Blog Blog Blog

Is it just me, or has the world of musicology blogs lately been a bit...well, humdrum? I certainly haven't been helping matters myself, but what's going on? Are we all bored with blogging all of a sudden? Is all of the energy of technically-adept musicologists going into maintaining the job wiki?

Oh well. But if you haven't been checking out our group blog Musicology/Matters recently (and you would be forgiven for not doing so, as Kariann and I have barely been posting anything as of late), amble over. Currently in the top spot is a very interesting post by the illustrious (and now-employed) CPO about everyone's favorite topic: the job market.

SAM Roundup

San Antonio? Funny town. Feels a bit like Disneyland, complete with an alcoholic version of the Jungle Cruise. And then there is that "Alamo" thing in the middle of town. Everyone says it is smaller in real life, and so I was expecting it to be small. But really, it is tiny. But as they say, it's not how big your metaphor for Texan liberty is, it's how you use it.

My paper went very well, the panel even better. Our two papers went together very nicely, I thought, giving a glimpse of the beginning and the end of identity politics. We were missing our third panelist, but it did mean that we had actual time for discussion afterwards, which was nice.

SAM is, as I said earlier, a lovely group of people, and the conferences are a ton of fun. I wonder sometimes what will happen to it in the future. It used to be that to research American music made you something of a dissident in musicology. That's no longer true, now that (most of) the big programs are turning out Americanists in droves. If one of the best places to study American music is Harvard...well, it means being an Americanist is something very different.

Similarly, going to SAM always reminds me that it's not exactly ideologically neutral to study the music of the most powerful country in the world, and I wish more of us would acknowledge that fact. And perhaps also acknowledge that our work has often been sustained by the state itself. Oscar Sonneck, after all, worked for the Library of Congress. And many of the pioneering scholars of American music had explicit ties to the government. A few conferences back there was a big tribute to the pioneering Americanist Gilbert Chase. At one point, almost in passing, someone mentioned that just as he was writing America's Music from the Pilgrims to the Present, he was also a longtime employee of the State Department in the 1950s. People working in the discipline of American Studies have been much more successful than we have, I think, in acknowledging what it means to be an "Americanist" in a time where that is a rather fraught political identity in the world. I know SAM as an organization has been trying to promote more transnational work, and to expand our scope to include all of the Americas. But so far, I don't think it's quite caught on. And even beyond expanding scope, there's a lot more self-reflexivity that could be occurring. Just my two cents, and not original cents at that. I fully admit I'm still trying to figure it out in my own work.

New Blog

My friend Kariann and I have started a group music blog, the optimistically titled "Musicology/Matters." Our idea is that we're going pick occasional themes that we'll both post about, and then also invite friends, colleagues, and interesting strangers to contribute posts as well. I know a lot of people who don't blog because of the perceived time/energy commitment, so this seemed like a nice way to let more people get their voices out their in a stress-free environment. Or even people who have their own blogs; I plan on cross-posting willy-nilly.

Kariann has led things off by talking about the distinction between music we like and the music we study. I'll post something on this subject soon myself, although I'm a little socked in with work at the moment. I'm on fellowship at the moment so theoretically I have lots of time, but somehow job applications, dissertation writing, and Echo-ing (new issue coming out very soon!) manages to fill the days pretty well.

Want to contribute? Let one of us know!

AMS Roundup Pt. 1

Phew! Now that was a long weekend. And mine was shorter than most--due to scheduling exigencies, I didn't get to Quebec until Friday afternoon, and for the first time in my academic life, I wished that a conference was longer. Too many papers missed, too many friends I barely saw (sorry M3!), not enough schmoozing with distinguished elders. Matters were not helped by my travel schedule: it began Thursday evening, when Mary and I drove to NYC to pick up a friend after her recital, and then drove five hours north through horrible traffic, touching down at my aunt's house in Vermont at about 3:30 am. We were up at 8 to drive the rest of the way, and believe you me, I was a bit worse for the wear for the rest of the weekend.

Anyway.

Good Papers

• Carol Oja's look at Leonard Bernstein's revisions to Wonderful Town to de-gay and de-communize things just as Jerome Robbins was testifying before HUAC. I need to get myself back to the Library of Congress.
  
• Melissa de Graaf's look at a lost opera by Paul Bowles, about a slave revolt. Melissa gets such great stuff out of the Composer's Forum transcripts--this being a New Deal program that presented new music in public concerts where audience members could ask the composers questions afterwards. The results were transcribed, and you get an amazingly unmediated peak at what people like Bowles were thinking.
  
• The whole "Analyzing Jazz" panel on Saturday morning. I unfortunately missed the first paper, but the three I saw were great. I have very ambivalent feelings about jazz scholarship, usually. 90% of it studies music that is in my period--the late forties and early fifties--but is music that I don't particularly care about, aesthetically speaking. And vice versa. I don't think I have ever seen jazz scholarship on bop acknowledge actual popular music of the period, which is to say the people I have a diss chapter about: Patti Page, Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, etc. By 1950, when jazz scholars are all so het up about Miles Davis, about one in ten American homes had a copy of Patti Page singing "The Tennessee Waltz." And while that statistic probably skews a bit white, it does so less than you'd think. This all said, everyone this panel talked about music I'm just not that into in ways that made me wish I were. Brigid Cohen's Wolpe paper gets a particular shoutout.
  
• Finally, there was a really great session on Friday night lead by the Cold War Study Group. It was at perhaps the single worst time for a panel--8-11pm on a Friday night--but it was really great. So great that I'm going to devote a single post to it, in particular Tamara Levitz's fabulous call to arms, and the tension between "the Cold War" and "McCarthyism." Stay tuned.

Undoubtedly Good Papers I Wish I Had Seen

• I missed every single paper by my colleagues at UCLA, and one by my undergraduate advisor. Sorry about that. I'm a horrible person.
  
• There are a bunch of grad students my age who are doing work on American experimental music, work that is interesting, rather than boring. Three of them gave papers at this AMS--Ben Piekut, Ryan Dohoney, and Kelsey Cowger--and I missed them all. I've seem these papers elsewhere, though, and they are all very exciting.
  
• Phil and Ryan's festival of the musicological internets.

Since this blog is not anonymous, there were No Bad Papers at this AMS.