Taking down Tosches

OK, Tosches, you asked for this one.

There's a school of popular-culture writing which comes out of the great rock criticism of the late '60s/early '70s: people like Greil Marcus, Bob Christgau, the great Langdon Winner, the even greater Ellen Willis, and that wonderful, beautiful, Bukowskian Detroit trash-saint Lester Bangs, about whom I've written elsewhere. Most of these guys were fans first (and, in Bangs's case, last well) who subsequently realized that they might be able to make a buck writing what they thought about music they were listening to anyway. The smarter and more pedestrian ones (Dave Marsh, Marcus, Christgau as the worst offender) realized that you could make more bucks if you dressed-up your essential fandom-style writing with relatively high-flown and abstract theoretical constructs. Over the decades, the ones who didn't burn out or die (like Bangs) or go on to other things, were able to parlay this essential fog-and-pomposity (thanks, Quantzalcoatl) into long-running high-dollar columns (Christgau) or even university appointments. Not all the writing was good, a lot of it was pretentious, much of it was musically illiterate, but at least most of it proceeded from a very sincere love for popular music and a solid conviction that it was good art. And for that they should be commended.

A particularly New Yawk version of that comes from people like New York's Nick Tosches. Tosches is a lot better-read than some of his colleagues, and he, like Bangs, can make language perform remarkable rhetorical loop-the-loops: prolixity is a valuable skill when (a) you don't really know anything technical about the music you're reviewing and/or (b) you're getting paid by the word. Tosches wrote some fantastic stuff about various rock artists in the Seventies--one of his most notorious pieces is an ode to masturbation and Van Morrison in the Marcus collection Stranded--but he's also done biographies and literary essays on people like Dean Martin, Sonny Liston, and Jerry Lee Lewis, and an absolutely magnificent early collection called Country--still his most consistent piece of great writing. He's at his best when he's "riffing" (to use Marcus's term for the same technique, which he stole from Tosches) across the cognitive landscape of American myth, legend, and popular culture. He's not really a "scholar"--he's way too dependent upon "researchers" (that is, the people who actually dig up the facts that he riffs upon) for that--as much as he's an essayist: someone who, like Faulkner or Joyce or Dylan, simply has the ability to put words together in the magic-realist, incantatory fashion that makes them dance off the page and into the reader's mind. It's a skill that's shared by a lot of street people and people who live near the streets: a skill that New Yorkers from Lenny Bruce to Frank McCourt (rest his soul) have almost always had.

New York is a walking culture--the very best way to see the island is by foot and subway, and the very worst is from behind the wheel of a car--and so ever since the 18th century, it's meant that New Yorkers of all ages, classes, races, and perspectives have bumped shoulders on the street and in the bars. The great New York literati (from Bruce to McCourt to Tosches to Dylan Thomas and so on) have understood this, have avoided the automobile, and have relished the bumping-shoulders contact and the conversations that emerge from it. It's where Tosches, and his spiritual step-son Anthony Bourdain (Bourdain is basically what you get when you cross Hunter Thompson and Tosches--an indebtedness Tony admits), get their language and their world-view.

On the other hand: back in the day when I actually wrote a lot of information-supplying helpful messages to Internet music discussion lists--a habit I've since largely sworn off, as Mencken's "ninety percent of everything is crap" and my "ninety-FIVE percent of everything on the Internet is crap" advises--I would always make a point of excising my academic signature file from those posts. Because I learned, quickly enough, that--especially in the forums I hung out in--the mere presence of an academic .sig file, or of advanced-degree letters after your name, was enough to provoke all kinds of snotty "oh, so you think you actually *know* something, Professor Asshole?!?" reactions.

In the case of the Irish musicians and the blues musicians, this kind of makes sense, because both groups have been treated particularly badly, over the years, by pompous academics who wanted to treat them as primitifs or worse. Colonialism, classism, ethnocentrism: you name it, the academic study of vernacular musics has been riddled with all of 'em. And, the reality is that, in the musical worlds I occupy, the degrees don't--and shouldn't--mean shit: what should matter is the quality of the understanding and of the playing ability, and the degrees are no proof of that. So I just learned to leave-off the letters after my name. And it's actually a good discipline: teaches you to make your points without the presumption that you know better than someone else.

But, on the other hand, it gets really fucking tiresome to hear/read people who don't know about the academic world except and until they DO think they know that academics are all one way or another. I don't doubt for a minute that lots of academics are loudmouthed self-righteous blowhards who are usually treated as entirely unresponsible for any asinine words they express or actions they take (Ward Churchill comes to mind here), but just because they're easy targets for over-generalizations doesn't make those generalizations any truer in the specific. I don't like it when Parker does it--and, Jesus, he got a PhD in Raymond Chandler: how much could he have suffered at the hands of academics, for Christ's sake?!?

And I don't like it when Tosches does it either. His Where Dead Voices Gather is a beautiful, beautiful piece of writing, which captures the seductive historical aroma of the early cylinder-and-78s period, the beautiful period when, as Ciaran Carson quotes Karajan, "everything was gaslight." So there are certain passages, about the doomed, just-too-late-for-stardom, pre-talkies "man with the clarinet voice" Emmett Miller, where Tosches just takes flight:

"A hillbilly string band calling themselves the Georgia Crackers had recorded six songs for Okeh in Atlanta in 1927, the year before Miller's first Georgia Crackers session in New York. In its own rough-hewn way, this hillbilly string band, from predominantly black Hancock County in central Georgia, echoed the same sources that informed their more sophisticated contemporary Jimmie Rogers and his black counterparts: those motes of vaudeville, minstrelsy, and the black songster tradition aswirl in the effulgence of that beautiful thievery that in the hands of one became the blues, in the hands of another country music. It was the nineteenth-century fiddle-based string bands, black and white, through which the mongrel motes swirled. It was the symbiosis and synergy and estuary of those nineteenth-century fiddle-based string bands, black and white, that brought forth, simultaneously, before the ascendancy of the guitar, what came to be called the blues and country music. It was the music of those fiddle-based string bands, black and white, that was the true indigenous and autochthonous sound of the nineteenth-century South, mother and wild bride and fickle daughter, enticer and enticed of all that swirled, of that eventual bastard song, neither black nor white, both black and white, of the midnight bottomland crossroads and the great lighted dazzling of Broadway alike. It was the likes of Emmett Miller and others that haunted both commingled midnights."

The absolute transcendent version of this, of course, is his virtuoso carnival sideshow razzle-dazzle tracing of "Cabbage Head" by Dr John, all the way back from New Orleans, to the Child ballad "Seven Nights Drunk," to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, all the way back to Homer, and maybe back further than that. After a while, it starts to feel a little like too much brandy: it's sweet, and intoxicating, but after a while you start to wish for a little more nutrition and a little less intoxicant.

But I'll give him that: the world of literature is big enough for brandy and whiskey and oatmeal stout and all. But sooner or later he's going to have to stop talking smack like this:

"There are no academic blues. There are no academic trughts. There are no academics in really sharp suits or fine snap-brim hats. Academic studies, the pus of the cerebrum in captivity, are nothing more than what Big Joe Turner, in a song title and lyric of 1941, referred to as 'Chewed Up Grass'; that is to say, bullshit."

There are sure-god a lot of academics who deserve this accusation, but the presumption that no academic had, or has, any existence outside the musty groves of self-indulgent masturbatory rhetoric, is phony, and cheap. And it proceeds from, at root, Tosches's awareness (just like that of Christgau, and Bob Parker, and Greil Marcus, and all the rest of them) that it's possible to be both of the street and of the ivory tower. Some of us can--and did--hang in Hell's Kitchen and the Bowery, and still dug ourselves out, and up, in to the ivory tower. More: some of us can still move in both those worlds. More: some of us have made our life's work out of fighting the battles (old joke: "the reason that academic turf battles are so merciless is because the stakes are so small) that would bridge the divide between those two worlds.

