Some Debts You'll Never Pay

As we speak, Patti Smith is playing a show at the Roxy, promoting the new album and kicking off the tour. The Roxy, mind you, is a small club, holding maybe 200 people? And it is walking distance from my apartment. Where am I? At home, because I couldn't get tickets to see one of my favorite performers playing an intimate show at a club in my neighborhood singing new music that would probably rock my world.

To console myself, I bought Arcade Fire's new album, Neon Bible. It is beautiful. I don't care if they went to Exeter. (We're an Andover family, 'round these WASP-y parts.) I'm listening to "Intervention," and it is bringing a lump to my throat. There is a pipe organ (a real one, the organ at St. Jean Baptiste in Montreal), a snare drum lifted from 80's arena rock, a xylophone, strings, who knows what else. There is a simple strophic melody over a repeating vi-IV-I, lots of natural reverb. There are goddamn trumpet fanfares that make you want to pump your fist.

The singer sounds like Bruce Springsteen crossed with Billy Graham. You can't quite make out every word of the lyrics, but you can just tell they are deliciously depressing.

Working for the church
While your life falls apart.
Singing halleluiah with the fear in your heart.
Every spark of friendship and love
Will die without a home.
Hear the solider groan, "We'll go at it alone"
Hear the solider groan, "We'll go at it alone"

But because you can only make out the occasional word, that shouted "We'll got at it alone" starts to feel triumphant, and the music keeps crescendoing, and, and, you're torn between abjection and uplift, and...man. Good stuff. Ineffable, even.

Oops, I almost forgot. Most pop music has a limited emotional range. Nevermind.

Progress?

For a brief, shining, happy, tiny little moment tonight, I had a moment of clarity where I could remember the names, origins, and stylistic distinctions of all the groups in my doo-wop chapter. It lasted about five minutes, but it was wonderful.

I swear, I should make some flash cards or something.

(The Mills Brothers)
(The Inks Spots)
The Ravens (Baltimore)
The Orioles (Baltimore)
The Clovers (Baltimore)
The Dominoes (NYC)
The Cadillacs (NYC)
The Five Keys (NYC)
The Four Fellows (NYC)
The Moonglows (Kentucky-Cleveland)

Argh! My brain just exploded.

• Incidentally, Gayle Wald's new biography of Sister Rosetta Tharpe is really great. Go buy it.
  
• The Wikipedia entry on Sonny Til is really pathetic, but I don't have the energy to write a decent one.
  
• You know what's a really weird song? The Orioles "Deacon Jones."
  
• Despite a really bad talk I once saw on it, I can listen to the Drifters sing "This Magic Moment" over and over again.
  
• I wonder if my committee would let me write my dissertation in bullet points.
  

Barneted

By the way...did I mention I'm in England right now? As is my typical fashion, I skipped out of town mere hours after finishing grading for the quarter. No jet lag to speak of this time; after five years of constant traveling like this, my body no longer has any problem with suddenly skipping ahead eight hours. I'm not sure if that is a good or a bad thing.

Saturday was spent at the antique markets in Notting Hill, indulging Mary's addiction to funky jewelry. Sunday we met a fellow expatriate Los Angeleno musicologist (it's a small but close-knit community) for drinks in Primrose Hill, before coming back to Barnet for baked ziti. Today, I think we are going to lounge around and go see The Good German, which is still in theaters over here.

So, in lieu of a substantive post, I'm going to fill out SoHo the Dog's survey.

1. Name an opera you love for the libretto, even though you don't particularly like the music.

To go with something recent, I liked the libretto for Dr. Atomic much more than John Adams's wishy-washy music.

2. Name a piece you wish Glenn Gould had played.

I'm not a Gould person.

3. If you had to choose: Charles Ives or Carl Ruggles?

Charles Ives. I've actually somehow managed to avoid listening to The Sun Treader all these years, at least until last week when it was a bonus question on a final I proctored. Not so impressed.

4. Name a piece you're glad Glenn Gould never played.

See #2.

5. What's your favorite unlikely solo passage in the repertoire?

This isn't really an answer to the question, but I just want to state that despite the fact that Schubert apparently hated the instrument, the viola lines in everything he wrote are truly beautiful.

6. What's a Euro-trash high-concept opera production you'd love to see? (No Mortier-haters get to duck this one, either—be creative.)

Hmm...I'm thinking...Harvey Milk set in Renaissance Florence. It could totally work.

7. Name an instance of non-standard concert dress you wish you hadn't seen.

When I was undergraduate, my university had a very strong world music performance program, and there was lots of great concerts by the resident gamelan ensemble. However, invariably, there would be a smattering of (always white men of a certain age) audience members who would show up wearing traditional Javanese tunics, and would sit cross-legged during the performance with beatific smiles on their faces. That was very unfortunate.

8. What aging rock-and-roll star do you wish had tried composing large-scale chorus and orchestra works instead of Paul McCartney?

Patti Smith!

9. If you had to choose: Carl Nielsen or Jean Sibelius?

I have a soft spot for Sibelius.

10. If it was scientifically proven that Beethoven's 9th Symphony caused irreversible brain damage, would you still listen to it?

If you've ever seen the film clip of Furtwangler conducting the Ninth, with Goebbels and a bunch of wounded war veterans in the audience and gigantic swastikas hanging over the stage, you'll find it quite easy not to listen to it ever again.

Who's that a-writin'?

