Review: Sound and Score (de Assis/Brooks/Coessens, eds.)

Cross-posted at Rebecca's Reading Rants and Raves

As with any anthology of essays, a particular reader will find some contributions more useful than others. Admittedly there were essays that I skimmed, as I was looking for specific writings that would interact with discussions for my graphic notation seminar. I appreciate the multitude of perspectives and styles, although I found the essays that were well-grounded in theory to be more useful. Both Virginia Anderson's "The Beginning of Happiness: Approaching Scores in Graphic and Text Notation" as well as Jeremy Cox's "What I Say and What I Do: The Role of Composers' own performances of their scores..." were particularly enlightening in their examination of score/performance relationships. Cox adapts Krenek's 1966 theory of process of musical thought to reveal a composer's performances as a "triangulation tool" (p. 21) between the score and Gestalt/musical thought. The only real quarrel I have with his investigation of Stravinsky's tempi in two different recordings (1946 and 1961) of the Symphony in Three Movements is that it is predicated on an assumption of "logic" when it comes to tempo choices--an assumption that isn't clearly delineated by the author.

Anne Douglas's "Drawing and the Score" is one of the strongest essays as she offers a succinct summary of the relationships that can be established when "an artist transposes concepts of drawing and notation across the borders of art forms" (p. 207). In just under ten pages, Douglas convincingly concludes that the tension between musical score and drawing is essential to all stages of the musical work, and in effect "loops" the components of a performed musical work "between author/audience." (p. 215).

The editing is good, for the most part, although there is a significant error in the captioning of Fig. 4 of Cox's essay (p. 24) and certain essays could have used a stronger editorial hand in order to keep expositional consistency. The book's division into four parts seemed somewhat unnecessary, particularly given the holistic interpretation that underscores the entire book. That said, the parts (I: Score and Idea; II: Mapping the Interface; III: Extending the Boundaries; IV: Choreographies of Sound) do provide interesting inroads to the larger discussion.

This is a very worthwhile collection and has readings that are provocative and useful for a whole host of different types of research and teaching, especially in contemporary music. Some essays are more accessible than others, but it is a valuable compendium for anyone who teaches composition, contemporary music performance, and/or music history.

Medieval, Not Med-Evil

On many occasions, I've had to defend medieval music as a topic on which time is well spent in music history curricula. Even beloved colleagues in performance have questioned the necessity of learning ‘dead’ repertoire that most of their students will never perform or interact with in a meaningful way. This is especially true of chant, that dustiest of dusty repertoires, inhabitant of music history's grungiest dustbins. 

These are legitimate questions, but they ignore the value of muddling about in the monophonic, and more importantly, in a tradition that is primarily oral—a far cry from the land of "deified composers" and "fetishized scores" that James Parakilas so aptly identifies in his essay, "Texts, Contexts, and Non-Texts in Music History Pedagogy." The question of what you can say or write about a single line of music is not inconsequential. It is hard, as my students quickly discover. Stripping away several centuries of musical knowledge is no easy task and requires a type of historical imagination with which they seldom engage. It is easy enough to picture Schubert at the piano during one of his famous soirées, making music with his friends, embodying the spirit of Romantic community, blissfully unaware that his music will be deployed on the battleground of style periods a century later. Somewhat less inspiring to the typical undergraduate is the anonymous-faced monk, cloistered away in the scriptorium, copying tunes that are but one version of a song born long before that moment.

But those monks are not so far removed from the beatified Mahler symphony as one might think. The copying down of those neumes led to various notational systems, including that of Guido d’Arezzo, who is responsible--at least in part--for “one of the simplest but most radical breakthroughs in the history of writing music,” as Tom Kelly reminds us. At this juncture, notation became not just a simple mnemonic device, but “made it possible to sing a song you have never heard before” (Kelly, 62). That distinction is a game-changer, and hardly something to be glossed over. Moreover, as David Hiley muses in his primer on Gregorian chant, pitch-accurate notation likely reflects the surge in new music in the eleventh century, when “many new melodies of non-traditional melodic character were composed” (Hiley, 200).  The real take-away here is that history repeats itself and what is distant and dusty is also a mirror for our own times. Without early notation might we imagine a Chopin-less world, a Beethoven-less world…the entirety of the Western canon at whose altar we worship having never been? Would music have ceased to exist? No, of course not--and that is exactly the point. The graphic notation of Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, and others, is the progeny of that new music of the eleventh century. (For a convincing argument for the direct influence of neumatic notation on Earle Brown’s work, see Alden, below). I don’t make claims of evolutionary progress here, but to deny the significance of early music and notation is akin to denying a relationship between primates and homo sapiens.  Chant is usually the first repertoire to be sent to the firing squad of curricular decision-making, ironically defended by shaky Darwineqsque arguments of natural selection and survival of the fittest. Shall we also remove “H. erectus” from our study of human development? After all, anatomy and science focus on Homo sapiens. (For that matter, does that make the recent discovery of the species Homo naledi irrelevant?)

