Rambling about Requirements

I haven't written in a while because I've been preoccupied with the end of the summer session and the grading that entails. Now that all the madness has ended and I have finished teaching my first solo course, it's time to take stock of events.

On the first day of class, all twenty-five of my students raised their hands when I asked them if they were taking my course to satisfy a requirement. I'd expected this. Academia is a business, and courses must be marketed and sold to a paying public (the students). Why else did I make promotional posters for my class?

Of course, it's not that simple. Students have to meet requirements, and sometimes there are precious few options for meeting these requirements. So a collection of scientists, sociologists, psychologists, athletes, and classics majors found themselves studying opera, when maybe they would rather have studied painting or design or poetry. Only four or five had ever seen an opera before, and most were not able to tell me what opera was on the first day. By the last day of class, they had certainly learned something.

Still, some people were texting or surfing the web during class; others stared vacantly into space. I found myself wondering what life would be like if there were no requirements. Perhaps all my students would be equally excited about the material? After all, the students don't have much particular say in what their requirements are: the requirements represent the university's idea of things all students should know something about. The administration is big brother, and even your education is not entirely in your hands.

There is a counterargument. The students knew what they were getting into when they joined this university, and if they didn't like the university's set of requirements, they could have gone somewhere else. So they have agreed to these conditions of their education, and the university is not big brother after all.

On the other hand, if we didn't have a requirement system, would I even get to teach a course on opera? Courses stand or fall by the number of students enrolled in them, which makes it profitable (or not) for the university to offer them. Without requirements, courses would fill only if they matched student interests quite closely. There might not be any particular demand for an opera course; opera's not exactly a popular form of American culture. Miley Cyrus is.

Perhaps, too, this entire discussion is an example of self-delusion. Perhaps students were apathetic simply because this was my first class? Surely my teaching technique could improve. Thinking about it, it's odd that our graduate students are not required to have any training in teaching in my department, even though we will probably spend our lives teaching if we make a success of our careers.

Or, perhaps, the 90-minute classes every day were simply too much for all of us, regardless of technique? That and the steaming summer heat hardly helped. And most of my students seemed to be taking a science class with a lab as well as my class; some of them probably came to opera to "relax."

Yet the students seemed to enjoy the class more as the semester went on. A brief poll suggested that their favorite opera was Carmen; the least favorite was Das Rheingold, although Wagner had some ardent defenders. Don Giovanni and Otello also had a number of admirers. I hardly expected - even though I was delighted - that one student would declare Wozzeck to be his favorite opera.

At the final, though, a number of the students thanked me for teaching the class. They seemed to have enjoyed it; maybe this required course stopped feeling like a chore and became informative and fun? It's hard to know, but I'd like to think the course transcended the inherent evils of the requirement system and became meaningful.

Meanwhile, I'm going to read more about teaching techniques. Whatever the truth of the matter, there's always room for improvement.

Portrait of the Artist as a Homeless Man

Last night I watched a movie about musicians. I tend to avoid such movies. Usually filmmakers cannot capture the reality of making music; hammy close-ups of the actors' faces are supposed to convey the meaning of the music. Composers always write their best work in reaction to a tragic event in their lives. And so on.

But the film I saw last night was different.

The Soloist is the story of Nathaniel, a schizophrenic homeless man (Jamie Foxx) who plays the violin and the cello. In a familiar plot twist, reporter Steve (Robert Downey, Jr.) discovers him playing on the streets. Both characters are socially maladjusted: Nathaniel hears disturbing voices, and Steve has no real friends. The film could easily lapse into triteness here, with each character "learning valuable life lessons" from the other, etc. Fortunately, director Joe Wright avoids the easy solutions (maybe he had to, since he based his film on a true story?).

