Category Archives: Music and Musicians

Experiencing Rush: A Listener’s Companion

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My chapter outlines for Experiencing Rush: A Listener’s Companion are going very well.  For my proposal (I have two weeks left to complete it), the folks at Scarecrow Press really only want one paragraph per chapter.  I can easily focus on what I want to cover, because I know the topic extremely well.

The book and the proposal both need to be in short, accessible sentences and without any kind of technical or academic jargon.  The trick will be to translate some of my more powerful song-discussion ideas from my UCLA musicology dissertation into “normal” language.

Another part of the proposal involves a writing sample of a page or two about a specific piece of music.   I need to sneak selected lyrics directly into my prose sentences, otherwise permissions would be a nightmare.   However, I might opt to include a short table that summarizes the main aspects of the structure and textures of whichever song I choose.

I should be able to write the entire book very quickly.  I need to, because I have other things to do, and I’ve mostly moved on from this topic anyhow.

Music “Trivia” for Musicians

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We had an enjoyable Grand Philharmonic Choir annual dinner last evening. However, there has to some kind of better after-dinner activity for a bunch of mildly-inebriated musicians than the sort of “Name That Random No. 1 Hit” type of trivia contest that hundreds of millions of non-musicians also enjoy and at which they undoubtedly do just as well.

How about actually performing some songs? (Duh!) Start with a fake book and a piano, and give out prizes for people who remember and/or figure out suitable introductions, best approximate synth patterns, vocally replicate riffs and guitar solos, add bass lines, bang out some drum fills on a table, get the vocal harmonies right, and so on.

I would REALLY prefer to engage with more than the first three seconds of each song! I can play “Name That Tune” whenever I want with my own iTunes library and with tens of thousands of songs—as opposed to a handful of former top pop hits. Musicians should certainly be able to deal with things other than “lowest common denominators.”

How to Sneak Cultural Musicology into Church!

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I’m looking forward to performing my church’s Lenten theme song, “Ashamed No More” (by Valerie Wiebe), this Sunday. Musically, it’s going to be something like Ray Charles performing “Amazing Grace” (but not like his sweeping version with orchestral strings) meets the Beatles’ “Let It Be” (i.e., mostly piano). I’ve R&B-ized the song a bit with some extra 7ths, substitute chords that work better on piano (especially this killer, I must say, diminished 7th in the bridge), and gestures (e.g., melodic thirds) that show the mutual stylistic derivations of R&B and country music—which Ray Charles, and to a lesser extent the Beatles, obviously explored. Cultural musicology in church!

Carmina Jehanna

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Carl Dreyer’s silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) combined with Richard Einhorn’s cantata Voices of Light (1994) was a quite memorable and moving experience in which to sing. I think it could also have been called Carmina Jehanna – Songs for Joan – with (as in Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana) often-fortississimo choral Latin, olde-tyme versions of one or more modern languages, and, according to the programme notes, Joan’s personal associations apparently being less “saintly” than one might have expected. I also think the cantata (or at least several key parts of it) would have worked just as well as a “progressive rock opera.” The performance featured not only our Grand Philharmonic Choir and the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, but also my early-2000s Elora Festival Singers’ “peeps” and others in the TACTUS Vocal Ensemble, all conducted by Mark Vuorinen.

Nerd-Sourcing

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I’m going to consolidate some of the open-source materials on http://www.openculture.com/category/music into my own site at http://OurMus.Net.  The range of music at Open Culture is narrow (a lot of punk and blues, for example), but at least this way I can “nerd-source” some of the things that are already out there on YouTube and elsewhere.  I’m going to do the same thing with music-related blogs.

This kind of collaborative and open-source work is at the heart of Web 2.0, as explained by Tapscott and Williams in their 2006 book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. They point out that: “If a small, underperforming company in one of the world’s oldest industries [mining] can achieve greatness by opening its doors to external input and innovation, what would happen if more organizations followed the same strategy?  Couldn’t just about any social or economic challenge be solved with a critical mass of self-organized contributors seeking an answer to the problem?” (2008 edition, pp. 268-69).  They could easily be talking about the pseudo-scientific peer reviews, closed loops, sub-disciplinary silos, and hidden-away trailer groves of academia, and music academia is easily one of its worst culprits.