But perhaps the historical argument is shouting into an abyss—if one is not convinced of history’s import in the first place, a distinction between notated v. orally transmitted music is probably not crucial. But what should be crucial to performers--and here is where the argument might be more relevant even to those who eschew history--is that much of the essence of chant as a practice is the basis for the music of modern times. There seems to be an increasing acceptance of "improvisation" as a valued contribution from the jazz world (Yale notwithstanding, as Alex Ross reports), yet chant, which one could argue constitutes improvisation before improvising was cool, is rarely mentioned in the same context. Improvisation isn’t a new idea—it was there first before the systems and the rules. How much less daunting might it be to understand that fact before dropping students into Lydian chromatic theory, chord structures, or a Schenkerian Ursatz? If we subscribe to a chronological approach to teaching music history (as most departments still do), why not get students saturated in the ability to understand that modern performance—a composite of artistic expression, deportment, and polish—grew out of an innate expression of human culture? In this way, chant is of cosmogonic importance in understanding music that was not conceived or learned originally by score.  Why not steep ourselves in repertoire that was improvised, not “performed,” and that was “composed,” but not fixed?

In my medieval music course (and I am fortunate to teach at a place with a five-semester undergraduate music history sequence), I ask my students to listen to a monophonic Alleluia, and then ask the intentionally vague question, "what can you tell me about this?" The initial response is "not much," but when pressed, out come timid comments about contour, key v. mode, speech-rhythms, melismas, text, and plentiful other observations and contextual hypotheses that seem to rise out of the anxiety of having nowhere to run. When faced with the absence of dense polyphony, augmented chords to identify, and instrumentation to critique, there is an invitation to investigate context, to understand that chant is part of a family of musical traditions--most of them popular--where authorship is ambiguous at best, and there are blurred lines between intertextuality, plagiarism, and musical borrowing. As Parakilas observes, one need look no further than a radio station to see this legacy play out in our urban soundscapes.

I’d like to return briefly to my embedded quip above about recent events at Yale and decisions about jazz in the curriculum. While I don’t wish to focus upon the place of jazz in music curricula, conductor Michael Lewanski’s thoughts on the matter are relevant to this discussion. He offered the following in a profoundly good essay:

“The notion of “training people in the Western canon and in new music” is flawed, first of all, because it assumes that the Western canon is a fixed, reified thing that doesn’t change, and, secondly, that new music is separate from it (whatever “it” is).”

Like jazz, medieval music is also increasingly getting short shrift despite its inarguable connection to the so-called “canon.” In fact, Lewanski’s entire article about jazz and new music parallels the argument that I am making. He continues:

“To pretend that these [canonical] pieces are deserving of being played because there is something inherently, unquestionably cool about them is the problem.  The reason they are important is the opposite: it is because they have a reception history, a tradition of people thinking about, feeling, playing, interrogating, fighting, reacting against them; and we are among those people.”

[Incidentally,  Lewanski’s postscript addressing canons and performing musicians is also a worthwhile read. ]

Curricular priorities are based on a lot of assumptions, some of which are so deeply embedded in institutional tradition that all the backhoes of practical evidence to the contrary can’t dislodge them. That said, it is time for a different discussion about “relevance” when it comes to history. And here I deliberately leave off “music” because this is ultimately not a discussion about chant and its importance. Instead, it is a plea for understanding and internalizing a truth that “old” and “new” are no longer terms to mark relative moments in time, but instead qualitative and often dismissive words that do art a terrible injustice. If we can recapture the newness of what is “old,” and the timelessness of what is “new,” I think that makes us better students, better educators, and dare I say it—better homo sapiens.

WORKS CITED

Alden, Jane. “From Neume to Folio: Medieval Influences on Earle Brown’s Graphic Notation.” Contemporary Music Review 26:3 (2007): 315-332.

Hiley, David. Gregorian Chant. Cambridge Introductions to Music. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Kelly, Thomas Forrest. Capturing Music: The Story of Notation.  New York: W.W. Norton,  2015.

