Category Archives: OurMus.Net

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.

Career Archetype Test

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On the Career Archetype Test, my top categories were Sage (81%) and Revolutionary (75%).

Apparently,

The Sage never stops learning and has a desire to understand everything.  This understanding doesn’t necessarily mean a desire to act on that truth, which can sometimes keep the Sage a dispassionate observer in his or her own life.  If Sage is dominant, you will feel most comfortable in a learning culture where people are valued as much for their knowledge and expertise as for the amount of work they generate.  Strengths: Discovering the deeper truths in situations means that the Sage is less likely to get caught up in an emotional reaction to short term problems.  You may have a capacity for critical analysis and tend to be a good strategic thinker.  Traps to avoid: The Sage can study issues forever and never act.  There is also a danger of getting caught up in a particular way of studying an issue, shutting out new or revolutionary ways of doing things. (from Sage)

By comparison, and in contradistinction to the end of the previous section,

Revolutionaries are unconventional risk takers with a tendency to do things differently just to be different.  Revolutionaries are rarely content with the status quo and will create new ways of doing things, even when the old ways are working just fine.  If you have a strong presence of the Revolutionary archetype you will feel comfortable in a work environment that encourages innovation and gives people the freedom to be themselves.  Strengths: Revolutionaries are innovators.  The innovation applies not just to products and process, but also culture and thought.  If you are a Revolutionary you are comfortable taking risks and usually don’t care what other people think about you.  Traps to avoid: The Revolutionary needs to avoid change for change’s sake.  Anarchy and chaos can overtake the reasonable order and discipline it takes to get everyday tasks accomplished. (from Revolutionary)

Those sound about right, but the only job types both in Sage and Revolutionary are Education and Science and Research, with IT-type things (computer software, hardware, and executive/consulting) also under the former category and Arts and Entertainment also under the latter.  My next three categories were Explorer (68%), Creator (68%), and Magician (62%), which certainly also explain my: (1) adventurous, but chaotic and unfocused, self-reliance, (2) inspiration, vision, and single-mindedness, and (3) over-complicating desire to redefine the issues in order to meet a new situation.

None of that is much help in my job search, though, I have to say!  Indeed, the fact that my highest “grades” on these scales are not actually very high underscores the issue that my diverse background (Ph.D. in musicology, academic research, university course instruction, professional choral singing, arts admin, IT studies and work, website and web content development, small business programs, etc.) has not actually coalesced into an employee profile that makes much sense in the “real world.”  I guess the results do motivate me, however, to think more about the idea of writing digital-only e-books on music-related subjects (for students and lifelong learners) and maintaining a related purchase, media-clip, and discussion-hub website.

Music and Labour – conference

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Friday May 24th’s “Working Situations II” is going to be a weird session, with a pair of papers about improvisational live electronic music and remix aspects of electronic dance music and my completely unrelated and semi-autobiographical one about the academic, alternative-academic, and non-academic labour situations for Ph.D.s who specialize in popular music.

I find it interesting that the conference is, on balance, largely about economic uncertainty impacting the music industry.  So, I guess my paper on economic uncertainty also impacting music academia is at least semi-related to that.

Employment Counselling and Jobs vs. Career

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My self-employment business advisor is still optimistic that http://ourmus.net (a collaborative community for music history & culture) can move forward and be successful in making me some income.  However, music scholars probably think that the way they do things (peer review, committees, etc.) actually works properly and that something also directed towards the public would not be sufficiently academic.  Meanwhile, the music-interested public would probably find the site too academic.  A “happy medium” may not be possible.  My self-employment coordinator (different from my advisor) got me an unrelated appointment with an Employment Ontario job developer.  However, that person has not really been of any use to me, probably because my background (in academia, music, and IT) doesn’t fit the types of jobs and employers she encounters.

I’m also now enrolled in an individualized job-search program.  The employment counsellor for that (actually a friend from my past!) and I concluded that I should do my academic work, music-making, and IT/website activities on the side (“evenings and weekends”).  For employment, I should use my local network outside of those areas to find some other type of work.  The areas of work I have in mind could be in administrative assistance (at a business, social service agency, church, or school), arts admin (at a museum, library, or performance organization), retail (such as technology, musical instrument, and/or other music-related sales), or publishing (editing, web content, etc.).  I have some people advising me in those employment directions, as well.

Meanwhile, I’m now lined up to do a book proposal for a “listener guide” about Rush’s music.  So, hopefully that project will move ahead.  The editors involved are both fans of Rush’s music, so that helps!  In addition, four out of six of my conference paper proposals have been accepted this spring, although I’ve had to bail from two of the four for lack of money.  The two I’m doing are about songs and mini-musicals in The Simpsons (in less than two weeks) and on the employment situation for popular music university courses (six weeks later).  I also still have possible conference papers coming up in July and October.

