I Can't Be the Wounded Man

I had intended to write my next post on music from Night Vale yesterday, but I'm glad something kept me from doing so.  For I read the final third of John Green's Paper Towns this morning, and realized what was keeping me from feeling a strong connection to Barton Carroll's "Those Days Are Gone and My Heart is Breaking." 



The narrator begets a child, but "couldn't stick around" and never even remains in contact with the mother or the child.  This attitude, the lack of responsibility for the child is foreign to me.  I immediately start judging him as a bad person.  It is easy to treat him as a one-dimensional character, just as several characters in Paper Towns realize that they had been doing the same.  Yet ultimately I know that we are all people trying to live the lives we have been given.  I don't know what kind of life the singer had before he left his town.  It implies he had friends, but these friends are abandoned (or abandon him).  He had a mean streak, and a rage over being held back from what he thought he deserved.  I did not grow up with similar feelings.  I grew apart from friends, and I've had feelings of being held back.  But ultimately I always felt the responsibility was on me, and I couldn't imagine abandoning my children.  I don't have the same wounds that the singer has, just as Quentin doesn't have the same wounds as Margo.  I haven't read Walt Whitman's poem, "Leaves of Grass" but Quentin interprets it as showing that while we all are connected, we can't truly know one another.  I don't think that is true with everyone, but there are people that I cannot relate to.  This is not their fault, and I need to remind myself not to judge harshly because of this.  The song's narrator has clearly grown as a person, no longer filled with rage but rather with regret.  He no longer feels held back by others, recognizing that he needs to put in the work to make connections and to earn his keep. 

The melody is very repetitive, within a major pentatonic collection of notes.  But the third line of each stanza is performed very quickly, within a single measure, which changes the flow.  There is a lot of space after this third line, setting up the fourth line as a different end-rhyme (AAAB). These unpredictable rushes and pauses can exhibit the narrator's nervousness in trying to reconnect with his old friend.  He knows he has made many mistakes, and needs to come clean in this attempt to reconcile.  Perhaps this is a first, easier step towards making things right with his son.  The last stanza eases the rhythm of the third line and doesn't rhyme as exactly.  Besides bringing things to the present day, the last stanza changes the refrain from "Those days are gone and my heart is breaking" to "Those days are here, and my heart is waiting."  He is thinking about the future, I think he is trying to fix the damage he did to his son and his ex. 

So maybe I can find connections with this wounded man.  There are plenty of mistakes I need to repair, even if not at the level of abandonment.  I can understand the nerves, and the relief once a hard step is taken.

The Fault in our Stars

I just finished reading John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, after getting to meet him and hear him talk at church on Sunday.  But this post is not about that book, not totally.  Instead, I am continuing to analyze the Weather segments from Welcome to Night Vale.  Episode 3, "Station Management," features "Bill and Annie" by Chuck Brodsky.



Chuck's voice is reminiscent of Bob Dylan, especially how he says "life" and "wife."  The song has a country vibe from the slide guitar, but mostly feels folk/singer-songwriter.  The lyrics are a complete narrative, no chorus to interrupt the story or emphasize a moral.  In the song, Bill and Annie can't catch a break.  They fall madly in love at his wedding reception, but Bill stays true to his wedding vows.  When Bill's wife dies, Annie has already gotten married herself, and had moved away.  They never act on their shared "one and only true love."  The narrator of the song is not Bill or Annie, but Annie's husband, Chuck (in a live version of the song, Chuck Brodsky suggests this is autobiographical).  They meet at Bill's peach stand, and Bill tells Chuck the story of their love.  The song deliberately leaves the point unclear, whether or not it is right that Bill and Annie valued commitment over true love.  Each strophe of the song ends on an inconclusive IV chord, much like the ending of "Let It Go" as Elsa unconvincingly claims that the cold (and isolation) doesn't bother her anyway. 