This post is just an experiment to see if I can have audio examples on this blog using a Flash-based player. This player was created by 1pixelout, and I followed the Blogger-specific instructions from here. Let me know if it doesn't work for you! Older computers, and those without a Flash plug-in installed, might have difficulty.



This is a clip of Blind Willie Johnson singing "John the Revelator," one of the tracks recorded for the 1927-1930 Columbia sessions. I just finished reading 30 undergraduate writing assignments about this tune, so I am now something of an expert. Well, an expert in the weird ways that an undergraduate--with little training in analyzing pop music and a deep willingness to trust Wikipedia--can listen to this song. It is a pretty bizarre little tune, I have to say, and I can't really blame them for having trouble with it.

Is it legal to have a clip of a copyrighted song here? Well, the legality of such things is actually highly unclear. There has yet to be a definitive court case on the subject, and fair use statutes are very vague and outdated. Few people have gotten in trouble with having clips that are less than a minute long, since that is more or less the equivalent of providing a short quote from a book. Certain online music journals have used the "one minute example" as a good rule of thumb, although as a non-profit academic journal, there might be a better case for Fair Use than for a personal blog. But who knows, really. I feel like that if I am only have a clip, and if I am making it at least mildly more difficult to download thanks to the Flash player, I've covered my bases as much as I can.

John Cage in Tehran

Know what's cool? Last Thursday night, the Tehran Symphony Orchestra performed Cage's Four⁶. The Cage community is understandbly all a-twitter. The late number pieces are not my favorite, but how often do you see major American orchestras performing any Cage at all!

The press releases don't mention it, interestingly, but Cage himself performed in Iran once, at the 1972 Shiraz Arts Festival--a festival originally created to celebrate the 2,5000 year anniversary of the founding of Persia. You can read an article about it here. [pdf] The concert was sponsored directly by the Shah himself, and was no doubt undertaken with the support of the U.S. government.

Marshall Berman later wrote, "When a creative spirit like John Cage accepted the support of the Shah of Iran, and performed modernist spectacles a few miles from where political prisoners shrieked and died, the failure of moral imagination was not his alone." That's rather sanctimonious, but he had a bit of a point. It's nice to know that at least for one evening this week, Cage's music was being used for slightly less imperialistic ventures.

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This is what I get for not keeping up with my blog reading: everyone in the world has already posted about this. (I really wish I could read that last one, it looks fascinating!)

Shuffle Shuffle Shuffle

Phil Ford over at Dial M for Musicology challenged music bloggers to post a list of songs randomly produced by their iPod shuffle, accompanied by explanation and/or apology. Sounds like a fun way to spend the evening, instead of trying to figure out how to teach Webern Op.11 to my students.

I should note, since at the moment the AMS listserv is roiled by a discussion of whether or not popular music scholars are smart enough to teach classical music too, that future employers should be assured that I do own classical music, I just don't put it on my iPod unless I am studying a particular piece and want to make it portable. Otherwise, the clumsy interface for classical music in iTunes drives me nuts, so I don't bother importing them. Hence, this is all pop.


1. Whitney Houston, "I Will Always Love You"

Clearly Dolly does it better.

2. Ella Fitzgerald, "Lush Life"

Again, I much prefer Billy Strayhorn singing this himself, especially when he says he used to "visit all the very gay places." He wasn't kidding. Ella is so innocent.

3. David Garza, "Discoball World"

Ah, David. Pronounced "Dah-veed," I think because he rediscovered his Latino heritage late in life. A little-known singer-songwriter from Austin, Texas, who is an object of simultaneous adoration and ridicule amongst my friends. He frequently plays at Largo, a little club near me, and we went through a phase of going to see him whenever he is in town, which is often. After a few weeks, it dissolved into a two-way battle, wherein we would shriek requests from the bar, and he would insult our taste from the stage. Good times.

4. Rancid, "Lock, Step, & Gone"

Okay, I was fourteen years old and living in the East Bay when Let's Go was released, so it is perfectly appropriate for me to own this song, and to have pretended at the time that I remembered the good old days of Operation Ivy. I didn't of course; I was nine when they broke up.

5. 'NSYNC, "It's Gonna Be Me"

To be honest, I was always a Backstreet Boys partisan. I mean, they were real, not like those "NSYNC pretty boys. I only have two or three random 'NSYNC tracks on my iPod, but several entire BB albums. Don't get me started on my Britney fascination.

6. Marvin Gaye, "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)"

No need to apologize for this one! Nothing is cooler than Marvin.

7. The Strokes, "The End Has No End"

God, the Strokes really annoy me, with their Drew Barrymore-dating ironic little synth riffs. But I do like this song.

8. The Barbarians, "Moulty"

This is a track from the famous Nuggets compilation that pre-punk Lenny Kaye put together. It's a collection of relatively obscure sixties garage rock, and is highly recommended. When I gave a paper at EMP a few years ago, Lenny Kaye was there, also giving a paper. It was on Bing Crosby and crooning, and it quoted Jeffery Kallberg. That is rock and roll.

9. Nirvana, "Smells Like Teen Spirit"

Wow, it is too perfect that this song ended up on my shuffle. I first heard this song when I bought Nevermind at about age twelve, on cassette tape. At the time, I was a metal head. So when I put in the tape, I liked the first bit, the intro where the guitar is really loud and distorted. Then it goes into the verse and gets kind of quiet. Being a metal head who had never heard of the Pixies, I thought that was wimpy, pushed stop, threw the tape somewhere, and didn't listen to it again for several months. Then it became my favorite song of all time.

