Tag Archives: pedagogy

Postmortem III

Here it is, the much-unanticipated and long-overdue third installment in the postmortem franchise. The main reason for the wait? My five-year break from teaching Writing About Music. While I might not have felt compelled to write a third postmortem after the odd experience of teaching the course back-to-back semesters before the gap, I was supposed to write something about the variety of research projects I had tried. Alas, as so much in the Pit Stop, plans went up in a puff of smoke. I may get around to writing about research here; if not, expect a Postmortem IV … someday.

But what am I doing, envisioning sequels of sequels before the present post has even been written? What is this, a summer blockbuster? A bestselling young-adult dystopian “novel”?

The reason for the hiatus, by the way, is that other faculty members expressed interest in teaching the course. Needless to say, this is a wonderful thing; you really feel like you’ve contributed to a department’s culture when you design (or co-design, in this case) a course that other faculty want to teach. These faculty then go on to create their own versions of the course, which may in turn influence the shape and direction of one’s own version, &c. So, for examples: Prof. Elyse Zucker structured the course entirely around jazz; Prof. Anne Rounds used the course to explore issues of music and culture (exercise, consumption, education, social space more generally). I’ll have a bit more to say about Prof. Rounds’s syllabus later on.

Anyway, it was good to have fresh bodies to work on, or at least the ears and the parts of the brains connected to them, the rest hardly concerns me, except insofar as it enables them to talk, walk in and out of my classroom, etc. A lot of water has passed under the bridge vis-à-vis reading and listening between Fall ‘12 and Spring ’18 (yes, it has been a year since I taught the course—again, puffs of smoke), much of it during my sabbatical over the 2016-17 academic year, and this meant a flood of new ideas for teaching—new texts to read, new assignments to write, new possible approaches to the material. In fact, I originally had in mind to do something quite different from what I’d done before. Part of the reason for this was my deteriorating hearing: I thought it might be impossible to teach the course with the sort of close attention to listening that I had in the past, and as such that it might be easier to structure the course more like I do my other electives (such as my historically-organized short fiction curriculum for Studies in Fiction), with students investigating a few longer texts that raise a variety of issues about music. I thought about using Geoff Dyer’s jazz book But Beautiful, and Carl Wilson’s contribution to the 33.3 series Let’s Talk About Love, both of which I read on sabbatical, and perhaps one or two others (David Byrne’s How Music Worksoccurred to me as well, but I’ve only read a piece of it thus far). But I wasn’t sure what framework I could use to bring them together—it’s easier to do with a genre course like Studies in Fiction, or even Latin American Literature in Translation, the other two sophomore-level English electives I regularly teach.

Maybe it was laziness. Maybe it was nostalgia. Or maybe it was some last hurrah before the ship of my hearing careens over the horizon of the audible. But it was also at least partly a result of looking over the reams of material I’d already created, and all the other work I’d done for the class over its three previous incarnations, and deciding there was quite a bit worth holding onto. I ultimately opted to keep the original framework of the course, update and expand the materials in the first three units, and replace the last two units with new materials and assignments, including excerpts from But Beautiful, the sole required text. What follows, then, is a tour through these changes, what seemed to work and what didn’t, and what I think is still left to be done, should I have the opportunity to teach the course again. One more time would do my heart good.

Now, if you’re new to this blog or these quasi-public teaching journals, you’ll probably want to go back and read the first two installments, “Postmortem I” (3.13.11) and “Postmortem II” (2.24.12), since the groundwork for the philosophy of the course, its general shape, and the assignments I’ve used are all discussed there, and I’ll be alluding to these throughout, hurdling most repetition to focus on new stuff. (Or, as the Japanese softcore producers say to Max Renn (in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome) when he asks to see just the climactic episode: “But Max! You won’t understand a thing! It’s all set up in the first two!”)

Words to listen by

To introduce the course, I went back to using excerpts from My Music (Wesleyan UP, 1990), the book composed of transcribed interviews from the Music in Everyday Life Project, for an icebreaker, and for the first, ungraded “My Music” essay. I’d tried a couple of other things the previous two times I taught the course, but I think this works best as a general introduction, allowing students to access music on a personal level before they are asked—as they will be for the remainder of the semester—to do more. The only problem was that I also threw them a couple of quotes by Jacques Barzun and Leonard Bernstein from longer pieces I’d used in previous semesters (as the Spanish say, me fue la mano, i.e., I got carried away), and these opened up some very large and muddy cans of worms I hadn’t intended to open until later in the semester. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to preview some knottier Big Concepts with the promise of returning to them later. The caveat, for me as much as for all teachers working to (gently) prod students out of their comfort zones: when we overload our syllabi (and overloading has been a perennial problem for me, as I’m sure it is for other teachers: our community college students need so much in the way of background knowledge, and we want to give them so much), there is a point after which the returns diminish; the more we try to do, the less we actually accomplish.

As in previous semesters, from here the course moved into a listening-focused unit, with a description of a piece of music as the capstone assignment. With some minor tweaks, I used to same assignment as before. What I expanded, however, was the manner in which I approached listening. Here I was inspired by Prof. Rounds’s syllabus (which she was gracious enough to share with me) to break down the listening unit into the elements of music. I’d always been rather scattershot before: an in-class exercise where I fired random bits of unfamiliar music at them, and had them work in groups to think about how they would describe it to someone who hadn’t heard it before; a class on basic song structure, cropped from the first of two music theory courses I audited at City College, to help them think about organization; and a few standout examples of musical description for models and strategies. Back during my last semester teaching the course (that is, in Fall 2012), I’d begun to move in the direction of formalizing this unit, and had even gone so far as drafting a multi-page handout on the elements. I hadn’t made it past melody and timbre, but I did share what I had with a Writing Fellow at the time, who gave me useful feedback and—perhaps most important—did not seem to think what I had thus far was entirely ridiculous. (I think I’ve had three different opportunities to kidnap CUNY grad center music doctoral student Writing Fellows, and every time they’ve given me great feedback and support. A thank-you to them and to our WAC coordinators for their generosity.) As I belatedly turned myself back to this work for Spring ‘18, that original four-page draft ballooned into a ten-page behemoth (twelve if you include the last part, “Other Strategies, Advice, and Caveats”), a bona fidepacket of listening exercises that formed the core of the classwork and homework for the three weeks leading up to the assignment … and only about two-thirds of which we were able to complete in any depth before moving forward.

There are a few questions buried here. The first is how much one can hope to achieve in five or six classes for students most of whom haven’t the faintest idea how to analyze music. It is, as I’ve noted in previous Postmortems, at once a central element and a quixotic fantasy, at least without some sort of music pre- or co-requisite for the course, which does not seem to be forthcoming. At the same time, frontloading the course with formal listening exercises is also an opportunity for them get a toehold in concepts and language they will continue exploring and potentially applying for the rest of the semester, as every succeeding assignment either mandates or invites them to do. Hence, what may seem impossible to do in a few weeks may actually form a substrate on which they (hopefully) grow for the ten or so weeks that follow, drawing on these nascent skills, and further developing them through application. Indeed, the goal of the course has always been to build outward from this “raw” approach to listening, so that describing becomes one element in a bigger toolkit for apprehending music in language.* As for this mini listening boot-camp, the goals were to (a) give students enough to work with, which in the context of the class means enough that they feel like they can approach writing a description of a piece of music they like, try to apply some basic vocabulary, and feel that developing 600-900 words is challenging, but not impossible; and (b) make doing so accessible, and potentially even enjoyable. In the end, I want them to think about the music they love but take for granted in a more formal way; to become more conscious about how it works, and why.

It was very much a feeling-out process, as can probably be imagined. I actually stole Rounds’s opening gambit: “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and the assignment that students come to class with a song they could hum—a really wonderful idea. After reflecting on how best to approach this, I remembered earworms, which I first encountered reading Oliver Sacks’s Musicophilia a number of years ago; I thought it might be a good topic of discussion for introducing melody: a song that they not only could hum, but that insists on being hummed! In hindsight, I think the Sacks chapter on earworms, which is only about ten pages long, would have made for better reading than the CNN and NPR pieces I ended up finding on-line. That said, there was something instructive about these articles. Researchers’ attempts to describe what makes an earworm are so vague as to lose any explanatory power: simple, but not too simple; should go up, but also go down; contains an interesting (??) interval …. one ends up with the impression that psychologists really have no clue what makes a melody an earworm. As one of my students quipped, if they ever did manage to figure out a formula, they’d be millionaires. (N.B.: Also potentially useful here is Mark Twain’s entertaining earworm story “Punch, Brothers, Punch,” which I posted on Blackboard but did not require students to read.)

“Twinkle” was indeed a great melody to begin with; I even found an instructional video on YouTube with Space Invaders-like blobs landing on the appropriate keys of an animated keyboard, the tempo at a wounded crawl. (What I wouldn’t give to have an actual, physical keyboard in the classroom for even just a few days … ah well. As my union puts it, our teaching conditions are our students’ learning conditions.) I ended up pairing “Twinkle” with “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”; the two worked beautifully together to think about similarities and differences between how melodies are shaped (ascent and descent, leaps and steps, range, repetition, question and answer, and so on). My coda was Eric Dolphy’s “Hat and Beard.” As I wrote many moons ago on this blog (see “Underground Man,” 5.27.10), Dolphy’s melodies sound like they should be hummable … but reproducing them when they’re gone, even after you’ve heard them a number of times, is enormously difficult. Dolphy’s melodies recall what the man himself (and others before and after him) said about music more generally: “You hear it, and it’s gone.”

In the process of constructing the packet, I also realized (or perhaps better resolved on) something else: given in part that this is an English course, making analogies—even sometimes rather strained ones—between the sorts of things students would have encountered in the writing-sequence courses and music could be a viable way for them to make potentially enlightening connections. Every art can serve as an analogical reference-point for any other, with music perhaps the one that most depends on such analogies. So, for example, I compared melodies to summaries—the “gist” of a song; the thing we can abstract from the broader sonic information. I used the relationship between dependent and independent clauses (which at least some of them suffered through, particularly if they started the writing sequence at the developmental level) to try to elucidate the role of tension and resolution in melody.† I also tried to illustrate tension-resolution by applying a technique we sometimes use in teaching poetry and description to highlight the importance of a writer’s word choice: How would the meaning change if word Xwere replaced by word Y? The same might be asked of a melody. I sang the first part of “Rainbow” and, on the “high,” the unresolved ending of the antecedent phrase, I replaced it with the octave (“way … up … high!”). I’m not sure it helped, but the idea seems right: they could compare a clearly resolving note with one that suspends, that expects an answer, in the context of a single melody. (It also (hilariously) made the song sound like a TV jingle selling, I don’t know, sofas—which is probably right, since a jingle, as opposed to a song, seeks immediate resolution.)

