Me, a Musicologist

Supposedly, I am a musicologist. I have a fancy (and expensive!) degree that says I am. I took a bunch of classes and wrote a few hundred pages in order to check off the box that lets me insist upon people calling me “doctor” (which I don’t do, but I work with some people that do, and I think it’s kind of silly). In 2015 I earned a PhD in musicology. Before that, I earned an MA in music (with an emphasis in historical performance practice). Both of those things supposedly make me “an expert” in this weird field that some people think I made up (“What is ‘musicology’ anyway?”).

But, I have yet to do anything—save the degrees of course—that really qualifies me as a “musicologist.” Certainly my crappy attempts at album reviews and occasional semi-witty musical commentary ’round here shouldn’t really qualify.

To come back to the question, “What does a ‘musicologist’ do?” The answer is not incredibly straightforward. The easiest answer is to say, they study, write about, and speak about music from a cultural/historical/philosophical standpoint, though this leaves several things out (and doesn’t even really say anything anyway). But, a sizable portion of what I am “supposed to” do as “a musicologist” is to write and speak about music. Most of us make our primary incomes as college professors, and the ones who teach at fancier places than I are often required to publish in journals regularly.

I haven’t published anything. I also don’t really care that I haven’t published anything. Each time I open a new edition of the Journal of the American Musicological Society or the Journal of Musicological Research or whatever other fancy academic journal one wants to name, I am mostly kind of baffled. I see these titles and I have virtually no idea what these articles are about. Even the ones that are ostensibly more “up my alley,” like Rock Music Studies, publish stuff that I only barely recognize; sometimes I wonder if I am actually subscribed to a molecular biology journal or something … some of these titles feel that foreign.

Me, a Speaker

What bit of musicologizing I have done is speak at a handful of conferences. I generally enjoy this, which is a little strange because I am actually quite shy much of the time. In fact, speaking at one of these conferences over the summer is what restarted me questioning nearly all of my life choices up to this point … Well, save my marriage. The conference didn’t make me wonder about that one.

Essentially, I made a presentation at a high-profile conference sponsored by one of the more prominent organizations in the world of popular music education and afterward I was kind of bummed out by the whole thing. From my side, I think it went fine. But, I got some pushback from the audience. Pushback is fine, it’s to be expected at least somewhat. But, the nature of the pushback has me feeling kind of lost.

My presentation was about my popular music ensemble and how I, as a “band director,” approach it. My premise was this: we should treat the popular music ensemble the same way we treat a college orchestra or choir; we should get the group to play the “great works” written for it (just like a choir or orchestra does). I have given this presentation once before, then for a different crowd; it was very well received (I think). And, to say that this time was not well received on the whole would probably be inaccurate. But, it’s the pushback—and the social-political-musicological situation(s) behind it, most of all—that has brought to this place where I feel kind of lost and confused.

This pushback cut at the central premise of my presentation; there were questions around the idea of “great works” and around my place as the one who chooses the group’s repertoire.

The second issue doesn’t bother me quite so much. The contention was, basically, “Why not let the students pick what they play?” My response is two fold:

What I am there for if not to “direct” the group (and thereby, choose what “directions” the group will go [i.e. what music we will play])? I am fine with taking input from the students, but that is pretty clearly not what this comment was about. He was after something different. It’s hard to explain to those outside academia, but, basically, there is this whole movement in higher ed (wrapped up inside ideas like “equity”) that says everything should be student-directed, even things like the actual curriculum. But, yeah, if the proper thing to do is just let the students do whatever the hell they want, why am I there? If their opinion is just as valid as mine, then why hire me? Why offer the class?
Isn’t part of the point of going to college the exposure to new ideas, new ways of looking at [insert topic here]? If I let my students call the shots on what we play, they would end up playing more or less the same stuff every semester. ‘Twould be a mixture of Led Zeppelin songs, Taylor Swift and/or Billie Eilish songs, and a few tunes by whatever rapper du jour happens to be “it,” then. Again, the students don’t need to go to college to do that stuff. I will grant that some of what they would choose is very valid, and we should explore some of that, but my experience shows that it’d be an endless cycle of the same-old after a few times around.

But it was this first line of questioning that had/has me feeling all sorts of confusion and general pessimism for where this is all headed. The basic premise of this person’s commentary was against the idea of there being “Great Works” at all. Or, more pointedly, is it ever appropriate to draw a line in the sand, so to speak, saying “this is great art” because, in so doing, you are excluding other works, and in doing that, you are making judgements about any given style’s/work’s/culture’s central aesthetics as being of less validity. That was kind of a mouthful. Maybe this is better: to say there are “Great Works” is to make decisions about what is and isn’t good in art, which necessarily weighs certain ideas over others.