For example, the only thing that keeps Nathaniel going is his love of music, particularly Beethoven. Yet Steve is never fully able to understand Nathaniel's love of music; at some level, music remains closed to him. The filmmakers do not construct an epiphany for Steve. Similarly, Nathaniel remains schizophrenic and untreated throughout the film. We don't have the Victorian tea-party apotheosis for the misunderstood that we might have had (and did get, for instance, in The Elephant Man).

This is by no means a perfect film. The editing was strange - disorienting in its abrupt cuts from scene to scene, from present to past - and I'm not talking about the parts that depicted Nathaniel's schizophrenia. But there were also touches of genius in it. The scene by the homeless shelter, set to the funeral march from the Eroica, is one of them. Who would have thought that Beethoven's music could express the horrors of modern American poverty so well?

Finally, and I am thankful for this, the film is not a polemic for classical music, not a piece ofhigh-culture propaganda (like those ever help anybody). Nathaniel loves Beethoven, and Steve visits a dim bar where a country band does not impress. But music is valued here for its own sake, not because of any cultural or social values attached to one genre or another. Art is valuable as long it is pursued with integrity. As Nathaniel says in one of his lucid moments, "Beauty is art; music is beauty."

One Man's Mozart Is Another Man's Weapon

You've heard this one: the genius kid in the back of your class grew up listening to Mozart. And he's smarter than you. (Or you think he is). Mozart = intelligence. Correlation = causation.

Apparently, the whole thing started with a misleading article that summarized and distorted another article.

At least, that's what this refreshing little article implies. (Yes, I'm aware of the irony: but I trust this summary article for some reason: it has a citation). The original study seems to have indicated that the effects of listening to Mozart only lasted about 15 minutes anyhow. According Frances Rauscher, the researcher who did the original study, it's actually possible to have the equivalent of the "Mozart effect" with any kind of music. I'm already thinking of a Weird Al effect. Or a didgeridoo effect.

We can all be glad that there's no longer a reason to link Mozart's music with intellectual superiority. That kind of musical elitism doesn't help anybody.

If we're going to speak of elitism and Mozart, we might as well think about the use of Mozart's music as a means of punishment, as a way of clearing teenagers from the streets. Especially in Great Britain, Mozart's music is used as a weapon against youth culture. The implication is that "undesirables" can be driven from parts of the city by the use of music, reserving those places for the people who do enjoy Mozart...who just so happen to be the kind of people already in powerA vicious cycle, and if it spreads, I think we should expect Mozart's popularity to severely decline in Great Britain as the current youth matures. I'm not sure this trend has everything to do with the "Mozart effect," but I suspect there's some causation as well as correlation here.

Of course, compared to the use of music by American soldiers in battle, and as a form of torture, the civic use of Mozart as a weapon is comparatively mild.

But it's a difference of degree, not kind. While the army tends to use Metallica rather than Mozart, the concept is pretty much the same: people are forced to listen to music they dislike or change their behavior.

Mozart, who believed that music "must never offend the ear," would be horrified.

Art, Entertainment, Charity: Extreme Cello

Do people think music is art or entertainment? Probably both. Let's just say that if you look for it in Google News, you find music news listed under "Entertainment," whereas the New York Times lists music under "Arts." Of course, Google News and the NYT are probably aiming toward slightly different audiences; the NYT features classical music reviews next to rock, rap, and jazz, while Google News's most popular or recent articles are about pop singers like Jessica Simpson and Katy Perry (or at least it was so when I was writing this column). In other words, the NYT is about what the NYT thinks ought to interesting, while Google tells you what people are interested in.

I'm not about to touch any kind of philosophical "what the nature of music ought to be" question. Rather, I'd like to tell you about something both artistic and entertaining: Extreme Cello.

Extreme Cello is a group of English cello-players from Sheffield - Claire, James, and Jeremy - who take on athletic and artistic challenges. Among other challenges, they have climbed the tallest mountains in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, carrying their cellos and playing at the end of their hike. Here, they're playing a classic Rodgers and Hammerstein tune after one of their hikes. On another occasion, they ran half a marathon while carrying cellos. Then they played their cellos at the end.