At the same time, developing students’ music-writing skills is a matter not just of more careful and analytical listening, but linguistic precision. After suffering through a few semesters of the blandest and most generic language to describe music’s affective character, parts of the packet forced them to expand their vocabulary in the pedagogically-dreaded abstract: to create a palette like a painter’s, but of words; to find stronger, more specific, more evocative terms for describing the shades and complexities of emotional states to which music can give us access. That’s right: I actually asked them to make lists of synonyms, and we discussed shades of difference between, say, angry and enraged (quantity), or chipper and pleased (quality), and then how these words might be applied to different music selections. Compare, for example, Peter’s theme in Peter and the Wolf to the beginning of the Pastorale symphony. If we agree both of these are “happy,” how can we distinguish the quality and intensity of happiness? We also discussed adjective-adverb combos, Roland Barthes be damned (e.g., “resignedly happy,” which may describe how I feel reading Barthes). I was taking off here from a moment in the opening chapter of Aaron Copland’s What To Listen For in Music, plane #2 of his planes of listening, the expressive plane. I should add that it was also a fine opportunity to undercut such approaches, and to make students wary of clichés. In case you don’t know or remember them, Simpsons creator Matt Groenig’s ‘80s Life In Hell comics featured the “Feisty Film Critic” and “So You Wanna Be a Rock Critic,” both extremely funny parodies of the critical enterprise. One includes a matching exercise where the critic selects an adjective from column one and an adverb from column two, and ends up with a ridiculously clichéd pair (e.g., “hauntingly evocative”). Touchee, Copland!

Now, is there something too rote, even pedagocally unsound, about this approach? Are you sure? How sure are you? I have the feeling many of my students have never been asked to think consciously about the way language parses emotional experiences, not even in poetry.

From melody we moved into timbre. I think this section of the packet also had much that worked well. I still follow the advice of an intro-to-music syllabus I found on-line a number of years ago: start with voice. Not only, as has been much written about, because the voice (together with the beat of the heart) is the basis of all music, but also because it’s what students feel most comfortable talking about. Voice, together with the words sung or rapped, allowed us to focus on three things: the story or emotion being communicated by the words; the physical qualities of the singer’s voice and the words we might use to describe them (breathy, raspy, gruff, that sort of thing); and the attitude (as part of their artistic persona) they projected, the last of which again draws on a concept they should be familiar with from their earlier English classes, tone. Thus, voice forms an entry-point for thinking about timbre more broadly; tone becomes a bridge to tone quality, something we use to distinguish one person’s speaking voice from another’s; and considering the voice as an instrument becomes a bridge to the timbre of instruments. For the latter, I confess—I have already obliquely done so—I used “Peter in the Wolf,” and another lovely educational video I found on YouTube. (I’m only rhetorically ashamed; I listened to this piece growing up and have always loved it, and I can’t think of a composer with a more robust and evocative melodic imagination than Prokofiev.) The focus on voice also allowed me to re-use several of the tracks I had used in my previous “scattershot” semesters (2010 and 12) for opening listening exercises, including Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday,” Tom Waits’s barroom “Innocent When You Dream,” Alberta Hunter, Nina Simone, Johnny Cash, Perla de Cadiz, and Pantera.

Any attempt to try to explain music’s affective meaning raises a host of issues. For example: how to speak about any one element in isolation from the others? Of course, this is true of any analysis. (Given that I have largely abandoned a formal approach to the elements of fiction and poetry, I should ask myself here, publicly, why am I attempting it with music. Naivete?) In giving students, say, the opening section of the Pastorale symphony, or Peter’s theme, one can’t help but notice that the affective character of the music is as much a product of instrumentation and arrangement as of melody—and before long the whole kit and caboodle is dragged into the discussion. (We were actually able to capitalize on this by listening to a selection from Swan Lake, in which the central theme radically changes its character when it re-appears in a new arrangement.) In hindsight, it makes me wonder if this formalized listening unit might be turned ninety degrees, so that, rather than foregrounding the elements, it foregrounded instead the physical aspects of timbre and melody on the one hand, and its affective character on the other. In this way, one might begin with emotional response—what the music makes us feel, often the first impression of a piece—before asking students whatthey are hearing in the music that provokes this response. This would allow the elements to emerge more naturally from a discussion of the way we respond to the music we hear. Something to think about.

Something else worth considering: as noted, by the time they take this course, students will have completed the foundational courses in the English sequence (Comp 1 and 2); they will have been trained throughout those two semesters to find main ideas, paragraph topics, and (God forbid) that elusive-reductive something called the meaning of a poem or story. But in this course, students are pushed up against texts where they’re asked to think less about meaning than texture: to describe what it is they hear, and from this to consider how and why it provokes certain responses in a listener. Of course, we try to do this in Comp as well, particularly in the second semester, which, at Hostos, is literature-based. But we know, as per Billy Collins’s hilarious “Introduction to Poetry,” that resisting this desire to ferret out meaning is an uphill battle (cf. “They begin beating it with a hose/ to find out what it really means”). I know that my students have always had a wretched time with prosody—ironic, given that prosody fills their lives in the form of the music most of them listen to (or maybe not so ironic; see below). But if they have so much difficulty parsing the music of a poetic line or stanza, why would I imagine they could do it with melodies, with sound? Of course, resisting this trampling the text in the quest for meaning, the violence of it, the consumer mentality behind it, and teaching students to luxuriate in the sensual thereness of the text, might itself be a justification for a class like Writing About Music: without the ability to jump right to meaning, students are forced to confront the physicality of the musical “text” … and this might have a payoff for their ability to appreciate the sensual there-ness of any text: linguistic, visual, etc.

Speaking of texture … I won’t, not very much, because I didn’t, not very much. It is in some ways the most difficult element to teach to non-music students, so it was somewhat fortuituous that we ran out of time to really do it justice. A couple of years back, Prof. Rounds introduced me to a Steve Reich piece called “Clapping Hands.” It begins with a synchronized 12-beat pattern, repeated eight times; after each set of eight, one person begins the pattern a beat ahead of the other, and, as in a classic Reich tape-loop composition (e.g., “It’s Gonna Rain” or “Come Out”), the two clappers fall further and further out of phase with each other, until they wrap around again. As “the rhythmic corollary to the harmonic idea of imitative polyphony” (as I have called it elsewhere on this blog), the piece seemed like a perfect way to introduce the concept of texture. And so long as we were singing and/or listening to “Happy Birthday” (Monroe) and “Twinkle, Twinkle” (Space Invaders), we simply hadto try “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” which was actually the piece cited in my first-semester music theory textbook to introduce the concept of polyphony.

But I also realized that a rigorous, formal understanding of polyphony wasn’t necessary for students working at this level of music appreciation. Non-musicians (a category which would include many, if not most, music writers/critics) tend to use the concept much more generally—not to say vaguely/sloppily—to mean something more like the overall sonic density of a piece, with an ear toward the way voices and timbres bleed together as well as stand apart. In this way, texture becomes a variant of signal-to-noise: To what extent do the various sonic components of a piece of music blend into a single mass of sound? To what extent can we hear individual voices braiding together, or pulling apart? To what extent does a single voice predominate? To illustrate, I used the very New York analogy (which I think I might’ve read somewhere) of sitting in a noisy public place—a park, a bar, whatever. I wanted students to be able to think about the overall ambient quality of a piece, the way the combination of sounds, of timbres and melodies and rhythms, sometimes pull away from each other, sometimes bleed into each other, to create music’s Gestalt effect. The problem: it’s difficult to articulate this without entering into a basic discussion of harmony, of consonance and dissonance, without exploring a few basic intervals … and given the overall trajectory of the course, where I want students to be for their first graded assignment, opening this Pandora’s box might be the straw that … broke … opening this straw camel might be the box … shit. Let me come back to this a little later.

Of all the elements we explored, it was rhythm that snookered me. I was very much a victim of my own assumptions here. As an amateur musician who always felt more comfortable with rhythm than melody or harmony, I thought I had some intuitive grasp of the topic; perhaps I even thought that rhythm was somehow “easier” to explain than the other elements; and that these two things together meant I already had the resources to make it clear. An embarrassing admission for a veteran teacher, but there it is. These assumptions led to a number of confusions as we tried to parse the rhythms of the various assigned pieces. It was most an issue when we listened to a baroque piece together: without percussion or bass to provide a clear backbeat, and what with all the fluctuations in dynamics and tempo that accompany classical performance, students had difficulty finding the regular pulse (so-called “motoric rhythm”); tempo, meter, and texture (in the shape of other voices ornamenting the melodic line without changing the pulse) ended up all balled together, and were only partly untangled by taking a few steps back. The upshot here is that I need to rethink my lesson on rhythm to find the sorts of handholds I’ve found for melody and timbre. Perhaps, given how beautifully “Clapping Hands” introduces the idea of polyphony, re-ordering the elements—even putting rhythm first—would make sense.

I did have at least one idea worth revisiting and revising: dance as a means of imagining rhythm (and to be sure, music more generally). Even just by tapping a foot or hand, or clapping along, rhythm becomes visible, tangible: we see/feel the way the body translates it. Unlike my mostly failed attempts to get students to hum their hummable melodies, a couple of students did get up and dance a merengue to Joseito Mateo. (The humming was very early in the semester … so maybe they were just beginning to feel more comfortable in the oddballness that is this class, and more importantly, with each other.) My epiphany here for future semesters was to ask students to find/watch a video of the dance associated with the rhythm in question (the two may be synonymous), and write. What does the way in which the body (and perhaps pairs or groups of bodies) translate rhythm reveal about the characteristics of that particular rhythm? And perhaps, though more carefully: What elements of the associated culture might this rhythm/dance express?

As noted above, for song structure I partly reduxed the adapted lesson on Cake’s “Stickshifts and Safety Belts”; I thought it worked better this semester with the addition of Beyonce’s “Halo” for comparison and contrast. Structure is a great example of something students “know” from listening to so much popular music, but aren’t necessarily conscious of knowing. It was a good opportunity for me to take basic verse-chorus-bridge song structure and algebraically boil it down to 32-bar structure, allowing me to make a connection back to “Rainbow” and forward to the jazz we would listen to later in the semester, and hence maximize the recursive use of the assigned listenings. It was a similarly good opportunity to again make connections to both the English sequence and the just-studied elements, here by thinking of a song as a story independent of its lyrical content: Does it have a climax? If so, where? And how do you know?

Ending the unit with structure makes for a nice segue into the formal assignment, since it provides one possible model for how to structure the description essay. But this semester I also provided a second, more direct model: a model description essay using the Judas Priest song “Fever,” which I posted and annotated to show the different techniques I had used to organize and develop. Making models for the graded assignments was actually a big overall upgrade in the course as a whole this semester. I had good a student performance review from a previous semester which I also annotated and posted; I also linked to a couple of performance reviews on the Pit Stop. For the photo-bio assignment (see below), I annotated and posted a current student’s “A” paper, for those who needed or wanted to revise. And for the final assignment, which asked students to analyze song lyrics in terms of their musical components (below, below), I again wrote and annotated a model, this one using Dr Octagon’s “Earth People.”

Given all of the above, and the new ideas that occurred to me during the semester about how to approach some of this material, I did begin to wonder whether the time devoted to introducing the elements of music should be extended to seven classes, that is, fully one-quarter of the semester. But at what point does this “close listening” component begin to take over the course, and turn it away from the writing that is its ostensible focus? At what point, given that I am not a music instructor but rather play one on CUNY-TV, am I doing students a disservice by not transitioning more quickly into reading and writing? Re-organizing this unit, as per the notes above, might help me re-think how much time I want to devote to the elements/analytical listening next time I teach the course. Perhaps the goal here should be—particularly since this is a writing-intensive course—to make sure each element has a language/writing payoff in the way the description of timbre does (and, prospectively, rhythm). These are the sorts of questions raised by interdisciplinarity, particularly when one is trying to build a bridge from one’s own discipline to the mare ignotum of another. There are other possibilities: continuing to explore the “other” discipline via reading, auditing classes, and talking with teachers; co-teaching or co-developing materials with music professors, as I have done with WAC fellows. (Unfortunately, the pecuniary environment (austerity) doesn’t reward educators who want to team-teach.)

