Music and the Self

This is a conference sponsored by ECHO, the online "music centered journal." Held at UCLA, in Schoenberg Music Building, the conference is this weekend, June 1-2. Here is the program:

Friday June 1st, 2007
Schoenberg Music Building, 1344
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3:30 pm: Check-in and Refreshments

4-6 pm: Panel I
Philip Gentry (UCLA), Chair

James Deaville (Carleton University) "Trailers Are a Film's Worst Friend: Re-Framing Moulin Rouge Through Image and Music"

Charles Carson (University of Pennsylvania) "'But Do It With Taste': Race, Class and the Origins of Smooth Jazz"

Justin Schell (University of Minnesota), "'Modern Urban Norman
Rockwells': Hip-Hop and the Twin Cities"

6 pm: Dinner Catered by ASUCLA
Ackermann 2nd Floor Lounge


8 pm: Concert by Eric Wang, harpsichordist
Location: The Rotunda, UCLA Powell Library
Featuring works by works by Froberger, Soler, Scarlatti, and Handel

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Saturday, June 2nd
Royce Hall, Conference Room 314
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9 am: Coffee and Continental Breakfast


9:15-10:45 am: Panel II
Stephan Pennington (UCLA), Chair

Lisa Musca (UCLA) "Music as a Way of Knowing: Idealism, Bessonenheit, and Subjectivity in Beethoven's Late Bagatelles"

Silvio dos Santos (Youngstown State University), "Constructing Identity: The Case of Alwa in Alban Berg's Opera Lulu"

Sean Nye (University of Minnesota), "What is Teutonic?: On the German Question Today"


11-12:15 pm: Keynote Address: Susan McClary (UCLA), "Self-ish Musicology"

12:30-2 pm: Lunch on your own

2-3:30 pm: Panel III
Kelsey Cowger (UCLA), Chair

Ryan Dohoney (Columbia University), "Feldman's Grid and Pollock's Body: Avant-garde Performance and Cold War Masculinity"

Martin Nedbal (Eastman School of Music), "Dvorak's Armida and the Czech Oriental 'Self'"

Joseph Di Ponio (SUNY-Stony Brook), "Freudian Identity and the Prism of Guattari": (De)Territorializing the Narrative of Savatore Sciarrino's Infinito Nero"


3:30-4 pm: Coffee Break

4-5:30 pm: Panel IV
Zarah Ersoff (UCLA), Chair

Jennifer Saltzstein (University of Pennsylvania), "'Ci respondit la dame': Gender and Voice in Medieval French Song Citation"

Jenny Olivia Johnson (New York University), "'Those Songs': An Acoustic Reading of Childhood Sexual Abuse"

Robert Walser (UCLA), "Musicking as Selfing: How Our Brains Lie to Us and How We Lie Back"

They're wired differently!

Fred Himebaugh should feel vindicated in his disdain for people with synaethesia. Mind Hacks reports on a study that shows through brain imaging how synaesthetes have more connections in the fusiform gyrus. So essentially the white matter of synaesthetes brains are wired differently. Not only that, but different forms of synaesthesia reveal different forms of wiring. The article cited, from Neurophilosopher, also describes the different form of brain imaging, DTI, which measures water molecule diffusion. It's fascinating what scientists can come up with.

Dancing Well

I see a connection between the recent kerfluffle about the Atlanta Journal-Constitution dropping its music critic and Stefan Kac's critique of The Nation's music criticism. Stefan rightly points out that good writing about music does not involve jargon, but does require knowing the technical aspects of music so the key differences can be described accurately. Compare Stefan's description of "So What" and "Giant Steps":

Both Miles and Coltrane were moving away from the dominant jazz style of the late 1950's (known as hard-bop), but in different directions. For example, whereas Miles implemented more static harmonies and a relaxed tempo in his classic So What, Coltrane did the exact opposite in the landmark Giant Steps, filling the tune with many then unfamiliar chord changes and taking it at a blistering pace.

with Yaffe's:

Miles Davis's Kind of Blue had come out a couple of months earlier, just a few months after John Coltrane's Giant Steps, each disdaining chord changes in favor of solemn inquiries into chords and modes. Davis's So What coolly navigated between a couple of minor Mixolydian modes; Coltrane's Giant Steps circled the circle of fifths.

