Category Archives: Academia and/or Musicology

Master of Library and Information Science (?)

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I just made an inquiry re Western’s Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) program, in order to introduce myself and to ask about whether they have any preliminary scheduling information for the next several semesters. I’m interested to know what they’ll say, although I expect they’ll mostly just encourage me to apply.

I explained that after my BA in Music and Applied Studies Co-op at the U. of Waterloo and my MA in Musicology at the U. of Toronto, I completed my PhD in Musicology at UCLA and then more recently also a Co-op Certificate in Computer Applications Development at Conestoga College. I also said that in addition to my background in academia (research, teaching), music (e.g., choral singing), and my current work in public music history (books, articles, and conference papers), I have had several part-time jobs involving libraries, including a recordings’ research position at UCLA’s Music Library Special Collections, serving as the choral librarian of the Elora Festival & Singers, and my current volunteering in holds shelving and missing-item traces at the Waterloo Public Library. I also let them know that I once taught a course in popular music & culture for their faculty (FIMS), have developed a number of websites, took a pair of small-business/self-employment courses, and am currently a Visiting Scholar at Conrad Grebel University College at UW.

I wondered if there is an expected schedule yet for the five required courses in Summer 2016 and/or a list of what is expected to be offered in 2016-17? I said that I’m thinking of starting the program this coming summer, doing my second term in Fall 2016 (including some courses online, as I live in Waterloo), then doing a co-op term in Winter 2017 (taking one more course, possibly online, during that term), and completing the program in Summer 2017.

 

Experiencing Peter Gabriel – one more chapter!

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Experiencing Peter Gabriel: A Listener’s Companion mostly focuses on the songs found on his four primary studio albums: III/Melt (Chapter 4), IV/Security (Chapter 5), So (Chapter 6), and Us (Chapter 7). Chapters 1-2 cover his early years with Genesis (three studio albums per chapter), and Chapter 3 covers his first two solo albums: I/Car and II/Scratch. I’ve covered tours, film scores, other collaborations, cover versions, biographical details, etc. more briefly along the way. Thus, I think I can probably manage to include 2010’s Scratch My Back covers of other people’s songs, 2011’s New Blood orchestral reworkings of his own songs, and 2013’s And I’ll Scratch Yours covers of his songs in the same chapter (Chapter 8) that mainly covers 2002’s Up.

Musicology for Just the Cost of Shipping and Handling

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I have often used the 15th-century Franco-Flemish composer Johannes Ockeghem as a whipping boy to underscore my field’s lingering, unrepentent obscurity. For example, I found it hilarious when I had an internship at the American Musicological Society’s office in Brunswick, Maine in the summer of 2010 that there was nothing much there other than this huge, unsold stack of Vol. 3 of Ockeghem’s collected works from 1992. The fancy, expensive books had obviously been sitting there since the AMS office moved there from Philadelphia in 2006. Now, in 2016 the office will be moving to New York City, and they’re trying to pawn the books off for just the cost of shipping and handling. It occurred to me that they might actually get rid of a few of them if they included some free Slap Chops!

Performance Studies conference

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I’m interested in proposing a paper for the 2016 Performance Studies Network conference at Bath Spa University. However, would the subject matter of my forthcoming listener’s guide to the music of thirty-year Bath area resident Peter Gabriel actually count? His “diverse, interdisciplinary developments,” “global perspective,” and so on certainly do seem to fit the themes of the conference, even though all of the confirmed activities are so far restricted to contemporary art music and world music. How could I afford to go, though?

Letting Academic Things Go

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Kelly J. Baker just posted an article called “Goodbye to All That,” about abandoning her recently-contracted plan to write an academic book on the cultural history of zombies. I have very similar feelings about my work on music in The Simpsons, including my proposed academic book, related possible journal articles, and already-presented conference papers (e.g., 2006, 2013). Without a tenure-track, professorial context, I have to let those types of academic things go and possibly reimagine them as public music history projects instead. I’ve already made that transition from my dissertation on the rock band Rush to Experiencing Rush: A Listener’s Companion (2014) and am currently working on Experiencing Peter Gabriel: A Listener’s Companion (2016). So, I don’t see why I should stop now. Maybe, I’ll be able to get to the point of making a living wage at it!

“Public Musicologists” Ignore Public Musicology

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Institutionally-unaffiliated PhDs in my field are routinely swept under the carpet. Amanda Sewell’s report in the August 2015 newsletter of the American Musicological Society about an early 2015 conference on the Past, Present, and Future of Public Musicology confirms this by not bothering to mention my paper.