One constant of music appreciation textbooks is that students should get a broad range of things to listen to—sort of a no-brainer, but it bears mentioning. We want them to open their ears to different sounds and forms of expression. We want them to create new synaptic connections, push their brains to fire in new ways—I can’t think of a better way to describe what happened to me when I first heard Bartok’s string quartets, or Ligeti’s etudes, or Messiaen’s Catalog of Birds, or John Zorn with Milford Graves, and so on, and so on. That said, there is a fine line between opening and overwhelming; and, when the task at hand is analysis, focus might be more important than breadth. All this is to say that I most definitely overkilled on the number musical examples I assigned. It is part of the seduction of having so much available. As I write this, I wonder if there might be a way to synthesize what I tried this semester with what I have done before: spend that first day firing a bunch of random, broadly-selected pieces of music at them; in the subsequent classes, turn to parsing the elements, focusing mostly on pieces they were exposed to in that first class. This way, studying the elements would become in part an investigation of why they wrote some of the things they did on that first day … and how they might use the elements to approach listening on a different level.

That said, as I’ve noted several times above, recursivity was indeed something I have tried to build into the course since teaching it for the first time; the issue is continuing to find moreopportunities to make connections, while at the same time not allowing the evolution of the course to stagnate (via the possibility that each element becomes so essential to every other that one is loathe to change absolutely anything). For example, giving students “The Augurs of Spring” to listen to when we examined rhythm, and “Free Jazz” for texture, means that, when we got to the question of the importance of historical context for determining the meaning of performance (see “Postmortem II”), together with the excellent reading “Beethoven’s Kapow” (about the first performance of the Eroica symphony), we will look at similar historical responses to the first performance of the Stravinsky (excerpted from Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise) and—in our modern context—the rift in the jazz community created by the arrival of Ornette Coleman, and again with the release of Free Jazz (captured in the divergent reviews the greeted the album’s arrival in Down Beat) as other examples of ruptures—moments when audiences were (at least in some versions of the events) unprepared for the sonic experiences that awaited them … when, just like my students encountering some of the strange music assigned in this class, they, too, were overwhelmed, confused, frustrated, shocked … enraptured.

Where’s that confounded bridge?

I admit it: I didn’t get the joke of Led Zeppelin’s “The Crunge” until a couple of years ago. Now I’m hip enough to use it as a section title. I’ve come a long way, baby! My “bridge” here will consist of a few notes on the units of the class that changed the least—comparison-contrast and performance review—and maybe even a fourth chord.

The more formal listening unit made it possible to treat my old lesson on “Born in the USA” (see “Postmortem II”) as at once capstone and step forward. The unit, which segues nicely into the comparison-contrast assignment between covers and “originals,” didn’t change too too much: a few new choices for song pairs, and some new readings. I never much cared for the old ones, but had never been able to find anything better. I had already assembled a handout of provocative quotes for in-class writing from those two articles, and realized this semester they’d actually work fine without the articles themselves. Together with these quotes, I assigned new material from a critical anthology about cover songs, Play It Again: a short excerpt from the introduction, and a longer, denser one from an article by pioneering metal theoretician Deena Weinstein. In “Stereophony,” Weinstein introduces the title concept to explain how we listen to covers, and the way that this listening practice differs from the romantic assumptions that accompanied the birth of rock ‘n’ roll. Overall, the combination of excerpts gave a much fuller set of ideas to play with, and helped pave the way for a richer discussion of today’s musical landscape of samples, mash-ups, and plunderphonics. Again, I’m embarrassed by the sheer quantity of the riches of YouTubeLandia I mined for my class: from Will Smith’s recasting of “Just the Two of Us” and Puff Daddy rapping over a loop from The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” to Evolution Control Committee’s seminal mash-up of Herb Alpert and Public Enemy, etc., etc.§

Something else happened in this “covers” unit that is worth mentioning, in this case because it strikes me as so indicative of the musical-cultural moment our students inhabit. One song pair I wanted to assign was Hendrix’s “You Got Me Floatin’” and PM Dawn’s wonderful re-invention (on the Hendrix tribute album Stone Free). The problem? I couldn’t find Hendrix’s “You Got Me Floatin’” on YouTube. WTF? I wasn’t aware we had entered a new era of YouTube: the combination of listener reviews (I believe they’re called “vlogs”) and amateur covers buries the originals so deep that they become unrecoverable. (I have the feeling this is also a matter of copyright protection: as songs are continuously removed and re-posted, they do not generate the number of views to compete with popular vlogs and covers, and so grow increasingly invisible as viewings of the latter, “parasitic” texts increase.) Annoying? You betcha! Here I was, nervous that we had moved beyond the age of covers, into an age when only samples and mash-ups make sense anymore … and what I discovered was quite the opposite: we have never been more in an age of covers than we are now. And then the teacher in me started to wonder if this might be an opportunity, a platform for a new assignment. Thus far, the four times I have taught the course, the song pairs have been assigned by me. (In fact, in this last semester, it was the only one of the five graded assignments where students didn’t get to choose their own piece. My reasoning: the cover and original have to “work” together to produce a successful assignment; the added variable makes it that much less likely that students will choose viable material.) Instead, what if students picked a song they liked, and then a variety of amateur covers, listening for what changes between them, and judged which cover version was “best” based on criteria developed through class discussion of the assigned reading—the most creative re-invention, the truest to the original’s “essence,” or whatever? This would have the added virtue of giving students the opportunity to push the “evaluation” button they’re so desperate to push with everything they listen to (see “Postmortem”) … but only after doing the initial legwork of close listening, analysis, and comparison.

As for the performance unit, very little changed in terms of reading selections or assignments. That said, as noted in my introduction, my ability to speak to and organize discussions about some of this and other topics was deepened by the reading I have done over the last half-decade, most of all during my sabbatical; the example that pops to mind is Steve Waksman’s discussion of the contrasting significance of stadiums and festivals, which helped inform our discussion of Hendrix at Woodstock versus Houston at the Superbowl.

Pictures worth a thousand notes

In the last two units of the semester I departed entirely, or almost entirely, from what I’d done in the course before. The fourth unit, focused around jazz and Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful, built nicely from the gallery walk lesson (see “Postmortem II”), for reasons to be explored in a moment. As it turned out, the bridge between the two African American musical forms that were the focus of these last two units, jazz and hip hop, was created by the students themselves, since hip hop came up in the initial discussion of jazz, and allowed students to use a contemporary context as a way to help them make sense of the earlier form, with which they had little if any direct contact.

Before jumping into the Dyer, it made sense to take a week to give students a brief historical and cultural grounding in jazz. Many of the short reading selections were taken from Robert Walser’s excellent anthology Keeping Time, with a couple of other tidbits thrown in (from the introductions to Nat Hentoff’s Jazz Is and Ted Gioia’s brand-new (at the time) How To Listen To Jazz, and Bill Evans’s justly famous liner notes to Kind of Blue). Musical selections were paired with the Walser readings: Satchmo and Gershwin and Duke; Bird and Diz; and two examples of the contemporary moment, the more provocative of which was Esperanza Spalding’s “Jazz Is Soul”—so great to see a contemporary performer whose range spans jazz and a variety of popular forms defining what jazz is, in performance! We then spent two weeks on the introduction plus four chapters of the Dyer, each about a different musician—Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and Charles Mingus, and each of which was paired with a couple of musical selections. We discussed what these different chapters said about jazz, about art and the perils and beauties of its creation, about African American history and musical forms … and, of course, about how we approach that elusive thing called music in words.

If anything, I think I was blinded to the possibilities for this unit—and this text—by the fact that I was suddenly holding a book in my hand, and was able to look around the room and see students (most of them, anyway) holding books in their hands, too! How comforting for an English teacher! I was suddenly back in a literature class, and breathed deeply the familiar air. As a result, the text’s potential for this class remained untapped, in at least two ways. First, as Dyer says in his introductory note, what was most inspiring to him as a writer—more than biographies or even the music—were photographs. He goes on to make a number of (highly debatable) points as to why. Dyer includes a few such photos in the text, and mentions a few others in the bibliography, some of which I posted; we took some time to examine them in class. But how much more we could have done! In hindsight, I realized that each of the four classes about each of the four musicians should begin with a much more extensive analysis of a photograph—or, better yet, the students could write about those photographs, either before coming to class or in the first ten minutes. Doing so would help (a) once again weld elements of the class together, in this case by drawing forward insights and practices from the just-completed gallery walk; (b) give students a visual foothold for discussing the fictive aspects of the text, i.e., the details and scenes via which Dyer brings the musicians to life as characters; and (c) create a much firmer segue into the graded assignment.

Connection between the reading and writing: that’s what was most missing from the jazz unit. Students had a choice between writing an essay on jazz based on a couple of prompts, drawing in But Beautiful and/or the introductory readings; or writing a photo analysis based on an artist of their choice. Not surprisingly for this one—as opposed to the other assignments—literally no one chose the straight essay. This was my second revelation-in-hindsight for this unit, one that applies equally to the next unit (see below), and possibly to other assignments where the text serves as generating point rather than sole focus. The key here is to work the introductory material, in which Dyer discusses the use of photographs in his own creative work, into the instructions for the assignment. The assignment would thus ask them to begin with a discussion of Dyer’s preface, probably with some suggested questions to help develop; they would go on to analyze their own photographs of their own artists, drawing in part on the ideas from Dyer they had presented and discussed in the first part of their essay.

Words ARE music

As noted, for the final unit, Sounds, Words … Voices, we turned our attention to poetry and lyrics, and the way poets, singers and rappers encourage us to hear words not just as empty nodes of meaning, but as musical objects in themselves. We segued into the unit by examining poetry that gives particular attention to the sounds of words. Some of these poems I’d taught in Writing About Music before, though without thinking of them as a segue into considering lyrics. This semester, the idea was to make a transition from poetry that foregrounds sound (whether over & above/in lieu of sense, or as an emphatic adjunct to it) to song lyrics, with a particular focus on hip hop. I allowed myself a day-plus to once again try to bridge back to the terminology for analyzing rhyme and meter they would have at least touched on in their second semester writing classes. Although the packet also contained poems by Poe, Hopkins, Carroll, Hughes, Roethke, cummings, and Lorca, I ended up focusing on Frances Conford’s “The Watch,” John Updike’s “Winter Ocean,” and Michael Stillman’s “In Memorium, John Coltrane” for our full-class discussion. The Conford made a nice departure point for the way regular rhyme, meter, and onomatapeia help to create a poem’s meaning and tone. The Updike and Stillman made their own perfect pair: each is a flash musical composition, but with antithetical feels: Updike’s is indeed a winter ocean, all clashing stresses and jumbled images, whereas Stillman’s is pure flow—the relentless drive of a Coltrane solo.** Reciting—really performing these poems was indeed key; and I think that in the future a more formal performance component might be woven into this lesson—perhaps even as a competition? (By the way, if “poetry slam” just popped into your mind, or more broadly the way that spoken-word poetry might fit with this unit, rest assured it has occurred to me as well. It is so much the poetic ambience in which our students live today. Doing so would mean expanding and/or revamping this unit, as well as delving into the culture and practice of spoken-word poetry, about which I am largely ignorant.)