And that is the shit that Tosches and his ilk are really carping about. They don't really hate academics--they hate that there's a way of knowing out there that they know, deep down, might actually have value, and that they don't have.

Unless he wants to say it me: ex-biker, ex-bouncer, ex-oil field roughneck, ex-cook, ex-carpenter, earned doctorate, tenured academic professor. You want some home truths, Tosches? I got 'em right here, baby. You decide ever to come back from the Solomon Islands and get on a podium with me, we'll see who can walk the walk as well as talk the talk.

Aw, hell.

It's still OK with me. Tosches can write like a dark angel, and his prose comes dancing off the page like St John of the Cross (another good Catholic boy who'd lost his faith). That's enough--I'm not gonna demand scholarly rigor from someone who traffics in a different coin.

"The glory-beaming banjo!"

When you want genuine music - music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whiskey, go right through you like Brandreth's pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pinfeather pimples on a picked goose - when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo! -Mark Twain

Plz don't throw me inna bra'ar patch, boyo!

It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it:

Dr Coyote has just received a travel grant from the [redacted] Fund in support of archival research for his book "Ethnomusicology in Oils."

He has also just been appointed External Examiner for the University of Limerick's Bachelor's in Traditional Music program for the period 2008-12. This will require that he spend a week each May through 2012 hearing juries and recitals by students at UL.

Dr Coyote is deeply disappointed at this.

"The Office" (workstation series) 111 (back in the saddle edition)

Blogging light this weekend. But for the sake of both the blog and my own concentration, a status report on "Office" (e.g., professional musicology) chores:

Draft of book chapter on Afro-Celtic interaction for The Irish in the South collection: submitted;

Third chapter of rock-history text drafted--but I'm holding off on submitting, as this particular editor never seems to get it together to request the next installment until the night before he absolutely has to have it. I'm happier if I'm a draft ahead of his requests, so as I complete each one, I hold onto it until requested, and as soon as I send it, I start on the next one, which I'll likewise delay until requested. Makes for a much less stressful life.

Haven't done near as much work since August on the minstrelsy project, with the very significant exception of the work for the "Irish" chapter above. That "chapter" wound up being about twice as long (around 8700 words), and it became pretty evident pretty early in the composition process that, as is typical for me, I was going to wind up writing the "whole-picture" story; e.g., the historical/cultural/economic factors that shaped Afro-Celtic musical interaction across the continent, not just in the South and over the entire time-span between the Revolution and the Civil War, not just the 1830s-50s. As I say, this is typical for me--I have a hard time understanding how I want to cut or specify certain aspects of a historical/analytical narrative until I have the whole narrative laid out before me. It's kind of like wanting to make the whole batch of sausage before I go slicing individual links.

In this case, that works out, because, by framing the big picture first, I can then slice out that portion of the narrative that pertains specifically to the topic of the Irish in the South, while retaining the full document. And, with comparatively straightforward and self-evidence adaptation, that becomes Chapter Three of the minstrelsy book.

So I guess maybe I have been getting some book-stuff done.

Excellent pub session last night, part of the Fall Fest. First of the Celtic Ensemble concerts drops tonight.
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Now playing: La Musgaña - Lubicán
via FoxyTunes

Day 04 (Round II) "In the trenches" (Here we go round again edition)

Cue Ray Davies:

And we're back where we started,
Here we go 'round again,
Day after day I get up and I say
"I better do it again, do it again."

I've quoted it before and probably will again--ideas become cliches because they're accurate, not the obverse. Four days into the semester and it already feels as if we've been back-in-the-saddle for quite some time.

Much of my teaching work is much simpler than it was, because much of it is based upon courses I've now taught in 3 or 4 or 5 iterations, and so, no matter how much revising/digitizing I do, it's still not like conceptualizing the course for the first time. Although the initial brainstorming of topics and modeling of procedures is largely internal (you don't have a lot of tangible physical evidence, like lecture notes or playlists) at that early stage of the game, it's in fact the most difficult and sometimes the most time-consuming part of the process. Having the idea, and working out how to articulate/implement the idea, is the hardest part of designing a course, or a thesis, or a dissertation (or a book, for that matter). One reason we run both our undergrads and grad students, both musicology and non-musicology majors, through multiple repetitions of the "topic idea - thesis statement - short bibliography - abstract - annotated bibliography - background paper - final paper" paradigm, with assessment and response at each of those stages, is because the best way to learn how to formulate a new idea, thesis, project, or course is to do it multiple times, tinkering with what works. This is less painful and more efficient before you actually apply it in the public academic marketplace, or before (for example) you put a classroom full of undergraduates through an experiment whose efficacy you can't yet predict.

On the other hand, it does get easier. Not only because revising an existing course is easier than creating an original one. But also, and equally significantly though less obviously, because you can learn to get better at the process. The task of generating the ideas for a new project is unique to each individual, of course, but something I have observed to be remarkably consistent amongst most people who are reasonably productive is that the task is not linear but rather comparatively intuitive. You don't say "well, I know that I am interested in Topic A within Time Period B and Culture/Content Issues C and D and so therefore I know that the original thesis X will lead me to interesting and worthwhile research." In my observation and experience, it's much more like the line from Malory's Morte d'Arthur, where he describes the knights of the newly-minted Round Table deciding that they must go out seeking adventure singly, not in a group, and each enters the trackless forest alone, "where the trees seemed thickest."

What this gets at is that new scholarship does not actually proceed by "building upon existing work." Of course it must take the existing work on a given question into account--that's what Literature Reviews, the bane of most dissertators (and of most editors trying to turn dissertations into books), are precisely intended to do: to comprehensively internalize and accurately summarize the existing scholarship on a topic or question. But the Literature Review is not the foundation of the original hypothesis or insight. The Review gets all that stuff into your brain, so that (a) you can command the existing information and (b) assert with reasonable confidence that the work you propose to do does not replicate existing scholarship.

But the map is not the territory. The Lit Review shows you the known world, and your job is to contribute to that known world by scoring a path through some portion of the White Space ("where be monsters") on that map. You can't comprehensively diagram that territory--there is too much of it and, absent a specific point on the horizon as a goal, you won't know where you're trying to go--but you can provide a "reading" of the terrain; show somebody at least one efficacious way to negotiate the ups and downs and twists and turns. It's the rough spots--where you're lost--that lead to new insights.

Below the jump: sunrise on the South Plains.

"The Office" (workstation series) 107 ("Big Picture" edition)

Just flat ran out of steam yesterday (see last night’s post), but there’s a couple of good reasons: Dharmonia’s home (“Dharmonia’s home!”), and I did a ridiculous amount of work yesterday. When she’s away, I tend to get into a very focused—probably too focused—a groove: virtually every day she was away, I’d get up, get breakfast at home (some kinda protein—beans or tofu, plus some kind of grain, usually tortillas, plus my “powders”, my one placebo), and try to be at the coffeeshop “Office” by around 9am. Work like hell until just after the Rec Center’s lunch rush, then hit the cross-trainer around 2pm, back home for a late lunch, practice until I couldn’t stay awake. Day after day after day. Which is pretty damned great for getting work done, but something I notice after a week to 10 days of this is that my fuse (for bad drivers, inconsiderate West Texans, Internet wankers, etc) gets pretty short. What I’ve realized is that even if that regular, high-efficiency schedule makes me feel good about getting stuff done, it gradually erodes my social skills—I don’t talk to people, I avoid the phone, I live in my head a lot, and I wind up getting irascible. And I sleep badly. I am reminded—again—that working too much is actually counter-productive.