My contribution was called: “The Untapped Doctoral Majority of Potential Public Musicologists.” The paper begins by covering such things as:

  • the over-supply of musicology PhDs for the number of academic positions
  • what some musicology PhDs actually end up doing outside of academia

It continues by covering my:

I also then explain that I created music history instructional videos and that I adapted my dissertation on the Canadian rock band Rush for a public book called Experiencing Rush: A Listener’s Companion (Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). I end the paper with an example from Chapter 1 of my forthcoming book in the same series: Experiencing Peter Gabriel: A Listener’s Companion.

I have done almost all of that work outside of conventional institutional contexts, so does that mean it doesn’t qualify as “public musicology”?! The Musicology Now (blog) version of the report is only slightly better, with one, highly-misleading sentence about my work: “Durrell Bowman (independent scholar) spoke of the challenges he has faced in the decade-long search for an academic position in musicology.” Both my assigned title of “independent scholar”–which I loathe, in favour of “public music historian”–and the falsely-reported subject matter of my paper–which is actually a whole bunch of things I have done in Public Musicology–may explain why the editor of the AMS newsletter decided to exclude it. Not surprisingly, the newsletter version of the report also excludes the following sentence: “Felicia Miyakawa (academic consultant) explained why she left a tenured position and chose to pursue public musicology.”

I can’t speak for Miyakawa, but “we” are not amused.

Ageism in Musicology? – The 2015 Hiring Statistics

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Is it likely that ageism is at play in the fields of musicology and ethnomusicology? I’ve just had a look at the 2014-15 Musicology/Ethnomusicology Wiki. Including the temporary/visiting positions and the handful of post-doctoral fellowships, the two fields produced 82 full-time positions this year. Of the 73 positions for which we know the person hired and giving 2016 as the benefit-of-the-doubt-year for the six hired ABD (all but dissertation), the average PhD year is 2012.5. That number includes outliers from 1998 (someone I know), 2003 x 2 (not including me, sadly), and 2006, but everyone else who was hired in 2015 completed his or her PhD between 2008 and 2016. The most hired-from year is 2014, and the 57 people in the five years from 2012 to 2016 represent 78% of the hires.

My earlier research shows that there are around 375 new PhDs produced in musicology and ethnomusicology each year. So, the backlog of career-age music scholars who have not ended up in full-time academic employment must number at least several thousand. Lots of older scholars continue to apply for full-time academic positions, but publishing books and articles, presenting conference papers, and/or working as a part-time adjunct instructor apparently makes very little difference. Promising, newly-minted thirty-year-olds almost always win out over experienced fifty-year-old PhDs. It’s impossible to prove for sure that ageism exists in all of this, but the statistics simply speak for themselves.

If at first you don’t succeed … you won’t!

Visiting Scholar Status

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I recently asked about arranging for status as a Visiting Scholar to the Music Department of Conrad Grebel University College at the University of Waterloo. That’s my undergraduate alma mater in the city where I now live again. They just agreed to that, which will give me such Faculty/Staff/Grad library privileges as term-long book loans, access to scholarly publications and media through inter-library loans, and internet access in an office/carrel-type setting. The scenario will definitely help me work more efficiently on my current book project: Experiencing Peter Gabriel: A Listener’s Companion. So, thanks to Grebel music chair Laura Gray and librarian Laureen Harder-Gissing!

Experiencing Peter Gabriel: A Listener’s Companion

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Please read the book summary and writing sample for my next book, which I expect to be published by the spring of 2016.

Public Intellectuals

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Mark Greif’s “What’s Wrong with Public Intellectuals?” gets at the issues that are also keeping the supposedly quite new area of “public musicology” about forty to eighty years behind the times: http://chronicle.com/article/Whats-Wrong-With-Public/189921/

Excerpt:

“A large pool of disgruntled free-thinking people who are not actually starving, gathered in many local physical centers, whose vocation leads them to amass an enormous quantity of knowledge and skill in disputation, and who possess 24-hour access to research libraries, might be the most publicly argumentative the world has known.”

My Comment:

That might actually work if the 83% of PhDs who never land permanent, full-time academic positions actually had 24-hour access to research libraries. I certainly have no such access myself, and neither does most of that “large pool.” Also, my attempt at a collaborative website for public music history & culture, OurMus.Net, did not succeed for reasons similar to the difficulty Greif and his colleagues at n+1 had in soliciting useful public writing from early-career academics. Most such people simply don’t know how to write for anyone other than themselves. That has got to change.