The articles about rap, John McWhorter’s “Americans Have Never Loved Poetry More … They Just Call It Rap” and Kelefa Sanneh’s “Word,” a review of Jay-Z’s Decoded and the Yale Anthology of Hip Hop Lyrics, nestled together beautifully. McWhorter, like the Yale editors, makes the case that rap is poetry. But Sanneh points out—correctly, in my opinion—not only that such claims are more than anything about cachet, but also—and this is really the crux of it—that such a claim ignores hip hop’s actual contribution, its “genius”: “to make us hear words as music.” In this way, the McWhorter-Sanneh “debate” also dovetails beautifully with the jazz unit, which included an excerpt from Billy Taylor’s “Jazz: America’s Classical Music.” What is gained by asserting such equivalencies, Walser asks in his intro blurb, and what is sacrificed? In effect, Sanneh asks—and answers—precisely this question about rap: When rap is equated with poetry, is not something—in fact, its very essence—lost—even in its translation to the printed page, where “literature” is supposed to exist? (What a long way we’ve come since Newsweek’s notorious 1990 attack on rap, which, sadly, does not seem to be available on-line; it might have made a nice counterpoint.) In this context, it was also useful to recall the kerfuffle around the Dylan Nobel Prize a couple of years back—though the connection occurred to me too late to try to find/work in an article; such an article might work well with the McWhorter and Sanneh, demonstrating the way hip hop and folk music are both reference points in broader cultural conversations about and anxieties over art and value: what is literature, who gets to say so, whether lyrics should be valorized as such, and whether what works on the page works orally, and vice-versa.

As always, the sound-based poetry, and then the discussion of the rap articles that followed, was partly intended to serve as a platform for the assignment to come, which asked them to analyze a snippet of hip hop lyrics (or other lyrics, in the case they didn’t listen to hip hop) both “on the page” and in performance, in terms of their sound—rhyme, rhythm, and vocal quality (timbre, delivery, etc.). One of the best things that came out of this—the best things are always unanticipated—was a discussion of the concept of “flow,” which Sanneh raises in his article, quoting Jay-Z. It’s one of the few moments I can remember that I was able to capitalize on a “teaching moment”: I told students to go find the definition in a credible source. It became an extra credit paper-chase. Two sent me personal definitions—they clearly believed themselves authoritative!—although one of them added three wonderful links to freestyle rappers that I was then able to turn around and use in our next class. Interestingly, one student found a blog associated with Oregon State University, but it turned out to be by a student—not strictly authoritative, but with some worthwhile ideas, and good fodder for a discussion of .edu sites and credibility. Finally, one hit the goldmine: Oxford Music Online, the same source they were supposed to visit for the research project, and whose entry on rap from 2013 contained a lovely and very academic definition of “flow.” It also presented a great opportunity to consider why the 2001 OMO entry for rap did not contain “flow” at all, and why the term was not itself an entry … though, as one student rightly noted, it might become one in the future.

Though students had the option to write an original verse in someone else’s style (together with an analysis) or an annotation, the vast majority chose the college essay analyzing lyrics (according to the model provided about “Earth People,” noted above). In this regard, the discussion of “flow,” together with the assigned articles, should allow me to do for this assignment what I intend to do with the Dyer text in the jazz unit: students would draw on concepts and ideas presented in the readings in their introductions, and potentially to help them develop their analyses. This will help (once again) balance the reading and literary element of the class (using expository writing to discuss a text) and the creative and listening element (selecting their own musical text to work with and applying ideas from the class to help parse it).

One bonus of this final unit was that it provided an opportunity to flesh out an idea I had unwittingly raised at the very beginning of the semester, by introducing those quotes from Barzun and Bernstein: music as a circuit that bypasses representation, seeming to appeal to the emotions without recourse to image or concept. In this light I thought to bring in some concrete poetry, though the cummings served well enough to show how the page, as a visual artifact, also communicates outside the meaning structure of grammar. In this regard, it might be nice to also bring back the broader question about how listeners relate to their music—a question that also arises at the very beginning of the semester around My Music. How do they, as listeners, weigh the relationship between words and music? To what extent do, say, racist, or misogynist, or politically-obnoxious lyrics change our relationship to a song?

Conclusioning-a-ning

Well, here I am at the end of another extensive postmortem—the most extensive yet: the organs all in their proper little trays, the body splayed & evacuated … but there, just under where the gallbladder once was, the research project, once again left behind. Like Gary Larsen’s cows, who sit there without opposable thumbs, unable to answer the phone: so I sit. This semester I actually used Prof. Rounds’s research project—I mean wholesale, just took it and jimmied the damn thing into my course, with hardly an edit—I shouted, “There ye are; and make the best of it!”—and so maybe, in my above-threatened Postmortem IV: The Revenge, I will have an opportunity to talk about in what ways it kicks the crap out of the research assignments I’ve tried in the past. As it is, I’d rather spend the remainder of this post(mortem, ha ha, punny punny) discussing what IS here, and what might be.

What IS it, man? A sort of chimera, a hybrid between a very writing-intensive music appreciation course and an advanced composition course that takes music as its semester-long theme. And that is, I think, the right interdisciplinary space for it. The question for me moving forward, then, is not how to change the identity of the course, but how to fully capitalize on this interdisciplinary niche, in such a way that students find and keep their bearings through the semester-long ride.

One way, as noted, is to rein in the assigned listenings (see above). The increasingly extensive use I’ve made of the Blackboard site is obviously a good thing—particularly as this is one of the few courses I teach that I could imagine in an asynchronous environment. But after preparing a hybrid course last year (for second-semester comp), my weaknesseses with Blackboard became that much more apparent. And it’s not just the sheer quantity of material. Why, for example, did I keep the oldest stuff on top, burying the new at the bottom of a Course Content page deep as a well? Scroll, scroll, scroll … So the hybrid training helped me become conscious of stuff like this. But I’m still going to have to start with a judicious pruning of the amount of material; only then will the recursive elements of the course really stand out to the students.

In terms of developing the course further, as I look back particularly on my attempts to make the listening portion more robust, I have started to fantasize about auditing another class—but this time, rather than theory (which, I admit, I partly did for my own pleasure), music education. I actually got this idea by way of my niece, who, as a euphonium player studying music at Northwestern, with an eye toward possibly becoming a music educator, was assigned to visit music classrooms in area high schools. I think a similar endeavor would help me to consolidate the changes I’ve made in the “elements” portion of the class. The trick will be finding a place where I can do it, as I am longer blessed to be living a five-minute walk from City College’s Shepard Hall (cf. “Goodbye, Music Library!” 12.31.12)!

At the end of the semester I gave my students my own evaluation. In addition to asking them about the best, worst, and most difficult readings, listenings, and assignments, and memorable lessons, all of which I’ve done in the past, this semester I asked a series of true-or-false questions: (1) This class exposed me to music with which I was not familiar; (2) This class enabled me to notice things about music I hadn’t before; (3) This class helped me think about the music I like in a new way; (4) I’m now sort of interested in exploring jazz; (5) I’m going to stop listening to everything I used to listen to and, from this point forward, listen only to death metal.

My reasoning was as follows: #1 has to be true; anyone who answers “no” is clearly doing so from either ill will or lack of attention; an “F” answer would would help me rule out corrupt surveys. #5 is obviously facetious. The core questions, then, are #2-4; #2 and #3 are broad goals for the course, while with #4 I just wanted to know if the jazz unit had piqued any interest. I can’t, of course, put too much stock in such a survey; even though I kept them turned over and asked for anoynymity, it does not have the sort of safeguards of a regular evaluation. Still, I thought whatever information I might glean could be useful.

As it turned out, I was wrong about question #1: the only student who marked “F” actually wrote a thoughtful closing note (in a space I had marked for “closing thoughts”); how he or she already knew all this music I can’t say. The only survey I discounted was the one marked “T” for every question … including listening to death metal for the rest of his (or her) life. (Someone else wrote in the closing comment box, “I will never listen to death metal.”) Discounting the all-T survey, the answers were as follows, T’s first: 1, 12-1; 2, 12-1; 3, 9-4; 4, 7-6; and 5, 0-13. Obviously, I’m happy with #2, and moderately so with #3; I really like the idea of students turning a new sort of attention on “their” music. There might be cause for a tiny celebration about #4; some students even marked But Beautifulas their favorite reading, and expressed the wish that the jazz unit had been longer.

And finally. In the academic-political context of our time, it’s hard not to see this long-ass post as a bit of a protest. Perhaps the most dispiriting transformation in academia since I began teaching has been the move to outsource curriculum. Faculty become content-delivery machines, education allocators. Chevron writes my curriculum; I just stick the nozzle in my students’ ears and pump that good ol’ Chevron-knowledge in. I become a glorified TA, really just there to do the grunt work of grading papers, and of course AI is slowly catching up with us there (hilariously, at least for the time being). Frankly, I think we’re in danger of outsourcing ourselves out of a profession. To me, the two most exciting things about teaching are developing curricula and being in the classroom, and my hearing issues are rapidly making the latter a thing of the past. Why on earth would we allow a network of increasingly-corporatized schools and for-profit companies to rob us of the best part of our profession? I love that little feature on Blackboard called “teaching style,” which enables you to select a course theme (rocket! legal pad! ocean!), and the shapes of the buttons. Pretty soon that’s what we’ll be reduced to—what we’ll reduce ourselves to. See ya, birthright! Hello, mess o’ pottage! Every such platform shapes the way we teach, and “education corporations” (an oxymoron if ever there was one) clearly want to control this, in the same way textbook publishers want their products to get adopted, and database companies want to gouge colleges (and use faculty for free labor too boot). Curriculum is the hard-fought product of the reading and study and teaching teachers do, and the dialogue and sharing they engage in: the collective creativity of the professoriate. Why teach otherwise? When I developed my first hybrid course earlier this year, as noted above (to help mitigate my hearing problems), I was given the opportunity (but not mandated—please don’t misunderstand me here) to look at the products offered by one such company; I could, like, link to their dude giving his American lit survey lecture. And then I wouldn’t have to do all that work myself, would I? I, or rather my institution, could just buy it instead. It’s seductive, isn’t it? Being a kept man. Colleges maximize the number of classes we teach, and the number of students in our classrooms; the grind takes away from the time we have for developing course materials; we all went to get our scholarship done, or write insanely long blog posts … and voila, like a little wish-granting fairy, Edukation-R-Us appears to sell us the stuff we need, so colleges can keep stuffing more students into our classrooms, more classes into our schedule. But why would I use that when I’ve already made my own? I like my lectures. I keep refining them as I keep reading and learning. I’m not against the cornucopia of wonderful material available on the web; in my American-themed Literature and Composition course, I always post several of the Annenberg “American Promise” videos and encourage students to watch them. I also post several links about every author I teach, generally ones created by colleagues at other colleges, some by government organizations doing state history, some by independent scholars. That’s a creative commons, like the smaller one we have here at CUNY, onto which, when I am done writing, I will upload this, in the hopes that someone may find it as useful as me, and for the karmic responsibility to others doing the same. But a ready-made template provided by some poor underpaid sop probably burned out from adjuncting, unable to secure tenure-track work in our current academic inferno? Really?

