Category Archives: Music and Musicians

The Music Discussion Network (MDN)

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The YouTube Channel for the Instructional Videos of the Music Discussion Network (MDN) is http://youtube.com/MusicDiscussionNet. MDN’s website is http://Music-Discussion.Net/, which includes the same videos, but also Additional Information and Links, as well as Discussion Areas. So far, I have completed instructional videos on Bob Dylan, Josquin, Laurie Anderson, Handel, Rush, Chopin, and Music in The Simpsons.

Music Discussion Network – ROI (Return On Investment)

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You know you’re in the bottom of the 99%, when you have to look up the acronym “ROI,” because you truly and honestly have no idea what it means in the thing to which you’ve just been invited: a debate called “Be it resolved: That social media initiatives must pass an ROI test to be worthwhile.”
I would agree that a return on investment is necessary once one gets past the development stage of a website and its related content. However, if you’re doing something comparatively specific (http://youtube.com/durbow, http://music-discussion.net) and you haven’t invested anything other than your time and expertise (because that’s what you have), the “return” would presumably involve other people participating in the website with their own time and interest, such as in discussions.

Tori Amos – Midwinter Graces (2009)

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I just listened to Tori Amos’s 2009 “seasonal” album Midwinter Graces for the first time. Not surprisingly, it’s not overly “church-y,” which is consistent with the “reacting against her religious background” aesthetic of some of her earlier songs. What she mainly does is take segments of existing, “traditional” Christmas carols (various combinations of words, tunes, rhythms, chords, etc.) and folds them into “arty” songs that are thus perhaps each around 60% original and reflective of her view of the season as being most usefully seen as not being particularly “Christian” OR “secular.” It reminds me a little of Jane Siberry’s live, 1997 album Child: Music for the Christmas Season.

Amos often somewhat modifies a carol’s familiar words to de-emphasize its religious tone (although she also retains certain Latin words), and in some cases she combines aspects of two carols with her own ideas. Flowers, stars, candles, harps, and angels thus become relatively “generic” (both in her adaptations and in her original “Snow Angel”), and she transforms the idea of a “silent night” into an original love song: “A Silent Night with You.” I found her combination of “Lo, How a Rose” and “The Holly and the Ivy” (“Holly, Ivy and Rose”) to be the most effective.

Almost all of the instrumentation is for orchestra and/or piano (or the occasional synthesizer or harpsichord), sometimes with a modest amount of percussion. Thus, the ninth track (the original “Pink and Glitter”) is fairly jarring when it suddenly introduces a kind of Sarah Vaughan, big-band jazz sound, which then abates for the following adaptation of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and the two, concluding, original Tori Amos songs: “Winter’s Carol” (very Kate Bush-like, and with its words from the 1864 fairy tale “The Light Princess”) and “Our New Year.”

Metal Evolution (TV series)

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The TV series Metal Evolution is 6 episodes too long (11) & spends as much time on glam & grunge as thrash & on Poison & Nickelback as Metallica, etc. Anyone who doesn’t care about heavy metal is going to find more than two episodes quite enough, and anyone who does is probably going to know way more than anything provided in the series. (The questions asked are just not good enough, the biggest problem being that actual pieces of music are almost never discussed.) I don’t CARE if Nickelback plays more interesting stuff live than evidenced in its radio hits: its radio hits are terrible (although I do find “Bottoms Up” a half-decent example of an irresponsible, excessive-drinking song), and Creed was mostly just warmed-over (and thinned-out) early Pearl Jam.

Carlo Gesualdo

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Alex Ross (the music critic of The New Yorker) has “helpfully” suggested that Schubert (d. 1828) and Wagner (d. 1883) trace an “eerie harmony” continuity from Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo (the Prince of Venosa, ca 1566-1613) to the “present day” (i.e., Italian nobleman and composer Francesco d’Avalos, a descendant of the family of the unfaithful wife Gesualdo famously murdered). Vaguely suggesting that d’Avalos’s son Andrea may have been the one listening to some unspecified hip-hop as you left the ancient building in Naples is seriously NOT GOOD ENOUGH. I could find only one photo of “Prince Andrea d’Avalos” – with dark, short hair and glasses, wearing a tux at some kind of international fundraising event in 2003, probably around 25 then. No signs of hip-hop! There are too many other people with the non-Prince name, though, to figure out much more.

Was Gesualdo (1) a tortured genius who blasted through the boundaries of harmony two or three hundred years before anyone else did, or (2) a person of considerable means who didn’t have to follow any rules (in his personal life, such as killing his unfaithful wife and her lover, OR in his music) and thus also didn’t really have to know what he was doing? Either way, the correct parallel is probably not so much Wagner or the Second Viennese School, as Ives! If you’re interested in this, you might also like Werner Herzog’s 1995 biography on him (Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices). It definitely has some strong-minded Option 1 types, but I think I’m still going to go with Option 2!

