1. What is your project?
2. Why is it significant? [usually it has to be material of inherent interest combined with a promising approach to the material.]
3. What are your main ideas about it?
4. Why are you qualified to do it? [not just qualified, but uniquely qualified, if possible]
5. What is the outline of the constituent parts of the project?
There are other questions, like when are you going to do it (timetable of completion); where the material located that you have to find, etc... Those questions have to do with the pragmatic of completing it, not with its initial set-up.
Saturday, February 3, 2018
Friday, February 2, 2018
Vernacular
Today my goal is to think of 5 ideas about "vernacular" musical approaches to Lorca. That is the best word I can think of so far for what I am trying to get at in one of the major sections of the book. So far I have a chapter planned as an intro, in which I discuss axes of contrast (vocal / instrumental // classical / vernacular etc...) along with a musicological rant. Then a chapter on Lorca "himself," so to speak. Not his "knowledge of music" but a deeper reading. Then a chapter on vernacular settings, and then a chapter on "art" settings. Then an epilogue. This might work. My Feb. research goal is to have the book thought out more or less, with five ideas for each part, and have an NEH proposal by April.
I worry because I hate dilettantism. If I include musical examples (scores) in the book then anybody's not a musicologist eyes will glaze over. Plus I can't really do that kind of analysis anyway and I am writing for people in my own field. I've thought of doing an edited collection but I think I can do this project better than anyone else from the Lorquismo perspective, at least.
Also, what happens to Lorca III which is well on its way to being written as well. I have to reorganize my whole life in order to write even more than I am. At least the music will not suffer.
I worry because I hate dilettantism. If I include musical examples (scores) in the book then anybody's not a musicologist eyes will glaze over. Plus I can't really do that kind of analysis anyway and I am writing for people in my own field. I've thought of doing an edited collection but I think I can do this project better than anyone else from the Lorquismo perspective, at least.
Also, what happens to Lorca III which is well on its way to being written as well. I have to reorganize my whole life in order to write even more than I am. At least the music will not suffer.
Books for my project. A book on "Samuel Becket and Music." It's kind of a miscellany. Of course I love it that Morton Feldman wrote a Beckett opera. Nothing very useful methodologically for my project, except a reference to a Lorca piece I didn't know about!
Another one on Celan. Written by a single author (a Swede) rather than an edited collection, which is good. A good precedent for my project, though Celan is mostly set to music in Europe, it would seem. No discussion of vernacular traditions in music. A book on Lorca and music would be much richer in its raw materials.
There is a book on Walt Whitman and modern music I haven't looked at yet, edited by L. Kramer, no surprise. What I'm looking for has a very precise library of congress subject heading:
Last name, first name of poet--musical settings--criticism and history. I have to guess what poets or authors have a lot of musical settings, then search for them one by one. Another possible syntax is 'poet's name--knowledge--music.' I'm not studying Lorca's knowledge of music, though.
Another one on Celan. Written by a single author (a Swede) rather than an edited collection, which is good. A good precedent for my project, though Celan is mostly set to music in Europe, it would seem. No discussion of vernacular traditions in music. A book on Lorca and music would be much richer in its raw materials.
There is a book on Walt Whitman and modern music I haven't looked at yet, edited by L. Kramer, no surprise. What I'm looking for has a very precise library of congress subject heading:
Last name, first name of poet--musical settings--criticism and history. I have to guess what poets or authors have a lot of musical settings, then search for them one by one. Another possible syntax is 'poet's name--knowledge--music.' I'm not studying Lorca's knowledge of music, though.
Thursday, February 1, 2018
Música callada
I'm listening (and playing part of) Mompou's "Música callada." It is a hauntingly simple composition based on St. John of the Cross. Needless to say I thought of the poem of the same title by Claudio Rodríguez as well.
There is no place to hide
My scholarly projects always cannibalize my creative ones. There is no place to hide. I can go into my music room but my cv comes in and finds me and demands that I write about music too.
Art Song
The assumption of the Art Song (in the musicological literature) is that the text comes first, and then the setting later, so that we can study the text itself (By Schilller or Goethe) and then see what the composer did with it. I guess this is accurate, and yet...
1. The experience of the listener is simultaneous. The reader does not first read the poem, interpret it, and then hear the musical setting. She might encounter the melody before the words, if she's heard instrumental versions before hearing the song sung (as happened to me with "Blue Skies" by Irving Berlin.).
2. In the popular song tradition [in many vernacular traditions], we don't give priority to the text over the setting. We simply don't care whether the lyricist wrote a lyric to a melody, or whether the lyricist and composer worked simultaneously, or whether the composer and lyricist are one person, or whether the composer set a pre-existing lyric to music. In folklore we have songs that come with their words and melodies together, and nobody cares what came first.
3. Words are not prior to music ontologically, then. Putting words first is the artifact of a particular musical tradition. Nevertheless, this tradition is extremely significant, because, well, we have very significant poets being set to music by equally significant composers. Aside from the Lied, there is the French mélodie.
4. Do we put more value on the music than the words? It depends. If we have Baudelaire and Debussy... Do we have to think that George is greater than Ira? (Because Ira's rep as a poet is less than George's as a composer?). I admire song lyrics because I cannot write them very well.
1. The experience of the listener is simultaneous. The reader does not first read the poem, interpret it, and then hear the musical setting. She might encounter the melody before the words, if she's heard instrumental versions before hearing the song sung (as happened to me with "Blue Skies" by Irving Berlin.).
2. In the popular song tradition [in many vernacular traditions], we don't give priority to the text over the setting. We simply don't care whether the lyricist wrote a lyric to a melody, or whether the lyricist and composer worked simultaneously, or whether the composer and lyricist are one person, or whether the composer set a pre-existing lyric to music. In folklore we have songs that come with their words and melodies together, and nobody cares what came first.
3. Words are not prior to music ontologically, then. Putting words first is the artifact of a particular musical tradition. Nevertheless, this tradition is extremely significant, because, well, we have very significant poets being set to music by equally significant composers. Aside from the Lied, there is the French mélodie.
4. Do we put more value on the music than the words? It depends. If we have Baudelaire and Debussy... Do we have to think that George is greater than Ira? (Because Ira's rep as a poet is less than George's as a composer?). I admire song lyrics because I cannot write them very well.
Self Improvement
The point of self-improvement is not to reach some ideal self, but not to stay in the same place or get worse. So suppose I hadn't started to write music, hadn't taken piano lessons or sung in the choir. I would be the same person, but without whatever growth I achieved from going into music more seriously. I didn't need to learn to read Italian: I would have been fine without doing so. I could give up crossword puzzles and still have a satisfying life, without trying to do them faster and faster every day.
The idea that I need to find new research projects. I could easily just coast the rest of my career, and teach things I have already learned rather than come into the classroom with things I have learned in the past few years, as I like to do.
Without self-improvement, though, the world narrows rather than expanding. I would find it difficult to imagine being in a teaching situation in which I couldn't be a learner myself. It would go stale pretty quickly, and I think the students would notice too.
The idea that I need to find new research projects. I could easily just coast the rest of my career, and teach things I have already learned rather than come into the classroom with things I have learned in the past few years, as I like to do.
Without self-improvement, though, the world narrows rather than expanding. I would find it difficult to imagine being in a teaching situation in which I couldn't be a learner myself. It would go stale pretty quickly, and I think the students would notice too.
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