On the other hand, I’m in the midst of a process of writing which I actually recognize: massive overpreparation for a solicited chapter in an edited collection on the Irish in the South; my particular essay is about Afro-Celtic musical interactions. It’s an outgrowth/product of the larger minstrelsy topic; of course I proposed essay when requested because I knew I wanted to kill two birds with one stone. But, it called for a lot of work and implicated some uncertainty, because I don’t really know squat about the Southern situation. For the past 2 years, I’ve been working on the Northern/urban context: dozens of books, literally hundreds of articles (I loves me some JSTOR), hundreds of hours of conversations and a hundred thousand words written—but mostly regarding the Northern/urban settings which conventional scholarship has presented as the birthplace of minstrelsy. So when I proposed and took on this southern topic, I knew that, while it might provide a useful counterbalance to the work I’d been doing, and to the eventual book project, I also knew that I had a lot of catch-up to do. And, even, an open question about whether my thesis (that the black/white working-class musical exchange that went on in places like lower New York’s Five Points had a parallel in the South and on the frontiers) would even prove out to be accurate.

As always, the project got bigger and bigger, extending to a reasonably comprehensive literature review not only on black-white culture in New Orleans, Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and like cities, but also: canal culture, construction, history, and demographics; the Haitian revolution and diaspora; Afro-Celtic musical exchange on the Caribbean islands; black sailors in the Atlantic trade going all the way back to the 16th century, and on and on and on. This is a process I remember from writing my dissertation: some scholars learn how to formulate a thesis, and skim a lot of reading, reading in detail only that material which they can almost intuit is going to be directly relevant. Though I know how to do this now—particularly for smaller-scaled or one-off projects—it took a while to learn: when I wrote the dissertation, all I knew how to do was to engulf virtually everything, and then render it down. And here, in a sub-topic I don’t know much about, it’s almost mandatory that I read a huge volume of stuff, looking for the patterns which emerge and might be relevant to the thesis. Takes a long time.
‘
And then, writing up that material—just trying to pull it all together into a coherent background narrative which lays out the factors that might have shaped the prototypical minstrelsy synthesis—takes yet more time. I work from the notes I’ve taken, juggling both the historical chronology, the sequence of the points I want to make (not at all necessarily the same sequence), and the overall rhetoric of the argument. With this wide a range and this large a volume of information, that linear narrative can become very complex (50 pages and counting). It’s obviously much larger and much more broad than what this edited collection requires, and will have to be cut down yet again to fit.

But, despite the mushrooming scope of the thing, there are several advantages: (a) it means I can be reasonably confident that I have a reasonably complete and comprehensive grasp of the material, even if all that information doesn’t make the final cut; (b) it means I have the resources to link the Southern context, addressed in the essay, back to the larger narrative of the book MS; (c) maybe most importantly, if I uncover patterns in the Southern material that link with those I’ve found in the North—if the patterns of exchange, creativity, social and cultural function are consistent in both environments—then I’ve tested and reinforced the book’s overall thesis.

And, as happened initially with the chapters included in the proposal, which I was sketching and sketching—for months—in a wiki, one day I looked up (in this case, that would be yesterday) and realized that I had written another chapter of the book, at the same time that I was generating and over-generating material for the solicited essay.

Exhausting day—hence the four hours conked out in the Papa-Bear chair—but a good one.
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Now playing: Dave Swarbrick - Byker Hill
via FoxyTunes

The lineage of American musicians

Inexpressibly moving: Springsteen and the Seeger Sessions Band, in Italy, strike up the introductory riff of "Old Dan Tucker," and the entire stadium of Italians start singing along.



One of the few things about contemporary America that still makes me proud is the lineage of Our Music.

"The Office" (workstation series) 101 (facin'-up edition)

Some days it's hard to face-up to the work you know you need to do. It can be a personnel issue--where you have to promulgate a decision made by superiors, which you know is unfair and to which you're opposed, but which is beyond your control. It can be a subordinates issue--when you have to give a student a piece of news that s/he doesn't want and won't like. It can be a "do what's good for you whether you like it or not" issue--like taxes or grant writing.

But it can also be work that you really want to do, really believe in, have been really excited about, but upon which you've recently gotten burned. This is particularly true if it's your own scholarly or creative work, once it's out there in the world of assessments, editors, and outside readers. No matter how competent--or autonomous--the typical academic may be, in terms of her/his daily duties, responsibilities to students and colleagues, income, lifestyle, and so on: when it's time to send out a recording, a composition, or a draft, there's still a tinge (or more than a tinge) of Ralphie turning in his theme to the teacher, and a similar sense of vulnerability. It's really, truly out of your control, and--especially given the invulnerable anonymity enjoyed by outside readers for academic presses--the righteous potential for getting burned. And if you don't get burned unfairly, even apt and fair critique can leave you feeling a little bruised.

The body's natural inclination, upon such injury, is to leave it alone--to avoid touching the sore spot, because you're convinced that even a slight contact is going to hurt as bad as the initial impact. This is not physiologically accurate, but it's a pretty-much involuntary and visceral animal/body reaction.

The problem is that this does not get you past it. Avoidance is visceral and animal and understandable--and the more we avoid prodding the bruise, the longer it takes us to realize that it doesn't hurt anymore. Perspective--usually provided by chronological distance--helps this realization. The great Tibetan teacher Pema Chodron says we should actually welcome this painful spots we want to avoid--as she puts it, we should "lean into the sharp place", the places that prick at us and tempt us to avoid them. Avoidance is like denial: it's instinctive but counterproductive. It puts us on the level of responding mindlessly and it doesn't help us cope, or learn to cope, with disappointment. Facing these things--understanding that you can make conscious choices about how you process a painful experience, rather than just dumbly avoiding--is a learning process.

So to today's topic: the first day I've had the clear space, and the mental/emotional energy, to face up to the guts of the minstrelsy manuscript. This was the MS that I sent in around Dec 15 07, on the request of the university publisher, for consideration as part of their impress on American music. In the event, the editor took care and consideration in assigning the sample chapters to outside readers, and it took a while to get their responses. Along about May 15, I had a long conversation with the editor, on the basis of the readers' responses: one brief and effusively positive; one very long and, while proving detailed criticism, essentially optimistic; one of medium length and, as far as I can tell, essentially offended at the premises.

It's incredibly difficult (for me, anyway) to avoid getting defensive and then angry when some jamoke seems to have intentionally misread a MS, seemingly specifically in order to dismiss it. But, one thing that maturity teaches you, and which dealing with a bureaucracy drives home, is not to respond half-cocked. What I wanted to do was write a lengthy and nasty rebuttal to Reader #3 and post forthwith. I've learned that this is not only tactically unsound, but also a faulty psychological strategy: you are not going to feel the same way about the disappointment, after 72 hours, as you do five minutes after getting the bad news.

In the event, after receiving the reader responses, I rang the editor, and asked if we could converse about those responses around a week later. That latter was a very positive conversation, during which she said "well, there's really no reason that we would have to even involve Reader #3 in the assessment of the full manuscript." This was some kind of vindication, not least because she went on to reiterate to me how much she wanted the MS for the series. Though I'd spent 72 hours ranting to myself, and wanting to punch walls, it was a very good thing that I had waited--and that I know myself enough to know that I'm going to feel more optimistic after 72 hours than after five minutes. The editor closed the conversation by thanking me for "being so receptive to the Readers' comments." I didn't feel receptive, that's for sure, but it was a good reminder of the fact that, in a professional situation, what matters is what you do--not what you feel. Yes, you want to know if you're pissed-off and resentful about somebody else's professional decision--but you do not want to respond from that place.

