated in a conference celebrating Sondheim. I had the distinct pleasure of reading my paper in the company of Cornel West, with whom I had a quite engaging conversation afterwards. Also thrilling was getting to hear multiple approaches to the works, from literature, theater, and gender studies alongside my own musical one. It was good practice for me too, learning to communicate music on a more layman's level without falling to superficiality (or at least I hope that's what I did). I also enjoyed meeting one other musicologist and a theorist who both are working on Sondheim; we banded together. There was also a performance, a film screening of Hangover Square, and a fascinating Q&A with Sondheim at the close.

As you can see, it was busy, but it made a suitable Valentine's Day gift, spending it with Sondheim's corpus and a couple friends from college. The highlight for me was Saturday, though, in which the conference had ended and I had a day to spend enjoying the city and its musical (and Valentines Day-appropriate) offerings.

First up was the revival of Sunday in the Park with George, Sondheim's take on the creation of George Seurat's Sunday on the Island of the Grande Jatte. It takes a couple minutes to get used to Dot's cockney accent and the digital animation, but that aside I found the revival to be beautiful. The first act has such a nice subtlety to it, from the delicate chamber orchestrations to the way George stands helpless in the corner, facing away, as Dot says her last goodbye in "We Do Not Belong Together" (which has the brilliant exchange: "There's nothing I can say is there?" "Yes, George, there is. You could tell me not to go"). And the end of the act, everything comes together in the painting in a magical moment. The second act is a little problematic--it feels rushed, and the characters don't develop as much, but it's hefty emotions as a modern day artist faces not just artistic crisis, but loses his grandmother, his last surviving relative. It's impossible not to get a little choked up at some of the more tender moments, and I love the way themes both dramatic and musical return transformed in the second act connecting the two. And the end not only undoes the relationship problems of "We Do Not Belong Together" but also undoes the creation of the art, leaving a nice open ending. "So many possibilities."

Second, I saw David Robertson conduct the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. They have an amazingly crisp sound, beautifully balanced and tight without feeling mechanical. The concert eatured the NYC premiere of John Adams's Dr. Atomic Symphony. The work feels oddly assembled, with transitions almost nonexistent between material, but the material itself is quite good, especially the famous Act I ending Batter My Heart, Three Personed God, a powerhouse of an ending fusing raw minimalist energy with baroque lament. They also performed Sibelius's Tapiola on the same half, which is a piece I don't get, but in a sure-footed production it's much easier to take, especially the way a single note is seamlessly transferred among several instruments. The two are interestingly paired, since the Sibelius has almost no distinct material, but everything is so interwovenly connected. The first half started with the Brahms Tragic Overture in the best performance I've heard yet that highlighted the thematic solidity of the work without losing the orchestral color of Brahms. But the highlight was Christian Tetzlaff giving a superb rendition of one of my favorite pieces, the Berg violin concerto. My friend Jack was noting how much he loves the opening, stacked fifths that play with the orchestral and violin timbres. I'm partial to the closing. The second movement has that lovely Bach chorale that enters in so clearly before getting submerged among the other material (but always audible). The very last moment, the violin plays the row extending into the uppermost registers of the instrument, and underneath it briefly comes a solid, glowing major chord in the brass. That moment is pretty affirming, but Berg goes even further, ending on the most luminous, rich chord I can imagine. Fitting music for Berg's dedication, "to the memory of an angel." Who needs valentines, when you have this?

The shocking secrets of classical music fans

2008-02-08T11:35:00.000-05:00

No, not me. The NYTimes critics "have decided to reveal some of their secret musical passions: works and performances they listen to for sheer pleasure — but perhaps not loudly when neighbors are around to hear." The implication is that classical music fans also like other music, or at least the line "when they are not listening to timeless classics" implies (that only classical music is a timeless classic is itself unnerving).

So what do we get?

Leroy Anderson. OK, who doesn't love a good pops piece. But this is still not a household name, although Sleigh Ride probably is. I do love pops concerts, and think there's a fine art to letting go like that.

Federico Mompou. Apparently, these are "tiny unassuming piano pieces." How is this different from some of Chopin or Schubert? Who knows. But it's Spanish, and obscure, and frankly this seems to be flaunting the nature of the question, saying "Look at me! I know obscure classical music that I like even though it's not a brand name!" I don't know the pieces, but it sounds, well, like classical music. (On a side note, I like the emphasis he places on how simple music can be so engaging, a characteristic often lost).

Beecham's version of the Messiah. Again, this flaunt's the author's knowledge of preferring historically informed performances. And again, I like the message, that many interpretations can be valid and enjoyable without being technically "correct." But is that the best we can do.

Simone Kermes. A soprano.