Oh, Henry David! H.D.! Help me! (Thoreau appears from a wisp in the air, dressed as a shrub oak, knocks out the Edukation-R-Us fairy with a two-by-four, and says:) “It is no worse than a thousand other practices which custom [i.e., capitalism] has sanctioned; but that is the worst of it, for it suggests how bad the rest are and to what result our civilization and division of labor naturally tend.”††

 

* Cadences aren’t always easy for students to hear, particularly if they don’t have a musical background. Then again, if Peter Manuel is correct in his analysis of fandangos as heard by audiences with different cultural backgrounds, what counts as resolution is at least partly culturally specific (see Peter Manuel, “From Scarlatti to ‘Guantanamera’: Dual Tonicity in Spanish and Latin American Musics.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 55:2 (Summer 2002), 311-336). I wonder: If one plays the leading tone (in the proper harmonic context), will all people, irrespective of their origins, and based solely on the cognition of hearing, expect resolution on the tonic? It does seem like the academic pendulum is swinging back toward neurobiology. Those last three notes of the antedent phrase of “Rainbow” (“way up high”) are actually the same last three notes of the old six-note jingle in National Brand Outlets commercial (“N, B, O!”). (Is the jingle in a different key? I think so.)

† I realize this is ass-backwards to the way music is thought about today, i.e., not in terms of its elements, but in terms of cultural contexts; there is no such thing as “raw listening.” This is me nodding; this is you waiting for me to say something intelligent in response. This is me going on and talking anyway. This is you, sighing and reading on.

§ The old song pairs I used can be found in the original “Postmortem” post. This semester, I deleted the Beatles Cubanos and the Stones/Devo “Satisfaction” and added three new pairs: “Take Me To the River” by Al Green/The Talking Heads; “Me and Bobby McGee” by Roger Miller/Janis Joplin, and “Crazy in Love” by Beyonce/Antony and the Johnsons. Not surprisingly, the Beyonce had several takers, though I got better work out of “Me and Bobby McGee.”

** Together with John Sinclair’s brilliant Monk poem “humphf,” Stillman’s is my favorite jazz poem. Why does jazz poetry have a tendency to be so elegaic, so heavy? So much jazz poetry seems to miss the breath and hop and light beauty of the music—and what Art Blakey called “goofin’.” They intone rather than sing. Not that there aren’t a number of other poets whose jazz-themed poetry I admire: Baraka’s, much of Komunyakaa’s, O’Hara’s beautiful elegy for Billie Holiday …

†† From “Black Huckleberries,” an excerpt from Wild Fruits, left unfinished at the time of Thoreau’s death, published by W.W. Norton in 2000. The excerpt appeared in Harper’s.

Crash Course in Auto-Drumming

INTRODUCTION

Hello! Thank you for purchasing product number 99A/ToyCo, Crash Course in Auto-Drumming for the Toyota Corolla. My name is Helldriver, and I will be your instructor for this brief introduction to the fine art of auto-drumming. Before we embark on our journey together, let me tell you a little about myself, and about the philosophy of the course.

I come to you today with more than two decades of experience in auto-drumming. Each of my cars—the ’73 Firebird where I began my studies, the ’81 Citation and ’77 LeSabre where I came of age, and the two Corollas (2005 and 2015) where I achieved mastery—had a profound impact on my development; and each had as unique, as characteristic a sound as if their hood ornaments had said, not Chevrolet or Toyota, but Tama, Pearl, or Paste. I am, if I may be so bold, the consummate auto-didact: everything on offer in this crash course comes by way of yours truly, the fruit of my twenty-odd years driving and drumming, drumming and driving.

Before going any further, an important admission. I’m not a drummer; I’m an auto-drummer. Put me behind an actual kit, and quite probably your little brother, who plays in his junior high school ensemble, would wipe the floor with me. But put me behind the wheel of a car, and I’m Neil Peart, Lenny White, and Dave Lombardo all rolled into one. In fact, were any of these Hector-sized heroes to bum a ride on my horseless chariot, and then have the audacity to challenge me in this, my domain … rest assured they’d arrive at their destinations with new assholes well-torn.

Of all the myriad technologies that inundate American culture, the car is the one best understood as an extension of the human body. (If you have not read J.G. Ballard’s Crash, I would recommend you do so concurrently with taking this course.) So it’s little wonder that I, like many of you no doubt, began by drumming on my body, or that I continue to do so, sometimes in lieu of anything else to drum on, sometimes out of sheer pleasure. For what is the body, but a hide stretched over a bony frame? And what is the chest, but a resonating chamber, a sounding-box for the voice? It is thus but a small step—and a giant leap!—from yourself to your car.

Just as there are many of you who would not publicly admit to deriving pleasure from drumming on yourselves, so there are a fair number of you out there you who hide, as best you can, your proclivity to drum while driving. I understand. But consider, if you will, the central, indeed, the godlike place of the car in our auto-saturated culture of gas-guzzling individualism. How can there possibly be any shame in being an auto-drummer? At least, there should be far less shame in being an auto-drummer than there is being, say, an air-guitarist. At least in auto-drumming one makes actual physical sounds analogous to the instrument emulated, rather than just imitating the gestures of playing that instrument (cf. that embarrassing Journey video). Think of it as percussion karaoke, done in one of those private rooms with only a few people present … perhaps only you. Or like singing in the shower. You may be performing just for yourself, if you’re the sort that showers alone, but make no mistake: you are performing. Once you acknowledge these things, I think you’ll see why auto-drum-shaming should go the way of fat-shaming, second-hand-smoke shaming, and relentless-gutter-ball shaming.

In establishing my credentials, I should note that, in confronting the many obstacles I faced on the road to becoming a master auto-drummer, I have only had one serious at-fault accident. It was more than twenty-five years ago, and it came from screwing with the radio, NOT from drumming. On the contrary: I have found that drumming actually helps keep me time with driving, imparting it a rhythm, making the driving, too, part of the art; making driving itself musical, like those bartenders who juggle glasses. (Yes, I’m aware they occasionally drop them.) I learned to drum by driving; I learned to drive by drumming: for me, both statements are equally true.

Okay. Enough tooting my own horn. Are you ready to start? Good! Vroom vroom! Let’s do some preliminary exercises together, and then touch on our route and destination before calling it a day.

First things first. Get comfortable. That’s the first key to being a great auto-drummer: comfort. Ahhhhh. There. Let’s do some ergonomic, ambiental exercises. You should consider beginning every practice session with them for the entirety of the time you are taking this course. Put on your choice of music, by which I mean your choice of prog rock, hard rock, heavy metal, or heavy alternative, and not some lame shit I can’t take seriously (if you need to consult your brochure for examples, please pause the podcast to do so now). Pick a song you’re comfortable with, that you know every beat to, that you’ve drummed a thousand times, on kitchen countertops, on school desks, on close friends, on lovers, on yourself, in your head. But don’t go anywhere yet, and for God’s sake, don’t beat on anything! Move the seat up or down, backwards or forwards, until you achieve what feels like an ergonomically satisfying distance from the key elements of the car interior. Distance to the steering wheel is of particular importance; it may be slightly different from the distance you use for driving. That’s okay. We’ll come back to this in Lesson One. Run your hands over the console, the wheel, the dash, the mirror, and the side window; shuffle your feet on the floor. Touch every part of the interior of the car that you can reach comfortably from the driver’s side seat. Use the different parts of your hands to do so: nails, tips, knuckles, balls (i.e., the top of the palm, directly beneath the fingers), palms, and heels. Pause this recording until you’ve done so. Back already? Okay. Now, put your right elbow on the armrest between the seats and your left one on the armrest of the door. Move your forearms up and down; feel the way your elbows become pivot-points for your forearms and hands. Close your eyes. Consider the immense possibility of timbres around you. Visualize a common route in your head; visualize yourself, driving, drumming, along this route. Take a few deep breaths. Smell that? That’s the cairn of mouse shit on the air filter. The mouse piss, soaking it.

Sorry.

Do these preparatory exercises at least three times before attempting Lesson One. Next up: the anatomy of the interior; or, I didn’t know you could make that noise here!

Honk! Honk! I’ll see you there!

 

LESSON ONE: THE ANATOMY OF THE INTERIOR

Hello! Thank you for continuing to listen to me! I intuit by your continued interest that you have not had a massive accident, your sternum impaled on the steering column, your ribs and spine ground like peppercorns in the mortar of your hips, yourself pinned together like a dinosaur skeleton, with a bevy of nurses making a gamelan on your poor plaster frame!

But then you haven’t even made it out of the driveway, have you? There’s still time! Ready to move forward? No? Good! Terrified? Think how the other drivers must feel!

Today, we’re going to go through the parts of the driver’s-side interior for their common analogues to the traditional drum kit. Lesson One is parts.

Paaarts! Paaaaaaaarts!!!

Like our bodies, the interior of the average automobile provides manifold opportunities for different resonances, a plethora of timbres that mimic the variety available on a drum kit, a rich palette of possibilities. Even the shittiest tin-can of a car is thus the equivalent of the greatest prog rock drummer’s bloated surround-kit, imaginatively speaking.

It will hardly surprise you to learn that the steering wheel is the main place where auto-drumming happens. The wheel is thus much as Neil Peart once described the snare: no matter how big your kit gets, the snare remains the center, the focus. Keeping in mind the analogy to the automobile, we might call the steering wheel the point of departure and place of return: no matter where our hands putter off to, the wheel calls to us back, like a beacon from home. The journey to and from the wheel is thus the equivalent, perhaps a microcosm, of the journey we make in our car, played out many times in the course of a single voyage.

Unlike the snare, however, which in rock drumming is often used for a single, steady timbre to hold the beat, the steering wheel presents multiple possibilities for mimicking different parts of the kit; indeed, one can become a proficient auto-drummer without ever looking outside the steering wheel. This is one advantage of newer cars over older ones, whose single-piece, instrumentless wheels (such as that in the Firebird of my novitiate) tended toward a poverty of timbres, and had little resonance. The drum-gods have clearly smiled upon auto designers and manufacturers since then. That said, the number of timbres available is partly due to the wheel itself, and partly to the hand that strikes it, since, unlike the kit, auto-drumming is done entirely by hand (unless, that is, you would like to imagine someone driving using sticks, mallets, or brushes: a frightening proposition, a horror movie on wheels). Just like when we drum on our bodies, sound is not just a matter of where we strike, but what part of the hand we use.

So, let’s drive thru the parts of the wheel and the timbres they best approximate when struck with different parts of the hand.

The TOP RIM OF THE STEERING WHEEL, roughly between the proverbial ten and two o’clock of the conscientious driver, struck with the ball of the hand, produces a dry thud perfect for mimicking toms, including the floor tom, as well as the bass drum(s). This is so because of the way the wheel shudders when properly struck. Bear in mind that, the closer one plays to the wrist, the deeper the resonance. As such, fingers are better for higher-pitched toms, heels for bass drums. Even struck with the fingers, however, the top of the wheel can make an adequate bass thud; it can even, in some cases, serve for a snare. We’ll consider the ramifications of these multiple uses in just a moment. In the meantime, please note that, in order to strike the top of the wheel properly, you will have to raise your elbows from the aforementioned pivot-points on the arm rests.