10. The Foundations, "Build Me Up Buttercup"

I often use this song in teaching, just because it kind of plays with your expectations of what it means to sound "black." First, the students think it is a Motown song, or a Motown-style song by a black group. Then I tell them that the Foundations are actually British. They all go "whoa." And then I remind them that not all British people are white, and the Foundations were an interracial group made up of white and Afro-Caribbean Brits. They all go "whoa" again. And that's education.

Bad Musicologist

Menotti was still alive? Who knew?!

Don't Mess With Texas

Alright, the self-pity is over, and never to be spoken of again. I am back in the game. There are errands to be run, books to be read, tasks to be realized, new dissertation chapters to be wrought.

But first a request in the comments to my previous self-pitying post, from the lovely chelsea girl. She asks, in the context of pairing poems with pop songs for an English lit class, if there are any good songs in which a woman kills her husband. Another commenter has already suggested Aerosmith's "Janie's Got a Gun," which is an interesting choice. I had always assumed it was about a child abuse victim killing her father, but re-listening to it I realize that it is unclear who Janie actually kills--it could very well be that her abused childhood causes her to kill some (slightly) more innocent victim.

My first offhand suggestion? The Dixie Chick's classic "Goodbye Earl," with its fabulous chorus:

Goodbye Earl
Those black-eyed peas
They tasted all right to me Earl
You're feeling weak
Why don't you lay down
and sleep Earl
Ain't it dark
Wrapped up in that tarp Earl

Off topic: I first heard this song in college, and it was played to me by my partner's aunt. This lady is a very nice woman, but has quite conservative politics--she certainly would be proud to say that Bush is from her state, if he was, which he isn't. And I think she would reject the label feminist as well. But man, she loved this song, and the message of empowerment it gave. When Natalie Maines gets to the point where snarls, "Earl had to die!" she would sing along at the top of her lungs, and smirk at her husband.

But does anybody else have any suggestions for woman-on-man uxoricide in popular music?

I Am Sitting in a Classroom

One of the things I love about teaching music is the chance to play great music for students. That sounds obvious, but it really is a special thing. Particularly in a large public university like mine, where the undergraduate students have had their lives so thoroughly instrumentally-rationalized for the past 18 years, and where even the music majors are on a frantic pace to earn credits, get good grades, accomplish the right extra-curricular activities, and do the right internships, particularly in this situation I love making my students sit still for a moment to listen to music. It's not like a lecture, there is no note-taking. It's not a film, which tends to zonk them into television-viewing mode. It is one of the few times in their hectic lives when they have to plop down, be quiet, and be mindful.

The professor I am currently TAing for values this as well, and has no problem with using copious amounts of class time just for listening. The entire Tristan Prelude? Sure. A few scenes from Boris Gudonov? Yes!

But I just want to briefly pay tribute to the very first music class I ever took in college, where I learned the value of listening carefully and quietly to music. I had been a musician in high school, but not a very good one, and when I went off to college I didn't really intend on studying music. History, maybe, or Political Science. But I had an spare slot in my schedule, after French II, History 201 ("Medieval Europe"), and a special freshman seminar in early Arthurian literature. So on a whim, I registered for a class called "Introduction to Experimental Music." It seemed like it might add some pleasant variety to my life.

The first day of class, I nervously made my way to a cavernous dungeon of a classroom, a former recording studio buried several stories underground. It was a large class, probably about a hundred people. The professor was an elderly man with a bushy moustache and a pronounced stutter. His name was Alvin Lucier, and although I had never heard of him, when I flipped through our textbook--a xeroxed copy of Michael Nyman's then-out-of-print Experimental Music--I saw that he was mentioned frequently in the text as an important composer. It was a great class, and his stutter soon became permanently impressed in our brains. Like most speech impediments, it seemed to get worse when he had to speak loudly, or to a large crowd, and especially when words began with the letters "r" or "s." He never talked about it, though, and we soon got used to the long pauses and quirky rhythm the stutter gave his lecturing.

Fairly early on, Lucier played for us his piece for which he is most famous: I Am Sitting in a Room. Many of my readers will know it, but some won't, so let me describe it. It is a tape piece, and starts with Lucier sitting in his apartment in Middletown, recording himself speaking this text:

I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice, and I am going to play it back into the room again and again, until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves, so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration as a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.

And that's exactly what he does. This text recorded, he then plays the recording out loud, and with another tape machine recorded the sound of the text being played in the room. Rinse, wash, repeat. As he records, plays, and records, certain frequencies of the recording begin to be absorbed by his room, and others are amplified. By the end of the forty-five minutes, you can no longer make out what he is saying, and you are left only with a beautiful wash of ringing sound. You can listen to the original fifteen minute recording from 1969here.

Like any piece Alvin has ever done, it was a very conceptually clear work. He picks a process, and sticks to it. But also like all of his works, there is a surprising amount of hermeneutic interest. What could be dry, almost scientific music, actually contains within it multitudes of personal meanings. For even when recording himself speak, Lucier stutters--the "r" of the word "rhythm" is particularly obvious, and you can hear him leaning heavily on several other words. And so this piece of music is not only about demonstrating the physical properties of the room, as he says, but also smoothing out his speech. And although one critic has read this as his attempt to consign himself to "sonic oblivion," it was always clear to me that for Lucier himself it was nothing of the sort. I still remember him standing in front of the classroom, with the lights turned down low, and playing us the entire 1980 recording. He looked so proud. He had never spoken to us about his stutter, and he didn't need to. We could hear it, and for Lucier just hearing was the important thing. And once you just heard his stutter as a sound, you realize that it can sound beautiful. But what I like even more about Lucier's music, more than Cage's rather stern formalism, is that the lesson to be drawn is not that all sounds are beautiful. Lucier was proud to have created these beautiful sounds with his own voice. Sounds are beautiful because they involve people. I think that is the important lesson I learned in that class.

