When I’m not hustling as a UCLA grad student, I work as an editor for a large music publishing firm. We mainly put out method books, collections, and repertory aimed at the K-12 crowd. Currently I’m editing a collection of string orchestra originals and arrangements for middle schoolers, and I came upon a piece this morning that has presented me with a quandary. The song is called “War Drums.” It’s a simple 4/4 tune with a steady 8th note pulse on a conga drum, and beats 1 and 3 are accented. The basses and cellos play a repetitive pattern in 5ths down in the low register. It’s really basic stuff, but here’s where “War Drums” gets tricky..

It is clear from the first note that this tune is a representation of Native American music, albeit one that is completely inaccurate. (I should mention that the composer, a regular at my company, is white.) Essentially the piece is a stereotyped version of the old patterns white composers (especially for film/TV) have used for decades to represent the Indians of the Wild West: insistent drumming with accents on the beat, parallel fifths, etc. I have no doubt that the composer is approaching this project innocently, but you can’t help but hear this piece and think of “How, white man” from 1950′s westerns and the Neverland Indian pow-wow in “Peter Pan.” It’s a culturally insensitive musical stereotype of the Noble Savage.

I’ve thought about simply revising the piece, but the entire composition is centered around these sonic markers signifying Indianness. Therefore, I’m thinking that either I’m going to have to approve the piece as it is or cut it entirely from the 140-page collection. It’s a tricky situation because the composer has spent a lot of time preparing the piece, and he’s a friend of the company (and a big-seller). On the other hand, I don’t want to be party to the perpetuation of an ugly musical stereotype, especially in a publication aimed at kids whose associations between sounds and groups of people are starting to solidify. When published, this collection is going to be in school music rooms all over the world. There’s an issue of moral responsibility involved in this question.

So, I ask you – how would you handle this situation? How damaging do you think this particular representation of the musical Other is? Should I nix the piece or keep it (perhaps with disclaimer)? Help!

First, a few perceptions which have been lurking about in my mind from our readings:

1.  THE canon is a respectable yet somewhat villainous character.  Wearing a dinner jacket and smoking a pipe, it sits in its comfortable 19th century den and rules the musicological world with an elegant hand— marginalizing women, the popular, and most of the world from its elite circle of power.

2.  Post-new-musicologists, embracing disdain for hierarchies, find pleasure in defying said canon, even though many still find great pleasure within its circle.

My Questions for our class:

1.  What do we think about canon (or THE canon to be specific)?  Really.  Honestly.  What do we think about it?  How do we plan to position ourselves in relation to it, against it, ignoring it, embracing it, rebelling against it, etc.?

2.   Can a canon be a useful tool?

3.  Can a discipline be defined without a canon of some type?  (It doesn’t necessarily have to be musical works/composers to be a canon.  It could be the work of certain scholars, geographical areas studied, certain theories, etc.)

The special edition of the Journal of the Society for American Music, Volume 3, No. 1 (Feb 2009) on Leonard Bernstein is a great example of the interesting fruit that can come from ethno/musicological teamwork.   Check it out.

Mindy

“Wynton’s desire to perfect and bottle New Orleans jazz is just another ‘Early Music’ conservatory project with ‘period instruments.’”    [from the Jazz is Dead??? comment board]

Them’s fighting words! Or really, a very good point of departure for another debate.
Since last week Alex mentioned the possibility of debating the period-instrument/historical-performance movement, I’d like to invite her to enter the fray at this juncture. What about the assumptions behind Marissa’s “just another…” ? Is she right?

I rarely read blogs and have never, until very recently indeed, considered engaging in blogging myself. That I am now actually blogging these words is the result of a discussion several weeks ago in the seminar under whose rubric they now appear: Musicology 200A, Introduction to Graduate Studies in the Musicology Dept at UCLA. In this discussion it became painfully evident that my aversion to the medium and to the activity was not very well reasoned. It seemed only just that I attempt to arrive at some real reasons not to blog—if there are any—through blogging.

In order to clear the ground a bit, let me state my most unreasonable reasons first. I really dislike the word ‘blog,’ partly, I admit, because of a classicist verbal snobbery that makes me look askance at all neologisms, but more importantly, I think, because it is especially ugly; just saying it makes me feel like I am trying to say “belong” with a cold coming on. It foregrounds the English L, one of the most peculiar and least attractive sounds in my native language. It also resembles the vocable “blah”… I think it is not impossible that if an elegant coinage had been attached to the activity from the beginning, I might have been more inclined to engage in it.

Somewhat more substantively (though really, what is more substantive than the sound and feel of a word?)—I am suspicious of blogging because it seems to lend itself to writerly self-indulgence and exhibitionism.