As the authors of Wikinomics also suggest, new, upstart, start-up, “non-legacy” organizations “can experiment for very little cost and at very little risk on the Web, and in ways that incumbents can’t.” (p. 301).  However, they are point out that: “Self-organized projects … marshal the efforts of thousands of dispersed individuals, sometimes in miraculous ways.  Loose, voluntary communities of producers can self-organize to do just about anything: design goods or services, create knowledge, assemble physical things, or simply produce dynamic, shared experiences.  But don’t overlook the fact that these communities operate according to well-defined norms and have internal structures and processes to guide the group’s activities” (pp. 295-96). 

In their followup book, Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World (2010), Tapscott and Williams indicate that: “Collaborative communities not only transcend the boundaries of time and space, they can reach across the usual disciplinary and organizational silos that inhibit cooperation, learning, and progress” (p. 19). Also, in their chapter on “Rethinking the University,” they paraphrase Brown and Adler’s 2008 EDUCAUSE Review article by saying that: “[O]ur understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions” (p. 142).

In Music History & Culture, it’s time to move on to something that should actually prove to be of great benefit to millions of people:  a free, online, open, shared, and collaborative community that generates “public musicology” simply by being all of those things.

Classic Rock (A)Live and Well in Waterloo

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Well, that was fun. Classic rock cover bands in Kitchener-Waterloo seem to have continued after my old band, Bil Weber and the Glum Bunch (ca 1988-92), in which I played keyboards and sang about half of the lead vocals. The Waterloo Open Streets Festival just featured Neil and Friends (OK, they definitely need a better name!) playing very similar stuff to what we did, and with similar attention to how things were performed on the original recordings.

Both groups played Santana’s “Black Magic Woman” and Dire Straits’ “Sultans of Swing.” We, however (because we had keyboards, instead of a second guitarist), played the Doobie Brothers “China Grove” instead of Neil etc.’s version of “Listen to the Music” and (at least at one gig, combined with another band) Derek and the Dominos’ “Layla” instead of Neil etc.’s version of Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love” (both originally involving Eric Clapton).

I introduced myself to Neil and Friends, but they were a bit freaked out that I was talking about my band from 20+ years ago. (They are probably all IN their twenties, though perhaps in their early thirties.) However, they did seem impressed that I had done my dissertation on Rush. They didn’t play any Rush songs, and the Bils were from so long ago that what we played also predated my academic work on that band (so we didn’t, either). However, they did play some CanCon via April Wine’s “Say Hello” and (sort of, via) Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth.” Our late-60s pseudo-CanCon (and more keyboard-oriented) equivalents were Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride” and “Born to be Wild.”

Maybe I should get in touch with them and offer to play keyboards and contribute some vocals! I’ve moved so often over the past 25 years that it’s been very difficult to get around to that sort of thing again. These guys all have jobs in the area and just play for the enjoyment of it, so there wouldn’t really be any pressure, presumably.

“Come on, Children” (teen documentary, 1973)

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I just watched Allan King’s sublimely weird documentary Come on, Children (1973), which includes young Alex Zivojinovich (i.e., Alex Lifeson, Rush’s guitarist) living in a rural Ontario farm house with nine other teenagers for ten weeks. It’s the winter of 1971, and Alex turned 17 the previous summer and became father to the first of his two sons, Justin, in October of 1970. He did not go back to finish high school (grade 12) during the 1970-71 school year and also seemed to be split up temporarily from his girlfriend Charlene: Justin’s mother, then apparently living on welfare. (Alex and Charlene did end up together, though, getting married in 1975.)