In the craziness of my first semester of college, his stutter soon became a comforting presence, a reminder that for twice a week, for one and a half hours, I could sit quietly in his dimly lit classroom and just listen to sounds. I learned a lot about music history in that class; nine years later I still occasionally consult my notes. But as a teacher, I always hope to reproduce that moment where we can also sit quietly and listen to one another.

Morty, oh Morty

Morton Feldman is so hard to write about. I've managed to avoid writing about him with any seriousness thus far. I've done John Cage to death, I've done Earle Brown in some detail, I've spent some quality time in the David Tudor papers, and if pressed to say something intelligent about Christian Wolff I could definitely pull through. But Morty? Luckily, I have not had a gun pressed to my forehead with the knowledge that if I simply talked about Feldman's length and quietude I would be shot. But it is going to happen some day. My grand plan is to write a book some day about the New York School (my advisor loves it when I talk about my next book instead of my current dissertation), and so I'm just not going to be able to avoid it.

It's not that I don't like him. I love him. I saw Yuri Bashmet play The Viola in My Life with the San Francisco Symphony when I was in high school, and even at that early age, barely having heard of John Cage, I knew it to be beautiful music. When my professor--the estimable Alvin Lucier-- played us Two Pianos in the first music class I took in college, I was spellbound, and checked the score out of the library to ponder. As I have blogged before, I occasionally put on the epic Flux recording of String Quartet No. 2 for solace in times of blustery despair. Last summer I read his collected essays, Give My Regards to Eighth Street, and still quote its clever lines left and right. Like this one: "Impressionism isn't painting, it is an idea about painting." I just wrote that from memory. I consider Feldman to be the only true postmodernist of the New York School. 'Cause as Gayatri Spivak says--and here I also quote from memory, but probably in error--postmodernism is the result of living under postmodernity. I read that to say you can't adopt postmodernism, you've got to be born under it, and breath it out instinctively.

...I brought John a string quartet. He looked at it a long time and then said, "How did you make this?" I thought of my constant quarrels with Wolpe and also that, just a week before, after showing a composition of mine to Milton Babbitt and answering his questions as intelligently as I could, he said to me, "Morton, I don't understand a word you're saying." And so, in a very weak voice, I answered John, "I don't know how I made it." The response to this was startling. John jumped up and down and, with a kind of high monkey squeal, screeched, "Isn't that marvelous. Isn't that wonderful. It's so beautiful, and he doesn't know how he made it." Quite frankly, I sometimes wonder how my music would have turned out if John had not given me those early permissions to have confidence in my instincts.

I love John Cage the squealing monkey. But anyways, okay, so Morton Feldman is great. No question there. But if you believe in writing in specific and communicable detail about what makes a piece of music great, we obviously can't stop there. And I have no idea how to. How do you deal with his music with any specificity? There is not much in the way of good writing to turn to. Kyle Gann just did a post that is a great example of how to do it--he notices that Feldman tends to change his textures more or less page by page. Obviously the question is what next to do with that observation, but with Feldman's all-too-mystic music I think it is crucial to start with this sort of demystifying maneuver.

The Archive and the Repertoire

A few nights ago, thanks to the munificence of Jewel Dakini, Mary and I were treated to a free ticket to see Jeffrey Kahane and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra play through three Mozart piano concertos: 16, 18, and 25. It's part of their Mozart year effort to play all 23 piano concertos, come hell or high water. And I have to say, it tends towards the former. Kahane is an amazing performer, of course, and it is a good ensemble. There is nobody I would rather see run though all 23 concertos. But... number 16? I had never heard, or heard of, this one before. Of course, I am the furthest thing removed from a Mozart person, so that's not saying so much. But looking through the Mozart books I happen to have at hand, it seems I am not alone. Charles Rosen tells us that it "is difficult for many listeners to appreciate...this is not the Mozart we love." Neal Zaslaw's Compleat Mozart mainly focuses on the fact that it was published in his lifetime, and an annotated copy he sent to Nannerl has one of the few written-out examples of Mozart's own ornamentation. Maynard Solomon just tells us that it was one a series he composed to bring in some money in 1784. From hearing it once, I can tell you it is a pretty dull piece of music.

So, in other words, there doesn't seem to be a lot of reasons to play this piece. I know, I know, that's musicological hearsay. But I think that's the thing--is there a musical reason to perform this? Or is it simply necessary to play it because it completes the set? Do we play because we enjoy playing it, or listening to it? Or do we play it simply to reaffirm the canon in the most extreme sense: not only is it only played because Mozart wrote it, but furthermore we only play it because it is one of his numbered piano concertos. If it was not by Mozart, and if it was one of his piano/orchestra pieces not given an official number, we'd never have to hear it again.

Last spring I was in a seminar which was lucky enough to have Diana Taylor of NYU come give a guest presentation. Taylor's book The Archive and Repertoire has caused many waves in the field of performance studies. Its basic idea is that performance, defined broadly, is an important repertoire of knowledge and memory. Traditional histories are defined by the static existence of the archive, the official history of events and actions. The idea of an embodied repertoire gives a powerful new voice to alternative histories.