So, what does this article say? Well, it says several things. It says that classical music is not just a single entity, but a complex aggregate of different interpretations. It speaks quite well for listening to different approaches openly and with awareness, and about what we often undervalue in music--emotion, simplicity, and the act of pleasure. But it also reaffirms something, that classical music is off in its own separate world, that its interests run counter to other musics. But if the article is going to preach individualist interpretation, pleasure, and emotion, how can you still make that claim while completely disavowing other forms of music that rely on the very same idea? If Leroy Anderson is the closest (and apparently most humiliating) you'll come to begrudgingly acknowledging "lesser" forms of music, then we've got ourselves a problem.

Also check out the audio sample of the "Fourth" Symphony. Yeah, if we're going to be elitist, let's at least get it right.

Program NOTs

2008-02-06T23:49:00.000-05:00

I went to a concert here the other night. Beethoven 4th piano concerto and Mahler 5. The Beethoven was beautifully elegant, with a stunning display of lyricism by the concerto competition winner, although her tempos were rapidly fluctuating and on the whole ar too slow in every movement for my taste. The Mahler was distinctly excellent, after a rough first movement. It's rare to get an orchestral work of that magnitude so light on its proverbial feet, but the waltzes and fanfares and marches glittered with a very Viennese classical style. I loved the vividness of the scherzo and last movement, the translucent textures in the modestly subdued fourth movement, and the sharpness of the end of the second, where everything drops off into a series of one note gestures. The audience was incredibly quiet at the end of the two even numbered movements. Bravo.

But that's not my point here. Ahem. My point is about program notes. Part of me (the cynical part) would love to see a site where people put up quotes from the worst program notes out there (the other part of me says that I'm being too critical of something that isn't meant to have that level of scrutiny). I remember one that vividly explained that Tristan and Isolde was in a rondo form. I, uh, guess that chord keeps coming back...yeah. The notes for this one weren't bad, except for the following about the Beethoven:
The piano's short introduction ends on the dominant key of D, followed by the orchestra restating the theme down a third, in B major; a harmonic technique that Beethoven used often.
Movement by third, yes common. In between movements, or maybe for the secondary theme. But definitely not for the restatement of the first theme immediately after the exposition. What infuriates me is the way this turns the most magical moment in the entire piece into something apparently commonplace. I love the opening. The piano enters so quietly and serenely, and then the orchestra enters in a new harmonic sphere. The contrast is attention-grabbing, sure, but in the most seductively, transportive way, at once familiar and foreign.

Rant over. What are your favorite program note gaffes? Maybe if there's enough, we can start that website after all.

Film score addendum

2008-02-04T22:54:00.000-05:00

I am happy to report that the Academy did well looking at songs. Both Enchanted and Once made good use of songs within their stories (as did the un-nominated Into the Wild). My position is that the song needs to contribute to the movie in an effective way, rather than just play over the credits. It need not be diegetic, but it ought to comment upon the movie intelligently and effectively.

Oil Runs Thicker Than Blood

2008-02-04T22:13:00.000-05:00

Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood is an engrossing tale, as large as the landscape it fills, and about as bleak. It's a modern day parable of greed told through two characters. The central character is Daniel Plainview, first introduced in a stunning, wordless introduction that sets the ominous, gritty tone perfectly, working hand in hand with the stunning cinematography, which negotiates between claustrophobic darkness and expansive sepia-toned frontiers, and Jonny Greenwood's immensely effective score (more on that later). Daniel is an oil tycoon, who fights mercilessly for what he wants, which is power. His rival, and in many ways double, is Eli Sunday, the youthful evangelist who runs the local church. Filling out the relationships are Eli's father Abel who sells Daniel the farm for drilling in hopes of a better life and H.W., Daniel's son who helps soften Daniel's image if not his heart and conscience. Eli and Daniel are locked in a battle of, well, Biblical proportions, equally greedy to not only win the town's hearts but to do so at the expense of the other. This is a dark parable of the American dream, feeding hungrily off the best of American cinematic epics. The characters are large, and their shadows are more than filled by two intense performances, most notably Daniel Day Lewis as Daniel, whose voice ever so slowly slides from slick to mad, often accompanied by sickening smiles and flinty eyes, drool, laughter, and silences. It is a bravura performance, one that towers over anything else, although Paul Dano's quieter Eli often alludes to the same fierceness in his own way. Both men battle each other at the expense of all around them, and the sprawling epic traces this battle to its gut-punching end.

The score, as I mentioned, is fantastic. It's darkly chromatic, working not as your typical score, but at times as its own dramatic agent. The opening strains slide from a dense cluster to a single pitch, saying more than anything else about the opening few seconds about what is to come. It is percussive at times, but the string writing is particularly inventive, alternating between stern passages of intensity to more fluid sections of darkly expressive music that hovers on the edge of sentiment but remains firmly clear-eyed, reminiscent of Berg I thought. This has been a year of exceptional music (I was recently reminded of the brilliant use of Handel's Messiah in Charlie Wilson's War, but this towers above them in its declaration that music can do so much, placing this film among such lofty company as Vertigo, 2001: A Space Odyssey and On the Waterfront. It's a crime this film was overlooked for a nomination for Best Original Score. It is not only the best score of the year (not to mention film), but the most original.