Peter Gabriel, Tori Amos, Kate Bush

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The last nine albums I added to my iTunes library are: Peter Gabriel’s OVO (Millennium Show), Long Walk Home (the soundtrack from Rabbit-Proof Fence), Scratch My Back, and New Blood; Tori Amos’s Abnormally Attracted to Sin, Midwinter Graces, and Night of Hunters; and Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut and 50 Words for Snow. Number of songs: 127, range of duration: 0:59-13:32, average duration: 5:00, number of songs without guitars, drums, or synthesizers (i.e., with orchestra, piano, and/or choir): 61 (48%). Three minutes, three chords, three verses, three choruses …… not so much. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!)

Peter Gabriel – New Blood (2011)

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Peter Gabriel’s New Blood (2011) is a fascinating album, comprising orchestral arrangements (by John Metcalfe) of some of Gabriel’s best album tracks from 1977 to 2002: such as, “The Rhythm of the Heat,” “San Jacinto,” “The Intruder,” “Wallflower,” “Digging in the Dirt,” and “Darkness.” Disc 1 has vocal versions, and the Special Edition’s Disc 2 mostly has instrumental versions that don’t include approximations of the vocals. Those renditions are thus “karaoke” songs (the “empty orchestra” being literally orchestra, in this case), presumably for people–like me–who know most of these songs really well.

There are NO versions of such more obvious Gabriel hits as “Games without Frontiers,” “Biko,” “Shock the Monkey,” “Sledgehammer,” “Big Time,” “Steam,” or “Come Talk to Me,” but it does include four songs from the 1986 hit album So: “Red Rain,” “In Your Eyes, “Mercy Street,” and “Don’t Give Up”–the vocal version featuring Norwegian musician Ane Brun providing a guest vocal quite unlike Kate Bush’s original. It also has two songs from the 2000 soundtrack OVO – The Millennium Show (“Downside Up,” featuring his daughter Melanie Gabriel, and “The Nest That Sailed the Sky”), plus (after a five-minute ambient noise track) a “bonus track” of “Solsbury Hill.”

The Special Edition disc also has “Blood of Eden” (in a vocal version) and there were two additional digital-download-only songs. I think “Here Comes the Flood” would also have worked pretty well, but I suppose there are already quite a few alternate versions of that song.