Perhaps explaining the flow of ideas within my presentation will help me explain what all of this is about:

Many colleges have now decided that they want to take the academic study of popular music seriously (yay!)
With this, many of these schools have added popular music ensembles into their programs
But, what should these groups play/sing?
Well, what do the other ensembles play/sing?
They play/sing the “Great Works” written for those ensembles.
Maybe pop-music ensembles should do something similar.
But, what would that look like?
A: One way to go is to play the “great” albums in popular music history.

So, the central idea I was trying to get at was a discussion of my experience with implementing this “great works”/whole albums approach in my college’s popular music ensemble, and, to a lesser degree, a “defense” of this approach.1

Being that the conference was held via Zoom, I was able to go back and listen to it—and the ensuing commentary—again. So, I watched it again to see if I was remembering things correctly. The comment that still has me both scratching my head and kind of nervous about what all of this might mean for my future in this field, pushed back against my premise pretty hard. And, again, this has more to do with the nature of the pushback, the things it signaled, than the commentary itself.

This person questioned the premise of the world of art music as a framework through which to look at popular music.

So far, this is ok; it’s not a perfect lens. I do think it’s useful, though, especially given the context of having a popular music ensemble exist alongside an orchestra, choir, etc., competing for “validity.”

The premise of there being a “standard repertoire” or a “canon” is not a good one; it’s something we should be shunning, not building upon. (While the words “privilege” and/or “racism” weren’t used directly, this was clearly the implication.)

Again, it’s far from perfect, but it’s the literal foundation of hundreds of years of our musical study and understanding. Everything builds on stuff before it. It would be a mistake to assume there is nothing connecting Mozart and Kanye West. Let’s include Kanye’s music in the conversation, but not at the expense of Mozart’s.

A criticism was made that the list of albums I’ve tackled with this group wasn’t sufficiently diverse. More specifically, the commenter pointed out that there was only “X” albums by people of color.

This is valid, to a point. I go out of my way—fighting against some of my own upbringing and musical biases—to make sure to perform works by black artists, female artists, and other less-represented groups. But, I wonder what percentage of representation would be the right one; is there a point where I could arrive at the “right” percentage of music by people of color?

I keep coming back to a few central questions/problems with these comments. More importantly, these comments were exactly on track with the contemporary currents within musicology (and academia in general), and they got me thinking in all sorts of directions about where this is headed.

If we can’t really call any music “good” or “great,” does that make it all equal in its artistic/cultural/historical value? Do we want that?
I have spent most of my life just trying to understand a few styles of music and I am still just scratching the surface. If the only valid way to examine or talk about music is to always do so from all angles equally, how could we ever get close to any sort of expertise over any of it?
I am worried about how quick we are to call everything racist. And, I hate to even say this as this aligns me (on the surface, at least) with lots of people who really are racist.
I am losing interest in this entire field (musicology) as it seems this is the only thing we’re allowed to talk about right now. And, again, I think some would say this make me racist as well.
I have always been a bit of a contrarian. I am sure many of my previous professors would tell you as much. But, now I am finding myself feeling like defending the “status quo” (sort of), which feels weird.
An idea that came up in some follow up discussion was the idea that we should be able to alter these “great works” however we see fit. We shouldn’t look at them as “great” as is, but as infinitely alterable based upon however we feel at any moment. This seems like a strange way of thinking about art. This seems to fundamentally confuse the artist and the audience, which I think leads us to a place where art isn’t really worth admiring anymore. Is this really the world we want to create? (In other cultures this is more appropriate, but those are not the cultures where this music was made. Insisting that a different culture’s way of doing things should be applied to this music seems like the opposite of what we’re supposed to do.)

All of this is my very long way of saying I am feeling really uncomfortable inside “academia” these days. The trouble is, I’ve painted myself into a bit of a corner; there isn’t much else I can really do for a career. So, now what?

This conference came at a time when I was already feeling kind of bewildered about who I am and what I do; this interaction made all of those feelings even stronger. I want to call Brian Wilson’s music “great,” I want to call Palestrina’s music “beautiful,” but it seems like these comments might land me somewhere in the realm of “problematic.” No one wants to be problematic.

No idea if this explanation made anything clearer or not. ↩︎