The net result is that, after summer's crazy-busy first-half, and striving to keep punching at extensive other writing projects, today was the day I sucked it up and opened the minstrelsy project files.

And you know what? There is a lot of good shit in there--but the work I've been doing on related projects has substantially impacted (I think enriched) my grasp of the MS. Now I want to rewrite the two sample chapters, because things I intuited, or didn't even recognize, are now much more concrete, realistic, defensible, and original. Getting bruised by two detailed sets of responses--one of them accurate and apt--may have sucked at the time, but the distance, perspective, and additional work I can bring to the material 7 months later mean that the final result will be much better. And that my own confidence in that material will be much stronger--now I know (rather than just intuiting) that Reader #3 is way out of line, and that the material holds water: that it is as original and solid and valuable as I formerly inferred.

Patience is a valuable thing.

"The Office" (workstation series) 094 ("Is it Summer yet?" edition) and, Fuzzy People 33

Finally into the saddle--I hope!--for the summer's work, and the damned thing is half over. I've been pecking away at writing projects (described below) on half-days here and there, ever since school let out May 7, but there have been so many big-chunk away days that I haven't been able to get much into the groove. Or, as Steinbeck put it, "squirmed down into the writing chair."

Here's what the past 5 weeks brought:

May 5-9: final exams, final grades, inevitable hysteria by Those who Had Not Done What They Ought to Have Done;

May 9-16: prep for China trip; try to bang out some writing; meet with students working on summer projects; write recommendations referrals job-tasks etc; yard-work and home-improvements; woodshed and try to get my chops up

May 17-29: China tour with friend's university wind ensemble; 4 concerts in 10 days (immediately following the 3 days of Official Mourning for the eighty-thousand people estimated to have died in the Szechuan earthquakes); hard-traveling at times, to be documented in Dharmonia's trip notes, but also including the Great Wall, a visit to Han Shan's Cold Mountain temple and the most astonishing Buddhist carvings I've ever seen, plus a panicked cross-city walk in Yanchou in 100-degree heat, only to be rescued by 5 youthful Chinese angels in a Smart Car, and possibly the most foul distilled liquors I've ever imbibed;

May 30-June 6: right back into the saddle in Lubbock--we made our regular pub session within 20 hours of touching down, after a 30-hour journey from Beijing (don't ever fly United airlines!!!); "First Monday" ceili dance on June 2; meet with students; paperwork paperwork paperwork; second meeting with Celtic Ensemble "Summer Band" (a very informal, off-the-cuff weekly jam-and-rehearsal session with those CE members who are in town and bored - needing - something - to - do over the summer; more on that in a subsequent post); prep for Zoukfest;

June 7-15: Zoukfest. Consistently, now, one of the high-points of our annual calendar, and reliably one of the most intense artistic, personal, and spiritual experiences I've ever had. I said it 10 years ago after ZF I in Weston MO, and it's never more true than right now. For a week, it feels a little bit like it must have felt like to be in Paris in the '20s with Joyce and Hemingway, or Harlem in 1916 with James Reese Europe, Eubie Blake and James Weldon Johnson, or San Fran in '56 at the Six Gallery Reading, or courts of the Burgundian nobility in the 15th century, or hell, even Paris in 1100 when Perotin was scribbling notes in Leonin's composition classes: you just feel lucky to be there, alive and participating at a magical time.

June 16-22: recording with old friends (bit of overlap with ZF: tenor David arrived at our house in Lubbock before we even did). Breaking our necks to live up to mentor Peter Burkholder's expectations (justifiable or not) regarding what we're capable of, in re-recording for the venerable Norton Anthology. Also rehearsing Summer Band, woodshedding on an new baby (5-string tenor guitar by GD Armstrong, more on that later too), teaching and then leading English Country Dance for colleague Susan's Kodaly teaching workshop (in a country line-dancing bar, and chased home by massive softball-sized hail). Also cranking out additional prose and student essay questions for a music appreciation text I'm co-authoring (see below).

June 23: meetings all day (meatspace and virtual) with students needing mentoring and colleagues/supervisors problem-solving for Fall 2008 semester.

But, as of today (June 24), that is about to change, for around 4 weeks: I don't have to travel again until around July 27. Dharmonia is off to Bloomington to help celebrate 10-year anniversary of old friends' and revered teachers' monastic foundation, but I've begged off--airline fuel prices being so high and the caliber of the airline experience so horrifically low. Here's the writing I'm hoping to do in the next 4 weeks--or at least get as far as I can:

Essay for a collection called Lost Colonies, on the theme of the immigrant Irish in the American South. My particular topic is the interaction of Irish and African-American performance arts (music and dance) in the riverine and maritime environments of New Orleans, Savannah, and Charleston. Reading a hell of a lot on immigration and demographics in those cities, as well as the history and primary literature on canal construction (and the workers who did it) on the Old Frontiers of upstate New York and Pennsylvania, and finding out that, once again, the received history about who lived there, what work they did, and the extent of their interaction, are all dreadfully incomplete in the scholarship. This is to be expected--there are so many different possible readings of existing primary data that any solid new research question is likely to uncover new patterns not previously recognized because not previously sought. This obviously ties in with the large-scale minstrelsy project, but very usefully kills two birds with one stone by requiring that I deepen my own understanding of black-white musical interaction in other maritime/riverine areas than Long Island. Research on this one well begun.

Essay for a collection (and conference) on 16th century (e.g., "early modern") Ireland. My particular topic is on the intersection of "early modern" (e.g., Continental) and essentially medieval (e.g., Gaelic) harmonic conceptions in tunes from this period, some of the first tunes that are documented--that is, written down--in the Irish tradition. I've suspected for years that the tunes of this period, some of which are clearly organized on modal (that is, medieval church-music) harmonic principles, and others clearly on triadic (that is, post-Buxtehude/Bach) principles, reveal the collision of two different musical traditions and the working-out of their synthesis in composed melodies. This essay and conference paper are a chance to try out that hypothesis. Research on this just started, but it's one I've thought about (and experienced, as a player) a lot over the years so I don't anticipate too much trouble in cranking it out. I expect my copy of Fleischmann's Sources of Irish Traditional Music, which I snagged at an outrageous discount at the AMS meetings about 6 years ago, will get quite a workout.

Conference paper for national meetings of Society for Ethnomusicology, held in my old friend Matthew Allen's old stomping grounds of Wesleyan university. I'm on a panel exploring the uses of music to create community and contexts in the Irish Diaspora. Haven't even begun this conference text, but I've presented on my own on this topic at various conferences, and published, and I've got fifteen years practical experience at using the music for precisely this purpose, so I expect that writing to proceed pretty freely and intuitively.

Writing review questions for publisher of a new music-appreciation textbook. This is contract writing, which pays a pittance, but it's a good thing to do, both for the CV and because it helps sharpen a critical eye one can apply to one's own writing--which is never wasted investment of time.

Continuing to work on my part of the co-authored music-appreciation text for Prentice-Hall. I've been recruited as the author for "Rock" sections (not the topic I would have selected myself--I'd be more comfortable with "Jazz" or "World", but "Rock" is what they had open). It's the first time I've worked on an entire book MS with multiple authors and with a team of editors, and it's proving to be an interesting discipline, to write to order (which I've done a lot), according to another party's multiple and occasionally shifting timetables (which I've done less), and according to a working- and text-organizing-method which is not my own (which I've done very little). Have to (a) try to leave space in the daily writing schedule to respond to editorial requests and (b) refrain from feeling obligated to crank out specific items within 24 hours of their being requested. I don't like having stuff sitting on my desk's (or desktop's) "Inbox"--am much happier "clearing to empty" as the Getting Things Done folks call it--but this compulsion can work against me if I drop other stuff I'm in the middle of.