Lewanski, Michael. “Education, Jazz, Canons.” August 30, 2015.

http://www.michaellewanski.com/blog/2015/8/30/education-jazz-canons (Accessed August 31, 2015)

Lewanski, Michael. “Education, Jazz, Canons: A Theoretical and Practical Postscript.” September 7, 2015.

http://www.michaellewanski.com/blog/2015/9/7/education-jazz-canons-a-theoretical-and-practical-postscript (Accessed Sept 13, 2015)

Parakilas, James.  “Texts, Contexts, and Non-Texts in Music History Pedagogy.” In Vitalizing Music History Teaching, 45-58. Edited by James R. Briscoe.  Monographs and Bibliographies in American Music, No. 20. New York: Pendragon Press, 2010.

Ross, Alex. “God and Jazz at Yale.”  August 29, 2015. http://www.therestisnoise.com/2015/08/god-and-jazz-at-yale.html (Accessed August 31, 2015)

"Statue of Guido of Arezzo". Licensed under Public Domain via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Statue_of_Guido_of_Arezzo.jpg#/media/File:Statue_of_Guido_of_Arezzo.jpg 

Yong, Ed. “6 Tiny Cavers, 15 Odd Skeletons, and 1 Amazing New Species of Ancient Human” The Atlantic. Sept 10, 2015. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/homo-naledi-rising-star-cave-hominin/404362/

 (Accessed Sept 13, 2015)

With many thanks to those who read this post in draft form!

Experiments: Writing to Teach

The title of this post tips its hat to the late William Zinsser's influential book, Writing to Learn, a tome that helped instill of a love of writing and learning in me at an impressionable age. Along with the work of Peter Elbow and the wonderful experiences I had at the Bard Institute of Writing and Thinking in 2012, Zinsser's ideas have changed the way I approach my writing--or, to be more honest--try to approach. Freewriting, too, has become central to most of my teaching, and I hope to recharge this blog with posts about writing in the music history classroom, among other topics.

As anyone who works with freewriting knows, one of the core dictums is that the professor should always write with the class. I admit that I sometimes forget to do this, my mind otherwise preoccupied with the best way to manage the ensuing discussion. I always feel guilty when I forget to write with my students because then it feels like I've assigned a chore, rather than an activity. That's not to say I have to participate in every in-class activity, but I think cooperative engagement is generally the best pedagogical model for my classes.

I've re-conceptualized my seminars over the years, and I'm particularly excited about my upcoming Orpheus and Music seminar this term. It is an expansion of a seven-week course that I have taught both at the conservatory and as a community programs course.  While having fourteen weeks does allow us the chance to cover more repertoire, I've decided to keep the core repertoire from the shorter version of the course and to spend the extra time creating a hybrid teacherless writing class instead.

Peter Elbow's Writing without Teachers presents a model that, in its purest form, is not logistically possible within the confines of most curricula—an ideal teacherless writing group of eight people requires 2 to 2 ½ hours per week (Elbow, 84). Short class periods and departmental expectations hamper the instructor’s ability to devote hours to peer responding, particularly when integrated into a subject matter that is not strictly Composition/Rhetoric.  That said, it does provide a worthwhile philosophical approach that can easily be applied to courses in a variety of ways.  I've decided to integrate more peer-responding—as opposed to "peer-editing”--into my graduate seminars. Students will have several opportunities to freewrite and discuss in-class the different stages of their term papers. I've found, as I'm sure many professors do, that "choosing the topic" can be the most laborious aspect of a term paper. I do not give exacting prompts for graduate seminars because I want them to be intellectually curious enough to pick a topic that actually interests them. For many students, however, being confronted with an übertopic like "Orpheus and Music" and then being asked to come up with a research proposal in a few weeks time is a daunting task. This is absolutely understandable. So I've decided to bring in "teacherless" peer writing groups from the initial stages of the project--starting with determining a topic all the way through to the final draft stages.

This is all an extension of peer-review/peer-responding activities I have integrated into my courses throughout my teaching career. But this year brings a new twist: I'm going to write a seminar paper with my students. Essentially, I'm going to join their "teacherless" writing groups. I have a head start on my proposal, but I'll present it to them for their feedback, bring in my drafts, etc. The obvious advantage of this is that I will get some writing done. I hadn't planned on doing any professional work with "Orpheus and music," but if I'm going to spend hours upon hours prepping the material for the seminar, why not turn it into a paper? I realize this is not a revolutionary idea, but it is certainly the first time I've decided to work with my seminar in this way. My hope is that it will reinforce writing and research as process—a means, not just an end. The students will receive a grade for the proposal, annotated bibliography, and the final paper, but are also responsible for two separate "draft sessions" wherein they bring in a two-page portion (first session) and then a five-page portion (second session) to share in their peer-responding groups. I will be there too, sitting anxiously among them--sharing, reading, writing, learning, and teaching.

