Me, a Musicologist?
I am a pretty crappy musicologist. At an earlier point in my life, I think I was a better one. I have almost no publications to my name and I haven’t made any huge contributions to “the field.” Once I finished by PhD, I stopped paying very close attention to musicology and didn’t do very much additional work in that world. Now that I think about it, I think I have only done one semi-high profile speaking gig since then (with a pretty big emphasis on the word “semi”).
I don’t really care about this. I didn’t really set out to be a superstar musicologist (if there is such a thing). In fact, I didn’t really set out to be a musicologist at all; I mostly just fell into it. I have gone into this elsewhere, I think, and I’ll probably come back to it here, someday. I do still use the word “musicologist” to describe myself sometimes; if nothing else, it makes me sound legit. “I am a musicologist” gives things I say a certain amount of gravity, I suppose. It’d probably be more accurate to say something like, “I was trained as a musicologist,” or, “I studied musicology in graduate school.” But, musicology is also something that sounds half-made-up to many people.
My Dissertation
I defended my PhD dissertation almost exactly ten years ago. This means I am this close to having my mountain of student loan debt paid off/forgiven through the PLSF program … provided said program still exists in a few months! When it was time to pick a dissertation topic, several years before that, I had a few ideas for what I might try to tackle. I spent about a year with one topic that I ended up abandoning and then another year on another topic I also abandoned. I realized it might be a good idea to think about stuff I had already written for other purposes—Which of those were still interesting?—and perhaps use that as a “springboard” into a larger project.
Claremont Graduate University, where I earned both my master’s and doctoral degrees, has a (or at least had, c. 2015) a “transdisciplinary” requirement for its degrees. Basically, everyone had to take at least one course designated as “transdisciplinary,” which meant the course wasn’t really in any specific field, but looked at a topic from several viewpoints. I think this is a good idea, as I think education, especially at the graduate level, can suffer from too much “tunnel vision.” The semester I took the class, the topic was Los Angeles. I don’t remember all of the angles, but it was essentially a class about the history of the city and little bit of analysis from a variety of perspectives. For our first assignment, we had to write something from our field’s perspective.
There is a fair amount to talk about re: music in L.A. I didn’t really know where to start, so I went with something kind of obvious; I wrote about The Beach Boys and how their music served as a PR campaign for the city. Reading back through that paper, it’s kind of a mess, but when I was thinking back on stuff I had already written that might still be interesting, this was one of them. Not that it matters, but I think I titled the paper “The Beach Boys and The Southern California Image” or something like that.
All of this was my long-winded way of arriving here: I wrote my doctoral dissertation about Brian Wilson. More specifically, I wrote about Brian Wilson’s compositional process during 1966 and ’67 while he worked on the ill-fated SMiLE project.For the curious, my dissertation was titled, “Assembling SMiLE: Understanding Brian Wilson’s Compositional Process Between Pet Sounds and Smiley Smile.” You can read it if you want.
A Weird Topic
This topic was a little bit strange given the department I was in. The core music faculty at Claremont included a harpsichordist and expert on basso continuo practice, a composer who specialized in a kind of “Americana” orchestral style (à la Copland or Bernstein), and a medieval music scholar (my dissertation advisor). The three folks made up my dissertation committee. You might have noticed that none of them had any expertise in what I was exploring, or really anything very close. As far as I know, I was the first (and only, thus far) person to come out of Claremont’s musicology program having written about rock ’n’ roll. Yay me!
Me, an Expert?
I wrote 300-ish pages about Brian Wilson, mid-60s recording technology, artistic culture in Los Angeles, mid-60s rock music, and a bunch of other stuff. I suppose this makes me an “expert” on some of these things. Every once in a while, someone finds out about my supposed “expertise” and is kind of excited about the idea. I have given a few guest lectures on these things and this is definitely the area within my history of rock classes where I feel most confident. Again, yay me, I guess.