Properly struck, the PLASTIC HOUSING AROUND THE HUB, which in newer-model Corollas extends and widens bilaterally into two spokes that serve as a second instrument panel, produce a flat, “clacking” tone that makes for a gratifying snare-equivalent. The most effective way to get this snare-like timbre is to hook your thumbs around wheel at the end of each spoke (e.g., three and nine o’clock); this stabilizes your hands (and, potentially, the car), and gives you a powerful base from which to slap the back of the housing with the tips of your index and middle fingers. As you get more comfortable, first with making a good snare sound and then with drumming while driving, you will find yourself lifting your hand (usually the left) entirely off the wheel to smack the rear of the housing, only hooking the thumb back around when it is absolutely necessary to stabilize the vehicle. Generally, the right hand will be used for accenting beats off the main one. Alternatively, for a snare you can play the top of the housing with the outside of the first knuckle of the thumbs, or with the ends of your middle three fingers, here again lifting the hand entirely off the wheel. In all cases, remember to keep your elbows locked on the arm-rests.

Finally, the BOTTOM RIM (roughly five to seven o’clock) struck with the tips of the fingers creates a rather neutral tone that can go in many directions: not as resonant as the top of the wheel’s shudder, but not as flat as the plastic console in the middle. This is useful, since it can represent any number of percussive sounds, measured against the other timbres of the wheel. Think of the bottom rim as a “wild card,” or perhaps a wilder card than the other standard sections of the geography of the wheel.

This last point re-raises a key issue: any and all analogies—between car and kit, imagination and song—will be decided by the exigencies of the individual song, and occasionally the exigencies of the road, so that the same strike on the same part of the car with the same part of the hand may stand in for different drums in different songs, or different parts of the same song. This, too, is part of the invention, the imagination, the improvisation that is behind all true auto-drumming. An example: we can and often must mimic double-bass runs with both hands on the top rim of the wheel; as such, tom rolls and double-bass runs can only really be distinguished by the musics against which they are set. Although we’re getting ahead of ourselves—these crossovers will only really come to fruition in Lesson Three—the point bears mentioning now, if only to avoid future confusion.

By the way, this is NOT to say that any timbre works to represent any drum. For example, one would never mimic a bass drum with a nail on the window, or, conversely, mimic a ride or hi-hat by striking with the heel of the hand. (Would you ever play “Iron Man” on a piccolo? Seriously? I thought not.) What it IS to say is that, in light of the limitations imposed by the automobile and by the act of driving, more closely-related timbres have a certain interchangeability. Or, put differently: one must always consider not only the sound of the individual part, but how it stands in relation to the other resonances one seeks from the car’s interior.

The next and most obvious component available to the car drummer is the DASHBOARD over the wheel—that is, the horizontal surface under the windshield, or its near edge. The dashboard actually presents fewer possibilities for tone-colors than we might imagine. (Note that, for passenger-side drumming, the dashboard directly over the glove compartment presents an entirely different scenario. See product 99B/ToyCo, which can be purchased at a discount with proof of purchase of any of my other auto-drumming products.) Like the bottom of the wheel, it produces a flat, neutral tone that can go in a variety of directions when struck with the fingertips (e.g., toms). When struck with the nail of the index finger, for example, I have found it most useful for mimicking either the snare (with the top of the wheel used as a bass drum; see “Blast Beats” in Lesson Two), or the hub of a ride cymbal or closed hi-hat.

Given that we’re in 2018 and you’re not a cavedweller, I am going to assume you drive an automatic; and if you don’t drive an automatic, you should consider the negative impact this has on your ability to achieve anything like minimal proficiency as an auto-drummer. For the sole purpose of your left foot should be to play the bass drum. (I should note that I owe the independence of my feet, one from the other, and the dexterity of my left foot itself, often the less-developed one in kit drummers, to auto-drumming.) The right foot is generally trapped on the accelerator or brake, and so is much less mobile. This does not rule it out entirely; it’s okay to create off-beat accents, and the occasional bass-drum roll leading into a hard left-foot kick, or a snare hit. You can do this by lifting your foot off the pedal and smacking the toe down, lightly enough that the car doesn’t spurt forward or screech to a halt. But that’s just the problem: you can’t get much volume from a light tap; and the pedals are actually less forgiving than the wheel, for which, after all, you have two hands. Thus, the effect of the right foot remains almost inaudible, and tends to interrupt auto-drumming by forcing the brain to focus overly much on the act of driving. But the left foot is free to drum to your heart’s content, and I suggest you content your heart as much as possible in this regard. Here I must say I find the newer-model Corollas to be somewhat deficient, as in the older models the FOOT REST or so-called DEAD PEDAL was a corrugated plastic pad lifted at an angle from the floor, which, though the timbre is a bit too dry to mimic a bass drum, was quite more audible than the flat, carpeted version of the same in the newer model. (Perhaps this is one reason I have sometimes dreamed of an ideal auto-drum interior, one which combines features of the several cars I have driven.) To get the requisite left-foot sound, again, simply lift up the toe and slap it down again. As you practice this while driving, you, too, will gain independence in your left foot, and be able to carry on relatively more and more complex bass-drum beats without interrupting the subtle gradations in acceleration and deceleration of the car with the right foot, any more than the hands interrupt the changing of the car’s direction.

These three components of the interior—steering wheel in all its manifold possibilities, the dashboard above the wheel, and the dead pedal—will, or should, occupy about 95% of your auto-drumming attention, with the steering wheel itself occuping roughly 70-75%, the dead pedal 15-20%, and the dashboard 10%. The upshot: Get to know the wheel!

And the remaining five per cent? Here are a few other, minor components that are also occasionally useful, and that I would be remiss not to mention.

The ARM REST (the one located between the driver’s and passenger-side seats) presents some interesting possibilities, since the STORAGE COMPARTMENT located beneath it makes a natural sounding box, and the sound produced can vary depending on the objects stored inside it. Newer Corollas have the advantage of an added CHANGE TRAY just under the lid, so that, for example, a handful of coins jump around when the lid is struck, like the beads in a snare, or the spangles on a tambourine, while the bottom chamber gives the whole a powerful resonance. If the change tray is empty, the compartment itself produces a low thud more equivalent to the deeper toms, particularly when struck with the heel of the hand or the hammer of the fist. Treating the arm rest as a sort of prepared piano by manipulating the contents of the aptly-named change tray can add exciting new timbres to one’s auto-drumming palette. The problem: reaching it is ergonomically challenging, since, as noted above, the arm rest is the ideal place to stabilize the right elbow. It is actually much more useful for the passenger-side auto-drummer (again, see 99B for full details).

The dry clack produced by the SIDE WINDOW when struck with the nail of the index finger or with the tips of the middle and index finger also makes a viable ride-hub or closed hi-hat (passengers will sometimes use their window as a viable snare-substitute, since they do not generally want to beat on the steering wheel when someone else is driving). The REARVIEW MIRROR, again struck with the fingernail, also makes a good ride; just be aware this can jar the mirror, and so require repositioning. But then you’ve seen this happen to actual drummers with their cymbals, even when they put strips of carpet under the stands.

Cymbals present a perplexing difficulty for the auto-drummer. Simply put, nothing in the car comes close to the timbre or sustain of an unmuted cymbal. Nothing rings, and if anything does, I would suggest you take your car to a mechanic. As a result, even though auto-drumming is not “airing,” the occasional cymbal crash is (regrettably) best approximated purely imaginatively, that is, by the hand striking an invisible object somewhere above the wheel, in the place an “actual” cymbal would hang. Better this, I believe, than ruin your whole auto-performance with an unsuitable timbre. I might add that it helps that cymbal crashes are often coupled with bass drum or other drum strikes easily achieved on the wheel or dead pedal.

There is, of course, the possibility of hanging an actual cymbal from the rearview mirror, as some people hang, or perhaps used to hang: fuzzy dice; disco balls; air fresheners; dream catchers; plastic gnomes; et cetera. It would be no more obstructive, and quite possibly the police won’t know what to make of it. But in this I would suggest you take my advice: avoid the temptation to hang an actual piece of percussion from the mirror, or anywhere else in the car. Why? Because its reality would clash with the rest of the automobile’s timbres, which only function analogously, as representations of the pieces of a drum kit. Quite possibly, the actual cymbal would make the rest of the car sound like exactly what it is: a car. It would say: Hey asshole. You’re not Bill Bruford. You’re not even Meg White. Put both your hands on the wheel. That’s what the cymbal would say. It would mock you, just like that.

Whew! Okay. That’s a lot. To conclude this lesson, I want to say a quick word about “dropped” beats. Then, to the homework.

As you speed toward proficiency in the coming weeks, you will probably ask yourself more than once: What about driving? What, that is, about having to pay attention to the road, other vehicles, and pedestrians? Will I not have to occasionally “drop” a beat to readjust the alignment and trajectory of the automobile? And the more skilled I become, won’t the occasional necessity of missing a hit to attend to the quotidian tasks of driving become all the more frustrating?

Here is a somewhat philosophical and forward-looking answer: In mastering the fine art of auto-drumming, the difficulty is not missing occasional beats—that’s a given—but moving in and out of the beat to attend to the necessity of driving in a natural, artistic way; as though it were not some distraction of driving that mattered, but your own whim about when to drum and when not to; as if, that is, it were a matter of choice rather than necessity; or, to think of it differently, as if the necessity were the pre-scripted, God-plan of the universe to which your individual will-to-expression perfectly conforms, so in tune are you with the music of the spheres. This way, whether part of the Plan or Muse-toodling whim, it becomes, not a miss, not a “dropped beat,” but a break. And this way, too, your performance becomes not a perfect reproduction of some drum recording (it never was that to begin with) but a conversation with said recording.

Alternatively, you can simply imagine you’ve dropped your stick, as even the best drummers do from time to time, and the show must go on, at least the snare beat, until you or your roadie can finagle another. You are a professional. Smile at the crowd. Wave. Elicit enthusiasm.

As your ability improves and drumming in the car becomes second nature, the goal is to alternate steering and drumming hands without dropping the beat, or with only the most deliberate decisions about when to do so. For example, you might be hitting the snare with your right hand, steering with the left; but in order to move the car in another direction, the left hand must momentarily take over. Or, you might steer with your thumbs and drum with your fingers on the back of the wheel. The drumming is now a natural part of the driving, and the driving a natural part of the drumming; they are a single, continuous effort, so that the one always augments, shapes, and speaks to, rather than interrupts, the other. Of course, these are masterful moves not to be attempted by the novice; they represent some of the most exciting achievements in the form, the endpoint of decades of practice. But once you realize such possibilities exist, such achievements possible, you will also overcome the temptation not to steer at all, or to steer with some ridiculous part of your body. A friend of mine’s brother, for example, could drive for many miles with his knees—he had quite long legs and bony knees. It is true, of course, that the whole ten o’clock-two o’clock thing is hugely overrated, and that, the sooner you realize this, the better auto-drummer you will become. Indeed, you will advance by leaps and bounds, accident by accident, with every fender-bender finding you a more proficient percussionist of the horseless carriage variety. But let’s not confuse the freedom and artistry of the auto-drum master with clownish and needlessly dangerous spectacles, shall we? Besides, what did my friend’s bony-kneed brother do when he needed to play the bass drum?

Okay. Homework! Homework!!! Ready? One hundred practice hits per day per each above-mentioned part of the console on the wheel, dash and floor for one full week before moving on to Lesson Two. I can’t be your backseat driver here—promise me a hundred! That number again is one hundred! 1-0-0!!! Ten raised to the second power! A ton of pounds! A Benny! Make sure to try them out against a variety of soundtracks, too, as this will begin to get you used to to the way parts of the console can take on different meanings for different songs.