Stay tuned!

SOURCES:

Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. Second edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Zinsser, William. Writing to Learn. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

Tending our gardens

"This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before." ~ Leonard Bernstein

In the wake of the events in Tucson, several of my friends posted this quote to their Facebook profiles, and it gave me pause, mostly because I felt rather uncomfortable. Part of me thought, “Yes, Gabby Giffords, you are in critical condition due to a bullet through your head, so I'm going to choir practice.” Then I batted snarky, cynical Rebecca off my left shoulder (or is it my right?), and listened to the more present Rebecca who teaches too many classes and is exhausted all the time, but holds back tears every time she plays the finale of Stravinky's Firebird or Josquin’s Ave Maria for her students.

Bernstein’s statement was made after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 (and if anyone can give me the exact source I’ll be indebted), and I wouldn’t be surprised if non-musicians, entrenched in their grief, might have had a mixed reaction to the statement at the time. But I hope that they took some time to really mull it over, as I have, because it has forced me to think a lot about what I do and my place in the world.

Sometimes making music and teaching music history seems terribly self-indulgent. Yes, I happen to think teaching is a very “noble profession” but at the end of the day, whose life am I saving? I’m one of those people who cringe on the airplane when they ask, “Is there a doctor on board?” because I know I’m not the kind of doctor they need. Yes, I know I have an impact, and I’m not claiming that we all have to be rushing into burning buildings for a living to have our work be meaningful. I watch my students bloom and grow over the course of a semester in ways not even remotely related to the subject matter. But sometimes it is difficult to see the value of what I do in my little flower garden, when it is such a tiny part of a global landscape that is covered in thorns.

I do believe in responding to violence with beauty, rather than hate, of course. As one of my friends noted, it isn’t a solution, certainly, but it is a response. But I think it is Bernstein’s directive to make music more “intensely” that is important here. We’ve all heard performances that are “intense” (not “tense,” mind you)---maybe you had tears in your eyes, or found yourself at a loss for words. In a way, it is a rather vague word because “intense” can have very individualized meaning. One might even argue that the alleged gunman who claimed six lives on Saturday was “intense.” But the intensity of which Bernstein speaks is so potent precisely because it DOES have the power to be beautiful, to stand up against the violence of the world and say, “I’m still here.”

So, in the end, I think Bernstein asks us to engage with beauty in a way that reaffirms its presence in the world. And I don’t think this is limited to music, or even the arts. Violence claims not only lives, but it plants seeds of further violence—especially when we are focused on being angry. Anger is important, yes…but only as a means to an end. I’m terribly angry when I think about Christina Green, and how she will never grow up to live out her potential. I’m angry when I see how our political battlefield has consumed our lives to such a degree that while Gabby Giffords fights for her life, we are screaming at each other about whose rhetoric is to blame, rather than seeing how we are all responsible for rhetoric running our lives in the first place. But that anger is intensity and I have a choice of what to do with it. I have the choice to create beauty. I have the obligation to create beauty as a musical professional. I think we all have that obligation. Every day at work is an opportunity to be generous, one that we probably don’t take as often as we should. I consider myself very lucky that what I do for a living is, for me, a large part of what it means to live. So, I choose to maintain a healthy perspective—no, teaching music history isn’t going to stop a very sick man armed with a gun from opening fire on a crowd of people. And I’m certainly not going to cloister myself away from my rights and responsibilities as a citizen to speak out against injustices and what I regard as irresponsible legislation. I am, however, going to value the opportunities I have to be intensely devoted to creating beauty, because, to borrow from Bernstein, that is the way to make our garden grow.

The Joy of Critical Thinking

Summer might seem like an odd time to blog about plagiarism, but it is a great opportunity for me to think about it, rather than react to it. At the end of the year I am inundated with plagiarized papers ranging from completely cut-and-paste jobs to citation infractions. I spend the first day of class reviewing plagiarism, how to cite, etc. and I pass out a "Guide to Citation," stressing that the attribution is more important to me than the format (at least for the classes where it is a large problem).

