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.

Public Musicology – How to Get There

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http://chronicle.com/article/Making-a-Public-PhD/130716


Highlights:
Yale University has a public humanities initiative. As one of its American Studies professors puts it: “Students have to invent their own jobs.” Similarly, a Yale historian says: “Historians have to get out and reach the broader public…the ultimate audience. … If academic historians don’t get involved, we have no right to complain about what we see at public historical sites.” A professor at another institution says: “I’m alarmed that there aren’t more people with strong history backgrounds actually doing public history.”


Followup: 
In a related vein, George Mason University has the Center for History and New Media, which has a Ph.D. program in digital history, dozens of IT professionals and developers, a number of original software tools, and over one hundred web-based projects with more than 16 million users annually.


“Public history” should certainly be expanded to include “public musicology” (public music history & culture, etc.). However, musicology presently exists almost exclusively within music departments, as one of a number of music sub-disciplines that focus mainly on “specialized knowledge” about classical music performance, music theory, and so on. Musicology thus almost never participates in such humanities’ contexts as Yale’s or even in what is arguably the ultimate public forum: the internet. However, it absolutely can and should!


The American Musicological Society’s brand-new professional development guide (188 pages) spends only two pages (i.e., that aren’t document samples) on the non-academic world, yet it exclusively seems to mean by that such contexts as museums. In addition, the document does not update the sample documents from the Harvard Arts & Sciences publication that it borrowed for this purpose. Those resumes and cover letter do not have anything to do with music or music graduate degrees, and they are also all nearly twenty years old.

The Grammy Awards

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I really want to like what Dave Grohl said last night at the 2012 Grammy Awards. However, I have to say that just because some people use Auto-Tune, etc. fairly cheesily doesn’t mean that other people don’t use technology in MUCH more interesting ways than what white, male rock bands (even Grammy-winning ones) supposedly do with their hearts and heads.

Anything I’ve heard by Foo Fighters is frankly not any better or worse than other mainstream, post-grunge hard rock music–such as by Nickelback (who, at least, weren’t once the drummer of Nirvana). I’m sure that this sentiment is going to surprise people who think I sit around all day listening to Rush, but I’d much rather listen to almost anything by Laurie Anderson than almost anything by Foo Fighters. The Grammys are meaningless.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNfTXQ5BzI4

P.S. As for Adele (what I’ve heard anyhow, especially her distinctive voice), I actually like her. Apparently, so does Dave Grohl, although I suspect he may have just been sucking up in order to “play nice” among his likely, fellow award-winners.

“The Last Waltz” (the Band, etc.) – Classic Albums Live

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I’m looking forward to the Classic Albums Live performance of the Band’s 1976 farewell concert “The Last Waltz” at Kitchener, ON’s Centre in the Square this evening. I wonder how authentic it will be, though: copious amounts of cocaine, “Joni Mitchell” not quite knowing what to sing in the verses of “Helpless” by “Neil Young” (himself at first unable to remember how the song goes), “Eric Clapton’s” guitar strap breaking, “Robbie Robertson” pretending to contribute to the backing vocals (while otherwise MC’ing as though it was “his” band), whether “Garth Hudson” uses a Lowrey organ instead of a Hammond, not being able to see Stratford, ON native “Richard Manuel” (d. 1986) singing lead vocals behind all of the guest artists onstage, “Levon Helm” being relatively pissed off about the whole ordeal, and so on. I can see faking Ronnie Hawkins, Neil Diamond, and Van Morrison (hell, I can fake them!), but who on Earth will be able to fake Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Eric Clapton, and Bob Dylan? The Classic Albums Live folks are out of Toronto, though, so the percentage of Canadians could actually be even higher than in the original!