And once you’ve begun to get comfortable with the hits, it’s time to put on that choice cut and take this puppy out for a spin. Just around the neighborhood; you might even drive in circles around your son’s or daughter’s high school parking lot, if it’s a weekend. Don’t leave your vicinity, and for God’s sake, do not attempt to head out to the highway. And yet … don’t just stay still! Drive! Drive!!! It all means nothin’ if you don’t get out and DRIVE!

Good luck! Break a leg, preferably someone else’s!

* * * * *

THIS IS THE END OF YOUR AVAILABLE FREE CONTENT. FOR FULL ACCESS, OR TO DOWNLOAD ANY OF OUR OTHER AUTO-DRUMMING PRODUCTS, PLEASE CONTACT HELLDRIVER DIRECTLY THROUGH THIS (OFFICIAL) WEBSITE. OBJECTS FOR BARTERING WILL BE ARRANGED ON A STUDENT-BY-STUDENT BASIS. IN ADDITION TO THE ABOVE, THE FULL PACKAGE FOR 99A-ToyCo INCLUDES:

LESSON TWO: BEATS AND COMBOS. “Beats and Combos” takes the learner through four basic patterns familiar to rock listeners, common variations on these basic beats, and beginning polyrhythms. Each beat comes with suggested song pairings for both the novice and the more experienced auto-drummer.

LESSON THREE: FILLS AND VARIATIONS. “Fills and Variations” guides the journeyman auto-drummer through fill patterns combining different parts of the car interior (such as the rim and hub of the wheel), fills using alternating parts of the same hand (heel-fingertips, thumb-fingertips), tremolos (rolling finger strikes), and composite strikes with the same hand (such as the dashboard struck with the fingertips and the wheel with the heel). Move beyond those endless, annoying tom-rolls along the 10-2 axis of the wheel’s top rim! These are the sorts of fills all true auto-drummers must master, and without which you will continue to suck utterly!

LESSON FOUR: FLOURISHES AND “DWD” PROTOCOLS. Combinations and added technical flourishes for the advanced auto-drummer—intended only for those who feel ready to head out to the highway—as well as basic protocols for the would-be professional. Suggestions for ways in which auto-drummers may develop their own unique voice and style, and translate their Corolla-based skills to other vehicles. Also contains auto-drum tabulature for “Red Barchetta,” “Raining Blood,” “Fool in the Rain,” “Headin’ Out to the Highway,” “Helldriver,” and 10 other acknowledged auto-drum classics!

THANK YOU FOR YOUR INTEREST IN OUR AUTO-DRUMMING GUIDES!

***

DISCLAIMER: By purchasing, downloading, reading, or coming into any sort of contact, deliberate or accidental, with this product (“THE PRODUCT”), you have agreed to absolve HELLDRIVER of any and all liability for whatever accident or injury might be incurred. Please note that HELLDRIVER has never been successfully sued, whether by personal injury attorneys over the accidental or intentional damage to vehicle or person, or for the maiming, crushing, or killing of passengers, other drivers, and/or pedestrians; or by divorce attorneys for any relationship strains which might be produced as a result of using THE PRODUCT.

 

BONUS!!! HELLDRIVER’S GUIDE TO BUYING THE RIGHT CAR

“I know that when you’re looking to buy a car, you’re supposed to care about things like sight-lines and handling, safety ratings, resale value, comfort and roominess and trunk space and, of course, gas mileage. But for the auto-drummer, that only gets you so far. Because once you’ve narrowed your choices down to a few viable models, when you go to test drive them with the salesperson, the only question you should really be asking yourself is: How good is it for a drum? Me, I’ll drive the car slooooowly out of the lot, and after a block or two I’ll say, “May I turn on the radio?” or, “Can I put on some music?” Then I turn it slightly louder than what would be considered comfortable for conversation, at least with someone who didn’t make their living in sales. Every once in a while, as discreetly as I can muster, I’ll smack the steering wheel, dash, or window, or stomp the floor with the toe of my left shoe. The salesperson probably thinks I’m testing the car to see if it’s solid, like the proverbial used-car salesman kicking a tire. It’s okay: your salesperson has seen customers do much weirder things …”

Postmortem II

In my previous Writing About Music semester postmortem (3.13.11) I promised a second, shorter installment dedicated to two aspects of the class I ran out of energy to address: the listening blog and the research paper. Said installment never materialized, and now I find myself with a second semester under my belt, and a great deal to say about new lessons and new materials, what worked and what crashed. On the other hand, I have a lot less to say about the history, philosophy, and organization of the class. So, with a little luck, I will get to say something about the research paper. A reflection on the tribulations of using blogs, which I presented on at a WAC meeting this past May, will probably require its own post(mortem).

Course re-organization

Fall 2010’s (F10) Writing About Music was organized with the intent of moving students from close listening to considering music in context (performance, literature, videos). For the Spring 2012 (S12) semester, I largely kept this model. On the macro-level, the first two-thirds of the semester stayed basically the same: description, comparison-contrast, and performance review. (For bare-bones descriptions of the assignments associated with these units, see the original post.) However, since I was concerned that the F10 semester was overloaded, particularly in the all-important unit on description, I moved the music/image and jazz poetry segments to the last third of the semester, which I revamped to examine crosscurrents between music, literature, and the visual arts. Here, jazz poetry and tone painting, which had cluttered the description unit in F10, seemed like they might find a more suitable home. One of the goals of the course (still!) is to build on students’ introductory knowledge of the humanities, not only by introducing them to sounds and styles with which they are likely unfamiliar—how can I forget that it was my own Writing About Music teacher who introduced me to Steve Reich?—but by inviting them to think about these sounds and styles in broader cultural, artistic, and historical frameworks.

And, somehow, make them better writers along the way.

Sadly, restructuring the last 5 weeks meant dropping music videos—a unit I look forward to building back into the course at some point in the future.

Intro and description: new materials and methods

One reading that had actually been in the “maybe” pile since F10 was Leonard Bernstein’s Introduction to The Joy of Music. I’m glad I tried it out; it’s a perfect complement to Jacques Barzun’s “Music Into Words.” Bernstein sets the writing-about-music bar impossibly high: it is either for the specialist, or it is entirely unhelpful; only artists of the caliber of Thomas Mann have any hope of succeeding. Barzun takes the opposite, empirical view: How can we say music cannot be put into words when no one can leave a concert hall without striking up a conversation? Indeed, maybe music must be transformed into words if it is to be fully appreciated. Somewhere between these poles of the necessary and the impossible lies the craft that we will spend the next fifteen weeks investigating. (Here, by the way, lies a clue to a damn good final exam … but more about this in a postmortem-to-be.)

I used Aaron Copland again to lead us into listening. And here already I arrive at a moment of Bernsteinian angst. First, a caveat: probably every teacher thinks that, if they could just fix the first few weeks of a semester, if he or she somehow frontloaded a course properly, the students would be miraculously better by the end. In a few weeks, one is supposed to make up for a dozen years of underfunded schools, standardized testing, parents who don’t read, and a culture that massively undervalues education. That said, one of the goals of this course is to improve not just students’ writing, but their listening—to improve each via the other, if possible. What I am coming to realize is just how crucial the 2-3 week description unit is to the rest of the semester. As for Copland and Barzun, the little practical wisdom they dispense about writing about music is only marginally helpful. For what I want most of all (as I noted in “Postmortem”) is for students to be concrete and specific: to become more conscious of what they are hearing, and then to try to find adequate language to describe it.

One of the reasons I am so much looking forward to the F12 semester is to consolidate the gains I began making in this unit last spring. Together with the more scattershot listening and describing exercise from F10, I drafted worksheets to help students (1) connect elements of music and some very basic technical vocabulary to “word palettes” they develop on their own or in small groups, and (2) interrogate the song of their choice in order to connect the vocabulary-building worksheet with the assignment at hand. I also spent part of a class going over basic song structure, a lesson which I adapted from my experience sitting in on music theory courses (thanks, Chad). Finally, I now have a useful student model for the assignment—I did get a few great descriptions back in F10, but as anyone who has tried their hand at developing grading rubrics knows, sometimes the best student essays are not the most useful models.

Why the focus on listening? For one thing, most of my students—including some of those with strong academic preparation—are developmental listeners. Everything is about “the beats,” a term that seems to encompass the totality of musical expression. While for a relatively literate listener “the beats” probably connotes melody, harmony, and tone color as much as rhythm (as, to a certain extent, it must), to many others it seems to mean just what it did to the audience members on American Bandstand. It’s enough to make me wonder what they do hear. Perhaps it’s just a question of degree, some of them as alien to me (and I to them) on one end of the spectrum as the saxophone player who asks the pianist what happened to the thirteenth in that B flat chord is on the other. Or maybe, as has been suggested, what they are not hearing in melody and harmony is compensated for by an evolved perception of other elements, such as timbre. And yet, to some degree they must be appreciating melody, harmony, and structure; they are just not necessarily conscious of these things. My one older student from last semester, who sings in a gospel choir, and who quite innocently asked me one day what I meant by melody—a question for which, I confess, I was entirely unprepared—clearly knows what melody is, whether she can articulate it or not—the definition, I mean; not the melody. (As the eminent music essayist D.F. Tovey once wrote, “It will be my object [in his book Beethoven] to convince the most general reader that, ever since he became fond of music at all, he has enjoyed tonality whether he knew it or not, just as Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Monsieur Jourdain, found that he had been talking prose his whole life without knowing it.”) Thus, from a listening perspective, the issue seems twofold: (1) making students aware of what they are hearing already, as we do with the elements of literature in other English classes, and (2) refining the organs of perception and cognition, so that this consciousness extends to more subtle aspects of music.

New lessons in comparison and performance

Since the comparison-contrast assignment on covers and originals draws heavily on the skills students begin developing in the description unit, refining the latter will, I hope, improve the results on the former, which were as mixed as in F10, this despite following my own advice to use more class time for small-group work on song pairs. Assignment aside, I did incorporate a new lesson into this unit which was quite useful in illustrating one of the more important concepts of the course.

One goal of the compare-contrast unit is to dramatize the way changes in music change meaning. Students seem to labor under the assumption that all meaning is carried by lyrics, and therefore, so long as the words are the same, the song “says” the same thing. For the lesson, I used two versions of “Born in the U.S.A.,” one the hit song everybody knows, the other the lesser-known version demoed during the recording of Springsteen’s previous album, Nebraska. I got the idea to do this from reading 33 Revolutions a Minute, a history of protest songs by Guardian critic Dorian Lynskey (thanks to Prof. Gerald Meyer, who gave me the book as a gift). As my reader may be aware, the hit version of “Born” is an example of a song where music and lyrics—and to a certain extent, verse and chorus—clash. Since many people have a hard time understanding the words beyond the chest-thumping chorus, it is difficult to hear the song as anything but a patriotic anthem, this though the verses are deeply critical of American myths of opportunity and equality. I began the lesson by playing the song, and then asked for reactions: both what students thought the overall message or feel of the song was, and how the music served to create it. After this, I distributed the lyrics, which we read and discussed as a class—the students remarking, of course, on the difference between what the words seemed to be saying and the feeling created by the music. (One student did present the interesting alternative that the rousing chorus was meant to show the protagonist retained his fighting spirit despite all the obstacles—an ideal “U.S.A.” that lies beyond the powers the song criticizes. In this reading, the song becomes patriotic in its dissent.) After this, I played the Nebraska version—solo guitar and voice. The reaction from the class was quite dramatic—how different was this protagonist and what he wanted to us to understand about his trials, and about his perceptions of his homeland, from the other! Finally, I handed out a passage from the Lynskey, where he calls the song “a Trojan horse with the door jammed shut”—a wonderfully pregnant allusion to unpack.