Go read Stefan's post to see what is embarassingly wrong about Yaffe's descriptions. But more importantly, this wrongness is compounded by the inscrutable jargon that tries to keep the audience from seeing the author's lack of knowledge. (See Calvin the academic)

The newspapers that have been canning their music critics don't understand the need for this specialized knowledge. Your average graduate of journalism school will not know the differences between Schoenberg and Stravinsky, much less between Augusta Read Thomas and Joan Tower. I also acknowledge that your average graduate of a music conservatory cannot express him/herself in writing well enough to get across these differences*, which is why a good music critic is so valuable. Write your local editor to either praise the local music critic or demand a good one. Even if newspapers are transforming into a different form of media, they still are the record of all important local events.

*I've been trying to change that with my seminars on music writing, though I'm not teaching it this coming year.

It's HIP to be square

Last week I went to two concerts of the Bloomington Early Music Festival. On Saturday, May 19th, I took my daughter to see Bloomington Baroque, really a catch-all name for any group of musicians organized by Stanley Ritchie. In this case, it included my daughter's violin teacher, Allison Edberg, along with Kiri Tollaksen and Bruce Dickey (!) on cornetto, bassoon, continuo, tenor, and two violas da gamba. Kiri and Bruce were fabulous, they can play so in tune and with wonderful dynamic shadings. Allison played the Schmelzer violin sonata, and turned in a great performance. Then this last Thursday I schlepped back to Bloomington to see Kiri and Bruce play in Kiri's group, Quarter Comma (a tuning system joke). This included a great soprano, continuo, dulcian (bassoon) and harp. The bassoonist hit some clunkers in his featured pieces, and the harpist made me nervous with her uncertain stage presence, but overall the concert was great. I sat closer for this concert so I could watch Bruce's and Kiri's fingers, picking up some good tips from these observations.

Boston's WGBH will be broadcasting Boston's Early Music Festival from June 11-17. It looks like the only opportunities to hear period brass music will be Nachtmusique and the festival orchestra (which includes former classmate Alex Bonus). Full details of the broadcast schedule can be found here or here for pdf.

FriPod: Sunday edition! Memorial Day

I had ten four and five year-olds over for a birthday party yesterday, which ate up all of last week and yesterday. Thus the lateness of this week's FriPod and the lack of blogging this week. This week's FriPod is devoted to Memorial Day weekend.

1. "Memories," by Charles Ives. I have two versions, by Thomas Hampson and Susan Graham. This song is in two halves: Very Pleasant and Rather Sad. The Very Pleasant portion is about waiting for a show at the opera house, rather manic in anticipation of the curtain rising. The Rather Sad part is the bittersweet part of nostalgia, regretting how some things have become old and worn over the years, perhaps to fade away completely. I think this sort of nostalgia is dangerous, leading to an idolatry of permanent things over changing people.

2. "Old Photos. New Memories," from James Horner's soundtrack to House of Sand And Fog. A provocative mix of solo piano with synthesized sounds that shifts to strings. A minimalist presentation, with an oscillating chordal progression. The movie is devastating, as each character neglects ways of connecting with each other, leading to sorrow for everyone. Another form of that dangerous nostalgia.

3. Elegy in Memory of Serge Koussevitsky, by Howard Hanson, performed by Gerard Schwartz and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. Similar to Hanson's Romantic Symphony in some ways, this memorial to the great conductor and bass virtuoso pays tribute to SK's roots in romanticism. Hanson himself was also rooted in this backwards-looking movement, to the detriment of the Eastman students' educations on 20th century music during his tenure.

