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.