Because I teach music history to performers (primarily), I try to draw parallels between the plagiarism of musicological work and the Joyce Hatto scandal. Most of them find the idea of falsifying a recording fairly horrible, so I try to explain that plagiarism in their papers is no less offensive to me. The idealist in me supposes that this little speech does the trick, but then there it is again at the end of the semester: plagiarism everywhere.

A friend posted this intriguing article on his Facebook page, and it made me think more carefully about plagiarism and the assumptions I make. A lot of the plagiarism I encounter comes from students whose facility with written and spoken English is minimal. These are good students otherwise, who attend class regularly, turn in their assignments on time, and generally pass quizzes. There are, however, two major issues I have encountered that rise out of the same cultural conflict. The first is questioning authority figures. The second is fear of thinking critically.

I do not believe that students lack the ABILITY to think critically. I think, in the best cases, the ability simply hasn't been encouraged or cultivated, and in the worst cases, they have been taught to fear it. The language barrier, coupled with the cultural barrier, often means that when I say, "Is that clear?" it really isn't clear at all to them, but I'll never find out until it manifests in a plagiarized paper. A student once wrote in his/her evaluation: "Sometimes I have trouble understanding what we talk about in class, but I don't want to stop class to ask a question." Another student said she was worried about taking up my time with questions after class and felt it was disrespectful to make me read bad English.

So now I try to impart that I'd rather read their original thoughts in terrible English, than someone else's ideas and words in perfect prose. Most of them now write and rephrase in their own words, but I'm still struggling with getting them to use their own ideas, analyses, and reactions. I don't want to rule out the use of secondary sources completely, because I think they need to know how to use those as well (and sometimes that is all that is available). But how do I not only make them believe that I WANT to read their thoughts, but that their thoughts are also valuable to THEM?

I have various strategies (journals wherein they are graded on their own reaction to the music they hear, etc), but I'm eager to hear how the collective wisdom deals with these issues.

Checking in with 2009-10

I'm probably not alone in marking my "years" by the academic calendar, rather than the Jan-Dec plan on which the rest of the world seems to run. ;-) That this is/has been the busiest year of my life is not overstating the situation. I've tested my limits, and I'm living to tell the tale.

At the end of Summer 2009, I wrote this post, with a list of everything I needed to prepare for Fall 2009 (and into Spring 2010). I think it is good idea to re-examine that list and see where I'm at for Spring 2010.

Syllabi (Spring 2010)

4.75 / 5

History Proficiency Exam (to write, not take...)

0 / 1

Book Reviews

1 / 2

Conference Papers (EEK!)

0 / 1

Program Notes

3 / 5

Pre-concert Lectures DONE!

1 / 1

Elections to coordinate/tabulate DONE!

1 / 1

Concerts to Review

1 / 9

Competitions to adjudicate

0 / 2

The list above represents the items to which I have commitments/have been accepted. Below I've included some goals for this year.

Conference abstracts to submit

0 / 3

Articles to submit

0 / 2

Book Proposal to outline

0 / 1

HMM. Very telling, indeed.

Fall is a-comin

Five classes. Three institutions.

Accountability as summer ends

Summer is effectively over. The meetings have begun. I'm constructing syllabi. I capped off my summer with a week-long research trip to Pittsburgh (or did I begin my fall?---not sure). At any rate, based on yet another good idea from Phil, I figured blogging my musicological to-do-list might be a good idea for accountability. I don't intend on making updates a regular feature, but this will help me focus on what I need to achieve this year. It is going to be a roller-coaster of a ride this fall term (five classes spread over three institutions), so anything that helps keep me on track is a boon.

Lets Get Started!

Syllabi (Fall '09 only)DONE!

5 / 5

Textbook orders placedDONE!

3 / 3

Book Reviews

0 / 2

Conference Papers

0 / 1

Program Notes

0 / 5

Pre-concert LecturesDONE!

1 / 1

Elections to coordinate/tabulate

0 / 1

The list above represents the items to which I have commitments/have been accepted. Below I've included some goals for this year.

Conference abstracts to submit

0 / 3

Articles to submit

0 / 2

Book Proposal to outline

0 / 1

So, there's nothing left to do except get to it! I'll take this opportunity to wish everyone else happy term-preparation!

NEXT POST: Jenny Lind sighting (in PA!) Rebecca's Jenny Lind Tour Development Post

Living Composer Final Project

(Insert obligatory apology for absence from blogging here).