Brian’s Passing
As I am one of the people out there who is an “expert” on Brian Wilson, a few people reached out to me last month when Brian passed away. Of course it’s sad when someone dies, and I was sad to get the news. But, it wasn’t a total shock as Brian hadn’t been well for quite a while. In fact, as much as I hate to say it, I think a lot of folks were surprised he lived as long as he did, all things considered.
And, with Brian Wilson’s death, a lot of us felt compelled to write about him, his music, his legacy, and all of that eulogizing-type stuff. He certainly deserves all of that, and I’ll probably get around to some version of that myself, but I am resisting that urge for the time being. I think there is at least a part of me that doesn’t really feel the need to add another bit of commentary to the deluge of stuff that’s flowing right now. As I said earlier, my musicological chops are kind of rusty and I don’t know if the world wants my maybe-less-than-top-notch commentary in addition to everything else that’s out there (and to what I’ve already said). But, there is this one thing …
The “Studio As An Instrument”
Rightfully so, one of the things Brian Wilson gets credit for is his innovative use of the recording studio. I am not totally sure Brian should get credit for “inventing” any specific techniques, but he operated right at the vanguard of emerging studio technologies and techniques.
Perhaps more than any other thing, Brian was famous for working in a few different studios across Los Angeles. “Good Vibrations,” for example, was recorded in three different studios over the course of three months (!). Nowadays, spending three months on one song, and bouncing between a few different studios is at least somewhat common, but in 1966, this was pretty much unheard of.
Brian’s habit of “studio hoping” has lead some to the conclusion that Brian Wilson was “playing” L.A.’s studios as if they were an instrument; some use a phrase similar to “the studio as an instrument” to describe this. Basically, these folks claim that Brian Wilson was was picking and choosing specific studios in order to get specific sounds from them. A prominent Brian Wilson scholar compared it to how a guitarist knows how to tune his guitar in order to get a specific quality of sound from his guitar; Brian Wilson, he claims, knew how to “tune” L.A.’s recording studios in order to get them to produce a specific quality of sound.
I’ll admit, this is a cool idea. “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” if Brian was that brilliant and he this intimate knowledge of L.A.’s recording studios was actually part of his orchestration? But, the evidence just isn’t there; it’s likely not true. I have looked and looked and looked at the studio logs, and have studied Brian’s methods pretty deeply. I have traced the evolution of more than a dozen songs over the course of a year. And, there just isn’t evidence that Brian’s brain was working the way folks like to say it was. There isn’t really any reason to think that he was moving from studio to studio for other reasons than practicality and logistics. All of the evidence I have seen points toward a question of which studio was available and what pieces of equipment were accessible, not some idea in Brian’s head that was connected to how each L.A. studio “sounded.” The only version of this that appears to be true is something like this:
Brian has an idea for a specific effect on a sound (maybe a reverb or a delay). Studio A doesn’t have this capability—due to differences in technological equipment—but Studio B does, so Brian books Studio B.
But, this isn’t really the same thing as the whole “Brian-is-a-genius-who-can-hear-the-subtle-differences-between-different-studios-and-therefore-uses-each-studio-as-part-of-his-orchestration” idea that gets thrown around. This is a lot more about logistics than anything else.
Like I said, I think it’d be pretty cool if Brian Wilson was such a genius that this was part of his “vision;” but, it likely wasn’t.
Allowing for Misunderstanding
I set a goal for myself last year about letting people misunderstand or misinterpret stuff more often. This might sound like a funny goal, but I decided I didn’t really want to be that “Actually …” guy so much any more. Sure, there are things that are pretty important that I should try to correct when doing so (or not) could have huge consequences, but a lot of the time peoples’ misinterpretations are pretty harmless and not worth correcting. There is a whole mini-industry out there that likes to go on and on about people’s misunderstandings of things, and, while that’s relatively harmless I suppose, there is part of me that finds it pretty frustrating because it shows a pretty glaring lack of epistemological humility. “All of those people totally don’t get it! I do, of course, but they certainly don’t. And now, I must make this known.”
Because, the most likely scenario, is that none of us totally get it, and we’re all just trying to make sense of chaos.