Khan Academy vs. OurMus.Net growth timelines

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For Salman Khan (of Khan Academy) to expand his project from his cousin Nadia (2004) to:

  1. dozens of users (2005)
  2. hundreds of users (2006)
  3. thousands of users (2007)
  4. tens of thousands of users (2008)
  5. hundreds of thousands of users, quitting his job as a hedge-fund manager, getting $110,000 (from the interested spouse of a venture capitalist), an actual office, and a handful of employees (i.e., other than himself) (2009)
  6. millions of users and getting multiple millions of dollars (from the Gates Foundation, Google, etc.) (2010)

took:  1. one, 2. two, 3. three, 4. four, 5. five, 6. six years.

By comparison, from my initial handful of business training sessions in September 2012 to the point of making my vaguely similar OurMus.Net a reasonable success (i.e., also on my own), I have:  six MONTHS!

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.

MuSNet, mark II

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If the profession in which you spent the past dozen years or so never resulted in you getting a continuing full-time job (or any job at present), would you try to develop something that would almost certainly end up useful to only a few hundred others in that field? Of course, you wouldn’t! So, I’m going to stop trying to do that right now, in favour of developing a music history & culture educational website that will potentially become part of an existing, large-scale, foundation-supported initiative and thus matter to a vastly larger number (millions) of people. My small business advisor and self employment coordinator are probably not going to like my change in focus, but this renewed approach is seriously the only way I will be able to move forward.

A Digital End-Run around Musicology

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I’ve been struggling for quite some time as to how to proceed with a combination of music scholarship and information technology. I have a Ph.D. and work experience in musicology (including research and courses taught on popular music and film & TV music), but I also have a Certificate and work experience in software development (including a web database project for the American Musicological Society).

My first attempt at a Digital Public Music History & Culture, the Music Discussion Network (MDN), would have resulted in a member-based community open to the public to post links to pieces of music, fill in relevant information fields, and participate in discussions about that music. It would have been paid for through annual fees of $40 per member (a cart mechanism was incorporated into the site), and I also experimented with on-site ad placements (i.e., about music, but it never worked very well). The first incarnation of MDN, however, never made it past its beta-testing stage in the summer of 2011.

My second attempt, the Music Discussion Network mark II (MDN2, now at http://music-scholars.net/mdn), was inspired by the Khan Academy (instructional materials for high-school students in math, science, etc., at http://khanacademy.org) and its humanities sub-site Smarthistory (an art history web-book mostly used by university students, at http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org). The Khan Academy is free, public, and funded by multi-million-dollar educational-foundation support from the Gates Foundation, Google, and so on. It has delivered 225 million lessons to people all over the world (including discussions, etc.), and even Smarthistory (which was originally developed at other institutions) has had 5 million visits. For MDN2, in late 2011 and early 2012 I made eleven music instructional videos of about 10-15 minutes, but each of those took about 20-25 hours create. Without institutional affiliation (i.e., unemployed), it seemed extremely unlikely that I would be able to (1) build a full system without getting other scholars to collaborate on it with me or (2) monetize my efforts, such as by making its materials available for purchase by students enrolled in specific courses at colleges and universities.

My third attempt, the Music Scholars Network (MuSNet, http://music-scholars.net), tried to combine MDN and MDN2, but according to a member-contributed subscription model geared specifically towards music academics, including adjunct instructors and graduate students. The site thus included job postings, calls for papers, teaching materials (such as my instructional videos from MDN2), conference information, research activities, and so on, and discussions possible for all posted items. MuSNet had a substantial portion of its materials available to the public, but only its members would be allowed to add or discuss things. It offered a 1-2 month free trial, then a modest membership fee of $30 per year (incorporated via PayPal). A web survey suggested that some music scholars would be willing to pay a small amount for such a thing, but it was never clear that this could become a viable business that would grow beyond more than a few hundred members. Very few music scholars have the time or energy to participate in such a thing and it is also not how they expect to do things, so it actually makes much more sense to focus instead on building something useful for interested members from within the vastly larger public of music aficionados.

MuSNet2 will focus once again on instructional materials, but it will be free, public, and with discussion capabilities available to any registered member. It will retain the name “Music Scholars Network,” but with the significant change in emphasis that anyone who studies music is a “music scholar.” The site will initially be built by me, including at least a few new instructional videos each month, but it will also be “collaborative” in the sense of including links to many existing music instructional videos already made publicly available by others but also fully researched and tested by me. I will thus endeavour to have the site become similar in scope to the Khan Academy’s Smarthistory web-book within about six months and with a large-scale, public, promotional undertaking through YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. This renewed focus would potentially reach hundred of thousands (or even millions) of people, as opposed to a few hundred music academics. The site would then become part of—and paid for through—an existing system of educational materials, such as the Khan Academy (free and public) or a college or university that offers online arts and humanities courses for money (increasingly the case in the UK) or Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs, which are free and typically have thousands of students for each course). Once MuSNet2 is part of a larger system, it could then also begin to include contributions by specialists covering additional areas of music history & culture. That is what Smarthistory was able to do to expand its art-history offerings once it became part of the Khan Academy.