Performances, Dan style

2008-02-03T14:33:00.000-05:00

Those of you who know me know I don't really play anything beyond CDs. Bad piano when required, and vivaciously bad singing more often than is probably prudent. But I'm not a performer, and that's how it is. Thus, when I do make music, it's a much more interpersonal activity, everyone engaged and no spectating. Two cases of recent memory that really made my day.

In sections this week, we've been shape note singing. I love it, but the day we combined three sections into a room of about 50 or more people, all singing as loud as possible, it's just incredible. I don't care about wrong notes, I care about feeling, and y feeling I mean volume here.

I went to knock on my friend Simon's door, and heard the faint strains of the Beethoven 4th piano concerto on the other side (2nd movement was just beginning). SO I knocked that stern baroque dotted rhythm along with the recording. He responded with the piano part. This, uh, continued until well into the third movement (which is honestly a blast to tap out that way), eliciting strange looks from people who only heard knocking and couldn't hear the music. That's precisely the level of dorkiness i like to keep up.

Catchup Post II: At the Met

2008-01-31T16:35:00.000-05:00

No, not that Met. The other one. The art one.

A while back I was engrossed in reading about the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's retirement. Philippe de Montebello had served as the director for the met for 30 years, longer than any other. I can't say that I've exactly kept up with the details or issues facing modern museums, but reading through the articles brought several important things to mind (not least of which is that I need to get back there and see it again).

In the Verlyn Klinkenborg (which is a fantastic name for arts criticism, although he appears to be a non-fiction author) Appreciations column, he writes:

"It’s usual to see a nimbus of adjectives whenever Mr. de Montebello is described, words like “patrician” and “imperious” and “old world.” Those words say somewhat less about his personal and institutional manner than they do about a chronic American anxiety over the largely non-American cultural richness embodied in the Metropolitan Museum’s collections. It is really a historic uneasiness for Americans — we see ourselves as a new departure rather than as part of the diverse and ancient continuum that Mr. de Montebello so elegantly championed."

This raises the point of the question of what the Met should be, or not be. The museum, at least to me, should be something that has the potential to educate as broadly as possible. Certainly, American art is going to go back less far than, say, Italian. But shouldn't that be a cause for celebration of the fact that this museum is here? Furthermore, is there a way we can make that tradition feel relevant and present for the visitor-off-the-street? I hope so.

There's several comments in this article and elsewhere about Mr de Montebello's ease with words, and that's precisely the sort of direction I like to see. One article discusses a war (their word) between the curator-as-director and the administrator-as director, with Mr. de Montebello serving as an advocate of the former. The director should be more than comfortable in front of the art, but they should be equally comfortable in front of the crowds, or at least put them at ease before the art without watering it down. Museums aren't meant to be sideshows or spectacles of the same works viewed and re-viewed without something to be learned. When given the option of molding the museum or molding the crowd, it's more challenging but more rewarding to do the latter. When you return to the museum, and see a familiar work, it would be nice to see it in a new light, with the sense that it becomes unfamiliar, and then refamiliarized. The obvious musical parallel here is that there's always something to be learned from hearing an old favorite brought to life in a refreshing new take. Risks are what the arts thrive upon, and we should be working to take an active role in shaping and presenting music to the masses.

The article also applauds his work at refurbishing the museum space itself. That's vitally important as important as acoustics in the concert hall. It shapes our experience, and welcomes us in and invites us back. There's nothing like the feeling of entering a gorgeous museum, that initial thrill of space, even before you see any of the art.

The main article notes that Mr. de Montebello has been criticized for being slow to embrace modern music, a criticism that in some way echoes Mr. Klinkenborg's comments about anxieties. This is a difficult subject for me, in part because I love modern art and know it doesn't always get the support it needs. But there are other institutions that cater specifically to that elsewhere in the city. My thought on this matter is that the criticism could best be deflected by a vital effort: make the historical stuff speak to modern audiences. It's hard to make modernism play well to audiences unwilling to understand it, but there are ways in which you can present the classics that engage them in the same sort of light as modern art museums use to bring their art alive to the viewer. Art has stories- political stories, love stories, adventure stories, stories that can not only entertain, but also deepen the understanding and engagement. To know why Goya painted what he did, to know the importance of this portrait and the iconography, ll of this can be drawn to modern issues. And this can in turn help to make the most of your modern art. The tactic to educate audiences about modern art (or music--he parallels I hope are becoming clear) doesn't necessarily have to tie it to just the visuals (though they can and should). But the contextual comparisons can feel more imminent and, well, important to the viewer. Bring the outside in.

