One of the toughest hurdles we must surmount as young academics is the extended trip. Ethnomusicologists generally spend between 6 months to 2 years in some place outside of their comfort zone, ranging from foreign countries to a field site on the other end of the city. Musicologists may do this as well, or they might spend months on end in an archive. As many Americanists know, international travel grants are among the most highly prized funding sources out there for our fields of study while domestic travel grants are difficult to obtain. It looks like the Americanists now have a new advantage of not having to worry about the TSA rummaging through their research notes.
In recent years, we've been hearing an endless stream of headlines about how our endless War on Terror influences what we do: if you wish to study Arabic or Farsi, odds are there is a government grant out there for you; if you happen to be a non-resident of the U.S. employed by a U.S. institution, you will probably have new troubles with your visa (we all know of the infamous case of the musicologist denied re-entry by the Department of Homeland Security). There is now a new hurdle for young traveling scholars that I don't think anyone adequately anticipated: the search and seizure of written documents upon re-entry into the U.S. after a lengthy research trip. The AAUP reports that as of 2008, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has directed customs and border control agents to seize electronic and printed materials upon re-entry into the U.S. without individualized suspicion. The TSA has been able to search and/or confiscate computers for some time now, but it is only getting news now due to a high profile subpeana and seizure that the TSA later withdrew. The Obama administration is keeping this policy. This morning I heard that many returning Fulbright fellows have had their boxes of research materials opened and returned in disarray – sometimes with the wrong contents, sometimes missing large quantities of research materials – without warning. The message came out over SEM-L that young scholars should be careful when returning from a research trip. Needless to say the AAUP and the ACLU are fighting this.
People, this is huge and terrifying. Speaking from personal experience, we all have enough hurdles to jump through when it comes to international travel and research. Visas on their own can be tough to get. Now we have to worry that our data might be seized without individualized suspicion?! I know we have plenty to be upset about these days (budget cuts, pay cuts, ballooning class sizes), but this particular policy will have a directly negative affect on all international research.
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Escaping Disaster in Higher Ed
Musicology and ethnomusicology blogs rarely discuss money matters. However, over the last month or so, as many of my former colleagues and students have been protesting the disastrous state of affairs at the University of California system, the silence has been deafening. At a recent meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology which happened at the height of protests UC-wide, I only heard of one scholar mentioning the situation during official business. From merely a musicological and ethnomusicological perspective, the long-term effects on our fields are something that many of us cannot possibly know. The two flagship universities, Berkeley and UCLA, have some of the most celebrated scholars in their respective fields of study. Now take a broader look at the scholarly contributions of the entire UC system and the effects are exponential. Imagine, if you will, what the fields of music study would be like without the scholarly giants at the UC and their academic offspring? It would not be imaginable without the investment of California taxpayers. From a personal perspective, I always felt that I had stumbled onto something special when I learned of the academic powerhouses that resided in Schoenberg Hall (before it was renamed Schoenberg Music Building) during my undergraduate years. I am sure that many of us young and seasoned academics would not exist without the California taxpayer's investment in superior music scholarship even if we never stepped foot on a UC campus. UC faculty permeate our proseminars and undergraduate surveys. What would we be without them?
As news of fee hikes, ballooning class sizes, faculty furloughs and pay cuts, protests, and arrests (numbering over 220 as of this writing) reached me in my small town in Maine, I breathed a massive sigh of relief. I escaped institutional disaster. I attended UCLA as an undergrad when resident fees ranged between $1200 and $1700 per academic quarter and when (shocker!) summer fees were subsidized by the state to help students graduate in a timely manner. My academic loans totals are less than the price of a mid-size sedan. That figure is unimaginable now. As a graduate student, I was a teaching assistant when student tutoring was one of the most tapped resources in undergraduate education. Tutoring centers all across the UC have laid off employees to half their desirable size. Tutors, like TAs, are teaching to larger groups where a typical tutoring session can have one tutor teaching to a full classroom. How much learning do you think happens in those settings? I can't imagine grading papers without undergraduate writing support. This is not the quality of education that made California's system the envy of the world. Imagine what California would be like without broad access to quality higher education. How can UC compete for the best students? What if a diverse group of high quality students just stopped attending the UC?
