Feb. Goals

My goals for Feb:

Keep walking 10,000 steps a day.  I will add 50 push-ups a day.

The key of the month with be E, with four sharps. I will play in that key every day and compose a few pieces in it.

I will learn the first Shostakovich Fugue all the way through, and two sections of Mompou's Música callada.  

I will have a strong, detailed intellectual andamiaje of the Lorca / Music book, with everything except the complete list of the actual pieces of music that will be mentioned. Main ideas of the book, main ideas of each chapter. Architecture of the book.

Wordly

What I've been trying to say is that the most "worldly" musicology, that which is trying to debunk the myth that music is a pure art for detached from human meanings, depends on the most technical, formalistic analysis, mostly of harmonic movement (only one aspect of music), invests these harmonic structures with ideological charges (resolution is masculine, the misogynistic conquering of the secondary, "feminine" theme), then creates allegories of human subjectivities around these ideological projections. The claim to be postmodern depends on forms of semiotics and / or hermeneutics that are distortions of these concepts. For example, if movement by thirds were semiotically coded as homosexual, then how come listeners unschooled in theory don't hear this in the music? Semiotics cannot be a matter of some secret code.

Of course we use metaphors to describe our subjective experience of music. But we cannot then turn around and establish absolute correspondences between the metaphor and the ideological charge of the music. These correspondences have to be more nuanced and contingent, more historicized. For example, I would accept the argument that a trumpet fanfare has certain historical associations and meanings based on its previous use. So a fanfare might introduce the entrance of the king, and something in another composition that reminds us of a fanfare has that association. That is something different from a musicologist claiming that a certain voice in a Back Cantata reminds her of a nagging wife, and that therefore Bach is being misogynist (a real example!). Wouldn't the musicologist be the misogynist one here, since she is the one hearing a sexist stereotype where nobody has heard one before?

Allegorical

The ideas I am finding in musicology for relating music to larger "human meanings" are turning out to be rather crude and intellectually naive.  The association of Western tonality itself with male dominance, or the idea that movement in fifths is straight and movement in thirds gay.  There are plenty of people in musicology itself who have called bullshit on this kind of thing, with the reintroduction of essentialist thinking that it entails. I'm sure you could teach a listener to identify certain kinds of musical resolution as misogynist, but many do / would not otherwise experience this. What good is a semiotic code for interpreting music if nobody knows how to hear music this way unless they are taught to do so on a very self-conscious level.

In contrast the seemingly naive belief that music has no meaning at all seems attractive--if this kind of allegorical reading is the only alternative.

This kind of ideological reading is also deeply ahistorical and anachronistic, in that it ignores the way people would have thought of this music at the time of its creation.

The abject badness of Lorca Studies

"El duende del jazz no es muy diferente del duende flamenco."

Some words I've learned recently

zibaldone

A commonplace book, but specifically for musical ideas in the context I encountered it.

lagniappe 

An added bonus given to you by a merchant when you buy something. By extension, an added bonus.

In our grammar book we are using in my Structure of Spanish class (King & Suñer), they explain the contrast between lexical categories which are closed (prepositions, articles, pronouns, conjunctions, etc...) and those that are open. Every speaker of the language knows all the pronouns and articles, but not all the nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. Also, we can easily add new nouns, borrowing from Italian or Cajun French as in these two examples, but it is really hard to introduce into the language a new definite article or pronoun. People are resistant about trying to introduce new pronouns like zir, but they don't get mad if I tell them about the word zibaldone.

Other sources talk about function words and content words. To understand a function word, one studies grammar; to understand a content, word, we look it up in the dictionary.

The 5 x 5 method

This is a method I've used to generate ideas.  You can do it in the car or when walking. Suppose you have five major areas in which to generate ideas. You take the first one, and think of five ideas about it.  On your next walk, take the second chapter (area, etc...) and develop 5 ideas about that one. At the end of the process you will have 25 ideas that you can then pare down to 16, by eliminating one areas and keeping four of the five best ideas in the other ones.

The melodramatic style

The melodramatic style in musicology consists of describing harmonic progressions as startling and cataclysmic.  They might be, in some cases, or this might be a discursive by-product of analysis itself. In one instance I've found recently, the writer makes these kinds of statement but then brings us up short:

"I should warn you that several of the points I have made in this chapter may not be audible on many recordings..."

Well that's a relief, I guess.

The writer goes on to say it's her duty to combat over-prettified interpretations with a call to make the music sound more drastic and conflictive, more in tune with her own "gnostic" reading of the score.

 A little later we get an "abject collapse into C minor."