I've read a few things. Thomas Hoving's Art for Dummies (Hoving was de Montebello's predecessor) was our assigned reading for the first week of my art history senior seminar. It proved incredibly insightful and infuriating, given Hoving's penchant for hyper-romanitcized tales of art and his dismissal of politics and anything controversial. Art is controversial. It's made during controversy, and its reception often depends a lot more on what's outside the frame than what's in it. I also read Lawrence Kramer's editorial about making the concert hall more individualized like museums. I think they both have a lot to learn from each other, and it would be nice to take notice of one man's impressive accomplishments and realize how far their echoes can reach.

Catchup Post I

2008-01-29T01:56:00.000-05:00

There were a few things I had meant to mention here earlier, but managed to get distracted by grading or Youtube or something of that sort. So, I'll try to reconstruct that. Also, I have a tentative plan to see TWBB on Sunday. I hope it works.

This past Monday was, as I'm sure you're all aware, Martin Luther King day. I'm used to celebrating this as the typically first day of classes at Swarthmore, but here at our little midwestern school, they declare it a holiday. And to mark the occasion, I attended a panel put on by the music school, which included two, count 'em, two musicologists. One was Jane Fulcher, whom we've recently hired on here, talking about Ravel, but emphasizing the importance of teaching music socially and politically. And while part of me worries about spin, or creating politics around pieces, or selecting music based on politics, she's right. The educational experience is diminished without this in several ways. Certainly part o learning about a piece is understanding how it was composed, received, and performed, and that knowledge just doesn't work without knowing about personalities, identities, cultures, and the political implications of all these. But there's more. I loved how attuned my Asian music professor here last year was to issues of contemporary global and intercultural politics. Music, in short, feels so much more relevant when you can use it to understand your own world, and this has been something I've been working to put into my own teaching practice. Second up was alum Guy Ramsey, who gave a very thoughtful examination on what diversity should mean and how if plays out. How diversity isn't just looking diverse, but recognizing differences, rather than trying to promote sameness through the promotion of equality. And an interesting counterpoint was offered by Aaron Dworkin, who remarked about African American and Latino members of orchestras. After some terrifyingly sad statistics, he pointed out that if orchestras want to include in their mission statements a need or community ties and outreach, then they need to reflect that in their make up. Classical music isn't seen as a young music or a black music, in part due to the lack of players, performers, or administrators. While I've heard some opinions about screening auditions, the fact that administrator jobs are not screened, but still reflect an almost absent black/latino voice in their outreach, education, programming, and artistic direction points to a larger trend. I think the most interesting part of the panel was a question about separate orchestras. Ramsey suggested this might be the way to go, that HBCs do wonderful things for creating diversity and developing leadership roles for students, and that all-minority orchestras might work similarly, while Dworkin elt the impact would be negligible, or furter entrench the current problems. I side more with Dworkin, in part because HBCs are not an end but a step towards some future, whereas minority orchestras might very well feel like the end of the road in the world.

It's nice to celebrate a holiday in a way that left me feeling informed, engaged, and hopeful. I can only hope Groundhog Day goes similarly.

Joie de vivre

2008-01-27T13:21:00.000-05:00

Carol Oja came and, as expected, delivered a highly entertaining and thought-provoking paper on West Side Story and The Music Man. But something she emphasized while having lunch with the graduate students in our program really stuck, that it's important to have a life outside of graduate school. And I do, and I'm glad I do. Then, talking with her and Richard Crawford after the talk, she mentioned how much can be gained by getting distracted, by looking in the unexpected places.

Inspired by that, I'll give you a couple fun videos that have made their way into my attention.

Since, on the subject of my work and the recent talk, I'm in a musicals mood, here's a choreographed dog routine to You're The One That I Want from Grease. Frankly, as much as I think musicals should provoke some serious questions (and it's very heartening to see that field taking off), there's also a strong side of me that enjoys the pure fun aspect. That's why Hairspray and Enchanted were such a treats and were among the most energy-driven musicals in years.

And in honor of my ethnomusicology professor Christi-Anne Castro, and her unabiding love for the Patriots, I'll forward on this link of football fans singing an interminable 80's pop chorus. It's not endorsement; I'm rooting for apathy.

Finally, here's a nice antidote to all the postmodern theory talk: Bill Irwin. There are other clips too if you want, all taken from an excellent Vaudeville reconstructred routine called The Regard of Flight. If I can work this into my dissertation, all the better.

Now, on that note, I'm going to go read some Glen Watkins, have dinner, and head off to see the Moiseyev Folk Dance Troupe this evening. And that's my life outside of musicology.