Plenty has been written about UC President Mark Yudof's failed public relations and flat out dishonesty. As a former TA union activist, I have far too much experience with the UC behaving badly when it comes to its relations with the state legislature and the public. (For a recent example, news of UC's record high research income in comparison to postdoc and staff researcher wages come as no surprise. Just yesterday, there was a protest for that: Postdoctoral Researchers Union and staff researchers demonstrated over stalled contract negotiations.) What shocks me is the complete lack of public outrage over these policies. When will the California taxpayers do something? Just last year a staff researcher died over inadequate safety precautions in a lab. What would happen to the state of research if it became too detrimental to one's health and too financially unfeasible a profession to pursue? What would happen if it all just stopped?
Music scholars on the job market like to moan about our dwindling job prospects as public and private institutions alike continue painful hiring freezes (for the record: last year there were 3 tenure-track musicology / ethnomusicology positions in the UC; this year there are none). I am concerned about the other side of the problem: the students public universities are supposed to serve. This last semester, my students have been extremely smart, but they have had far from the diversity of perspectives that the students I taught during my time at UCSD and UCLA had. As educators, we learn from our students. Pricing many of these students out of higher education will have as adverse an effect on the state of our field(s) as cutting jobs or entire departments. What will we do when our students become homogenous? What kind of action will musicology and ethnomusicology take to keep this from happening?
As news of fee hikes, ballooning class sizes, faculty furloughs and pay cuts, protests, and arrests (numbering over 220 as of this writing) reached me in my small town in Maine, I breathed a massive sigh of relief. I escaped institutional disaster. I attended UCLA as an undergrad when resident fees ranged between $1200 and $1700 per academic quarter and when (shocker!) summer fees were subsidized by the state to help students graduate in a timely manner. My academic loans totals are less than the price of a mid-size sedan. That figure is unimaginable now. As a graduate student, I was a teaching assistant when student tutoring was one of the most tapped resources in undergraduate education. Tutoring centers all across the UC have laid off employees to half their desirable size. Tutors, like TAs, are teaching to larger groups where a typical tutoring session can have one tutor teaching to a full classroom. How much learning do you think happens in those settings? I can't imagine grading papers without undergraduate writing support. This is not the quality of education that made California's system the envy of the world. Imagine what California would be like without broad access to quality higher education. How can UC compete for the best students? What if a diverse group of high quality students just stopped attending the UC?
Plenty has been written about UC President Mark Yudof's failed public relations and flat out dishonesty. As a former TA union activist, I have far too much experience with the UC behaving badly when it comes to its relations with the state legislature and the public. (For a recent example, news of UC's record high research income in comparison to postdoc and staff researcher wages come as no surprise. Just yesterday, there was a protest for that: Postdoctoral Researchers Union and staff researchers demonstrated over stalled contract negotiations.) What shocks me is the complete lack of public outrage over these policies. When will the California taxpayers do something? Just last year a staff researcher died over inadequate safety precautions in a lab. What would happen to the state of research if it became too detrimental to one's health and too financially unfeasible a profession to pursue? What would happen if it all just stopped?
Music scholars on the job market like to moan about our dwindling job prospects as public and private institutions alike continue painful hiring freezes (for the record: last year there were 3 tenure-track musicology / ethnomusicology positions in the UC; this year there are none). I am concerned about the other side of the problem: the students public universities are supposed to serve. This last semester, my students have been extremely smart, but they have had far from the diversity of perspectives that the students I taught during my time at UCSD and UCLA had. As educators, we learn from our students. Pricing many of these students out of higher education will have as adverse an effect on the state of our field(s) as cutting jobs or entire departments. What will we do when our students become homogenous? What kind of action will musicology and ethnomusicology take to keep this from happening?
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Lectures on your own stuff
For the last few week I've been officially teaching repertoire that rubs right up against the music I research. While my prep time for lectures has diminished to a minimum, I find teaching my own area to be the most unexpected challenge of my course. And I'm not alone. Just last week, I met with a few other ethno/musicologists working in a visiting assistant professor capacity for other liberal arts colleges in Maine, and we all agreed: teaching your own stuff is the most difficult unit of a semester. That is, even if you do not necessarily write or research one aspect of the broader specialization, you may still fall victim to assuming that basic things to your topic are common knowledge (which they are not) thereby complicating even what you envision to be the most straightforward of lectures. Rest assured, I have been learning a lot in this class.