And, all of that above leaves aside the garden stone I want to lay, the 2-hours-minimum of daily practicing, the 40 daily minutes on the elliptical, and all the other stuff I "told myself" I was going to do this summer.

Gotta get to work.

Below the jump: His Highness sleeping peacefully, post-tranquillized haircut and shearing (he picks up burrs easily but will fight tooth-and-nail to avoid having the resultant mats combed or cut). Below that, the "no papparazzi please" shot. One of the things I like about cats--and you can see it in this shot--is that they're never really tamed; they are always essential feral. And if you die, they'll eat you without compunction.

I like that.

[thanks to the Rev for the "fuzzy people" appellation]

Keepin' on

Nice pub session tonight.

Working today on the minstrelsy project, a book-chapter spun-off from that manuscript, and specifically the antebellum environments in which Irish and African immigrants might have interacted musically. Various scholars (Lott, Lhamon, and Cockrell) have identified the "liminal" public spaces of streets, markets, wharves, and docks as likely sites. One or two have commented on the possibility that blackface (burnt-cork faces, banjo-and-fiddle music, quasi-African dialect, novelty dance, etc) might have come down the Hudson into Manhattan from Albany--where German-tradition "Pinkster" (Pfingston) celebrations, and maybe some of the Anglo-Celtic Wrenboy/Whiteboy disguise and costume, had brought masking and inversion into the Anglo-American cultural mix--where they interacted with free-black musical inspirations, especially dancing. What hasn't been commented upon, to my knowledge, is the extent to which a large number of the early blackface practitioners (certainly TD Rice, GW Dixon, and Dan Emmett), whether born in the rural or urban North or the rural South, had direct and extensive experience in the maritime and riverine communities of the Ohio, Mississippi, Hudson, (and Long Island, which everybody seems to forget), and, especially, the new canals.

There was an explosion of canal-building throughout the continent's north-eastern quadrant from the 'Teens onward, after Robert Fulton's successful 1807 voyage in the steamship Clermont had shown a cheap and fast way to navigate new and artificial waterways without either sail or tow-horses. Being able to carry tons of raw material or manufactured goods, livestock or timber or furs, up as well as downstream, anyplace you could drive an 8-foot channel, transformed American commerce (the Erie, for example, cut transport costs ninety-five per cent). And it made canal-building, throughout the first half of the 19th century until the advent of the railroads, a huge growth industry.

And the people who designed and built those canals, respectively and overwhelmingly, were English and Irish: Englishmen who had learned the trade right around 1800, in the Industrial boom which had fuelled England's (eventual) victory over Napoleon, and the Irish who had actually developed the specialized skills necessary to dig, shore, and seal the canal's beds. There are advertisements in newspapers throughout the period seeking specifically "Irish" or "colored" workers and assuring both groups that they need not fear conflict with their competitors. And they were everywhere:

1777 Delaware & Raritan Canal
1792 Lowell Canals, built in Chelmsford by Irish laborers from Charlestown
1818 Manayunk Canal (Philly)
1819 Wabash Canal
1826 Erie Canal
1828 advertising for “colored” laborers to work the Penn canal
[Mar 11, 1828] LABORERS 500 Colored Men dry work, on the PENNSYLVANIA CANAL. THE subscriber wishes to hire five hundred colored-men, to work on the ... place. frequent quarrels which h between Irish and Colored will be avoided at this place, as no men are employed on this section of the Canal; ...From Delaware Patriot And American Watchman (Newspaper)
1827-1848 Illinois and Michigan canal
1852-55 Sault Canal (MS)

Irish laborers even built the Pontchartrain Canal (in the 1830s) and settled the "Irish Channel" of New Orleans.

Rice and Dixon were traveling actors both of whom claimed they had got their early repertoire in the "frontier" towns in which they toured, including Louisville (on the Ohio) and New Orleans (on the Mississippi). Rice was born in Manhattan and grew up on the East River docks. Joe Sweeney, who grew up in Virginia, had heard black roustabouts on the Cincinnati wharves. Dan Emmett was born on the Ohio frontier. There is simply no way that these men did not hear both Africans and Irish singing, dancing, and playing on the liminal boundaries of the rivers and canals they knew so well.

This is where minstrelsy was born: not in the cities, but also not in the Deep South. Not on the plantations, but also not in incompetent imitations of imagined folkways. It was born in direct observation of the "in-between" places in which men like this were creating America's popular music:

"The Office" (workstation series) 092 (Here-we-go-again edition)

Going to give myself one more day-off as per my original 5/17/08 post ("on hiatus until June 1"), as we're still jet-lagged from 30-hour return from China tour, and I've a hell of a lot to do this week, before heading off to help staff Zoukfest, which I'll be blogging as I did last year. But, "The Office" work continues: one of the major projects I have to crank up in the second 2/3 of the summer is the rewrite of 2 chapters and the composition of at least 3 more for the minstrelsy project.

We're still here, we're still in there punching.

More tomorrow.

Day 63 "In the trenches" (landscape in the sky edition)

Thursday/Hump Day of the pledge drive. Landscape's in the sky today--65mph winds and a whole lot of dust from off the cotton fields is in the atmosphere now. Lots of meetings today, lots of stuff to deal with--but also a good lesson with flute student, and a good meeting with the Diaspora seminar. The latter's lecture always a very interesting one, because it's where we present blackface minstrelsy, from its earliest roots in the 1830s solo song-and-dance performances of George Washington Dixon ("Zip Coon") and Thomas "Daddy" Rice ("Jump Jim Crow"), through the proto-pop bands like the Virginia Minstrels (who both created the idiom of American pop music, and left a raft of imitators in their wake across America and in Ireland and the British Isles as well), and into vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, radio comedy, early "Talkies", and beyond.

Interesting challenge: I've been thinking quite consciously about blackface minstrelsy for at least the last three years (and, as a white musician largely involved with studying and performing black music for three decades, subjected constantly to the suspicion of exploitative or appropriative behavior throughout those decades), and so I see the tropes and echoes of the idiom throughout the balance of American popular culture. And, maybe because I've been thinking about it hard, writing about it, and reading great scholarship about it, I've come to see and to employ the nuanced thinking its noxious racism and undeniable artistic brilliance both demand.

Most students haven't: the youngsters perhaps have never heard of the idiom, find its racial caricatures absurd (and unfamiliar), and thus don't feel much knee-jerk guilt about enjoying its comic brilliance and musical pleasures, especially in the post-blackface idioms of vaudeville, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Laurel & Hardy. The ones who are a bit older and more sophisticated do have an awareness of the racist implications in those later idioms, and are still uncomfortable with how to think about the conflicting issues of racism versus genius. So the task of the lecture is to both convey the history and to encourage a more direct, nuanced, thoughtful, historical, and critical response to the idiom and its paradoxes. An interesting pedagogical problem.

You have to begin from first principles: taking them back to the original actuality of the idiom--the caricatures of big lips and rolling eyes, ragged clothes and sashaying akimbo gait, and the implications of those; but also to the subversive, mocking, cakewalking cultural critique that both Anglo and African blackface slipped into their entertainments. There are versions of all the canonic blackface songs--"Jump Jim Crow", "Zip Coon", "Old Dan Tucker", and the rest--which go into great, lengthy, and very detailed social and cultural critique: just like the calypsonians of Trinidad, the sambistas of Salvador, and reaching all the way to the mocking praise-and-blame songs of the West African jeliyat.