In John Green's book (SPOILERS! but this plot point is revealed in the trailer for the movie), the two main characters do act on their love, but they also repeatedly acknowledge that "the world is not a wish-granting factory."  In fact, Bill's decision to stay true to his vows is supported by another character in Green's book: "Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway."  While Bill's wife was not his true love, she was a love that he felt the need to protect and honor, even if it was hard.  These are clearly the things that Chuck is thinking about at the end of the song. 

To shut up the crickets

I was finding I had many more interesting things to do rather than write this blog last summer, so I stopped. Every once in a while I would feel a twinge to start blogging again. One major guilt trip came during the annual conference of the Society for Music Theory. The meeting of the Music Cognition Interest Group was spent celebrating 25 years of existence, with remembrances of the state of music cognition research back then and comparing it with today. In doing so, Helen Brown of Purdue University was listing all the places music cognition research can be found nowadays, and passed around copies of the last few posts of this blog! This was awkward/funny for four reasons: 1) She didn't know it was my blog. 2) I was sitting right next to her. 3) I wasn't really paying attention to her speech at that point until halfway through her description of my blog, when I looked up in horrifying realization.* 4) My last post before this one is called Sexy Theory, which Helen relished in announcing to all of our colleagues. The awkwardness factor collapsed with Leigh Van Handel's (Michigan State) reminder to everyone that it was indeed my blog. Thanks, Leigh!

The second time came with the Grammy's, and an offer by my fiancée to help live-blog the event again. Yes, I have a fiancée now, along with three more children in a lovely Brady Bunch home. We even have our own Alice, except her name isn't Alice. Our schedules made watching the Grammy's impossible, much less live-blogging about them.

But finally, I got an itch to start writing the blog again. I've been stimulated by enthusiastic students, the prospects of my sabbatical, my upcoming wedding, and a friend who just e-published her first book. Speaking of which, my** first book came out last October. So, I plan to post about times a week. Lock up your interwebs and hide your backlinks, Musical Perceptions is back!

*Leigh, who was sitting right across from me, says the transition in my face was priceless.
**Mine, and nine other authors.

The Deathly Hallows

Not that I'm a fan or anything, but I purchased and read the final Harry Potter book this weekend. I won't spoil it for anyone, I'll just say that it is a satisfying ending to the series. Anyone who wants to discuss the book more in detail should visit this thread. WARNING: spoilers abound at this thread, including when Dudley wielded the light saber and....

Free book bleg

Routledge Press is offering me a free book for filling out a survey. I've narrowed down the field to seven books, listed below. I'd appreciate any comments on these books, for or against.

Music and Memory

I just finished reading this very good book by Bob Snyder. Bob is a composer who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While the title and the opening make this seem to be a very specialized book, it actually covers many different topics in music cognition and music theory. Snyder includes sections on Gestalt psychology, Jonathan Kramer's theories of linearity and vertical time, pitch discrimination, Lerdahl and Jackendoff's musical hierarchies, rhythm theory, music and metaphor, as well as many details of the psychology of memory. I picked this book up to bolster my pedagogy model, but ended up finding many things appropriate for my phenomenology of time project. This is a well researched book, but also very readable by musicians, psychologists, neuroscientists, and interested laity. It provides a great introduction to many of the issues of music cognition and music theory, so much so that I'm considering using this book as the foundation for my psychology of music class. While the book only covers some topics quite superficially, it refers to excellent books and articles for more depth on each of those topics. I could have the students track down sources, both to learn more about the subject and to practice good research skills. But regardless, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in music cognition.

A Concise History of Western Music

This post represents two firsts for me. This is the first book review requested by a publisher specifically for my blog. I haven't been receiving lots of swag like other bloggers, so this feels noteworthy. The second first is being hounded by the author to write the review.

This book is indeed a concise history. Clocking in at 316 pages (not including appendices), Griffiths' coverage of 4500 years of music (45,000 years if you include his Chapter 0) has to be brief. To save room, Griffiths does not give detailed biographies of major composers, and nonmusical history is very sparse (though more is included in the chapters on the Twentieth Century). There is also no world music, and not much popular music, essentially a history of Western Art Music.