Cello-playing has thus become an entertaining sport in addition to being an art-form. Or if you think cello-playing was already a sport, you have to admit that it's now become sporting.

Currently, the Extreme Cellists are getting ready to take the 192-mile Coast-to-Coast Challenge, raising money along the way for children with cancer.

Jolly good show, what?

Star-Spangled Banner Time!

Another year has gone by, and all across the land, many Americans, including 7-year-olds, will be celebrating by trying to sing the national anthem once again. Emphasis on trying. Our national anthem, as Jimmy Kimmel demonstrates, is a good deal harder than "God Save the Queen."

To start off on a good note, here's Marvin Gaye, who slows it way down and adds in a nice beat. He also removes the sharp 4 at "dawn's early light," which can easily sound false (the anthem was originally a drinking song after all - "To Anacreon in Heaven" - and so many people sound drunk on that note). Aretha Franklin is also pretty awesome - aside from that voice, she's got horns in her band...

Even though I don't like country that much, I thought it was only fair to include country singers too. And guess what? Faith Hill ain't half bad at the anthem. Although Carrie Underwood actually smiles while the singing the anthem. Not so sure about Carrie's final high note, but looking happy while you sing a patriotic song is a plus.

Then there's always Jimi Hendrix: why sing when your guitar can talk for you?

Variety is the spice of life, right? So how about theremin? Yeah, that one leaves me feeling really patriotic...

For all you World Cup fans, it appears our anthem has even reached the vuvuzela, although this might be miming.

As an opera guy, I can't leave out Puccini, even though here he's using the anthem to symbolize greed and imperialism (a point also made in the WP article below). The words translate to "All over the world, the itinerant Yankee enjoys life and transacts business...Life has no meaning for him unless he can possess every flower in the world."

When Puccini came to the United States in 1910, he was widely acclaimed, despite his use of our anthem. Igor Stravinsky, on the other hand, got much rougher treatment. The Washington Post summarizes the event:
" Stravinsky's modernist retouchings ran afoul of Massachusetts law, and after the first performance, which left the audience "stunned into bewildered silence," Boston cops showed up at a later concert to make sure he didn't repeat the offense.
"Let him change it just once and we'll grab him," a Capt. Thomas Harvey told a Boston newspaper. According to musicologist Michael Steinberg, at some point Boston cops seized the music. "

Today's column has mainly focused on the funny side of our national anthem. To conclude, though, I'd like to remember this moment, when the anthem served its true function, which is to bring together Americans and friends of America throughout the world.

Sudbin Plays Sexy Scriabin: Pleasurable Climaxes for All

I'm a musicologist, whatever that means. If you ask Mr. Wilkins (not his real name), a music teacher I know, musicologists do something, but it doesn't have much to do with making music. Really, the important thing is to make a clean tone on your instrument, respect the composer's intentions, and play with feeling and expression.

I'm the first to admit that Mr. Wilkins is a much better musician than I am. But I can't agree with him that music history is "simply in the music": Beethoven doesn't naturally lead to Wagner, nor Brahms to Schoenberg. Wagner and Schoenberg, of course, wanted you to think their music was a natural result of Beethoven's and Brahms's influence. But if you don't take composers at their own estimation, you can discover some interesting things. Schoenberg, to my ears, owes more to Wagner than to Brahms; his claim to be Brahms' heir was simply a way of asserting his legitimacy to fans of "absolute music." Wagner owes more than he would like to acknowledge to Meyerbeer; but as a leading composer of "New German" music, it was more important to him to stress his debt to Beethoven.

This is why it's important to think critically about composers and their agendas, to interrogate their writings the way you would question a witness in a trial. This is why musicologists need such broad training, since our field involves history, musical analysis, historiography by way of our immediate subject matter, and economic history, social history, political history, gender and sexuality history (and other subjects), by way of context.