The movie is like “reality TV” (but 35 years ahead of time), because there are actually almost no interview elements in it at all! The part of it I had seen before (excerpted in the 2010 documentary, Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage) features a family-visit day, during which Alex argues with his parents, etc. about his decision not to go back to finish high school the following year, as he doesn’t plan on going to university. He mentions that the band (never named, I think) will be able to make $240 ($80 each) per gig starting that fall.  Dissertation aside: By the fall of 1971, the band members (which didn’t include Neil Peart until the summer of 1974) would all be 18 and thus able to play in bars, because the drinking age in Ontario was set to be lowered to 18 in the summer of 1971 (it would later be raised to 19).

The parts of the movie involving Alex that I hadn’t seen before have him being relatively “grown up” compared to some of the others (cooking, making the others clean up, not really being into drugs that much anymore, I think, and so on) and having a bit of a fling with one of the girls in the group. Musically, he plays bluesy acoustic guitar (sometimes along with one or more of the other three musicians in the group, such as on John Hamilton’s performance “Mr. Bojangles”), or–more to the point–doing loud and distorted Jimi Hendrix-like instrumental electric guitar solos (including a BAD attempt at “The Star-Spangled Banner”) or blues-rock Clapton/Cream-like improvisations, etc.

The movie’s worth a look, too, for the relative freedom re teenage drinking (sometimes to excess), smoking (Alex included), drugs (pot, hash, LSD, speed, and even heroin), etc. in that period. Alex is very tame in those regards (only one of the ten abstains completely), although it could have just been edited to look that way.

Digital Humanities and/or Music

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The 2012 Canadian Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences took place at Waterloo, Ontario’s Wilfrid Laurier University and University of Waterloo from May 26 to June 3.  In the past, I would have exclusively attended music society sessions, but this time about two-thirds of what I attended had to do with the digital humanities.  I have very good reasons for that!

For my ongoing attempts to find the correct path forward for http://music-discussion.net (free/open/public vs. partially monetized vs. closed/publisher-based, etc.), the Society for Digital Humanities (SDH) does quite useful work.  So, from May 28-29 I attended various SDH papers and events (including a paper on MOOCs: massive open online courses; and several papers on copyright issues), and on June 1 I mostly attended inter-society, panel-like symposiums about public knowledge and open-access.  The June 1 meetings largely involved new methodologies and infrastructure concepts being explored for research projects, scholarly societies and journals, academic publishing, and (to a lesser extent) teaching.

On June 1 and 3, I attended some sessions of the Canadian University Music Society (CUMS), especially ones involving film music, Canadian music, and jazz (and even papers involving Canadian jazz film music), plus a symposium on the future of music in the academy.  Music is still trying to break down traditional music-department silos, such as achieving a balance among such things as performance, theory, and history; classical, popular, jazz, and world music; majors and minors; and core requirements, electives, and general education courses.  However, it is my impression that it would be at least as useful to break down the silos separating music itself from the wider humanities, such as history, art history, and English.

Although the theme of the Congress was “Crossroads: Scholarship for an Uncertain World,” it is rather telling that I (developing an independent project and currently without an institutional home) was the only person in evidence both at SDH and CUMS.  So, for 2013’s Congress at the University of Victoria, I will propose a music-related joint session between SDH and CUMS, and I may also participate in UVic’s annual summer digital humanities workshop.  A leader in the field is Ray Siemens, who is a professor at UVic and also an old undergrad friend of mine.  He and his wife Lynne (also an old friend) introduced me to a lot of people, and I look forward to building a greater level of understanding and collaboration between the digital humanities and music–especially music history and culture involving a wide spectrum of 20th-century music.

So-Called “Non-Academic” Work, Public Musicology, Ph.D.s, Jobs, etc.

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Why should earning a Ph.D. have to mean that one is qualified only for conventional, university-based “academic work” consisting of advanced research plus teaching? There are lots of Ph.D.s in other fields—such as elsewhere in the humanities—who do interesting, so-called “non-academic work” outside of such contexts, but sometimes still within universities.

