Books

Book on Beckett and Music by multiple authors.  Some good things, some anecdotal material. The idea that Beckett's work is already so perfect that you can't set it to music without destroying it. An analysis of Feldman's "Neither" that loses sight of Beckett for pages at a time.

Book on Celan and music. Based on idea of an antipathy to musicality and distrust of music in Celan's poetry.  Mostly set to music in a European context. The book is good, though with too much passive voice for my taste. Musical examples and dense analysis. Has a central thesis.

Book on Shakespeare and music. Too much of a survey; little attention to music itself. Takes a larger view and isn't that helpful methodologically (for me).

Book on Baudelaire and music. Very technical on prosody and song-setting. Musical examples and some dense analysis; charts and drafts. I haven't read enough to know how good it is.  

Book on the Spanish Copla and Conchita Piquer.  No attention to music or even performance style. An analysis of how the lyrics to the songs may have had a therapeutic affect on listeners during the Franco period. An entire book that's an analysis of a few song lyrics; lyrics not especially complex. This book won a prize from the MLA as best book in Hispanic studies that year.  

I haven't found the methodological model for my book, but then it would be my book, wouldn't it? I want to write a book for those that skip over the part of the music book with examples from scores, but still wants to read about music, not about everything except the music.

It could be that the choice of subject makes a certain kind of book inevitable, or not.  It is not the same thing seeing Schubert setting Goethe as Fauré setting Baudelaire or Feldman Beckett.  

No more drafts (3) + My greatest weakness

By not writing drafts and by having an organized bibliography from the very beginning, I will write this book much faster than the others. This is almost an unstoppable combination, because when I finish writing something it will be done.

It will slow down at some point, but it will slow down because it would anyway. I am not rushing in the least. I just want delays to be substantive ones, not because I get bogged down in incoherent notes or have to go back and figure out what the citations are supposed to be.

Baudelaire in Song

I got this book out of the library, BiS.  I immediately knew that it is a serious work, but nothing like what I want to do, being too technical, both musically and prosodically. "Analysis of the number of breathing spaces in this score reveals..." The author is Helen Abbott.

I do like the title. I'd like to steal it: Lorca in Song. I won't, because it would be stealing.

Lorca in Music.
The Musical Afterlife of .... 

In my mind I think of it as Lorca Music. That just might work.  My project is larger than song, because it has instrumental music as well. Eminently googlable.

really

We are understaffed so the service burden is growing, but one colleague suggested that we give more teaching releases in order to do service.  Really? Then who is going to teach our classes? I don't really want to teach any less, or do any more service than I am doing. As of now three out of twelve people are teaching less (chair, associate chair, language program director), and so should we have a few more do this? That would be half the department. When you add in sabbaticals, parental leaves, etc..., then you really don't have people to teach.  

A year of blind-folded rhythm changes

Here is a very simple idea: Play rhythm changes on the piano every day, blind-folded, for a year. The blind-folded part is probably the least important. The idea is to increase one's proprioception, that nice little sense that tells you where you fingers are without looking at the piano. I can play ok without looking, so that's the easy part.

I know the chords, so that's not particularly onerous. My weakness is in the improvisations, which sound very square to me, relying on a few cheap tricks. But I figure with a year, I can find some ideas.    

The "year" and the "every day" part are what's difficult. Since I already play piano every day, I could do this, but I also want to play other things. And then, the experiment might fade in interest for me after a few weeks or months, rather than lasting a year.

Still, it is a good concept. The idea would be to change it up if it got boring, so you could do only bass line for a week, or do it in a weird key, or work on a particular song with rhythm changes as its basis.

[The chord changes to "I got Rhythm" by Gershwin is a standard vehicle for improvising in jazz, and for writing new tunes with the same changes, or variations thereof.]

My Biggest Weakness

My biggest weakness as a scholar is a lack of organization in my citations.  So for the new project that is going to be one of my strong points. I'm going to put in all the citations and bibliography as I go along, rather than fixing it at all at the end, and sometimes doing so imperfectly.

The reason for this is because I work fast, in order to write down all my ideas, so I cannot be bothered to stop and cite something. This is obviously the wrong way of doing things, and I have no excuse except that I can sometimes get a way with it a bit.

Now I will see bibliography as the hard part, and put in my work there.  That will make the writing all that much easier.

***

Dream of music making

We had received musical instruments in the mail. (I was living in a household with other people.) Mine were a set of cymbal-like instruments, in thin rectangular metallic sheets hanging down from some kind of apparatus. I began to play a rhythmic pattern on one, using the top of an ordinary ball-peen hammer. Because of the harmonic qualities of the metal, the ride pattern I was playing also produced its own, inherent melody, which I was able to manipulate depending on what part of the cymbal-sheet I was playing in what geometrical pattern. For example, I could go diagonally to the four corners to improvise a different melody, or move the hammer in figure-eights.

 My time was perfect in this particular dream, and the instrument was designed so that there were no wrong notes, so to speak, only valid melodic combinations of the cymbal's harmonics.  The other members of the household were present in the background, and I knew they were listening, and enjoying my playing, but otherwise they had no firm roles or identities within the dream.  When I woke up I had an aural image of what this sounded like, and it ended up being like "rhythm changes" played on the piano the way I had been attempting to play the evening before...