At her presentation at my seminar, Taylor was asked why she chose the term "repertoire." She replied that it seemed to imply a sense of flexible possibilities, as in the OED definition "the entire range of skills or aptitudes or devices used in a particular field or occupation." In conversation afterwards, I pointed out that in the world of classical music, repertoire has a much different meaning. It refers to a set of musical works: either of a certain kind ("the nineteenth-century symphonic repertoire") or those pieces a performer is able to play ("My repertoire includes the Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, and Berg violin concertos"). There is a similarity between Taylor and Classical Music's usages, in that it refers to a set of skills of a sort. But in classical music those skills are not flexible tools, they are skills restricted to performing a very specific piece of music. In fact, in the first sense of repertoire used by classical music, as a set of works of a certain kind, there aren't any human performers anymore: the repertoire is not embodied skills, but abstract musical works. Whereas Diana Taylor's notion of the repertoire is about listening to an alternative set of knowledge, the classical music sense of repertoire is about preserving the archive--those canonical works that "we" have ideologically chosen over the past several centuries, at the expense of other histories and people.

Why do we play Mozart's 16th Piano Concerto? Is it for the archive, or the repertoire?

Tuesday Tunes

It's been pointed out to me that the last five entries in a row on this blog were about animals, more or less. While I am slightly obsessed with my cats, and love giraffes and my parents' new dog very much, I am actually a musicologist, and do spend most of my time thinking about music. So, in what I hope will be a regular Tuesday feature of this blog, I want to take a moment to discuss a favorite song. This week, that song is an obvious choice for those who know me. In fact, when I was teaching History of Rock and Roll this summer, I had an extra credit question on the final exam which read, "What is the greatest song of all time?" This was not a subjective, or defend-in-an-essay question. There was only one right answer, and I had warned my students earlier in the quarter that they needed to write down in their notes that this song was the greatest song of all time, and be ready to regurgitate this answer for the final. So, what is, objectively and empirically,* the greatest song of all time?

The Shirelles, "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" (1960

I'm not, of course, the only person to love this song so much. In our classes here, we usually teach this song in conjunction with Susan Douglas's lovely essay "Why the Shirelles Matter." Jacqueline Warwick's forthcoming book on sixties girl groups will no doubt discuss it excellently as well. The basic point that these authors make is that although the usual annoying rockist scholars of popular music studies tend to view the period 1959-1964--after Elvis joins the army, before the Beatles invade--as a fallow time in popular music, it's actually the period when we get unusually rich and complex music aimed at teenage girls. This song is a great example--rather than being sentimental about love and boys and things, it is quite frankly discussing sexuality and teenage romance as a meaningful experience:

Tonight you're mine completely
You give your love so sweetly
Tonight the light of love is in your eyes
But will you love me tomorrow?

Is this a lasting treasure?
Or just a moment's pleasure?
Can I believe the magic of your sigh
Will you still love me tomorrow

Tonight with words unspoken
You said that I'm the only one
But will my heart be broken
When the night meets the morning sun?

Compare this with Patti Page's marriage advice for girls, published the same year, and you can see how unusual it is to treat this subject so forthrightly and frankly. And not only is it frank, but it is subtle and emotionally rich--the song's only two and a half minutes, but it feels like this microscopic moment of decision is stretched out for symphonic ages.

But it's not really about the lyrics, of course. And although the songwriters, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, knew how to craft a fancy-pants chord progression very well, it's not even really about that either. I agree with one of Douglas's points that actually it's all about the timbre: the heavy reverb on the lead vocal, mixed all the way front. No saxophone or distorted lead guitar, just those lovely strings, that shimmery quiet guitar, and above all, Shirley Owens's throaty, heartfelt vocals. The violins represent hopefulness, and when they break off for their solo moment, you really believe that it's going to work. But every time Shirley sings, it's heartbreaking. You hear that voice, and you know what is really going to happen in the morning, no matter what she is saying. But then there is the ineffable: it makes me really happy to listen to this song. It's sad, it's heartbreaking, but...the pain feels good, in an endorphin-rush-after-a-tattoo kind of way. I just wish I could put my finger on how the music does this, technically speaking.

It's a sad song, and it's a lovely song, and it is the Greatest Song of All Time. If you haven't listened to it recently, go get a copy, find a quiet place, close your eyes, and enjoy.

*Objective and empirical because I am a musicologist, and I say so.

Payday on the Sunset Strip

Yesterday was the first of the month, which means payday in these parts. And as is my custom, I went up to the Tower Classical on Sunset to part with a percentage of my paycheck. As we all know, Tower is going out of business, and like most, I feel ambivalent. On the one hand, Tower was the first monolithic chain store to come along and drive independents out of the business. On the other hand, in these days of Walmart as the nation's largest music retailer, one gets nostalgic for the days of big bad record store chains--at least they specialized in music! And Tower, to its credit, has always maintained a strong commitment to classical music. Although I am definitely not nostalgic for the waning power of the canon--as some commentators have been--I did like that a large corporation was willing to maintain a small space for music that is not commercially viable. The Tower Classical I used to frequent was a great store--not as gigantic a selection as Amoeba, but perfectly decent, with a knowledgeable staff. Oh well.

At any rate, this Tower has now made it down to 30% off, which means that the FLUX Quartet recording of Morton Feldman's String Quartet No. 2 was only forty bucks. Haven't listened to it yet, but I'm excited. Not that I will listen to the whole thing, as it is about six hours long--the package comes with one version cut up into five different CDs, and then a version on one DVD so that you could theoretically listen to the whole thing in one sitting. I actually was around when FLUX was recording this--they did it at Wesleyan my senior year. I didn't attend any of the taping, although I can't remember why. It was definitely a big event at the time.