4. Tres Lent (In Memoriam Olivier Messiaen), by Joan Tower, performed by André Emelianoff on cello with Joan Tower on piano. This homage is almost creepy in its imitation of Quartet for the End of Time. There is passion, sorrow, respect. Why do these memorials avoid expressing joy for the great things these artists made?

5. "Hope and Memory," from Howard Shore's soundtrack to LOTR - The Return of the King. This clip starts very anxious sounding, but transitions to the hope from the Shire mixed with the Heroes' motive. These memories are nostalgic but full of joy for past accomplishments and hope for the future, rather than dreading any change (at least in the music, the books are a different story).

6. "Lammon tells how Pan saved Chloé in memory of his love for the nymph Syrinx. Daphnis and Chloé act out the story," from Daphnis et Chloé by Maurice Ravel, performed by Charles Munch and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Lush and romantic, this memory is not locked in the past, but willing to interact with the present to affect the future. Impressionistic candy, full of timbral colors through parallel chords and orchestration, and avoidances of cadences.

7. North American Ballads. 1. Dreadful Memories, by Frederic Rzewski, performed by the composer. This ballad starts very cheery, a lilting sea chanty. But a deceptive cadence leads to an abstract deconstruction of the ballad, revealing painful feelings hidden in the pleasant exterior of the melody. There is rage, confusion, sorrow, and regret.

New blog

Victor Grauer, who is a regular on the Society for Music Theory email list, has a new blog about ethnomusicology and the origins of music, called Music 000001. Related, the World of Music, the journal of the department of ethnomusicology at the University of Bamberg, has a blog presence advertising each issue.

Ways of ranking

In comments on the previous post, AC Douglas and Roger Bourland recalculate the list using Google links. I have done the same using the unpublished list of 116 blogs I have collected. Here are the blogs that didn't make the top 53 using Technorati, but would be in the top using Google (shoehorn them into Roger's list) (and some numbers are probably different, since I checked the statistics today):
#20: Vilaine Fille 854 (Crit)
#33: Daily Observations, 465 Charles Noble (viola)
#33: Fredösphere, 465 Fred Himebaugh (C)
#37: Café Aman, 421 Anastasia Tsioulcas (Crit)
#42: Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra Blog 368
#43: Brian Dickie 366 (artistic director)
#47: In the Wings, 346 Heather Heise (piano)
#48: Today's Opera News, 338 Alan Faust (O)
#49: Of Music and Men, 324 Ilkka Talvi (violin)
#50: Sound and Mind, 323 Kris Shaffer (A)
#51: Coloratur...aaah 322 (voice)

I won't mention which blogs would be cut to make room for these worthies. As I look at the different lists, I think Technorati has a better picture of the more current buzz, as it would with the emphasis on only the last six months. Google is a more historical approach, so even if a blog doesn't get new links in the past six months, it could still rank well based on past performance. Matthew Guerreri's blog is getting linked a lot lately, as the Technorati ranking shows, but by Google standards he would be down at #90 (oops, I just mentioned one). So I trust Technorati more for this use. Here is an old study comparing Google with Technorati, though some of his interpretations of the statistics are incorrect, particularly when comparing Google and Yahoo. Technorati doesn't record nearly as many links, the question is which links are important, and how old the links are.

Update: Chris Foley has generated his own list, using subscription rates on Bloglines, an RSS reader. He also makes good arguments for the validity of subscription ranking, not just because I go up considerably (to #11). However, I would have more faith with using statistics from one RSS reader if the numbers were considerably higher. There are 67 people who choose Bloglines to read this blog, but there could be many others that choose Google Reader, Kinja, deli.cio.us, or other aggregators. And the proportion of readers choosing one service over another could change radically from blog to blog, augmented by these low numbers. If we were talking in the hundreds or thousands, I would have more confidence. But I also understand the limitations Chris worked with. You go to list with the statistics you have, not the statistics you want to have.