Nearly Done

Well, I have nearly finished the work on my Master's thesis. It's been a long long road, and I wanted to make a post about a few final findings. I've included a chapter outline below.

All in all, my research on three new music groups and the culture in which they perform has been pretty fascinating. In particular, I have been surprised at the extent to which I got in my own way, an experience predicted in James Spradley's writings on ethnographic method. Most of all, I struggled with understanding the why of new music. Why perform this music? Why go into debt with little hope of earning a sizable income? Why settle for a life of poverty in exchange for the opportunity to make music?

I don't have complete answers to those questions, but I have some ideas. I remember Courteny Orlando telling me that Alarm Will Sound comprised some of her most favorite experiences. I remember Dave Farell describing his experiences with performers with fondness, and Jeremy Sment's story of working with eighth blackbird. I also remeber the rehearsals of the groups. Rehearsals strike me as particularly rich social events. At times, they resembled parties and at times the resembled surgeries. I'll have to spend more time with this topic in my future fieldwork.

I'll plan to begin circulating copies of the thesis to the ensembles themselves. It'll be interesting to see what people think.

Chapter outline (including subsections of interest):

Chapter 1 An Ethnography of New Music

Chapter 2 A Brief History of New Music Practice
Serialism and the Institutionalization of Art Music
Experimentalism, Indeterminacy, and Other Camps
Minimalism, Postmodernism, and Accepting Popular Music

Chapter 3 (Dis)Ordered Bodies: Performance, Difference, and Time
Breaking the Mold: the Postmodern Performances of Alarm Will Sound and
eighth blackbird
Yarn/Wire in the Concert Hall

Chapter 4 It’s not about the money: Patronage and Socioeconomic Structure
Symbolic Capital
“Real” Capital

Chapter 5 Reflections and Conclusions

Yeah, still writing the thesis.

In the meantime, I thought I'd post a few tidbits. First of all, I'm moving to Canada to go to school. Second of all, I'm currently living in Bloomington with Abby. Finally, did a presentation on New Music and Technoculture for a class I took this spring. I've attached the (slightly shaky) proposal below. More to come on all of this in later days.

Proposal for "Getting to the Music: Conduits of Technology & Metaphor in New Art Music"

Musicians in American avant-garde ensembles incorporate a range of technologies in their performances. High-tech devices such as laptops and sound systems appear alongside ostensibly low-tech devices like sheet music and acoustic instruments. In spite of this regular merger of high and low, members of new music ensembles clearly distinguish between their own low-tech concerts and multimedia extravaganzas of rock bands like Radiohead.

New music practitioners commonly view the incorporation of technology with suspicion, implying that "technology is somehow false or falsifying” (Frith, 1986). By celebrating acoustic instruments’ alleged low-tech status as a source of performative pride and prestige, they criticize the overuse or misuse of technology as a route to easy, less meaningful displays of virtuosity. In order to achieve new music’s ideals, musicians must confine technology to a discreet and subliminal role that foregrounds the authority of human performers. Their language surrounding technology and performance reflects and reinforces such ideals.

My argument applies the theories of Michael Reddy and George Lakoff to avant-garde musicians’ incorporation of technology. Focusing on language and performance, I draw on my own ethnographic research with two new music ensembles, Alarm Will Sound and eighth blackbird to reveal their articulations and expressions as instruments of place and authenticity. My approach demonstrates how these musicians perceive and produce “live” music and identify “music” as a site of truth or icon of good faith.

Sweet Lullabies

Recently, I've been reading a great deal about the appropriation of non-western music by European and American musicians. I feel this is a major issue, though I haven't engaged it much in my own research. Quite frankly, new music has a long history of exoticizing the music of non-western cultures. When I bring this up in discussions in the field, people often defend the appropriators, especially by pointing out that new music folks aren't making a lot of money doing this. I think that's a poor response and a dodge. This is a problem and we need to talk about it.

I read a blog post today by Ethan Zuckerman, a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He has a great blog and he posted way back in July about an appropriation story that's recieved much attention in ethnomusicology literature. I invite you to check it out.

ETS can suck it

I recently received an email from Educational Testing Services:

Dear GRE Test Taker,

ETS would like to invite you to participate in a survey to tell us about your experiences taking the GRE. The survey will take about 20 minutes to complete and can be accessed by clicking on the link below.
http://surveys1013.websurveyor.net/l.dll/JGsA5C6F9F9lxpD9U3012417J.htm
Your feedback is very important, as the results of this survey will help us develop and offer better products and services to you, and other test-takers in the future.