Walking back home, I happened by the Viper Room, the legendary club on the Strip that used to be owned by Johnny Depp. There was a small pile of flowers and candles outside, and a small sign that informed me that October 31 was the anniversary of River Phoenix's death from a drug overdose, on the curb outside of the Viper Room.

Venus in Fur

All the music blogs are talking about it:



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I think I need to explain to my non-musicological readers that "Venus in Fur" is a Velvet Underground song, which like most of the Velvet's stuff uses long drones. Like the kitten does, you see...nevermind.

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Second update: apparently, this video has removed from YouTube due to copyright violations. heh!

Goblins and Elephants

The first musicology I ever wrote was my senior year in high school. In AP English we read E.M. Forster's Howard's End, and I was very taken by the passage in chapter five where the family attends a concert of Beethoven's Fifth. When they get to the third and fourth movements, Forster illustrates the personality differences between the two siblings, Helen and Tibby, by showing how they listen to Beethoven differently:

Helen said to her aunt: "Now comes the wonderful movement: first of all the goblins, and then a trio of elephants dancing"; and Tibby implored the company generally to look out for the transitional passage on the drum.

Helen goes on to analyze the third and fourth movements quite extensively in terms of goblins and elephants. The goblins creep about the universe, "with increased malignity," until Beethoven scatters them about the universe.

He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of a superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion. But the goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things.

Today I got to teach the Fifth Symphony for the first time. Just the second movement, and after a lengthy review of German Idealism--as Hedwig says, "You, Kant, always get what you want"--we only had time to discuss the augmented 6th chord at about m. 28. It's just a little bit of harmonic trickery, the Gb of the violins in previous measures re-spelled as F#, now the raised 6th of the augmented 6th chord. And augmented 6ths always lead to the dominant, which in this case is G major, the V of C major. So thus, with this one quick little re-spelling we are suddenly launched into the world of C major, the eventual gusts of splendor and superhuman joy in the last movement.

The professor of this course wanted us to point out the augmented 6th here because it is one of many ways in which these C major moments poke through. However, technically speaking, a moment like this isn't "real." We aren't actually in C major for more than a few measures, and it is just a little bit of trickery that makes us feel momentarily assured. But you know, that's just a bit of annoying Beethoven-ness. Beethoven wants you to feel like nothing is real unless you've worked hard at it. It's got to be built from the ground up, and you've got to feel the pain along the way--and after a solid forty-five minutes of Beethoven, you've felt the pain! There's no quick fix.

Beethoven's probably right, but I don't like it. I think he is asking the wrong questions. Beethoven, and the rhetoric of hard work and discipline, doesn't pay enough attention to small gestures that might not be a gust of superhuman joy and the magnificence of life and death, but nevertheless accomplishes no small amount of work of its own. Earlier today, Mary and I were listening to a bunch of recordings from the Kronos Quartet 25th anniversary box set; an excellent investment, incidentally, if one is looking to blow some money! One of the CDs is a recording of Morton Feldman's Quartet for Piano and Strings. It clocks in at seventy-nine minutes of near-stillness and quietude, the music almost imperceptible at times. It does have its own ethic of discipline and hard work, since after all it does require an enormous amount of physical effort to play so quietly. But rather than Beethoven's model of extreme ups and downs, with goblins and elephants, the Feldman quartet models a life of quiet pleasure and appreciation for subtle beauty. And if music was a world, I'd much rather life in a Feldman string quartet than in the Fifth Symphony. Hard work just can't be sustained forever, or if it can be, it is at the expense of pleasure. I've definitely done a lot of hard work this year, and although it's gotten me to some good places, it's not going to get me everywhere.

London Bridge is Falling Down

On our last day in London, Mary and I took a break from surveying horses to go down to the the Tate Modern to see the big Kandinsky show. Snap review: I like Kandinsky; who doesn't? It seemed like a fairly thorough overview of his work, with an impressive number of major paintings. The exhibition subtitle was "The Path to Abstraction," and there was indeed a predictable emphasis on his chronological progression from early impressionist landscapes to the more abstract stuff. I'm not sure that was particularly enlightening, but I did like one room where they displayed one of his major paintings alongside all the sketches and studies for it. I imagine it is rare to see all those parts together in one place, so that's neat.

Kandinsky is not what I want to talk about today, however. Because on the way to the exhibition, we got off at the London Bridge tube stop. And thus, two songs immediately entered my head, one old, one new:

London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down
London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady.

and then,

How come every time you come around
My London London Bridge want to go down
Like London London want you to go down
Like London London be going down

The first is a nursery rhyme, the second is from this summer's hit song "London Bridge," by Fergie, on her first solo outing. Fergie's version, of course, has been the inescapable hit of the summer. The first time I heard it, it sounded to me like it was the same basic idea behind Fergie's hit with the Black-Eyed Peas, whose chorus goes "My hump, my hump, my lady lady lumps." Which is to say, it pushes inanity to the point where it becomes so shocking you can't help but be attracted to it. As such, it was in the same vein of songs like Kelis's "Milkshake," or maybe some tracks by 50 Cent.

But man, "London Bridge" has been everywhere. I have to ask myself, what else is interesting about it? I mean, for one thing, there is the fact that it wears its intertextuality on its sleeve, which is the academic way of saying it rips a lot of other songs off. There is the lyrical allusion to "Me So Horny," which, interestingly enough, can be found in two or three other pop songs on the charts right now. There is the more subtle nod to Missy Elliot, particularly the Missy of "Work It." (Really, go listen to the Missy track--it's hard to tell the two apart, except that of course Missy can eat Fergie for breakfast any day.)