Griffiths takes a mostly chronological approach, organizing music history into eight periods. These periods are defined by how the composers conceive of or use time. Each period is described in a brief introduction before longer chapters delve into the details. The first period, "Time whole," deals with music before notation was developed. This short section (necessarily brief as the lack of notation limits our knowledge of what the music sounded like) is followed by the first uses of music notation, "Time measured 1100-1400". I found the descriptions of the theory and the historical developments interesting, but the attempts to describe the emotional content of the music by Leonin and Perotin were not convincing. This lack of aesthetic enthusiasm stands in stark contrast to the excitement Griffiths is able to engender in later works. But many important theorists and treatises are mentioned as well as composers and aesthetic movements, and the descriptions of Machaut's works are excellent.

Griffiths calls the Renaissance "Time sensed 1400-1630." He clearly has an enthusiasm for DuFay, devoting several pages to his life and music. But I was also enticed by the descriptions of Obrecht. Throughout the book, Griffiths does a great job emphasizing how various eras of music were lost and rediscovered, sometimes very late. In the case of Obrecht (1457/8-1505), he "was forgotten soon after his death, and his music was little known until scholars and performers began bringing back into circulation in the 1990s." (p. 62)

The Baroque (through to Rococo) is "Time known 1630-1770." The Classical era was "Time Embraced 1770-1815", the Romantic saw "Time escaping 1815-1907" before it was tangled from 1908-1975. The last section, "Time lost 1975-," is all too short after the seventy pages devoted to the bulk of the Twentieth century. And in those seventy pages Griffiths saw fit to give four pages to Jean Barraqué [who?] while never mentioning George Crumb once. The Romantic era was swamped with names and dates, losing the fine narrative focus of the other sections. But in the last three sections much more social context is given, especially on the interactions of the composers and society.

Forms and structures are described by their emotional or dramatic effects, such as "Sonata as comedy" (chapter 11) or the development of basso continuo to offer flexibility in both instrumentation and tempo as a means of allowing the singer to portray joy and pain in Italian madrigals. (p. 84)

At the end of the book Griffiths includes recommendations for further reading and listening, organized by chapter. The listening recommendations are particularly useful, as I think the primary audience for this book will be listeners looking to expand their repertoires. Students could find it handy when preparing for graduate entrance exams, and I appreciated getting a review of topics that had grown dusty in my noggin. There is also a glossary of terms for the layperson and an index.

Overall, this is a very good book. I will leave any critiques of the musicological research to those more qualified, like Charles T. Downey or Dial 'M', and leave it that I found no glaring errors from my own understandings and found many good insights on connections between composers or genres. It is much better than the Concise Oxford History of Music, which I used to prepare for grad school, and less intimidating than the Grout/Palisca/Burkholder/hut hut hike.

Tagged

I've been tagged by a new (to me) blogger, Bodie Pfost. (A warning to Patty, he is a trombonist.)

Find the nearest book.
Turn to page 123.
Go to the fifth sentence on the page.
Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
Name the book and the author, and tag three more folks.

Soon afterwards Leonardo Vinci (c. 1696-1730) and other young composers, trained in the conservatories of Naples, began gaining an ascent over opera in Italy, introducing a style that, again, resembled popular melody in its short phrases and tunefulness. In this new world Bach was too learned and Handel too sophisticated. The younger generation's music favoured lightness, simplicity and immediate pleasure, qualities that characterize the rococo style in the arts, though with reference to music the term galant is sometimes used, with its allusion to a civilized gaiety of French Bearing.

A Concise History of Western Music by Paul Griffiths.

I will be reviewing this book on the blog in about a week. I had to cheat slightly, as Griffiths writes rather long sentences. The second and third sentences above are on the next page of the book. Like Jessica, I won't tag anyone, leaving it open to any interested parties.