Canadian Chamber Choir and DaCapo Chamber Choir (concert)

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There was a good concert on Friday, January 20, 2012 at Kitchener’s St. John’s Anglican Church, by the visiting Canadian Chamber Choir and the Waterloo area’s DaCapo Chamber Choir. Many recent Canadian pieces were performed, including several competition winners. Featured were Erik Ross’s “Icarus in the Sea,” “Patrick Murray’s “The Echo,” Leonard Enns’ “This Amazing Day,” two pieces by Jeff Enns (no relation to Len), Imant Raminsh’s exquisite “Ave Verum,” and a piece I’ve heard DaCapo sing before and which I think is very good: Don Macdonald’s “Tabula Rasa.”

I’ve sung in similarly excellent chamber choirs, including Toronto’s Exultate Chamber Singers and the Elora Festival Singers. At one point, I sang professionally in as many as six or seven choirs in a given week, including section-lead or core positions in church and community choirs. However, without also doing a lot of solo-work and voice-lesson teaching, professional choral singing caps out at only about a quarter of a proper salary. That’s why I’m bemused by the idea of such “professional level” (i.e., unpaid) choirs. The CCC somehow manages (in our present age of collapsing arts organizations) to find enough money to fly its singers all over the country. However, can that sort of thing possibly continue indefinitely?!

Laurie Anderson – “Another Day in America” (live performance, 2012)

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Laurie Anderson’s “Another Day in America: A New Solo Work in Progress” arrived as a 90-minute show in the atrium of Waterloo, Ontario’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics on Thursday January 19, 2012. Anderson’s most recent album, Homeland (2010), features quite a lot of music:  singing, synthesizers, samplers, Vocoder, strings, world music voices and instruments, and even (in one song) rock guitars and electronic dance music. She developed Homeland over several years’ worth of live shows, and I suspect she’s doing the same thing now, but for a spoken-word-with-accompaniment album. She did a similar transition from her 1994 pop-rock album Bright Red (produced by rock producer Brian Eno) to her 1995 performance-art-based The Ugly One with the Jewels (based on her stage show, Stories from the Nerve Bible).

As far as I know, in the new performance, Anderson didn’t really include anything from her previous work, although a pair of songs alluded to Homeland‘s “Another Day in America” (which she had spoken in “voice drag” to lower her voice electronically, although the new piece did not) and 1983-84’s Garden-of-Eden/snake-related “Langue d’Amour.” Musically, she mostly played samples and loops from two small keyboards and/or a notebook computer, speaking over them her often witty, philosophical, and/or political ideas about people, places, dreams, politics, and even her pet dog Lolabelle, who was shown playing a keyboard in some YouTube-like video clips (for a similar “performance,” from just before Christmas 2010, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YVnm2ZYD0s). Anderson also used several electronic effects devices and such things as pedals, triggers, and switches. On several occasions, she was much more overtly “musical,” playing her “electric violin,” which can electronically provide incredibly-dense textures and complex chord variations from only a few strings and/or pitches. Once or twice, she also played the instrument in the context of “live looping.” However, this particular Anderson work is not really concerned with the “singing” side of music at all, even though she does otherwise sometimes engage with that.

Anderson’s album Homeland includes quite a lot of Vocoder use (electronically making spoken or sung words seem like they are also being sung by an instrument), but she avoided that in this performance, possibly because she instead wanted to explore some different things. For example, she used a small pillow-speaker inside her mouth to “play” (“voice?”) a weird approximation of a violin solo. In one case, she also combined her spoken voice with a “voice drag” lowered version of it, instead of her more usual approach of keeping the two things separate (usually in different songs) or combining her spoken or sung voice with a simultaneous, electronic Vocoder part.

The audience of perhaps two hundred attentive and enraptured people consisted of a combination of middle-aged art and culture aficionados (artists, musicians, professors, etc.), science and technology professionals (some in the audience, probably from Research In Motion and various start-ups, but also including “lurking” employees of the Perimeter Institute), and younger people who were probably university students (including graduate students). Anderson knows that the audience for her more experimental and less music-oriented work is much smaller than for her pop-rock work, so it is highly commendable that she does not even remotely rest on her laurels, even though she is about to turn 65.

See also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70eZbksZET8.

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.