Double Narrative

Experiencing your experience

Mon, 07 May 2012 16:28:17 -0400

Experiencing your experience:

I’m just going to leave this here.

Norma Beecroft

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 00:25:00 -0400

Just to add another lost lady composer to our list. Check ‘er out.

-Elizabeth

http://music.cbc.ca/#/artists/Norma-Beecroft

The Score Is Not The Music

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 20:58:47 -0400

The Score Is Not The Music:

stephinstereo:

David Cope wrote a computer program, called Emily Howell, that can compose music. There are snippets of the music all over the internet if you google David Cope, but Centaur Records released an album of the music in 2010.

The fact that the music is musical makes a lot of people feel very uncomfortable. If a machine can make music that might move us, what does that mean about our creativity.

“The question isn’t whether computers have a soul, but whether humans have a soul.”

-David Cope

A book was compiled on the issue - Virtual Music - with commentary from cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, it’s a fascinating question.

MC * PM: Elsa Bienenfeld Stands Alone

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 21:47:54 -0400

MC * PM: Elsa Bienenfeld Stands Alone:

paulmathews:

Whenever I return to my research on Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, I find myself fascinated with Elsa Bienenfeld. Her reviews of Pierrot and other modernist works reveal an amazing insight into contemporary music.

Dr. Elsa Bienenfeld (1877-1942) studied musicology with Guido Adler and…

The Medium is the Massage - Mixtape

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 10:29:28 -0400

The Medium is the Massage - Mixtape

Noise

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 01:34:00 -0400

Noise, by Jacques Attali

How had I never come across this book until 2 weeks ago?

“Music is more than an object of study: it is a way of perceiving the world. A tool of understanding.

… In the face of the growing ambiguity of the signs being used and exchanged, the most well-established concepts are crumbling and every theory is wavering…my intention here is thus not only to theorize about music, but to theorize through music …”

-Elizabeth

More ladies in music, lost & found.

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 11:41:37 -0500

More ladies in music, lost & found.

Andree Vaurabourg

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 00:21:52 -0500

Andree Vaurabourg

What does recorded sound mean for music scholars?

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:47:46 -0500

Well, a lot right?

Just reflecting on this for a hot minute … how does recorded sound change the way we do music scholarship? And, how does it change the product of music scholarship?

What if recorded sound never happened? How would that change our focus on scores? Would organology be a lot more important? And WHAT would a listening exam be, excerpts at the piano?

Just curious.

-Steph

noise

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 19:51:16 -0500

Q: Really, Miss Beyer, is there any beauty in your pathological sounds and noises? Or does it appeal to some other sense?

A: Apparently it is nothing but noise.

Composer Johanna Beyer, 1936.

Love it.

-Elizabeth

quietquietquiet

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 22:49:00 -0500

quietquietquiet:

Reposting from Joanna’s blog about a kerfuffle between LaMonte Young and author Jeremy Grimshaw.

As art and culture scholars, how much responsibility do we have to be objective? Oscar Wilde called criticism an art, and I agree with Joanna that authors and scholars have the right to present their own opinion. But there do seem to boundaries. What are they, why are they there?

After the End of Music History

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 19:23:27 -0500

My fellow (IU) MA students may remember that the conference in honor of Richard Taruskin (entitled “After the End of Music History”) came up in our reading group a few weeks ago. Well, the NY Times covered it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/arts/music/after-the-end-of-music-history-conference-at-princeton.html

Apparently, there was some sort of semi-argument about new musicology and whether or not it would push out traditional concerns of musicological consideration:

In the wake of attacks on the notion of a classical music canon by proponents of what a decade or two ago was called “new musicology,” Mr. Berger offered an impassioned defense: not of a canon closed to the future (he cited as canonical works by three recent masters, Witold Lutoslawski, Gyorgy Ligeti and Gyorgy Kurtag) but of a canon closed to its surroundings. He fears that great music “is drowning in a flood of ever-new products of an industry paralyzed by an inability to discriminate among them,” he said. Elsewhere he spoke of “mountains of trash.”