There are plenty of performers who could do my job in addition to their own: they have great scholarly knowledge. But then there are people like Yevgeny Sudbin.

Yevgeny Sudbin is an extremely talented young pianist. I came to know his work through his album of Scriabin piano music, fiendishly difficult material which Mr. Sudbin carries off with passionate intensity. In fact, if you're looking for an introduction to Scriabin's music, Mr. Sudbin's album is a great place to start.

Mr. Sudbin wrote his own liner notes. He obviously worked hard over them and they are well-written and well-researched. He has read Scriabin's letters and other writings. But while the resulting notes tell us a good deal about Scriabin, there are times when they tell us more than I need to know about Mr. Sudbin's fusion of his sexual and artistic activities.

Of course, Scriabin tied his sexuality and his creativity together, as Sudbin points out. What is disturbing is how completely Sudbin buys into Scriabin's decadent aesthetic without any kind of critical distance. For example, consider the following quotation from Sudbin's essay:

"(Scriabin wrote: 'the creative act is inextricably linked to the sexual act. I definitely know that in myself the creative urge has all the signs of sexual stimulation...') The Fifth Sonata, regrettably, is only a do-it-yourself version of all this." (italics mine)

The last sentence arouses an image of the performer pleasuring himself through performing Scriabin. I would rather not know that this music is Sudbin's pianistic masturbation.

But is the performer pleasuring HIMself? Here's another quotation from Sudbin:

"The whole piece is based around a series of cadences, repeated over and over again. This creates a feeling of closely spaced multiple climaxes that, ideally, should become stronger each time they happen - even if the performer is male."

The last clause makes it pretty clear, I think, that Sudbin has gone beyond Scriabin's stated merging of sensual arousal and artistic creativity: he now posits an interpretation of Scriabin's music which resembles Wagner's theory of the androgynous artist. Apparently, playing Scriabin is the closest Sudbin will ever get to multiple orgasms, short of a sex-change operation.

There's much, much more I could comment on in Sudbin's essay, such as (I think) his use of the word "sick" as a sign of approval. I would like to close, however, with a passage which suggests that Sudbin views himself as Scriabin's heir:

"As the summit of his life work and the culmination of his visions, Scriabin was preparing the final salvation of mankind: not through atonement of sins (as had been attempted before) but by consecration through art. This was to be achieved by synthesizing all the human senses through one orgiastic performance of his final piece: Mysterium. The performance was planned to last seven days in the Indian foothills of the Himalayas, beginning with bells suspended from the clouds. They would shatter the universe with their lethal vibrations, after which humanity was to be replaced by better, 'nobler beings'. He never completed the piece. Just as he was preparing some texts about death, death arrived. A pimple formed on his lip, which became infected, and Scriabin died of septicæmia before he could fulfill his final calling. Although to my mind he did, but maybe not in the way he had in mind: the moment his music became part of my life, a better being emerged." (boldface and italics mine).

To sum up: playing Scriabin is a masturbatory act for Sudbin, one that takes place in public (in his concerts), and is marketed and sold on CDs for the enjoyment of the listening public. And now that he interacts with Scriabin in this way, Sudbin is better person than before.

Classical. Music. Pornography?

Wagner in Today's World

As part of my summer teaching, I just led a group of students through Das Rheingold. Most were enthusiastic about the music, and Wagner's aggressive stance against the Parisian opera industry drew their sympathy.

Yet even on the first day, the Nazi party's use of Wagner came up. Later, we read some of Wagner's infamous essay "Das Judentum in der Musik" (Jewishness in Music). The class, which was normally talkative and smiling, got cold and uncomfortable: how could such a great composer hold such outrageous views? Eventually conversation picked up. Wagner obviously still has value for modern audiences today, and the students worked through ways of separating Wagner's ideas from his music.