George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (1994-, http://chnm.gmu.edu) added a Ph.D. program in 2001 that includes not only a typical combination of academic faculty and graduate students, but also a staff of dozens of information technology specialists who develop and support software tools for history/humanities teaching, learning, and research (used by over a million people) and over one hundred project websites (with over 20 million visitors each year).  Meanwhile, according to a recent newsletter of the American Musicological Society (AMS), it seems that musicologists are supposed to be satisfied that they are doing “public musicology” on the basis of the occasional newspaper critic taking note of one of their conferences.
In 2010, I developed the AMS’s new, modernized, web version of Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology (DDM, http://ams-net.org/ddm).  However, despite the many improvements (and the fact that it is the AMS website’s most popular page), it still relies almost entirely on self-reporting.  I’ve crunched the numbers and done people-tracking research for Ph.D. graduates in musicology from one selected year (2006) and for their subsequent employment situations.  The number of Ph.D.s in DDM suggests an eventual tenure-track result of 54%.  However, cross-referencing with the much larger music literature resource RILM, though, shows that DDM is missing hundreds of Ph.D. musicology dissertations just from that one year.  So, 54% is much too high, and other evidence suggests a tenure-track outcome in musicology of not more 20%.  For example, information on the musicology job wiki corroborates that much lower number.  In any case, DDM needs to become much more widely used.
 
Musicology needs to enable new ways for Ph.D.s to find work that does not throw people either out of the loop entirely or else into terminal adjunctivitis.  Public initiatives that can also support academic teaching, learning, and research (perhaps to include partially-monetized, premium web content) could be one way to go.  The success of “digital history” suggests that a “digital musicology” would be advised to include such things.

The Music Discussion Network (paper summary)

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On March 31, 2012 at Rider University in New Jersey, I presented a paper about the Music Discussion Network (and related issues) at the American Musicological Society’s annual Teaching Music History Day.  On April 21 at Hamilton College in upstate New York, I also presented an updated version of the paper at an AMS chapter meeting.

In the first part of the paper, I discuss the idea of public musicology (open, shared, etc.), my recent return to school to study software development, and my subsequent plan to combine public musicology with web software and web content development.  I include an overview of how the Music Discussion Network is structured to include a wide variety of music, instructional videos, piece recordings, lyrics, reviews, information fields, and areas for members to contribute to discussions of specific topics.  Then, I explain how I go about making the instructional videos (which are on MDN’s YouTube channel) and how things are organized as individual topics pages on MDN itself.  I play excerpts from the instructional videos about Bob Dylan and Chopin and a clip from the music video for Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.”  In addition, I demonstrate how the dynamic, data-driven nature of MDN makes it easy to find related materials by clicking on links, searching, and browsing.

The second part of the paper covers several, non-music-related inspirations for MDN.  These include the Khan Academy, which provides over 3000 free instructional videos (mainly for high school students) on science, math, history, etc., but now also includes an art-history project (mainly for non-major undergraduates) called Smarthistory.  The Khan Academy’s videos have been viewed more than 130 million times (often as a part of “classroom flipping,” where students study such materials on their own), the system has significant financial support from the Gates Foundation and Google, it has grown to include a series of practice exercises, and it is used by a number of school boards.  Similarly, Stage 2 of MDN will include premium/paid content for university/college contexts, such as example test questions, automated online tests, ideas for essay subjects, and course-specific blogs.  Another inspiration for MDN is George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media, which includes a digital history Ph.D. program, dozens of IT professionals, software tools, and involvement in more than 100 public digital history web projects, with over 13 million users per year.

Then, in the paper’s third and final part, I get into some broader issues and contexts.  For example, in his writings about digital history, CHNM’s director Dan Cohen has broached the issue of the “tribe” (validation, etc.), and I pose some related questions regarding MDN, such as whether I should concern myself with such things as conventional peer review and academic publishing.  I also address musicology’s little-discussed tenure-track (or similar) hiring rate of less than one-third and how the American Musicology Society’s new career-development guide is of almost no use in preparing for a “non-academic” career.  Cohen also discusses the importance of curation and methodology, and I argue that musicology, too, needs to start thinking about those things (for example, to develop a “digital musicology”) and about becoming more public.