Now here, an important distinction should be made: I am aware that in dire situations—warfare, political oppression, natural disasters—blogging has proven to be a peerless ‘voice’ for people who otherwise would never have been heard from. This use of the medium seems to me noble, timely, and exigent, very much the opposite of self-indulgent; I’d engage with such writing more, if my immunity to despair and heartbreak were stronger…No, I speak here of blogging by those of us who enjoy freedom from dire situations, and in particular, of blogging by academics.

It’s funny—as a teacher of academic writing (I’ve taught my course “Writing About Music” nine years in a row), I am constantly encouraging students to use the first person, to unbend from what they imagine ‘academic style’ to be, to get personal, to experiment. This all would seem to tend toward the vaunted informality of blogging. However, these are undergraduates, who tend to hamstring their intellectual imaginations through an ill-conceived notion of what one may and may not say, and therefore, think, in an academic context. They confuse style and substance. Moreover, in my class the students’ efforts take place within an academic ‘container,’ the 12-page, 5-part forensic essay, composed according to extremely strict and well-defined rules (in fact I use Quintilian, since no one has actually managed to supersede him in the intervening 1500 years). So, I am advocating stylistic, and to some extent intellectual licence, but am hewing to a Classical rhetorical formula. (As some of the grad students in our department might attest, I am increasingly bringing Quintilian’s standards to bear on their work as well). Simply put, I think there is no substitute for being able to formulate useful hypotheses, ascertain which deserve to become a thesis, support that thesis, and accommodate counter-arguments to it. If you can’t do that, you can’t really contribute usefully to knowledge in your field, whatever it may be. The rest is just window-dressing.

Or, it is self-indulgence, or at worst, exhibitionism. Perhaps it is my current state of near burn-out from those nine years of teaching an extremely demanding course, but I am in general not very interested in other people’s processes of arriving at their arguments. When blogging revolves around a writer’s impressions or opinions of musical events and issues—something it very often seems to do—I get cross because I feel like I’m reading a rough draft. Impressions and opinions are hypothetical, preparatory material, in my view, basically private and not to be casually thrown into public view, as if they were somehow intrinsically interesting. Ninety nine per cent of the time, they are not. And I don’t think this is entirely an issue of academic vs journalistic style, either: even a concert review written on a tight deadline can have a proper thesis to it.

I think I needn’t inveigh at any length against the casual admixture by some academic bloggers of personal details with their impressions and opinions; it should already be clear enough why I think this doesn’t work and is a waste of my time. If I am interested in getting to know that author, I will seek them out in person.

I can see, at least theoretically, that blogging (especially in groups as we are doing here) could be a forum for the honing and refining of hypothetical material, for deciding which impression or opinion was worth pursuing, and which should be discarded. As such, then, a grandchild of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters. Well and good. But…isn’t it still better to do this in person? All the original protagonists of the Republique des lettres met often, often, often—2 or 3 times a week—for live discussion and argument.

I’m afraid that our increasing reliance in academia on these heavily mediated, shifty, somewhat faceless writerly personae, will lead to a shriveling of the art of live debate. Quintilian meant for the forensic essay to be memorized and delivered live, in the Forum. I worry that Internet culture is supplanting live culture, human Presence, with a facsimile that depends for its very existence on large machines originally created by the military and now run by large corporations.

I think I’d better stop before I dig my own grave any deeper here. I am looking forward to being refuted!

ELG

While jazz is my favorite genre for both scholarly and performance pursuits, its commercial decline concerns me.  Considering its current over-representation in musicology/ethnomusicology, I question the value of focusing on this dying art.  Perhaps we have extracted every last drop of substance from jazz.  But why do we refuse to abandon it?  Does our continued adherence to this particular American art form stem from political correctness?

There are a couple ways I can imagine hosting discussions online using this format. In the first scenario, nobody uses the comments (unless people from the outside world have something to say, that is!). Instead, every new thought in a discussion thread is created by writing a new post. If multiple discussions are going on between different people at the same time, you can add hyperlinks to connect your thoughts to another post. For example, click here to jump to my Taruskin blog. This should keep things relatively well organized.

Another option would be to use the posts as general introductions to the debates/discussions. For instance, a post title might be: Is Jazz Irrelevant in the Academy? The body of the text would be a brief summary of the topic. Then, all contributors to the discussion would chime in their thoughts in the comments section. This format would keep the number of posts to a minimum, which would make the blog easier to navigate. The discussions would appear more or less entirely as comments. Also, this would provide greater ease of access: in order to publish a post, someone has to be “invited” by the administrator (me) and open an account with WordPress. Comments, however, are open to anyone, so everybody in the class could get writing right away.

This is a prototype, so please let me know your thoughts and impressions (maybe even as a comment to this post!) and we can proceed from there. Thanks!