Musicology Needs a Reboot and a New Name

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Ever since I first entered graduate school in musicology, people have asked me: “What instrument do you play?” It is safe to say that almost no-one in the general public understands that musicology is largely about interpreting and contextualizing music—historically, culturally, and so on. The field’s closest parallels are not found in the fine and performing arts, but in the humanities, where an art history professor would never be asked: “What sort of paintbrush do you prefer?” Some musicologists also perform (or conduct, compose, etc.), but it is rarely the main thing they do. In any case, the field needs a reboot and a new name.
Musicology established, in central European universities in the mid- to late-19th century, the academic study of music. In the 20th century, university and college music departments (including schools, faculties, conservatories, etc.) then began to house all music sub-disciplines, with performance majors eventually comprising about 80% of music students. In nearly all music departments, musicology became triply-ghettoized as: (1) the provider of music history courses in a “service industry” to other types of students, (2) the purveyor of relatively obscure research in dissertations, books, conferences, and journals (such as journal reviews of books that have already been through peer review), and (3) a field giving ideological precedence almost exclusively to European classical music. Thus, it is hardly surprising that musicology has remained, with very few exceptions, a “faceless” discipline.
Musicologists still mainly teach music history “core” courses, covering various developments within the eras of European classical music: Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and 20th Century. Their students are mostly music performance majors, many of whom resent having to take any music history courses at all. Musicologists also usually teach a one-semester “music appreciation” course (i.e., mainly classical music, “once over lightly” and less technically) for non-music majors. A few teach courses on the history of popular music, the history of jazz, and/or other “outliers,” but such courses are usually also for non-major music appreciation. Music departments frequently expect their music history core and appreciation courses to be based around textbooks. Thus, it is only occasionally possible for a musicologist to give students much of a sense of his or her intensive, original research.
Sometimes, musicologists teach upper- or graduate-level seminars within subject areas more specifically related to their research specializations. However, nearly all music departments continue to expect such seminars to focus on detailed explorations of more specific topics found within the standard, European, classical subject areas and largely from before the 20th century. This is unfortunate, because by the first decade of the 21st century 48% of all new musicology Ph.D.s had produced dissertations on 20th-century topics (a 400% increase from the 12% of the 1950s). Such dissertations often covered a wide range of North American and other non-European topics, including not only concert music and opera, but also such non-classical forms as national/regional music from around the world, various types of popular music, jazz, and film/TV/radio music. Scholars working on such “new” topics are often highly innovative, using methodologies from cultural studies (e.g., issues of ideology and cultural hierarchy), critical theory (e.g., post-modernism and parody/appropriation), gender studies, and so on. Unfortunately, though, non-music departments and non-music scholars remain largely unaware of this excellent work.
In the late-20th and early-21st centuries, musicology encouraged (or at least allowed) dissertations on hundreds of topics that only a few music departments ended up tolerating in their courses. Those who argue that the best people always rise to the top of their profession are not in touch with the realities of subject-matter-bias found within music departments. Although some people would argue for the benefits of proprietary courses with specifically-assembled materials (as I would), almost any musicologist is capable of teaching standard, classical music history based around a textbook, its provided listening materials, and its provided lecture slides. By comparison, almost any musicologist who has never studied or performed popular music (or even listened to much of it) is going to look very silly teaching “The History of Rock” or running a seminar on “Interpretation vs. Analysis in the Study of Popular Music.” Tellingly, music departments routinely consider popular music to be “non-Western” (i.e., non-classical “world music,” and thus to be taught by ethnomusicologists), even though it is extremely diverse and makes up the vast majority of Western music.
Ph.D.s in musicology end up in tenure-track (or similar) academic jobs only somewhat less than one-third of the time, but what the rest are supposed to do remains a considerable mystery. Academic music research changed significantly in the 1990s and 2000s, but the requirements of music departments largely did not. Doing what you believe in doesn’t necessarily mean that search committees and potential future colleagues will also believe in it, even if your work is ground-breaking. So, musicology should aspire to become much more widely: (1) respected (e.g., by a much broader range of students and colleagues than has so far been the case), (2) consulted (such as for media interviews, public-interest debates, magazine articles, and so on), and (3) disseminated (e.g., outside of music departments, at non-music conferences, and including “public intellectuals”). Suitable contexts include cultural studies, “general” humanities, American studies, philosophy, media studies, history, gender studies, sociology, broadcasting, journalism, and the development of web-based content.
Above all, we need to establish a new and better name for our field, one that actually lets people know what we do. “Musicology” is: (1) much too pseudo-scientific-sounding, (2) widely derided by music students (and even by many of their instructors), (3) far too tied-up in its formerly-exclusive associations with classical music, and (4) misunderstood by the general public. So, let’s start calling it what it is: “humanities music history & culture”—or, in university contexts: “humanities music” and, in public contexts: “music history & culture.” Only then will some Ph.D.s in musicology actually have a chance of getting tenure-track academic jobs in places other than music departments and/or contributing to wider, public discourses about music.

Lady Gaga

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From what I’ve seen and heard, Lady Gaga’s videos, persona, and weird fashion sense are somewhat more interesting than her actual music. In a sense, that’s rather a lot like early- to mid-1980s’ Madonna, but Madonna then gradually became a better musician and by the late 1980s was quite involved in her songwriting and, especially, the business side of her career. The main difference is that Lady Gaga is a more accomplished musician from the get-go. So, it will be interesting to see if she can make artistic changes and updates from where she is now and continue to do interesting things for a substantial fan base in five, fifteen, or twenty-five years—like Madonna did.

Lady Gaga’s androgyny and frantic, digitally-manipulated presentations also seem to me to be influenced by such late-1990s’ artists as Marilyn Manson (although she’s named after the 1984 Queen song, “Radio Ga Ga”), and Manson was, of course, one of the most intelligent interviewees in Michael Moore’s 2002 film Bowling for Columbine. All of these musicians are really quite smart (Madonna apparently has the same IQ as I do!), and if the music/academic establishment didn’t remain so biased against popular music, other smart people would realize that such artists are at least as interesting to think about (even musically) as contemporary, experimental, so-called “art” music and earlier “classical” music. However, musicology will never get to the point of considering “21st century music” to include Lady Gaga, because it still doesn’t even consider “20th century music” to have included the Beatles! (I’ve just written a blog posting about some of the problems in musicology, and this subject played right into that.)

Classicized Rock (Music and Culture – Podcast 1)

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I’ve just launched my series of Video Podcasts, called “Music and Culture.” Podcast No. 1 is entitled “Classicized Rock: Heavy Metal, Progressive Rock, and Chamber Music.” A full, podcast version (MPEG-4, for iTunes, iPhones, etc.) will be available from my website. The complete presentation is 30 minutes long. However, I’ve also posted it on YouTube in two, slightly-edited halves: Part 1, Part 2.

“Classicized Rock” is about selected heavy metal and progressive rock bands (Black Sabbath, Genesis, Rush, and Metallica) and some of their songs (“War Pigs”, “The Fountain of Salmacis”, “The Spirit of Radio”, and “Master of Puppets”) adapted into classical chamber music (involving early music, pianos, violins, and cellos) by Rondellus, Ingve Guddal and Roger T. Matte, Rachel Barton, and Apocalyptica.