The danger for academia, he suggested, is that as musicology departments expand to include various forms of popular music or exotica, their traditional concerns will be crowded out. Such talk would make any new musicologist’s blood boil, and several were present, including Ms. McClary. But Mr. Berger had used up his allotted time, and the moderator, while acknowledging that a bomb had been dropped, closed the floor to questions.

I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone that I can sympathize with some of Berger’s concerns—I feel like I’m constantly ranting about how we shouldn’t end discussions by dismissing difficult or unsavory topics with arguments of relativism—but it does seem close-minded to suggest that “popular music [and] exotica” will “crowd out” the “traditional concerns” of musicology. That’s some pretty loaded language. But then again, those are the reviewer’s words, and it does seem as though he was hoping a fight would break out (a la Richard Taruskin). Perhaps the absence of such a conflict, even from such a prominent supporter of new musicology as Susan McClary (as recorded later in the article), suggests that Berger’s words were not quite as incendiary as Oestreich made them out to be?

— Joanna

Dudamel

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 23:23:00 -0500

Any thoughts on this article?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/15/arts/music/gustavo-dudamel-and-los-angeles-philharmonic-hailed-in-caracas.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&src=dayp

I think all the Dudamel worship is interesting, and sort of bizarre.

Also, these paragraphs caught my eye:

Mr. Dudamel said the Philharmonic was a guest of El Sistema, which is financed mainly by the government. “Is there something anti-American here? Nothing,” he added. “We are receiving our brothers and sisters from the United States with our arms open and with our complete love.”

Well, not everybody feels love in Caracas. The city has become one of the world’s leaders in kidnapping and murder, and armed robbery is rampant. Philharmonic members were given stringent recommendations: lock passports in the hotel safe; do not wear expensive jewelry and watches; do not leave the hotel on foot or use public transportation or hail taxis from the street or use cellphones in crowded areas; stay in groups of at least four. Mr. Dudamel travels with a bodyguard.

For some reason this just rubbed me the wrong way, but I can’t put my finger on it. “Well, not everybody feels love in Caracas” — I don’t know, it just seemed like a silly transition to me. Or maybe just an obvious, not-entirely-accurate angle that reporters frequently take when covering “developing” countries, Latin American ones in particular.

As for the advice given to Philharmonic members: yeah, that’s general advice you should probably consider when you travel anywhere, ok. It seems possibly problematic that the journalist is exploiting these kinds of stereotypes to bolster his angle about Dudamel being some sort of superhero.

Portraying Latin American countries this way seems to be a pretty pervasive journalistic convention. Just in my own experience, both with Mexican friends/family and from my time in Brazil, pervasive images of a country as some backwards, dangerous place can be counterproductive and pejorative to the people living in the “blighted barrios” the author mentions. On the other hand, it could be argued that this kind of negative branding of a country harms not so much the public, but the elite ruling class, by deterring financial and economic interests away from the country.

I’m curious what you all think.

-Elizabeth

Curating the Academic World of Collaborative Media: Call for Chapters: Virtual Bands, Virtual Music (due May 31, 2012)

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:56:39 -0500

Curating the Academic World of Collaborative Media: Call for Chapters: Virtual Bands, Virtual Music (due May 31, 2012):

Thought this might be of interest to y’all.

medeamalmo:

To what extent is contemporary popular music driven by the digital media, music technology, and creative artistic technology? Contributions for an edited collection on Virtual Bands, Virtual Music.

Shara Rambarran and Sheila Whiteley are seeking contributions from the wide spectrum of musicology…

SCANDAL ROILS THE MUSICOLOGY WORLD

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:17:00 -0500

Yeah, I don’t know. It’s a controversy over a recently discovered Brahms piano piece.

Good summary of the story here, updated details here (along with a photoshopped image of the “Indiana Jones of musicology”).