Then there is the issue of historicity. I've blogged about this before, and it is something that a number of critics have noted about Top 40 music right now. It is the "simple" idea that under postmodernity, our sense of history has collapsed. As Fredric Jameson writes, it is a sense of "historical deafness," punctuated by "a series of spasmodic and intermittent, but desperate, attempts at recuperation." Of the pop hits of this summer, I would put John Mayer and Jessica Simpson's tributes to, respectively, Curtis Mayfield and Madonna into this category of recuperative attempts.

But London Bridge? Hard to say. There is, of course, the titular object. As is well-known now, both the cover and the video for this song feature Fergie dancing in front of a bridge in London (see above). Unfortunately, it's not actually the London Bridge, but rather the Tower Bridge, a Victorian construction that is very pretty and elaborate, and suitably old-looking (the Victorians could collapse historicity like nobody's business), but is unfortunately quite different from the London Bridge.

The London Bridge is a much more pedestrian affair. As any Wikipediast will tell you, it has gone through three main incarnations. The "Old" London Bridge was a gothic stone construction that crossed the Thames from 1029-1831. As the nursery rhyme tells us, this bridge was falling down and the enterprising Victorians put up a replacement in 1831, the "New" London Bridge. This bridge was then replaced in 1973 by what most call the "Ugly" London Bridge, the current incarnation pictured above that is essentially a freeway on-ramp plopped over a river.

But what is fabulously postmodern about the saga of the London Bridge is that the "New" London Bridge was not destroyed. No, in a triumph of late globalized capitalism, it was sold to the highest bidder, taken apart brick by brick, and then reassembled in a new home. And that new home was none other than Lake Havasu, Arizona, where today it is surrounded by blonde coeds flashing their breasts at the Girls Gone Wild cameras in the shadow of the poor old London Bridge.

Which finally brings us to the ultimately unanswerable question of this song. At a party I was at tonight, the claim was made that Fergie's "London Bridge" is part of a trend of recent popular songs which celebrate powerful female sexuality, a trend that stems from Christina Aguilera's album Stripped and perhaps some fin-du-millennium hip-hop by Missy Elliot and Lil' Kim, music widely seen as representing a turn away from the de-sexualized ideology of Britney Spears, the boy bands, and "Genie in a Bottle" Xtina. The argument was made that the lyrics, which do indeed seem to involve somebody performing sexual acts on the singer, somehow represent a positive vision of assertive feminine sexuality. On the more performative sound, Mary pointed out to me that maybe it isn't the lyrics, but the ferociousness with which Fergie launches into the chorus that gives us an attractive sense of power. But how does this all tie together? From medieval London to Girls Gone Wild, from "Hit Me Baby One More Time" to "I'm a Slave 4 U"?

So yeah, it's a complicated text. If anybody has any other ideas about it, let me know.

Musicology in Action?

Who says musicology isn't relevant?

There was a very bizarre little item in the news today. Apparently, at the World AIDS conference going on in Toronto right now, a study was presented which investigated the correlation between HIV infection and musical taste. According to the article, teenage boys who listen to "gospel, techno, and pop" are more at risk for HIV than teenage boys who listen to "hip hop, reggae, reggaeton, rap and rhythm and blues."

Now, it was very hard to tell what this study is actually about from this quick little wire feed article, which was mostly just a few quotes from the study's author, Miguel Munoz-Laboy--all of which sounded like they were taken a little out of context. I did find the study's abstract, which tells us that this is actually an ongoing ethnography of urban youth cultures focusing on masculinity and sexual risk. The presentation at the conference was on one aspect of that project, hip-hop as a "narrative of masculinity."

Obviously, the musicologist in me--as well as the queer activist still in me, buried beneath the layers of graduate school, who really cares about the real-world implications of this study--has a lot of questions. Most of them are completely unanswerable in lieu of a finished, published project, rather than just an abstract and a half-ass interview. I do sense that it is a well-meaning project, and I like the fact that an empirical public health study such as this is taking music culture seriously. Obviously nobody is claiming that listening to one genre of music "causes" certain risky sexual behaviors. Munoz-Laboy's claim is that involvement in certain "scenes" tend to correlate with risky behaviors. That makes intuitive sense-- a "scene" is a community of people typically linked by an appreciation for a certain genre of music. And that "appreciation" is important--it is the way certain people appreciate music that matters almost more than what is being appreciated. A scene is an analytical tradition, not so different than, say, set theorists or Schenkerians.

Interpreting music is a social phenomenon--we don't call them theoretical "schools" for nothing--so if one's object is to study social behavior, such as sex, it seems particularly important to look at how these kids are listening to music. And that gets to one of the obvious problems of the survey as presented so far. By dividing up popular music into all these genres, they are doing the musical interpretation for the kids. I mean, can you really put "pop" music and "rhythm and blues" and "hip-hop" into different categories today? I think not. Yes, plenty of people do, and I have no doubt that the study attempted to take its cue from how the teenagers talk about their music. But I do think that if you are going to study such a complicated cultural problem, as this study thankfully attempts to do, you need to also look specifically at the music on its own terms. Because any sort of social behavior inevitably bleeds into other social behaviors, and studying how these kids listen to music might tell us something about how they do other things. Otherwise, you're just randomly correlating data, which can lead to also sorts of silliness.