Another semester is almost finished. The final exam in "Music of the Twentieth Century" is tomorrow. Alex Ross' fantastic text (reviewed by me here) helped guide my students through the constant interplay between music and historical events of the 20th-century. It struck me, however, that this was also an opportunity to get them to engage with music of the now. To this end, I assigned a term paper on a living (and in most cases, active) composer (or, in some cases, recently deceased). I gave them a list from which to choose (see below), and they had no other information about the composers on that list except for their birth dates and nationalities. The list provides a fairly wide sampling of styles. I gave them some time to do some "preliminary research" (aka Google) in order to pick a composer. Unfortunately, I did not provide a survey regarding their criteria or process, but all the same, the results were interesting. I've boldfaced the names of the composers who were picked by students (21 in all).

H. Leslie Adams (b. 1932, USA)
Thomas Adès (b. 1971, Great Britain)
Laurie Anderson (b. 1947, USA)
Harrison Birtwistle (b. 1934, Great Britain)
Henry Brant (b. 1913, d. April 26, 2008, USA)
Leo Brouwer (b. 1939, Cuba)
David Cope (b. 1941, USA)
George Crumb (b.1929, USA)
Peter Maxwell Davies (b. 1934, Great Britain)
David Del Tredici (b. 1937, USA)
Pascal Dupasin (b. 1955, France)
Tan Dun (b. 1957, China)
Brian Ferneyhough (b. 1943, Great Britain)
Lukas Foss (b. 1922, d. February 1, 2009, USA)
Kyle Gann (b. 1955, USA)
Osvaldo Golijov (b. 1961, Argentina)
Sofia Gubaidalina (b. 1931, Russian)
John Harbison (b. 1938, USA)
Stephen Hartke (b. 1952, USA)
Aaron Jay Kernis (b. 1960, USA)
Helmut Lachenmann (b. 1935, Germany)
Paul Lansky (b. 1944, USA)
Tania León (b. 1943, Cuba)
Magnus Lindberg (b. 1958, Finland)
James MacMillan (b. 1959, Scotland)
Meredith Monk (b. 1942, USA)
Tristan Murail (b. 1947, France)
Max Neuhaus (b.1939, 3 February 2009, USA)
Per Nørgård (b. 1932, Denmark)
Pauline Oliveros (b. 1932, USA)
Bernard Rands (b. 1934, Great Britain)
Wolfgang Rihm (b. 1952, Germany)
Christopher Rouse (b. 1949, USA)
Frederic Rzewski (b. 1938, USA)
Kaija Saariaho (b. 1952, Finland)
Esa-Pekka Salonen (b. 1958, Finland)
Joseph Schwantner (b. 1943, USA)
Peter Sculthorpe (b. 1929, Australia)
R. Murray Shafer (b. 1933, Canada)
Steven Stucky (b. 1949, USA)
Augusta Read Thomas (b.1964, USA)
Yehudi Wyner (b. 1929, USA)
Chen Yi (b. 1953, China)
John Zorn (b. 1953, USA)

Among other components of the project, I encouraged the students to try and contact their subjects for interviews (phone or e-mail). I was discouraged by the response of some composers (who shall remain nameless). Perhaps an undergraduate term paper isn't an illustrious honor, but it is a chance to engage with the future before becoming the past. I'm well aware that some of these students may have been ill-prepared (e.g. "Hi. I'm writing a paper on you. Tell me about yourself."), but what message does it send to be unwilling to answer a few questions? Art can no longer afford to be so aloof, I think. I don't believe in changing compositional styles to fit trends, but I do believe in engaging with the "outside world" in some meaningful way. Some composers may not care if we listen, but I would hope they'd care enough about their own music to talk about it when asked.

All the same, I think it was a valuable project. For many students, the whole idea of modern composition was a revelation. "Symphonies" and "operas" are the stuff of Mozart. For them, not only are the white guys dead, but so is the entire tradition itself. While I don't think any of them left the class embracing Ferneyhough or Boulez's music, I do think some of them have become more aware of an eternal soundscape, serving as both scenery and props in what they know to be "the present." My hope is that engaging with this music now will make it less "dusty" in fifty, seventy, or a hundred years and that we can finally view composition as a living tradition, be it Du Fay, Bach, Haydn or Golijov.

Playlist for Tuesday, 11/18/08

I find, as I get closer to the end of my course, that my lectures are resembling Time-Life Audio Collection infomercials. While that disturbs me at some level, it does make for fun listening. I'm not sure I could come up with an infomercial to encapsulate the following playlist, but feel free to try, if you like.