The Music Scholars Network, the Public, etc.

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I created and developed the Music Scholars Network (MuSNet) to enable a professional, interdisciplinary, member-contributed community.  Of the respondents to my October 2012 Music Scholars Web Survey, 69% felt that the conferences, journals, and websites of music academic societies are not always efficient enough.  In fact, 62% of them said they would be willing to pay between $10 and $50 per year for a membership in a network that allowed them to post, tag, find, share, and discuss such things as conference information, calls for papers, teaching materials, job postings, and research.

Most music academic societies, however, have ignored or refused my requests to distribute an email announcement inviting people to join MuSNet.  Getting the word out and encouraging people to add things to the website (even through free trial memberships) are thus turning out to be much more difficult than I had imagined.  Tenure-track academics (even people I consider to be friends and/or close colleagues) and academic societies (even ones to which I belong and/or for which I have worked) are not used to being second-guessed by so-called “independent scholars.”  I suppose it is also possible, though, that they are all just too busy.

Amazingly, members cannot directly add things to the websites of music academic societies.  Everything is channelled through executive directors, webmasters, moderators, and various sub-committees on specific topics, issues, etc.  The American Musicological Society’s (AMS’s) plan for “public musicology” (a vague and far too patronizing plan) is likely to take years to unfold, and it will undoubtedly prove to be highly unsatisfactory.  Another difficulty is that music academia is plagued by the problem of “silos” that consistently separate musicologists from ethnomusicologists and music theorists, academics from composers and performers, classical “snobs” from jazz and popular music “believers,” and so on.  It is not at all a healthy situation!

Over the next several decades, the various MBAs who now run most universities (and have been hired at a rate ten times that of tenured academics) will find ways to shut down or otherwise mess with numerous music departments.  They will reasonably ask:  Is music a part of the humanities, or is it a part of the fine and performing arts?  It will make no difference that music is obviously both of those things.  Many more music scholars than currently do so will end up having to do their work in places other than university music departments, but, in fact, a lot of us already do.

With MuSNet, I am developing an “alternative academic” venue for music scholars of various sorts to accomplish things efficiently, quickly, and affordably.  However, I am also very keen on the idea that the majority of materials posted and discussed by the site’s members should be made available to the public, used directly by students, consulted by journalists and music enthusiasts, and so on.  I hope to administer and maintain the network on a part-time basis, I’ve been enrolled in a self-employment (small business) program since September, and part of the goal of the business is to get myself off of social assistance.

The people who would probably be able to make the best use of MuSNet are current Ph.D. students and adjunct (a.k.a. sessional) instructors, including the many who work only part-time, as I often did from 2001 to 2008.  In 2012, more than 70% of US university courses are being taught by non-permanent faculty.  However, the American Musicological Society, for example, will not release the names and email addresses of its graduate student members, even to me: a long-time AMS member who worked at its office in 2010 to redevelop the successful new version of its Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology web index (which is, in fact, the AMS website’s most popular function).  Even worse, the AMS does not know how many of its members have non-permanent teaching positions.  It does not track its members’ “career stages” (as it calls such information), because it wants to believe that every Ph.D. eventually lands in a tenure-track position.  In what I take to be a related issue, there was some discussion at the AMS in 2010 about having a member-portfolio system, but the society wasn’t willing to commit to the cost of the 200 hours (e.g. $5000) I felt that it would take to develop it.

My research (more to come later) shows that two-thirds of music academic Ph.D.s since the early 1990s have NOT landed in tenure-track positions.  Even those among the fortunate one-third have referred to the past two or three decades as having produced a “lost generation,” but some of us still manage (despite being “lost” and even with the odds stacked against us) to publish books and articles, present conferences papers, teach part-time, and so on.  Music academia (unlike history, English, and other larger fields) has not prepared the majority of its members for the reality of needing to establish other types of career paths.  For example, the American Musicological Society’s official “alternative academic” career advice comprises only a few scant pages, which are lifted almost entirely from publications addressing non-music fields and are, quite frankly, almost completely useless.  MuSNet, on the other hand, provides an innovative, dynamic, networking context precisely so we can (among other things) help ourselves navigate some of these difficulties.

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.