It's worthwhile remembering a couple of things about blackface: (1) that it became a media phenomenon in the 1830s-'40s, which was precisely the same period during which Andrew Jackson's presidency had radically realigned public conceptions about who wasn't, or was, newly entitled to a vote in the democracy. Prior to Jackson's victory in the 1828 Presidential elections, the franchise was essentially limited to white males who were landowners. This was consistent with the British parliamentary model upon which the Republic was founded, which presumed that, even in the House of Commons, you had to own land in order to stand for Parliament. But the 1820s saw the US franchise extended to a much wider, much poorer, and (thus) more radical demographic. They were Jackson's constituency, and they (and their new power) scared the shit out of the old Anglo-Anglican aristocracy who had largely run the early Republic. So when TD Rice, in one version of "Jump Jim Crow" from 1832, sang:

Should dey get to fighting,
Perhaps de blacks will rise,
For deir wish for freedom,
Is shining in deir eyes...

Cho: Wheel about and turn about and do just so
Ev'ry time I wheel about I Jump Jim Crow

I'm for freedom,
An for Union altogether,
Aldough I'm a black man,
De white is call'd my brother.

He was preaching what was, in the context, revolution. And by doing it in the motley guise of "Jim Crow," or "Dan Tucker," or "Zip Coon," they reach back to the oldest archetypes of both European and African carnivale, and to that festival's mocking, wheeling, cakewalking critique of power.

In the guise of the Fool.

The great Eddie "Rochester" Anderson:

Dooley Wilson:

Ethel Waters and Eddie Anderson:

Duke Ellington, Buck & Bubbles, and the Hall Johnson Choir:


These people were geniuses. That they had to play caricatured roles in order to accomplish their genius lessens not their greatness, but only our own sense of entitlement to old and wrong valuations of culture.

Below the jump: landscape-in-the-sky; Springtime Blow on the South Plains.

"The Office" (workstation series) 089 (keep-on-keeping-on edition)

Meta: In this, the third weekend of the semester, I can definitely tell I'm back from sabbatical. Dharmonia's out of town, but so far I can still keep to the schedule that's shaping up: whereas over the course of the sabbatical, it was five-days-a-week of "The Office" series (charting research and development of the minstrelsy book proposal), and weekends were for "100 Greats", the procedure that's come into focus for the semester of return is five-days-a-week of "In the Trenches", with weekends for "Office" work and, when I can give birth to 'em, the last third of the "100 Greats." Even if the topics of the various series are different, they share reasonably consistent goals: to use this medium to try to boost the transparency of a public scholar's life, either for the morale or sense of solidarity of those in parallel situations--that is, colleagues, or for the (hoped-for) edification of those who are aiming toward this kind of life--that is, students.

So the "Trenches" series is an attempt to make-more-transparent the 5-days-a-week reality of teaching musicology to undergraduate and graduate populations; the "100 Greats" an attempt to both turn folks on to great music (the High Fidelity "Top 5 records" syndrome; cf the "Comic Book Guy" on The Simpsons) but also to try to show how great music might help shape, and save, somebody's life and sanity; the "Office" series to depict the process by which a large-scale project of musicological research might be conceived, mapped, pursued, and submitted for publication.

I suppose it's metaphorically apt that all three of those are still very much works in progress. That's life, I guess.

Back to "Office" work today: I will be waiting on notifications from the target publisher's outside readers for some time yet (at least another 3-5 weeks, I'd guess), so the only work I can/should do on the minstrelsy project would be that work I know I want to do anyway, regardless of the readers' favorable/un- reaction. So I'm filling in the gaps in some of the background reading:

• Robert Toll's Blacking Up, one of the important and relatively early (1974) studies of blackface. I didn't prioritize this in the initial Lit Review for the proposal, because Toll's book is mostly about the shows and their content, not their cultural/sociological intent or meaning (cf Lott and Lhamon), their roots in European carnival as well as African festival (cf Cockrell), their musical construction (Nathan) or performance practice (Carlin). And its focus is late: the shows only really became the focus of the idiom in the mid-1840s, which is approximately where Toll begins. I'm interested in the 'Teens and '20s, when the creole, improvisational, boundary-crossing street idioms that would be borrowed for the stage were first coming together on the Lower East Side;
• Lynne Emery's 1972 Black Dance, to which I'm returning, having previously read and note-taken, because the proposal in its final form identified movement vocabularies (specifically as captured in my target painter's oils) are going to be a key topic for analysis of cross-cultural borrowing; re-reading a good text in light of an evolved thesis is never a bad idea, because you see different things than when you are looking for evidence of a prior thesis;
• Leonard Curry's The Free Black in Urban America, 1800-1850, because another theme that has emerged throughout the research, particularly in the urban outskirts of antebellum New York (to north, west, and east of the city--especially on Long Island), is that free versus bonded and white versus black categorizations were nowhere near as consistent, impermeable, or contemporaneous as as been thought. The reality is that, even if there were not a great deal of mixed-race children born, outside the very low-income environs of Five Points, where blacks and whites, natives and immigrants lived, worked, danced, and slept together, there was a great deal of cultural exchange, and that cultural exchange blurred not only cultural but also racial boundaries. My crucial insight: that such blurring of cultural/racial/musical boundaries happened in rural areas--very much ignored by the scholarship, in favor of the more colorful, better-documented urban environments.

Gotta go to work.

[Oh, and by the way: if you're within striking distance of the South Plains, feel free to come out for this]

----------------
Now playing: Dave Swarbrick & Martin Carthy - The Pepperpot/Sailing Into Walpole's Marsh/Bunker Hill

Day 04 "In the Trenches" (Web 2.0 edition); also "Office" 88

Not a lot of time to blog today, but herewith update on "Trenches" and "Office":

Monday of first full week of the spring semester. Kids are sleepy (probably most of them stayed up all weekend, trying to prolong the sense of still being on winter break) but not unresponsive. Today was "what is 'modernism' and how did it differ from the previous 'romanticism'?"

We tend to teach the "Modern Period" section of our three-semester undergraduate music history sequence as the history of about 140 yea,rs (say, the Wagner Tristan Prelude of 1857 to the Reich Different Trains of 1990) as a chronology of the interaction, contention, modification, and evolution of "Isms"--that is, of artistic philosophies which are usually subsumed under the heading of "Romanticism" or "Impressionism" or "Serialism" and so forth. This lets us link the wild diversification of musical style (the "SHRMG" characteristics) in the period with the diversification of the influencing artistic and compositional philosophies. So we can teach "exoticism" in music, but also painting, or theatre, or poetry, and we can look at all of these other art forms as we listen to Rimsky or Ravel or Chavez, and try to find the artistic links. These kids tend to be incredibly responsive to such cross-media investigation, because it is after all how they take in most information about their world: not through text, but through the juxtaposition of diverse information sources. They're great at iconographic analysis, for example: they have very good interpretive insights, though they have trouble distinguishing between a subjective observation ("this music sounds sad") and an analytical insight ("this music uses a lot of minor chords, slow tempos, and falling melodic lines").

Nevertheless, they are very responsive and very intuitive, and very receptive to the task of interpretation. Our main job is to keep pulling them back to concrete analytical language and insights, and to help them see that the subjective observations that the music elicits are both constructed (by composers making "SHRMG choices") and intentional. That's why we call the course "Music AS Cultural History."