Rather than embarrass myself by listing the many examples of interesting assumptions I made during my São Paulo unit, I thought I would add my own take on lecturing best practices.
1) Even if you disagree with a canonic point, lecture is not the time to complicate it. Save those problematizing discussions for individual meetings and small seminar situations.
2) When discussing a culture different from the U.S. present, start with the nationalizing myths before delving into hybrids. I know it sounds basic, but it's an easy lesson to forget when trying to plan your syllabus.
3) When discussing notions of race elsewhere, avoid as much as possible comparisons to the United States. It's a rabbit hole and you will not escape.
4) Be emotionally prepared to get through significantly less content than you normally would in exchange for more depth. Students will ask more questions if they know it's your area.
And finally, when in doubt, refer to other sage guides on lecturing. It can be quite fun.
Rather than embarrass myself by listing the many examples of interesting assumptions I made during my São Paulo unit, I thought I would add my own take on lecturing best practices.
1) Even if you disagree with a canonic point, lecture is not the time to complicate it. Save those problematizing discussions for individual meetings and small seminar situations.
2) When discussing a culture different from the U.S. present, start with the nationalizing myths before delving into hybrids. I know it sounds basic, but it's an easy lesson to forget when trying to plan your syllabus.
3) When discussing notions of race elsewhere, avoid as much as possible comparisons to the United States. It's a rabbit hole and you will not escape.
4) Be emotionally prepared to get through significantly less content than you normally would in exchange for more depth. Students will ask more questions if they know it's your area.
And finally, when in doubt, refer to other sage guides on lecturing. It can be quite fun.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Let's Have Fun!
I am having a really wonderful and surprising experience with this book I'm reading. I’m starting to work on my chapter on the Berlioz Requiem, and I needed to learn about church music in the Nineteenth century. This book is called "Church Music in the Nineteenth Century," by Arthur Hutchings. Considering its title at least 50% promising, I brought it home, or rather, I had my husband bring it home for me, as I leave the house but rarely. It was written in 1967. I expected it to be curmudgeonly and/or dry as dust, and I readied my pen to take down some boring but necessary facts and figures. But! So far from being wrong in that presumption was I that I quickly found myself actually delighted by the book! It is an absolute treasure.
For starters, there is the most charming preface I have ever read. Some excerpts:
"I lack courage to forgo this traditional opportunity to forestall criticism, for I have discovered that if the subject upon which I so readily agreed to write were comprehensively surveyed, even in a small book, I should need more time and travel than I can afford for several years to come."
Then he talks about how it's easy to say what was sung in Vienna at Schubert's church, or at Notre Dame and Westminster Abbey; but what was sung forty miles away at Kuckucksdorf am Donau or Little Cucking? "An exercise bombastically called research, but accurately called prying into cupboards and pestering friends, leaves my answers still vague."
Thus, he says, "It seems sensible to supplement knowledge with imagination and to declare any indulgence in guessing." He says if he didn't do it this way, he "should keep the publisher waiting for a very stodgy tome."
He then does this great joke where he says, "I wanted to dedicate these pages to Canon Kenneth Meux," and delivers a whole long paragraph about what a great guy Canon Meux is, but then he says, "Yet he would agree that the dedicatees should be Mgr. Paul Grant, President of Ushaw College, and the Vice President and Choirmaster, Mr. Laurence Hollis. My protestant tongue does not falter at 'Father Hollis' but Ushaw proudly recalls the style of address brought from Douai and still used in this country during the penal years."
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So if that preface were not enough to stoke me up greatly 'pon the reading of this un-stodgy tome, here is the first paragraph of the book:
"We hear more sermons on faith than on hope, without which faith lacks radiance. Most outstanding men of the nineteenth century were such optimists that they either forgot the Devil or treated him as a medieval superstition. Two vast wars have since then set carpenters and clerks killing and maiming carpenters and clerks, few of whom wished to kill and maim; they could acknowledge their contribution to human error but could they reasonably believe that the horrors they witnessed were the just retribution for their sins? The wars 'came'; evil overtakes us because evil is with us."
WOW.