-Joanna

http://quietquietquiet.wordpress.com

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 11:57:32 -0500

http://quietquietquiet.wordpress.com:

Hi all,

This is my blog. Steph asked me to post because I’ve been doing some writing about gimmicks recently, which is something she’s also just gotten on to, as you’ll see from her last post.

Enjoy, or something.

Joanna

The Power of Suggestion

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 11:03:00 -0500

Lana Del Rey’s been popping up on my radar lately, and I’ve got to say I was immediately hooked by her single “Video Games.” A little more youtube digging and I found “Yayo,” and I thought, OK … I totally dig this. But something kept bugging me, the way she was posing and modelling in the video for Video Games really irked me. It was an overwrought cloud on the horizon of my burgeoning love affair with Lana Del Rey’s sultry voice. I wanted to know more about her, what was her bio? Was she for real? All in all, I wanted to know if it was alright for me to like her? After all, I’ve got my street cred to think about.

Well, apparently, the debate about Del Rey has already been churning considerably. I certainly wasn’t the first to be suspicious of one of Del Rey’s most obvious appeals; her blatant jaded Hollywood persona, steeped in the idea of sad worn beauty as it fades in the manmade desert dust. A ten minute search on twitter shows that people are clearly divided on the Lana Del Rey issue. It seems to be split down the middle, with those who have no patience for Del Rey and those who feel the need to defend her.

Some of the detractors:

“My little brother is blasting Lana Del Rey!!! Someone shoot me now!!!!!”

“IF U LIKE LANA DEL REY U UGLY!!!!!!!!”

“Lana Del Rey sounds like Fiona Apple’s farts.”

A defender:

“Lana Del Rey haters are basic, reductive, muggle lessers, for whom I have no patience/time.”

Someone who seems to have a grasp on the reality of the situation:

“These Lana Del Rey album reviews have more backpedaling than a unicycle convention.”

Lana Del Rey’s popularity rose with the posting of her video for “Video Games” on youtube, which consists of grainy clips of people running around the hotel Chateau Marmont and various other quintessential Hollywood shots. The combination of its sad languid melodies, big lips and hair and grainy footage won people over and, as the announcement of Del Rey’s forthcoming album was linked to the video, lucky girl has achieved being in the top 25 topsellers on Amazon … and that’s on presells.

So what’s the problem? Well, it wasn’t long after her meteoric rise that people began uncovering the truth about her past. Drugs? Booze? A longlost daughter of Mia Farrow? No, the truth of her dirty past is a young singer songwriter who put out an album that ultimately failed: Lizzy Grant.

Lizzy Grant is Lana Del Rey minus the big hair and pumped up lips. Minus the Hollywood mystique, Lana Del Rey is a singer songwriter of modest talent, who enjoys pursuing a jazzy sultry kind of a sound. But, in t-shirts and jeans, apparently this sound doesn’t sell. So Del Rey enlisted the power of marketing, developed a persona that could arguably sell anything from footballs, to shampoo to, yes, music and now her music has been heard by millions.

Does this change her music? It has certainly changed the opinion of some. A friend of mine, whose taste I respect showed me her video about a month ago with some interest. I asked him what he thought of Lana Del Rey last week. His response, “She’s awful.” What has shifted these opinions is the feeling that we’ve been had.

Nitsuh Abebe discusses all of this very insightfully in his pitchfork article “Why We Fight: The Imagination of Lana Del Rey”. He points out that the controversy surrounding Del Rey may stem from the fact that we aren’t sure if she is marketing herself as an indie musician or a pop musician. For the indie crowd authenticity has higher importance. For pop musicians, theatrics are par for the course. As Abebe writes,

Pop music treats imagination roughly the same way stage musicals do: You can take up the trappings of any aesthetic you like, roving anywhere through style and history, costume, and theme. But the music is always bedrock; it always needs to function as pop. This is how, say, Katy Perry can put across her Candy Land-pinup persona, and Ke$ha can put across her futuristic junkyard-rat persona, while both sing fairly similar songs, co-written with the same guy.