In "Office" news: today sent in a second chapter, at Editor's request, so that she could include that chapter in the package of materials that goes to outside readers. These readers are charged with the task of reading the samples, the prospectus, the Table of Contents, and making a conclusion regarding whether (a) the project fills an existing gap in the literature and (b) the project has a research design--and fundamental writing chops--sufficient to make an original contribution to the literature. So, as submitting author, you try to provide enough sample material, and a sufficiently-detailed descriptor, that the outside readers both understand and empathize with the project--but you avoid sending material that either (a) can't stand on its own without the rest of the manuscript or (b) isn't sufficiently polished to make a positive impression.

Not all presses permit you to either suggest or even know the readers--adhering to some archaic bullshit "blind review" standard, which in practice just increases the odds that the outside readers might be obtuse, disinterested, or actively hostile (I've had a few of those), but some presses do permit you to know--or at least to suggest sympatico candidates. I am fortunate enough to be in the latter situation, so was able to suggest 4 outside readers who were familiar with my prior work (in fact, had served on my tenure review committee) and also with the topic.

Unexpectedly, I have recently been able to suggest a fifth candidate for outside reader--a noted scholar who happened across this very blog, and the name of my antebellum painter, and was interested enough to read, and collegial enough to write to me, about the topic. He's also agreed to serve.

The above is thus a huge relief--the project is off my desk until such time as the Editor gets back to me, but at the same time, I can be reasonably confident that the proposal is receiving a detailed, sympathetic, and useful critical review. That's the way the "community of scholars" is supposed to work.

"The Office" (workstation series) 87 (cranking-out edition)

Got an "Office" edition today--"In the Trenches" is weekday teaching stuff, but this weekend is for book stuff. Hafta teach the Slow Session later today, and do a radio program either today or tomorrow, as well as write a couple of recommendation letters.

But the priority is the next step in the book - contract - hunt: editor has expressed interest to see additional chapters. I had previously sent a prospectus (overall description of the project's contribution to existing literature, and the format that the study would take), a CV, a Table of Contents, and one sample internal chapter. Had thought of also including the draft "Introduction" chapter, which included both the typical "this is why the study is important and here's what I'm gonna do" material, but also comprehensive Literature Review which I assembled for my own internal reference and sense/shape of the argument.

The problem is that a Literature Review really has no specific role in a scholarly book. It's something you write for a dissertation, and is mandated in that medium--because your committee needs to be convinced that (a) you have thought through the implications of your study, (b) know the existing literature, and (c) are not overlapping existing scholarship. And, in that respect, it's an invaluable part of the learning-to-write-scholarship training. And such a review has to be a stage in the creation of every scholarly text.

However, it's really superfluous in a piece of published scholarship: you still have to do the work, and have the command of the literature, but that command need not be exhaustively displayed for the general reader. Hence, the Literature Review is usually the very first component to be yanked out by editors in the process of transforming a dissertation into a book. Even more so, the inclusion of a Literature Review in a submitted manuscript almost literally signals "I'm still thinking like a dissertating graduate student."

So I've yanked the Lit Review out of my own introductory chapter. I still have it in my back pocket, and both the information (and perhaps much of the language) it contains will show up in one or another spot in the final manuscript--typically this would be in the parallel running commentary enabled by the footnotes (my mentor Peter Burkholder said: "you can have a whole parallel secondary argument going in the footnotes if you handle them right"). This is good, because it means that those readers who want/need to see how your argument fits into the jigsaw puzzle of existing scholarship can reference the footnotes--but those primarily interested in the argument itself, and its narrative, can skip the footnotes and keep the thread of the main text.

So Lit Review goes on the shelf for the moment, though it'll be referenced throughout the final-drafting process. And I polish the balance of the Introduction, sans Lit Review, to a high gleam, so that it, along with the internal chapter already submitted, can help persuade outside readers of the validity and solidity of the proposed manuscript.

And it needs to go in on Monday. Gotta go!

Last duties 2007

Finished last duties of 2007 last night: Celtic Christmas went off without a hitch. After 6 years, most of the participants have multiple iterations under their belts, and know what's expected of them, and goes about the business of getting it done with a minimum of fuss or high-maintainence. Celtic Ensemble played like champs, guest artists gave their best, all the various dancers were great, we took in bunches of donations, sold 500 tickets and around 30 CD's, and got everybody out of the hall and safe home in the aftermath. A bunch of the kids came to our place for the after-party, and ate like locusts (fortunately, I know that about them and had prepared a ton of food in advance).

After we shooed them off home, old buddy Roger and I sat, talking through the minstrelsy project, and killing most of a bottle of Bushmills, until just before dawn. Hence the late start and the slow day.

Ringing out the old year, 'round here. If you're traveling be safe.

And be kind.

See it deh!

A-yi-hah, jamdung
See it deh, proposal done!
Selah!

[paraphrasing the final lines of Michael Thelwell's great Jamaican novel The Harder They Come]

Color it gone: proposal for Ethnomusicology in Oils: William Sidney Mount and American Music's Creole Synthesis is out the door, one day in advance. On May 1 I targeted December 15 as a self-imposed deadline--the technical last day of my Fall 2007 sabbatical--for doing the reading, research, archival work, and writing necessary to complete a proposal to my target university publisher, whose Music in American Life series is the ideal home for the manuscript.

Package went out the door a little before 12noon MDT today.

DONE, baby!

I think I'll go have a couple of fingers of whiskey. And a nap.

"The Office" (workstation series) 81 (T-minus-4 edition)

Winding down the semester now. Set Dharmonia up for her 7:30am final exam; met with Super TA's for Fall semester post mortem: great ideas coming out of that which we hope to implement in Spring 08 semester; met with other assistants to winnow and select proposals for national conference; finish writing Literature.

Book proposal drops in 4 days. I'm in the place I more-or-less expected to be at this point; e.g., not as far along as I could be, but with a 4-day cushion for the target date and materials I set: I'm done now with the stuff I want to send Saturday.

One of the most valuable composition lessons I ever learned, from my revered teacher David Baker, was that, if you're involved in a creative process and have to take a pause, you should not "finish at a logical spot." In other words, don't keep working until you've run out of stuff to think of or do--but rather, work in a given session until you can see clearly the next two or three steps, and then don't complete them. Put the project down knowing that you can return in the next session already seeing the next two or three steps you had intended: this makes it relatively straightforward to get back into the creative process that was flowing so well last time.

So the Introduction, Literature Review, and Chapter Six ("Instruments' Commanding Power: Recovering the African-American Roots of Minstrelsy") are done, along with a detailed (down to the level of the sub-headings) Table of Contents--but I'm not going to send them all. There are multiple stages to the writing process of any extended work, and some of those stages of writing will never appear in the final product. You write them so you know what you would say if the opportunity or need arose. Hemingway used to preach the wisdom of writing--but not printing--the back-story of various secondary or tertiary characters, because he believed that the author simply knowing the backstory would enrich her/his ability to sketch the character in a few lines of dialogue.

So with scholarly writing. There is so much reading, and thinking, and note-taking, and skimming, and talking, and writing, and re-writing, and re-re-writing, that at the end of a given day you cannot know whether what you've written will wind up in the finished product. And, that material winding up in the finished product is not the point--the point is to work through the intellectual process of articulating the ideas. Thus, with this Literature Review (included as part of a 90-page "Introduction"), I'm not at all sure it will all end up in the final product. The Literature Review is one of the sections most rigorously demanded by a dissertation committee and it's usually the first chunk of the manuscript that an academic publisher yanks out again in considering whether the dissertation is publishable as a book.

The point is that you write the Literature Review, and the thousands of pages of notes, and the detailed exegesis of the gaps and absences and lacunae in everybody else's prior scholarship, primarily in order to complete the intellectual focusing-task of figuring out what the hell you yourself are contributing. And that writing, even if it gets yanked out of the dissertation in transition to the book, or is never even read by a dissertation committee, or by anyone but the author, can still be an essential part of the process.