I genuinely did not expect a survey of church music in the Nineteenth century to indulge in such whimsical flights of fancy, nor did I anticipate an exposition on Good and Evil and the Hearts of Man. It just goes to show you that you quite literally can not judge a book by its cover. I was struck over and over again, reading through this dude’s words, by the love of his subject that shone forth betwixt each page, but even more than that, I was struck by how much he clearly enjoyed the act of writing itself. Clever turns of phrases, beautiful and evocative passages, and always taking an extra moment to point out something humorous or interesting. He uses his imagination! He holds no grudges, even against the atheists. He speculates. He turns what could be dry historical facts into a rich and inviting world. Even when I disagreed with him on some point, or found a section boring, which is surely the fate of almost any book, scholarly ones especially, I still felt compelled to continue, because his prose was so charming, his weird personality apparent on every page.
It reminded me, as almost everything does these days, of my deep and abiding love of Jacques Barzun. I love a smart fancy person who can be serious without taking himself too seriously. There is a certain ease of address with Barzun that I enjoy whenever I encounter it. Can’t we just write down our thoughts and have fun doing it? We can’t, really. We need too many footnotes. We are too scared of the job market. And the disciplines have separated and become so rigid—gone are the days when somebody in the academy could write about Berlioz and baseball and race in America and crime fiction and the educational system without batting an eye. (And by "we" and "somebody" I don’t presume to mean "me," obviously, as I am nobody’s idea of a public intellectual, being but a proto-junior junior scholar who doesn’t really know about anything yet, except zombie movies, and certainly not baseball (sidenote: how much would I love to read something Jacques Barzun wrote about zombie movies?? Impossible to quantify)). I would just like to encourage everyone to take pleasure in writing, I guess, and I would like to try to continue enjoying writing even as I (hopefully) become smarter. I would like to read things written by people who like to write. I would like everyone to write in an enjoyable and compelling manner, such that people outside their discipline could still read and appreciate their words. This is how the Humanities will thrive, and how people outside the academy will understand what it is we are doing and why it is important for the world.
Anyway. This book is really taking the bad taste out of my mouth that was caused by the inadvised reading of two back-to-back devastating New Yorker articles, about global warming and the CIA's predator drone program, all at once, without coffee. Jesus, where is the New Yorker of bygone days, which taught me about how insights happen and how bees communicate???? What good is learning about this horrible world if there's nothing I can do about it except get blown up in my bed by an errant missile launched by a remote-controlled robot hovering in the sky over Pakistan whose coordinates got screwed up by the guy operating it from a bunker in suburban Denver?
LETS LEARN ABOUT CHURCH MUSIC IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
For starters, there is the most charming preface I have ever read. Some excerpts:
"I lack courage to forgo this traditional opportunity to forestall criticism, for I have discovered that if the subject upon which I so readily agreed to write were comprehensively surveyed, even in a small book, I should need more time and travel than I can afford for several years to come."
Then he talks about how it's easy to say what was sung in Vienna at Schubert's church, or at Notre Dame and Westminster Abbey; but what was sung forty miles away at Kuckucksdorf am Donau or Little Cucking? "An exercise bombastically called research, but accurately called prying into cupboards and pestering friends, leaves my answers still vague."
Thus, he says, "It seems sensible to supplement knowledge with imagination and to declare any indulgence in guessing." He says if he didn't do it this way, he "should keep the publisher waiting for a very stodgy tome."
He then does this great joke where he says, "I wanted to dedicate these pages to Canon Kenneth Meux," and delivers a whole long paragraph about what a great guy Canon Meux is, but then he says, "Yet he would agree that the dedicatees should be Mgr. Paul Grant, President of Ushaw College, and the Vice President and Choirmaster, Mr. Laurence Hollis. My protestant tongue does not falter at 'Father Hollis' but Ushaw proudly recalls the style of address brought from Douai and still used in this country during the penal years."
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So if that preface were not enough to stoke me up greatly 'pon the reading of this un-stodgy tome, here is the first paragraph of the book:
"We hear more sermons on faith than on hope, without which faith lacks radiance. Most outstanding men of the nineteenth century were such optimists that they either forgot the Devil or treated him as a medieval superstition. Two vast wars have since then set carpenters and clerks killing and maiming carpenters and clerks, few of whom wished to kill and maim; they could acknowledge their contribution to human error but could they reasonably believe that the horrors they witnessed were the just retribution for their sins? The wars 'came'; evil overtakes us because evil is with us."