Fascinating Rhythm (Gershwin)--- Ella Fitzgerald
Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man (Kern)--- Helen Morgan
You Send Me--Sam Cooke
Under the Boardwalk--- The Drifters
Hound Dog--- Elvis Presley
In the Ghetto--- Elvis Presley
Can't Help Falling In Love--- Elvis Presley
It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels--- Kitty Wells
It's Mighty Dark To Travel--- Bill Monroe
Talk About Jesus (Dorsey) --- Marion Williams
Precious Lord (Dorsey)--- B.B. King
Take My Hand, Precious Lord (Dorsey)---Mahalia Jackson
Mercedes Benz--- Janis Joplin
Summertime (Gershwin)--- Janis Joplin
Summertime (Gershwin)--- Willie Nelson

Adventures in Teaching: Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing

I'm always reading about creative pedagogy and drooling over the idealized students to whom these techniques must apply. Yes, of course I'd love to bring in some clay (engaging other senses!) and have the group (group work!) create a life-size replica of their favorite (ownership of ideas!) American composer (visualization of subject matter!). Ok, so I exaggerate--just a little.

But let me tell you that I love my students this semester. I'm not sure they'd be up for "Let's Pretend-to-be-Rodin" but here's what they DID do this past week:

We were discussing the African-American spiritual, and on a whim, I decided I was going to get them to sing...in four-part harmony, no less. Keep in mind, that this is a class of non-majors, most of whom have little to no music background. I wasn't about to take no for an answer. I chose "Go Down Moses" (which their text discusses), because it gave me a chance to do something responsorial (where I would sing, and then they could come in on "Let My People Go.")* So I asked the women, "Who sings soprano? Alto?" As you might expect, they were fairly reticent to claim any voice part, so I divided them up myself (which was easy, since the "soprano" part is in the same range as the alto). The men were likewise reluctant, but it turns out that my class is mostly tenors (where is Paul Robeson when you need him??).

So I played each part separately and had each group sing. What surprised me was the gusto applied by the gentlemen!! It wasn't necessarily completely in tune, but it was...intense! The women were pretty timid, but I had a few voices in there who were unafraid. So, when it came time to put it all together, there was a lovely and sincere quality to their singing. I feel really strongly that they get in touch with this more vernacular music in a visceral way and singing was the best way to that. There was nervous laughter, of course, but I think they enjoyed it (the evaluations will tell, of course).

Of course, my little experiment put us slightly behind in the schedule (sorry, Sousa, you are getting short-changed), but I think it was worth it. For a few of them, it may be the first time they've heard themselves in harmony with other voices. I remember the first time I heard my own voice blend with a chorus of others, and it changed my life. Did singing "Go Down Moses" change their lives? No, probably not. But I hope it gave them some sense, even on a subconscious level, that they can sing. Not all of them could/should charge money for it, but they have the right to make their own music.

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*While I don't think it should ever be necessary to defend singing a sacred song as a demonstration of a musical tradition, I can think of some places I've taught where I could not have done this without some kind of backlash.

On awards, books and the merits of You Tube

First off, I would like to add my congratulations to Alex Ross, for his well-deserved 2008 MacArthur Fellowship. I'm really leaning toward using his book for my non-music majors in next semester's course, Music of the Twentieth Century. If anyone has any other suggestions appropriate for the non-major, I'll be happy to consider them. I find that a lot of the standard textbooks are unsuitable as they get bogged down in musical details that will be meaningless to those without musical background, OR they make blatant (and erroneous) stylistic generalizations about the music of the 20th century. Nope, I'm not naming names.

Earlier this year, Ryan posted about the merits of YouTube as a research/teaching tool, and this resulted in a fascinating discussion. While I took sort of a hard line against the citation of YouTube clips as authoritative sources (since they can be heavily edited), I have found myself calling upon YouTube (in class) a whole lot this semester. We read a chapter in Stephen Marini's Sacred Song in America about the Sacred Harp tradition. Marini is wonderfully descriptive in his writing about the modern tradition, but I have a feeling this particular YouTube clip really helped my students "get it." Somehow, a homemade video of this Sacred Harp convention (they are singing from the Missouri Harmony) seemed appropriate...maybe even more than nuanced documentary footage.