A while back, in these notes, I described this composition method, of writing everything I could think of and then thinking of the "through-line" to the narrative, as being like planting an entire field of succulents and only subsequently mowing down everything that wasn't a tomato. It's a cumbersome method, but it's how I learned to write from a position of authority--of feeling sufficiently confident that I knew what was and wasn't there that, like Hemingway, I could sketch an argument with a few sentences or a single metaphor, knowing that the backstory (read, written, but excised from the final text) is sufficiently under control that my Hemingwayesque brevity is accurate and defensible.

So, the Lit Review is done, but won't go in--and also, not least, because it's always possible that the Outside Readers selected to pass judgment on the manuscript might be some of the same scholars whose work I've critiqued in it.

But at least I know what's there and what isn't.

Celtic Christmas drops same day as the book proposal. Sixth iteration, and it starts now to feel like tradition. One of the great benefits of growing old--and preferably, concurrently, growing at least a little bit of self-awareness and -reflection, is that you realize the link between "Now" and "The Future" lies in the present moment's choices. I didn't know, six years ago when we started the Celtic Christmas, that it would grow to be a family and community tradition, here where the only model for "Celtic" culture was giant Scottish Games aimed at selling shit.

But what I did know was that, if there was ever to be a chance that people in this, or any, North American materialistic oligarchic consumer-shit-oriented community were ever going to experience the basic sanity of traditional values ("work hard, pay attention to the seasons, keep your temper, cooperate with your neighbors, get up early, enjoy happiness because it's fleeting and leave sorrow for its own inevitable timetable"), we were going to have to start building somewhere. I didn't know if we'd ever be able to build the tradition which now, after six years and even if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, is starting to take root.

What I did know was that, if we didn't get started, in the wake of 9/11's insanity, we were just putting off the payoff and worsening the odds.

So we built something. Payoff comes all along the way.
----------------
Now playing: Dick Gaughan - Stand Up For Judas

"The Office" (workstation series) 79 (VMC weekend edition)

Another quick hit: weather's turned cold (shift to the Great Plains Blue Northers), old friends in town to play for the CD release parties--gigs Thursday and last nights, another tomorrow afternoon, final rehearsals for Celtic Ensemble at Celtic Xmas, finalizing turning in grades (or, to be honest, mostly helping colleagues not on sabbatical get their grading done), toting PA systems, slow session to teach today.

I've ramped the political commentary 'way down on this blog, because it's too easy (and too depressing) to just run drive-by commentary on the insanity and criminality of the Bush administration. But that don't mean they're off my radar.

I am coming to believe that the magnitude of their crimes, including war crimes, torture, murder, trillion-dollar graft and corruption, and the intentional subversion of both the Constitution and the rule of law, will not be forgotten when--as I'm convinced--they lose another 25-35 seats in the House, 6-8 in the Senate, and the White House. I believe that, given for example Sheldon Whitehouse's recent revelations about the breadth and intentionality of the crimes, there will be criminal indictments. I believe that there is that much anger and that the crimes of sufficiently gross magnitude.

Celtic Xmas drops a week from today.

7 days to proposal deadline.

"The Office" (workstation series) 76 (One Big Note edition)

Quick hit this morning, which I'll return to edit and expand later: have to run off in a few minutes and lead the traditional end-of-semester in-class freshman performance of Terry Riley's 1964 masterpiece IN C. Riley, along with Lamonte Young and, a little later, Steve Reich (my favorite) and Phillip Glass, was one of the early architects of the Euro-American concert music revolution misleadingly labeled "minimalism"--which label, at the time, was assigned because the music allegedly made use of "minimal" musical materials. It was music of seemingly lengthy repetition, in which musical change (and musical material) was presented very slowly. It tended, like the African and East & South Asian musics which were its inspiration, to provoke very strong critical reactions, either for or against: the critics, who were still stoking the fires of serialism's "music is a research science and it doesn't matter if people like to listen to it" 1950s academic paradigm (most notoriously exemplified in the title assigned to a Scientific American article by Milton Babbitt: "Who Cares If You Listen?"--which was not Babbitt's selection) mostly hated minimalism, because it subverted most of the last 150 years of musical aesthetics: "density is good", "only complicated music is 'serious' music", "harmony is the most important experimental parameter", "if it's popular it can't be art" and so forth. Serialism, which had begun as a remarkably prescient and courageous experiment by Arnold Schoenberg attempting to invent a new mode of organizing large-scale compositions in the early '20s, by the mid '60s had a stranglehold on academic composers: if you didn't compose using the serial technique (compose a "row" of the 12 chromatic pitches which must then be compositionally employed in strict "serial" order, without repetition), you couldn't get tenure, couldn't get accepted into a composition studio, and didn't get the government grants.

"Minimalism" (I like Reich's term "process" music--e.g., "music about processes", not objects--better) defied that. Mostly coming from non-East Coast, non-European-trained, non-tenured or -academic composers, minimalism looked at the entire rest of the world of music, and at the changing social contexts for music in 1960s America, and asked itself whether all those presumptions cited above were necessary. Minimalism was interested in giving control--or at least choice--back to performers, at breaking down barriers between performers and audiences, at subverting the cult of the virtuoso and of the Promethean composer, and at re-connecting to music as a processual experience instead of a contemplative object. The people who liked minimalist music--in contrast to the critics cited above--tended to be the same people who were responding positively to the 1960s social and cultural revolutions.

IN C is a series of 53 short melodic fragments between 2 and around 9 beats long, each with a distinctive rhythmic shape, sketched across a single large sheet of manuscript paper and number 1-53 (the whole score is that one page). Riley instructs that, to the accompaniment of an unchanging eighth-note high C played on piano or mallets, all players--in any number or combination of instruments--will begin with fragment 1 and play each subsequent fragment in succession. The performer's input comes not in the melodic material or in the sequencing, but rather in the number of repetitions each player gives to each fragment: all begin on #1, and must repeat the fragment at least twice. But thereafter, player A may choose to move immediately to #2, while player B remains on #1 for some additional number of repetitions. All players play all fragments in strict sequence, but each player may choose individually the number of repetitions.

So what happens is that, within a fairly constant 8th-note rhythmic pulse, the parts begin together, but then rapidly move "out of phase" with one another (another early term for the idiom was "phase" music, though the early John Cage title Music of Changes, attached to a period composition not in this idiom, is an equally accurate and far more lovely and evocative descriptor). So the relationship between parts, the "polyphony", is constantly changing, is shaped by the individual players, and is unique to each individual performance.

It's a masterful balance of pre-composition and moment-by-moment player choice, and the experience of playing it, like the experience of playing Shona panpipes dances, or akadinda xylphone, or Ghanian percussion music, or Javanese gamelan, is marvelously immediate and engrossing for the players. It's music that seeks, not to "begin at measure 1 and play through in strict regimented perfection to measure Infinity", but rather to set up an experiential field, within which parts, players, and audience all interact with one another.

The kids love it. They hear a description and then a good recorded performance early in the Freshman semester (as the free jazz players say, "It was when I learned I could make a mistake that I knew I was on to a viable approach"), and then the last day of the semester, when they're hammered with data, woefully short of sleep (due to all-nighters resulting from bad time management), and scared about looming finals, we cut them loose in the classroom--all players and singers, all instruments--on a performance of IN C. It's good for them physically, and also emotionally: as close to meditation as you can get and still be playing a piece of ensemble music.

Tends to send them out the door feeling better. Or at least more like musicians.

10 days to proposal deadline.