WOW.
I genuinely did not expect a survey of church music in the Nineteenth century to indulge in such whimsical flights of fancy, nor did I anticipate an exposition on Good and Evil and the Hearts of Man. It just goes to show you that you quite literally can not judge a book by its cover. I was struck over and over again, reading through this dude’s words, by the love of his subject that shone forth betwixt each page, but even more than that, I was struck by how much he clearly enjoyed the act of writing itself. Clever turns of phrases, beautiful and evocative passages, and always taking an extra moment to point out something humorous or interesting. He uses his imagination! He holds no grudges, even against the atheists. He speculates. He turns what could be dry historical facts into a rich and inviting world. Even when I disagreed with him on some point, or found a section boring, which is surely the fate of almost any book, scholarly ones especially, I still felt compelled to continue, because his prose was so charming, his weird personality apparent on every page.
It reminded me, as almost everything does these days, of my deep and abiding love of Jacques Barzun. I love a smart fancy person who can be serious without taking himself too seriously. There is a certain ease of address with Barzun that I enjoy whenever I encounter it. Can’t we just write down our thoughts and have fun doing it? We can’t, really. We need too many footnotes. We are too scared of the job market. And the disciplines have separated and become so rigid—gone are the days when somebody in the academy could write about Berlioz and baseball and race in America and crime fiction and the educational system without batting an eye. (And by "we" and "somebody" I don’t presume to mean "me," obviously, as I am nobody’s idea of a public intellectual, being but a proto-junior junior scholar who doesn’t really know about anything yet, except zombie movies, and certainly not baseball (sidenote: how much would I love to read something Jacques Barzun wrote about zombie movies?? Impossible to quantify)). I would just like to encourage everyone to take pleasure in writing, I guess, and I would like to try to continue enjoying writing even as I (hopefully) become smarter. I would like to read things written by people who like to write. I would like everyone to write in an enjoyable and compelling manner, such that people outside their discipline could still read and appreciate their words. This is how the Humanities will thrive, and how people outside the academy will understand what it is we are doing and why it is important for the world.
Anyway. This book is really taking the bad taste out of my mouth that was caused by the inadvised reading of two back-to-back devastating New Yorker articles, about global warming and the CIA's predator drone program, all at once, without coffee. Jesus, where is the New Yorker of bygone days, which taught me about how insights happen and how bees communicate???? What good is learning about this horrible world if there's nothing I can do about it except get blown up in my bed by an errant missile launched by a remote-controlled robot hovering in the sky over Pakistan whose coordinates got screwed up by the guy operating it from a bunker in suburban Denver?
LETS LEARN ABOUT CHURCH MUSIC IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Everyone Loves Tico-Tico
One of my favorite recent memes on Google Reader (especially Bruitus at Immanent Discursivity) is the flood of interesting videos of various people performing the Brazilian choro classic "Tico-Tico no Fubá" by Zequinha de Abreu. To get an idea of what I am talking about, here is the world's most famous Brazilian parrot, Joe (Zé) Carioca, teaching Donald Duck about samba through a demonstration of "Tico-Tico" (start around 04:41).
The title literally means "a little bit of (maize) flour" and was a way of describing how dancers looked as they danced to this song. Despite its popularity at dance events around Rio de Janeiro, this choro was only recorded in 1931, a full 14 years after it was first composed.* It was incredibly successful and attained its height of popularity during 1940s – no small feat at a time when sambas and choros were all the rage in the Brazilian record industry.
Eventually, "Tico-Tico" became one of the most widespread Brazilian songs from Hollywood's embrace of Brazilian music during the Good Neighbor Policy Period; it appeared in 4 additional films and was performed by Carmen Miranda in Copacabana(1947) after she'd already starred in a number of popular Fox musicals. A recording by organist Ethel Smith from 1944 was probably the most successful on the hit parade.
True to the demanding choro genre, this song is often a vehicle for tour-de-force instrumental virtuosity and showmanship (even if it is sometimes reinterpreted as a tango). By way of example, look at this impressive duo performing "Tico-Tico" on one guitar.