Thank you in advance for your participation!
Please note: all of your answers are completely anonymous and confidential.

Sincerely,
ETS Marketing Research
marketresearch@ets.org

This may not seem ridiculous to you, so allow me to explain why this email sucks. Educational Testing Services has already charged a small fortune to mail my test scores to the grad schools I've applied to.
Registration: $110
Fee to mail scores to one grad school: $20
Number of schools: 16
Total: $430

ETS wants me to help them improve their testing services, so that they can get better at testing people. Basically, ETS is inviting me to be a part of the process of screwing myself. I suppose my feedback could help, but I have serious misgivings about this. I mean, why do I even take this test? It strikes me as a way to create a financial barrier to applying to school, inhibiting working class people from creating many options for themselves.

Presidential Arts

Alex Ross, music critic for the New Yorker, has posted a link to an article about Pres. Obama's attendance at a recent Kennedy Center performance. Ross describes the article as "a promising piece," implying that Obama's action represents a positive act. The article reports similar responses in other art scene players:

If outings to arts venues become a habit with the first family, “it would be a huge boon to the arts community in Washington and for the United States and the world,” says David Andrew Snider, president of the League of Washington Theatres. “There’s a widespread feeling that he ‘gets it.’ He gets the importance of the arts” (Boehm, M. and Jones, C. 2009).

Two things manifest here. First, a "rhetoric of survival" (McClary, S. 1989) runs throughout the responses quoted in the article. Above, Snider connects Obama's faithful participation (expressed with the colloquialism "he gets it") with the potential for increasing the public profile and attendance in art events. Snider suggests that some don't "get" the importance of the arts and that that is bad.

Second, patronage and its devices shape the economy of prestige practiced by artistic cultures. Snider expresses this with the word "boon." President Obama's presence acts as an endorsment, blessing "the arts community" with enormous symbolic capital.

IU conference

This Saturday, I'll be presenting on my research at the 2009 Special Symposium on Performance and Analysis at Indiana University (in Ford-Crawford Hall shown here). The paper I've written draws on my thesis research on eighth blackbird, Yarn/Wire, and Alarm Will Sound. I apply Pierre Bourdieu's theories to demonstrate a new music network of production, and demonstrate aspects of new music's sociocultural context. I've included the abstract for the conference below.

OK, I have a large range of emotions about this. First of all, I'm super excited. It's nice to present after a year and a half of research, kind of like going to the bathroom after holding it too long. Several good friends who study at IU, including my g/f Abby, plan to come to my paper. One of my academic heroes Susan McClary will also attend as a keynote. I've posted about McClary, or as I like to refer to her in my head "SuMac," before. Her work has been a major influence to me, and I'm thrilled to meet her. Added Bonus: I get to pick her up at the airport and hang with her for the hour-long car ride between Indy and Bloomington. (!)

But I am anxious about presenting a paper on sociology and sociomusical practices to a music theory crowd. To my knowledge, Bourdieu's theories don't make for standard reading in music theory (or in musicology, for that matter), and the concepts get a bit complicated. Also, in the paper I argue that contemporary abstract music has a social and cultural context; some people may take issue with this (it's complicated). Suffice to say that my position, in a way, conflicts with that of some of my informants.

Whatever happens, I'm gonna give it my best. I presented the paper here yesterday to some faculty and students, and the edits and suggestions they gave will help me take this paper up to 11.

Chapter 2 outline, baby!

I am excited to announce the outline to chapter two of my thesis. Below I have posted the handwritten draft that Dr. Golden, my advisor, and I cooked up yesterday. As snow blanketed Knoxville, we hashed out the relevant composers and styles for my study. It's not a perfect or even complete history, just a grounding with which to explain some of the significance of the music performed by Alarm Will Sound, eighth blackbird, and Yarn/Wire.
A few things require explanation: "PoMo" is my short hand for postmodern; I'm trying to both separate a musical modernism from a postmodernism and to demonstrate the interconnectedness of these two positions. Also, I'm really pumped to incorporate a folder I got from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester during a recent visit. I was fortunate enough to get an interview there, and I found a lot of flyers and literature that seemed super relevant for my study. Also, the fact that I was able to do fieldwork while interviewing for the Ph.D. program further illustrated a connection between institutions and new music that I make in my thesis.