On Journeys and Cacophony

Well, it has begun. Once again we mark our year by due dates, concerts and conferences. I'm in a new place, both literally and figuratively. I'm teaching at a new institution and I'm teaching "Music in the United States" for the first time. My students are smart and ready to go. We packed our suitcases full of "fundamentals" this week, and I assured them we'd be pulling them out again at appropriate places in the journey. We'll make an interesting bunch. I have one student who clearly knows more about the British Invasion than I ever will. Another is a Bob Dylan fan who sees Dylan as a distinctively "American" voice. One student wants to learn about sacred music and jazz. I played a clip of Run DMC and I think they were relatively insulted when I suggested they might not know Run DMC (HEY...I teach students who haven't seen E.T!!).

So, we loaded the bus and determined our windy path through Music in the United States. Well, actually, I guess I'm driving the bus, but I think I'll have a whole lot of back seat drivers. I'm looking forward to it. :-)

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On an additional note, I teach in a very new music building. The classes all have internet/computer access, reasonably good pianos, etc. One thing everyone complains about is the lack of soundproofing (guess someone forgot that detail). However, as I sat in my office yesterday, hearing a trumpet on one side, a harp on the other, and a vocalist across the hall...I thought, yes. THIS is what a music department sounds like. I welcomed the cacophony. I have been at other institutions that have been all too silent.

Oh, and the photograph? Just a shot I took last weekend at a local pond. A little reminder that summer will end...soon.

Hello, again...Hello.

Well, I've been on quite a vacation, but believe me, the only vacation I have had has been in the virtual realm. My friends with whom I communicate via e-mail must think I've gone AWOL. I won't make any promises about the frequency of my posting, but let's just say I'm hoping to be more present, at least in my reading of wonderful musicological blogs. I devoted some time today to "catching up" with the blogging community, and discovered I missed this wonderful post by Phil Ford over at Dial M. I have watched my own writing develop, and can gladly say that I no longer feel it necessary to include the word "polemic" in every single piece of academic writing I produce. I'd like to think I use it with more discretion now. Writing, much like teaching, can always be better. Part of the "fun" is the revision process (although it is rarely fun in the moment) because you catch those entire paragraphs that probably made sense to your sleep-deprived brain at the time, but now read like a sermon in Swahili. Thank goodness for peer-reviewers and editors.

Before I tell you what has kept me from engaging with the blogosphere this summer, I have two bits of inconsequential but fun news to share.

First, I received my wonderful t-shirt from Soho The Dog. I'm wearing it proudly today as I'll be meeting with a musicologist colleague later. I prefer to think of it as "edgy coolness" rather than nerdiness.

And, this came in yesterday's mail. One down, one to go!

So what has Rebecca been up to? For the first summer in a long time, I have not left the state of my residence (and now that I live in Massachusetts, we will not be counting day trips to New Hampshire or Rhode Island). I did, however, receive a flurry of house guests all in the span of three weeks: friends, parents, and in-laws. I took a course in Marketing for Performing Arts Organizations. I've been organizing conferences, sitting on boards, doing some preliminary house-hunting, and trying to enjoy the summer offerings of Massachusetts.

Musicologically speaking, I'm working on several projects. One involves the Pittsburgh Symphony, but that is on hold until my dear friends move to Pittsburgh in a few weeks. M has just accepted a professorship at U Pitt (in physics), and he and his wife have bought a house...with plenty of room for guests. So, you see my strategy---free accommodations should never be rejected.

Secondly, it appears I'll be teaching a class entitled "Music in the United States" this fall. So, I'm going through the gratifying/frustrating process of constructing a syllabus. It is a general course for non-majors, and cross-registered with American Studies. I'll be using Richard Crawford's America's Musical Life, which I think will suit my class quite well. Of course I'm struggling with distribution and how much time to spend on the potpourri of musical styles I'll need to cover. I'm considering some overarching themes ( "Music and Religion," "Music and War," for example) to guide the course structure, rather than a strict chronological approach. I'd love to be able to talk about William Billings and William Schuman (New England Triptych) in the same class. Why does this feel so risky to me? (Not a rhetorical question---I'd like to hear your thoughts!)

It is my hope that my connections between ye olde American musicke and modernity will lend some kind of resonance to the subject matter. I don't think these students are taking this particular course so that they can recite some sort of canonized development of music in the United States. The timeline aspect is important, yes, but I think it is secondary to understanding the major interactions between society, culture, politics and music. Isn't that why I'm a musicologist in the first place? So, I'm going to continue to pull from the past and pull from the present, and hopefully the class will come to appreciate music history as part of a greater work in progress.