Clearly, this is some very impressive stuff. The first performance of it that I heard after learning a thing or two about Brazilian music was by Shooby "The Human Horn" Taylor in a class I took at UCSD. Here is a video that includes some animation to accompany Shooby's characteristically creative interpretation.
As someone who has heard all of Shooby's recordings, this is probably the closest I've ever heard him come to how a song is performed in other contexts. Stunning stuff, really.
Which bring me to my point: "Tico-Tico" has a sustained popularity in certain circles, especially among aspiring musicians wishing to demonstrate their instrumental prowess. How does burning through this chorinho (little choro) give so many people pleasure? And why does it still enjoy widespread popularity on so many different instruments? Sure, there is something fun about the song: it's upbeat and melodically and harmonically intricate. Something tells me that its larger than that, perhaps having something to with novelty. Thoughts from the peanut gallery?
-----
* Jairo Severiano and Zuza Homem de Mello, A Canção no Tempo: 85 Anos de Músicas Brasileiras (Vol. 1: 1901-1957), 6th ed. (São Paulo: Editora 34, 2006), 107.
The title literally means "a little bit of (maize) flour" and was a way of describing how dancers looked as they danced to this song. Despite its popularity at dance events around Rio de Janeiro, this choro was only recorded in 1931, a full 14 years after it was first composed.* It was incredibly successful and attained its height of popularity during 1940s – no small feat at a time when sambas and choros were all the rage in the Brazilian record industry.
Eventually, "Tico-Tico" became one of the most widespread Brazilian songs from Hollywood's embrace of Brazilian music during the Good Neighbor Policy Period; it appeared in 4 additional films and was performed by Carmen Miranda in Copacabana(1947) after she'd already starred in a number of popular Fox musicals. A recording by organist Ethel Smith from 1944 was probably the most successful on the hit parade.
True to the demanding choro genre, this song is often a vehicle for tour-de-force instrumental virtuosity and showmanship (even if it is sometimes reinterpreted as a tango). By way of example, look at this impressive duo performing "Tico-Tico" on one guitar.
Clearly, this is some very impressive stuff. The first performance of it that I heard after learning a thing or two about Brazilian music was by Shooby "The Human Horn" Taylor in a class I took at UCSD. Here is a video that includes some animation to accompany Shooby's characteristically creative interpretation.
As someone who has heard all of Shooby's recordings, this is probably the closest I've ever heard him come to how a song is performed in other contexts. Stunning stuff, really.
Which bring me to my point: "Tico-Tico" has a sustained popularity in certain circles, especially among aspiring musicians wishing to demonstrate their instrumental prowess. How does burning through this chorinho (little choro) give so many people pleasure? And why does it still enjoy widespread popularity on so many different instruments? Sure, there is something fun about the song: it's upbeat and melodically and harmonically intricate. Something tells me that its larger than that, perhaps having something to with novelty. Thoughts from the peanut gallery?
-----
* Jairo Severiano and Zuza Homem de Mello, A Canção no Tempo: 85 Anos de Músicas Brasileiras (Vol. 1: 1901-1957), 6th ed. (São Paulo: Editora 34, 2006), 107.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
MJ CFP
It's nice to see that the slow wheels of academic musicology are finally swinging into motion:
POPULAR MUSIC AND SOCIETY
CALL FOR PAPERS
Special Issue:
Michael Jackson: Musical Subjectivities
Edited by Susan Fast and Stan Hawkins
Submissions are invited for a special edition of Popular Music and Society that examines constructions of subjectivity in Michael Jackson's music, with a focus on gender, sexuality, age, disability, and race. Contributors are invited to address ways in which Jackson's vocality, grooves, rhythmic invention, songwriting, conformity with and/or irreconcilability of generic categories, particular songs, song categories (such as ballads) or albums, record production, use of technology, and live or mediated performance work to produce his own, often spectacularized, subjectivities, as well as those of his listeners. We are interested in drawing together articles that engage in an interdisciplinary manner the myriad ways in which subjectivity is constructed in Jackson's work: narratives of desire, healing, redemption, anger, violence, celebrity; engagement with world politics, charity; intergenerational relationships; the spectacular body in performance; illness as it impacted his music and performance; freakishness/the fantastic; challenges to hegemonic constructions of race, masculinity, sexuality, gender--to name only a few possibilities. Although we welcome contributions that employ a broad range of methodologies, including the development of new methodologies for the analysis of popular music, we intend that these essays address musical sound and sound related to text (lyrics), image(s), and dance directly. While the complexity, ambiguity, and irreconcilability of Jackson's subjectivity/ies have been covered exhaustively, mainly by the mass media, only a few scholarly essays have made significant inroads to understanding these phenomena; moreover, none of these has addressed musical sound in detail. We therefore see the need for rigorous scholarship into Jackson's creative output, with specific emphasis on musical sound, the place where he, himself, arguably commented most explicitly upon the matters referred to above. Our vision is that this issue will include essays that range over Jackson's long career, from his time with the Jackson 5 through his last studio album, Invincible, and final live performances, perhaps including the forthcoming film documenting preparation for his This Is It tour.