With indie musicians it’s the opposite. The music itself is allowed to follow its aesthetic imagination off in strange directions, but the artists are often expected not to. The artist is always just an auteur, the creator of a fiction: She might make an album totally committed to theatrical concepts, but she’ll show up to interviews in normal clothes, explaining her ideas like a normal person. Persona, imagination, ideas about style— listeners expect them to be packed into the sound. It’s when a musician tries to embody them in person that fans start grumbling about being imposed upon, or asked to believe in something ludicrous.

This idea, that theatrics, gimmicks or any extramusical element that factors into our perception of music is in essence an imposition on the listener is fascinating and reminds me of the arguments over program music and absolute music of the 19th century. When the message of music is dependent on extramusical elements does that weaken the music itself. Does it simply mask inherent weaknesses or can it strengthen certain characteristics or styles?

I have no answers to offer, nor would I place greater value on one or the other. What I do come away with however, is a greater appreciation of how easily the power of suggestion can affect the ideas we assign ideas to music.

-Steph

Hey all, at our most recent meeting a few folks expressed...

Sun, 22 Jan 2012 17:56:23 -0500

Hey all, at our most recent meeting a few folks expressed interest in the abstract for my Elliott Smith paper. Here ‘tis….

Musico-Poetic Structure in Early Songs of Elliott Smith

Since singer-songwriter Elliott Smith’s death in 2003, many critics have incorporated him into a canon of musician-poets that includes Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and other songwriters whose lyrics stand alone as poetry. That said, Smith’s musical and poetic styles depart significantly from twentieth-century singer-songwriter traditions, and from the 1990s alternative music trends of his contemporaries. In his prolific catalog of folk-punk songs, listeners often appreciate his music and lyrics separately: his music for its peculiar harmony, chromatic melodies, and distinct double-tracking recording techniques, and his lyrics for their dark, provocative imagery. However, few writers have acknowledged the complex interaction between these two elements. I suggest musico-poetic analysis as a strategy for exploring Smith’s distinct musical language.
In this paper, Smith’s song forms serve as a framework for analyzing musico-poetic elements such as rhyme, meter, syllabic density, text-painting, and phrase rhythm. I compare musical and poetic forms in three songs, “Alameda,” “Condor Avenue,” and “Last Call,” to explore the variety of ways these elements interact in context, demonstrating Smith’s flexible approach to conventions at the service of musical development. In these songs, musical sections and poetic stanzas overlap and intersect, musical phrases are elided and extended to respond to poetic meaning and structure, and unusual, irregular poetic rhyme and meter at times operate within conventional pop forms. Ultimately, Smith’s lyrics emerge not only as a rhetorical medium for conveying anxiety, apathy, and remorse, but also as a defining element of musical structure in his short, but hardly simple, songs.

And here are the other 2 songs I plan to mention:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeWHRA_snDk (“Alameda”)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGaAtKgb3lI (“Last Call”)

-Elizabeth

I study genres.

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:31:00 -0500

I was at a bar in Tacoma over break, and some guy asks me what I study. I’m like, “Oh, musicology…”, bracing myself for the inevitable perplexed look and/or question, “So…what is that, anyway?”

(Most of my friends and family are computer scientists, med students, law students, accountants, engineers, and entrepreneurs — you know, practical careers — so I get pretty used to defending study of the humanities/fine arts to people.)

Except this guy was actually pretty intrigued (albeit perhaps only because he was drunk). “Oh cool! Musicology! So that’s, like, the study of different genres?”

And for some reason I never thought of musicology that way. It seems so concise…definitely too simplistic…but honestly, it’s a pretty good summary of what we do. I was just like, “Um…actually, yeah. Yeah. That’s exactly what it is.”

-Elizabeth

Welcome back to Indiana y'all!

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 11:05:00 -0500

Welcome back to Indiana y'all!