And might actually give you some ideas for how to fix things. I know a high school teacher in Los Angeles named Patrick Camangian, who uses hip-hop lyrics to teach his young charges critical thinking. That is, he didn't just use hip-hop to gain street cred with them. (As a former drop-out of the school at which he taught, he already had that!). He uses it to teach them analytical skills, and critical thinking. And the optimist in me does think that if you can learn how to be critical in one part of life, you might start to be critical in others.

I sound awfully formalist, don't I? Oh well. I'm very open to opinions others might have about this. Really, I just think everyone needs a musicologist in their lives!

Hips Don't Lie

Yesterday was my last lecture of the summer. We covered nineties hip-hop--NWA to Jay-Z--and then spent the last half of class discussing the top ten singles on the iTunes Downloads chart from last week. I had originally wanted to assign the top ten singles on the Billboard chart, but the singles chart for last week didn't have a single rock-ish number on it, and I really wanted to have at least a little bit of diversity. The "Most Downloaded" chart had John Mayer's recent single on it, and a song by The Fray, a very dull alt rock band.

In fact, here are the songs, just for posterity:

1. Gnarls Barkley, "Crazy"
2. Ashlee Simpson, "Invisible"
3. Nelly Furtado & Timbaland, "Promiscuous"
4. The Pussycat Dolls featuring Big Snoop Dogg, "Buttons"
5. Christina Aguilera, "Ain't No Other Man"
6. Jessica Simpson, "A Public Affair"
7. The Fray, "Over My Head (Cable Car)"
8. Cassie, "Me & U"
9. Shakira featuring Wyclef Jean, "Hips Don't Lie"
10. John Mayer, "Waiting on the World to Change"

It's really fascinating to try and look at this rather arbitrary assemblage of songs, and try to construct some sort of greater point out of it. I'm not sure we really succeeded. Couple things though:

Generic boundaries are obviously quite blurred. Many of these songs would vaguely be considered R&B, but the line between R&B and Pop and Hip-Hop is not a particularly clear or useful line these days. When you think of the top songs from the early nineties, this would not have been the case. The top artists of the nineties all had very strong generic identifications: we all know what genres Nirvana, Garth Brooks, Metallica, and Dr. Dre fall into. But Shakira?

The postmodern collapse of historicity seems to still be in effect. In this list we have allusions to early hip-hop (Nelly Furtado conjures up "The Message", Christina Aguilera works with DJ Premier), a near exact recreation of Curtis Mayfield (John Mayer), another near exact recreation of early Madonna (Jessica Simpson), and of course Gnarls Barkley, the songwriter of whom made his name mashing together the The Beatles and Jay-Z's Black Album to create The Grey Album.

As usual, people are really concerned with Ashlee Simpson's relationship to authenticity. No surprise here, although I was surprised with the intense emotional hatred some have for her, but not for her sister. Given that both sisters are more or less doing the same thing, it seems to be that it is that matter of genre is still really important in some ways. Dance music, it's okay to lip-synch. Rock music, not so much.

Any other points to be drawn from this list?

Welcome to the Jungle

My nifty diagram from Thursday's lecture, captured by my valiant TA's cell phone, tells you everything you need to know about 80's pop metal. You know when a cat is frightened, and it arches its back and bushes up its tail to appear as large as possible? Same idea with, say, Guns N' Roses.

In other musicological news, today's business is trying to finish up a review I am supposed to be writing, my very first academic publication. The item under consideration is a DVD featuring a new recording of a Very Important Piece of Music, with an accompanying documentary. Thus, an expensive trip to the local Tower Classical to buy every version of the piece available, for comparative purposes. Maybe I am a lost cause to nerd-dom, but honestly, I can think of few better ways to spend a Friday afternoon then listening to endless recordings of a great piece of music!

Smells Like Teen Spirit

In preparing for tomorrow's (ed: well, technically today's) lecture on 80's metal and 90's alternative, I realized that in my last lecture, I unwittingly passed an important milestone.

On Tuesday I played my class a snippet of Michael Jackson's "Beat It", just to point out that Jackson's complex fusion of many musical genres included heavy metal, in the form of a guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen. Ladies and gentlemen, "Beat It" was the very first pop song I can remember. I don't believe I heard it when it first came out, as Thriller came out when I was only three. But at a very early age, probably about five, I distinctly remember hanging out with my best friend in his kitchen, and he had a cassette tape of "Beat It." We both thought it was pretty cool, and I memorized the words as best as I could. Even then, in my pre-musicological childhood, I could sense that illicit danger early Michael Jackson communicated so effectively and creepily.

As we now move further into music with which I have very deep personal connections from my youth--particularly Nirvana and Metallica--I admit I feel a little trepidation. Am I going to do this music justice? Am I going to be critical enough? Am I going to have any insights, or am I just going to sit up there and be Mr. Fanboy? I'm bringing in my guitar, mostly to demonstrate power chords and two-handed fret-tapping for the 80's metal, but I know I am not going to resist playing some Nirvana. After all, I learned how to play guitar by playing along with Nevermind for hours at a time, and I can still more or less play my way through the entire Nirvana catalogue, from Bleach to In Utero. (Unplugged too, which although clearly sub-par did introduce me to Bowie and Leadbelly.) I hope it works--I've found that some of my most effective lectures have been on music with which I very clearly did not identify, such as early hip-hop.

I considered including in my slide show a picture of me in full grunge regalia, with shoulder-length hair dyed black, but I think that might cause them to lose all respect for me.