Essays of 6,000-8,000 words are due by September 2010. Essays will be peer-reviewed. Inquiries regarding potential essay topics and their suitability for inclusion are welcome. Please include your professional/academic affiliations, a postal address, and preferred email contact with your essay; for purposes of blind peer-review, please do not include your name within the body of the essay.
Please address all communications to: Susan Fast (McMaster University, Canada) fastfs@mcmaster.ca or Stan Hawkins (University of Oslo) e.s.hawkins@imv.uio.no
Friday, October 9, 2009
Google Keeps Changing the Music Reception History Game
For two chapters of my dissertation (remember that?), I attempted to tackle that music history beast known as reception history. I spent weeks on end in libraries browsing through old issues of Vogue, Downbeat, New Yorker, and Billboard among other periodicals. And as I refined my ideas about samba in the 1940s and bossa nova in the 1960s, I sometimes had to revisit these collections causing further damage to my eyesight. (Nothing exhausts one's eyes quite like spending days in a row searching and browsing microfilm.) But this process was good for me. It hardened my research resolve, and I had the opportunity to make connections that otherwise would not have been possible.
But I have a confession to make: I knew to search in these periodicals because I did a few lazy searches in ProQuest's historical newspaper database. If that didn't exist, I never would have thought about going down that road. For many young scholars, ProQuest and other services like it changed the game of how we do reception history, and on a larger level, research. The mere fact that someone was treating old periodicals the way that Lexis Nexus or IIMP treated recent stuff was a revelation.
A few months ago, I heard something absolutely crazy through Phil's Blog: Google Books now has full issues of Billboard on hand. They also have Life Magazine, New York Magazine, The Village Voice and Ebony. This is fascinating. Of course, as luck would have it, Google Books did this well after I defended and filed my dissertation, so I am officially off the hook for what a lazy person's word search might reveal. However, as I adapt my research for publication, I cannot ignore what recent searches turn up. Already, my mind is spinning and I am already embarking on similar browsing sessions that I never would have considered were it not for digitization. Many people bemoan the lost insights that come with not having to do searches while being physically present in the library (you know, those books you only would have picked up because they were on the same shelf as something you sought out). But in this case, there are some clear positives. Thank you Google! You keep changing the research game.
But I have a confession to make: I knew to search in these periodicals because I did a few lazy searches in ProQuest's historical newspaper database. If that didn't exist, I never would have thought about going down that road. For many young scholars, ProQuest and other services like it changed the game of how we do reception history, and on a larger level, research. The mere fact that someone was treating old periodicals the way that Lexis Nexus or IIMP treated recent stuff was a revelation.
A few months ago, I heard something absolutely crazy through Phil's Blog: Google Books now has full issues of Billboard on hand. They also have Life Magazine, New York Magazine, The Village Voice and Ebony. This is fascinating. Of course, as luck would have it, Google Books did this well after I defended and filed my dissertation, so I am officially off the hook for what a lazy person's word search might reveal. However, as I adapt my research for publication, I cannot ignore what recent searches turn up. Already, my mind is spinning and I am already embarking on similar browsing sessions that I never would have considered were it not for digitization. Many people bemoan the lost insights that come with not having to do searches while being physically present in the library (you know, those books you only would have picked up because they were on the same shelf as something you sought out). But in this case, there are some clear positives. Thank you Google! You keep changing the research game.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