But did Wagner actually separate his art from his ideas? After all, Wagner's essay attacks Meyerbeer (a Jewish composer who dominated the French opera scene) and claims that Jewish people are incapable of real artistic expression - are subhuman, in effect. Wagner's failure to mount a production of his operas in Paris in the 1840s seems to have led to his disillusionment with grand opera, a genre which he came to view as commercialized, privileging the medium (musical display) over the message (drama). Thus Wagner's attempt to fashion an orchestrally-dominated "German" style of music drama in opposition to the conventions of grand opera seems tied to his opposition to music he considered most commercial and Jewish.

But so what? you could say: As listeners, we are not bound to think what Wagner thought. The reader determines much of the message received from a text; we can take a different meaning from Wagner's work than he intended. After all, the music is beautiful; the works remain influential even if only viewed from a musical point of view; their importance as national myth, as part of the zeitgeist of the succeeding generations is hard to ignore. We can't ignore Wagner. All good points and I was pleased with the students for engaging with such a difficult issue.

Yet I'm still disturbed by the topic. It's easy enough to situate Wagner in a distant past, to say that his ideas were wrong but the music he wrote was lovely. It's easy enough to assume that Wagner's nationalist program to create "true German art" in opposition to a "commercial Jewish art" died by 1945 at the latest. But what if the nationalist aspect of Wagner reception is still alive? If someone tells you in 2010 that Wagner is first and foremost a GERMAN (with all the baggage that entails), then what are the implications? Many Israelis seem to understand Wagner solely in terms of his antisemitism. While, as a musician, I applaud Daniel Barenboim's efforts to play Wagner's beautiful music, as a thinking person, I have to wonder: what if the Israelis are right? What if the nationalistic, antisemitic, hateful side of Wagner culture has not died?

For example, see this website http://www.georgehutchins.com/, our local example of Tea-Party fundamentalism. I mean no personal disrespect to Mr. Hutchins, a military veteran, and I should make clear that my own political views are centrist: I don't vote on party lines. Hutchins seems to waging an ardent war against the Republican Party itself, which seems to be distancing itself from his fundamentalist stance.

If you scroll down Mr. Hutchins' page far enough, you will find that an American politician actually used the "Ride of the Valkyries" to promote his political campaign in 2010, and that he did so "to honor German Americans who served America since 1775." (He thinks the piece comes from Goetterdaemmerung, but that's neither here nor there). As a German-American myself, I'm not entirely sure we need special praise ; nor am I convinced we need Wagner to honor us (why couldn't he use Beethoven?) Wagner's political views are an embarrassment, and the further we keep Wagner away from OUR politics, the better. (And who uses an appeal to a German-American audience as a political platform? Yes, there are plenty of people of German heritage in North Carolina, but I'm not aware that we were a political power-base waiting to be tapped.)

More disturbing is Mr. Hutchins' concept of national pride, which is largely of the flag-waving kind. Thus his site refers constantly to "honor" and claims that his supporters are "patriots" (implying that his opponents are...not patriotic - way to respect the dissent essential to a functioning democracy). Hutchins also seems to assume that most Americans are European or English (I'm guessing that makes you white): thus the page "Win the Culture War" (no comment) leads to a picture of Hutchins at Stonehenge, with the caption: "Stonehenge, England, is a...part of our American Heritage, which our ancestors brought with them from Europe, to America."

So Hutchins is a white politician who assumes that the Americans he needs to reach have long European heritages, and he uses Wagner's music to promote his campaign. Yet he's not antisemitic; he is a firm supporter of Israel, etc., etc.

So what gives? Does it really matter if one politician used Wagner in his campaign? Given Mr. Hutchins' avowed respect for the Torah and support of Israel, I think he would be horrified to read "Das Judentum in der Musik." Probably, his use of Wagner is caused by ignorance. At least I hope so. After Auschwitz, I hope that the first thing American people think when they hear Wagner is not "Gee, I'm proud of my German heritage."

Mr. Hutchins seems to think it might be.