So I wrote a bunch about how people should blog/newsletter more about their teaching, and here I am, teaching, and not regularly doing that. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised. So: a brief teaching update!
We just wrapped up our first big unit in MUSC 130 (music appreciation) on symphonies, covering a bunch of Beethoven 5, a little bit Dvorak 9, and a moderate amount of Price 1. It went well, I think! Right now, the students are doing their first of three “capstone” projects of this semester, each of which is pegged to a big unit (symphonies, operas, experimental music). This is the most straightforward of the capstones: a take-home exam that asks them to talk about musical meaning in the symphonies we’ve learned. Here’s what the last few weeks have looked like:
My goal was to move from a basic understanding of the sound of symphonies to getting into how knowing biography and social context affect how we hear Beethoven, and then using those frameworks to understand Dvorak/Price, the relationship between them, and their relationship to American culture. I wrote already about my framework for musical meaning; I think it’s worked decently well thus far, and the exam should hopefully give the best indication of how they parse this out and make it effective. We’re moving into opera this week, which I’m tackling differently: we’ll spend two weeks going over the basics of opera in-general — a day on arias, a day on what-opera-is, a day on what-opera-singing-is, and a day on what-opera-staging-is, before spending two weeks on The Cunning Little Vixen, which the Maryland Opera Studio is performing.
One new thing I’ve experimented with this semester is in-class polling — clicker questions — via the Turning Point app, which UMD has integrated with all of our other stuff. I definitely think it’s way cooler than the students do — they seem to be extremely used to it, whereas it’s new to me — but it’s been useful to gauge understanding on various issues. Basically, I can ask a question in a Powerpoint slide, and students get out their phones and answer it, and the answers will appear on my slideshow in real time. (It acts as a way to measure participation/attendance too.) Sometimes I’ll ask a multiple choice question to review what we’ve been talking about, or prompt a discussion. My favorite (again, this is probably extremely basic to people who already do this, but novel to me!) thing it allows for is word cloud responses, so I can ask a question like “Describe the sound of this music” and everyone gives one-word answers that become a word cloud. Unfortunately I haven’t saved any of the wordclouds we’ve done so far, but this is what would looks like (please replace all of the hilarious sample words in your mind with more relevant ones):
Anyway, it’s a useful exercise for abstract symphonies: play two minutes of wordless music, and ask everyone to describe it in one word, and then talk about what’s going on in the music that leads a large percentage of people to say things like “dark” or “intense” or “happy,” etc.
One through-line with the symphony unit — that’s also one of the things I like talking about — has been unpacking the cultural significance of the symphony as a genre, from Beethoven through Price. That means talking about E.T.A. Hoffmann’s epochal review of Beethoven 5, but also talking about the cultural weight that the Beethovenian symphony took on in 19th century America, why people even cared that Dvorak came to the United States, and ultimately why the symphony (as opposed to jazz and blues) was a vehicle that black intellectuals cared about during the Harlem Renaissance. We go from this quote:
to this quote:
Which I enjoyed, and which indexes something important, I think. We’ll see what happens with opera!
We’ve been doing a lot of different stuff in public musicology thus far: writing program notes, practicing preconcert talks, blogging, exploring what makes good podcasts good. So far it’s been pretty fun, and seemingly useful. More on all of that soon, I think!
I’m in a “do lots of random stuff” phase of late book. Which is to say: right now the manuscript is with my editor for her thoughts and revisions, and after that I’ll do one more edit, and then I prepare to send the “final manuscript” to Oxford. After that, it goes into production, copyediting, proofs, etc; I’m not 100% sure what the timeframe is on that — I don’t yet know when it will *come out* — but it means we’re basically entering the final stages. So I’m prepping things for the “final manuscript submission” phase which requires… a lot. Such as:
Permissions for all images, and all archival material. This is almost entirely done, with a couple errant photos that still need to be tracked down.
High-res version of all images. Also almost done, although some images have been hard to track down.
All kinds of front matter and back matter, including acknowledgements (which will be long!), lists of all the figures, etc. This still needs to be tackled.
Abstracts and keywords for every individual chapter of the book and for the bigger book; I’m working on this today.
Filling out a lengthy marketing questionnaire which includes writing various promo descriptions of the book, discussing audience and competition, people who I want to potentially blurb it, and cover thoughts. This will take a while!
Putting all of this stuff, and probably some other stuff I”m forgetting, into an organized series of folders to actually send.
Every step I get closer to the end, a new thing presents itself. But we’re almost there!
Maybe this will be the promo-oriented blurb? Or maybe not? Thoughts?
As the twentieth century came to a close, American composers contemplated their cultural relevance anew. After decades of academic and experimental music seemingly aimed only at fellow specialists, minimalism and neo-Romanticism began to reach a broader public. Could it last? Many institutions––from upstart festivals and granting organizations to record labels and major presenters––hoped so, and sought out new audiences for new music in the 1980s and 1990s. In doing so, they fundamentally changed the landscape of avant-garde music in the United States.
Amidst these developments emerged a scrappy festival called Bang on a Can, which presented eclectic and irreverent marathon concerts of contemporary music in downtown New York. Overseen by the young composers David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe, Bang on a Can soon grew into a multifaceted organization with a major record deal, in-house ensemble, and standing gig at Lincoln Center.
Bang on a Can sought to recapture new music’s lost public, and succeeded. But they did not do so alone. Surveying the industry of American composition at century’s end, this book reveals how new music turned towards the marketplace, as classical music looked to contemporary music for relevance, record labels scrambled to reap profits from its newfound popularity, and government funding was imperiled by the Culture Wars. This turbulent but idealistic moment made new music what it is today.
Since my last newsletter, I did another passthrough of the book, revising a bunch of stuff based on feedback from the Bang on a Can folks (which has been an interesting and helpful but complicated process that I probably won’t write about publicly, tbh) and from peer review. The peer reviewer suggested beefing up my conclusion a bit, which I did, and also made the very wise suggestion of creating some kind of appendix chronology that can help the reader track what’s going on year-by-year. I did that, too, and I like it! Here’s a sample (missing part of 1991 and 1992 for fitting-in-screenshot-reasons):
I had a great visit to Bowling Green last week where I gave a talk tied to Chapter 4 of the book, on multicultural arts funding, the New York State Council on the Arts, the Group for Contemporary Music, Bang on a Can, and the Culture Wars. I also had a really fascinating conversation with the DMA students about the state of contemporary music; many thanks to Ryan Ebright and his department and fam for hosting! I’ll be giving the same talk this weekend as a keynote at the Rutgers musicology grad conference — the program looks awesome! — this coming weekend, and a couple more times this spring.
Here’s a story about Georgia and bunnies.