The point, then, is that music impacts, curves—potentially even undermines—how we understand words. Now, if students leave the class feeling this in their bones, then perhaps I actually accomplished something. But I have the suspicion that, for many, the Springsteen lesson did not extend beyond that day. I say this because many still ended their compare-contrast essays with the assertion that their cover songs had not changed the meaning of the original … because, after all, the lyrics were the same. Instead, they tended to want to tell me whether or not they liked the cover version—which the assignment didn’t care a fig about—or express their outrage over the way a cover corrupted the original’s intention—as though the whole point of the cover (at least, the good cover) weren’t to revise, rather than to memorialize, said intention. One project for F12, then, is to weld shut the connection between the Springsteen lesson and the cover songs assignment. (Was it music, I wonder, that had prompted such a visceral response? Or was it the ingrained habit, which I also try to burn out of my composition students, of thinking analysis is solely about saying whether or not they liked something?)

The other new lesson I want to share came up in the performance unit. My F10 students found Virgil Thompson’s review of a 1945 performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony extremely difficult. Thompson’s purpose is to explore the way the historical moment inflects how a piece of music is interpreted, and, in times of crisis, distorts the composer’s intention, or at least Thompson’s understanding of it. With the covers songs, students had already been asked to consider the way history inflects meaning. My goal now was to build on this by exploring how artist, audience, and history interact to create meaning in the context of performance.

Before discussing the Thompson, I showed two videos of performances of “The Star-Spangled Banner”: Whitney Houston’s at the Superbowl at the beginning of the first Gulf War, and Jimi Hendrix’s at Woodstock. Students were by and large very good at picking out musical and visual clues, connecting them to the two events, wars, and eras, and parsing the differences between them. Armed with this example, I thought the class was better able to get a grasp of Thompson’s point about World War II’s impact on Beethoven. (Thompson aside, students also wrote some astonishingly interesting blog posts about the national anthem—so much so that I’m thinking of beginning this lesson in F12 with some informal writing about their perceptions of the anthem, and about anthems per se.)

If the Thompson went down a little easier in S12, the new companion reading, “Beethoven’s Kapow,” which I culled from Best Music Writing 2011 (though I neglected to highlight it in my review of 1.9.12), was tougher going—but, I thought, a very worthwhile complement. The composer is the same, the work similar, and the themes congruent. What would it have been like, Justin Davidson asks, to be at the first performance of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony? And how is listening to the Eroica—and classical music more generally—different in our own historical moment? It was very much a walk-through lesson … but then I think the heavy hand of the instructor can sometimes be very useful for scaffolding a difficult text.

I think it’s pronounced hi-A-tus: the question of reading

In the last several paragraphs I’ve been backing away from the question of reading, so it’s high time I addressed it. Because this is a writing- (and listening-) focused class, some of the same questions about the role of reading in freshman writing courses apply here. On the one hand, the readings can serve as models (e.g., How do I write a performance review?). On the other hand, the readings can help us explore ideas more deeply (e.g., How does the historical moment change how we hear a piece of music?). These are not mutually exclusive functions, of course; but it is difficult to find readings that do both well.* Many of the most thought-provoking readings hide their cards in terms of technique, while good models don’t always have a lot to chew on for big-picture discussion.

And yet, the real problem isn’t lack of models. It’s that, as the course is currently conceived, the assignments (for the most part) don’t address ideas that arise in the readings, leading to a disjointedness between the reading and writing. The performance unit is a good example. Students are assigned to write a performance review; and while it is hoped (!) that the readings will lead them to think in a more nuanced way about performance, discussing Lester Bangs’s meditations on God and technology, or whether the contemporary illiteracy about classical music is an opportunity or a tragedy, does not go very far toward helping them bang out a review. What roles, then, are Bangs, Davidson and Thompson supposed to play?

Enrichment, sure. I’m happy to enrich. It is, or should be, one of the big goals of a liberal education. To a teacher at a senior college, particularly an elite senior college, all this fretting about the ultimate purpose of reading probably sounds idiotic. We’re about opening minds, stoking imaginations, creating opportunities for lifelong learing. All well and good. But for the nontraditional students at a community college, making these sorts of clear links matters. (It matters elsewhere, too; it’s just that better-prepared students can usually be counted on to make those links themselves.) I’m not talking about assessment. Frankly, I wish the whole “culture of assessment”—a phrase invented to give accreditors a hard-on—would find a large, warm, fetid lake to go jump in. But I am talking about facilitating learning for students desperately trying to build a bridge between high school underpreparation and the expectations of a senior college. What this means for reading is that I need to be extraordinarily judicious—moreso than in a literature class, where it is often enough to find a theme and choose five or six books that speak to it and each other—about how to use reading in the class, and how the readings work (or don’t work) with the goals of the individual units.

A corollary: I needn’t feel guilty about having students not read very much during the first five weeks of the semester, when they are better served building skills through hands-on, listening-focused exercises. For the S12 description unit, I piloted two new readings from the 2011 Best Music Writing anthology (“Curiosity Slowdown” and “Making Pop for Capitalist Pigs”). While both had excellent, useful examples of description, these tended to get lost in other verbal fireworks and side issues. I did end up distilling some examples onto a handout, but only after “losing” a class day to discussion. With two semesters of hindsight, it makes more sense to restrict this unit’s reading to, say, five or six meaty passages as models for analysis … plus an excerpt from Stephen King’s “Imagery and the Third Eye,” which will tell my students more than anything else I could give them about what I mean by concrete and specific.

A caveat: this is not, nor do I want it to be, an entirely skills-based, workshop-style class. (N.B.: Many of the best workshop-style classes I took had  an interesting reading component as well.) I want us to engage with at least a few of the bigger cultural issues around music; such background knowledge is obviously part and parcel of being able to write well about it. At the same time, as I noted in the previous post, this is not a music and culture class—we are not doing a unit on, say, the music business, and then writing about the essays we read. Hence, the reading problem points to a larger identity problem—not a crisis, I don’t think, but a challenge. This is an English class, but sort of not; this is not a music class, but sort of is; this is a writing class, but … you get the point.

But to return to the performance unit: I like everything about it. The readings are smashing. The in-class exercise on Tito Puente is the sort of thing students point to fondly at the semester’s end. The annotated review assignment needs more time, but it is useful. It all works; it just doesn’t all work together. Maybe the performance unit is just too scattered, overloaded, like the old description unit was. Maybe it’s a question of where the unit is located, a sort of linchpin between the early skills-building units and the later, somewhat more thematically-oriented ones. An assignment should be like a magnet that makes all the ideas of a unit line up in a pattern, but the only thing tying the assignment to Bangs et al. is genre. This must have been the rationale behind the original (F10) incarnation of the assignment, which asked for two reviews of the same concert from two different perspectives/voices, and which failed, though less because of how the assignment was conceived than for reasons of time and length. Anyway, I have been lavishing three weeks on this unit, so there should be some time to play with the assignment and the order/choice of readings and exercises. More to come.

Synaesthesia (pulling teeth?)

I had mixed success (mixed failure?) with the last unit of the class, a smorgasbord intended to build bridges between music, visual arts, and literature, to understand how musical ideas can be articulated in painting, poetry and narrative, and to explore what the representations of and expression about music in other media can tell us about music (and vice-versa). As I noted, some of this material had cluttered the description unit in F10, on the rationale that thinking about music analogically is one tool for approaching it in language. It is not that students weren’t prepared to hear this, or even try it out. They just weren’t ready to explore the concept in depth. Nor were we able to do any justice to jazz poetry or tone painting under the narrow rubric of description.

The music and visual art (really, painting) material was mostly new. We began by listening to “The Old Castle,” from Modest Mussorgsky’s piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition, and “The Engulfed Cathedral” by Debussy, which “tells” the legend of the Cathedral of Ys rising from the sea at dawn, chiming its bells, and sinking again. Two pieces with a similar goal, played on the same instrument, composed a generation apart … and yet the pictures they paint, the moods they evoke, the way they use sound, could not be more different. As always, surface similarities serve to throw differences into relief, and to help one think more deeply not just about how sound (and title!) work to create image, but about sheerly musical differences in style, with the image as one scaffold for hearing them better. (One of my favorite comments of the semester came from a student who works as a DJ. The Debussy, he said, “sounds like nothing is ending,” like “everything is being left in suspense.” Who more likely to hear this than someone who makes a living splicing together bits of music?)

The second lesson in this mini-unit took the form of a gallery walk. My partner did a gallery walk several years ago on the subject of allegory, and on recalling this, I thought it a natural, interactive way to approach the topic of music and image. I picked seven pieces of music, and seven paintings to go with them, which I set up on laptops around two classrooms. Student groups went from station to station, playing the music, examining the image, and recording their impressions, ideas, affinities, etc. on the provided handout. (Geek alert: I played the “Promenade” theme from the Mussorgsky every time groups were supposed to walk from station to station.) Some tweaking definitely remains to be done—both a longer pre-exercise introduction and post-exercise debriefing would be helpful (the gallery walk was right before spring break). But the level of engagement was high, and based on conversations in the gallery and work on the handouts, the exercise seems to have succeeded in pushing students to think analogically, associatively, etc. between visual art and music.**

For narrative, “Sonny’s Blues” delivered as usual, and this time around I actually took the opportunity to play some Louis Armstrong and (more) Charlie Parker in class. (Sonny calls Armstrong “old-time down home crap”; his brother has never heard of Bird, calls him, most squarely, “this Parker character.”) The assignment, however—a personal narrative—suffered from the same disjointedness I described with the performance review: after all this great discussion of a classic story, no opportunity to test the ideas out in writing. If I didn’t feel this in F10, it’s probably because the Baldwin came up earlier in the semester, and because the stories they wrote were so interesting. In S12 it was pushed to the end of the semester, and the move into writing personal narrative felt rushed. Based on this, I am more and more recognizing the virtue of giving students a choice between analytical and creative assignments; and this unit is a perfect opportunity to give students a choice between a literary analysis of the role of music in the Baldwin, and a creative assignment that takes its cue a bit more clearly from the reading. (For those who think that this will allow weaker students to “get away” with not writing analytically: my experience has been that weaker students feel much more comfortable with a “college essay,” and the stronger, more confident writers tend to choose the creative options.)

So … jazz poetry. My biggest disappointment of the S12 semester. Here was my plan: Spin the unit out over two weeks. Start by reviewing the elements of poetry students had learned and forgotten from second-semester comp. Introduce them to some basic elements of jazz—a genre which, to many of them, does not sound like music at all. Then, give them plenty of in-class time to work on the poems/artist (Monk, Coltrane or Holiday), answering questions to help them scaffold the essay. Fun! Excitement! Jazz! Learning!

While the plan wasn’t entirely unsound, numerous little snags along the way added up to overall, catastrophic failure by the unit’s end. A few reasons for this: (1) Because I wanted to highlight the “connections” theme of this last third of the semester, I focused too much on the musical elements of poetry rather than doing an overall review of the elements of poetry; the assignment, and the jazz poems, ranged more broadly. (2) Nothing but extensive listening and discussion is going to make jazz anything but weirdly alien to many of these students—particularly the kind of jazz practiced by Monk and Coltrane. I am not regretting choosing these artists; their styles are so recognizably eccentric, particularly Monk’s, that they almost beg a response, and create clearer connections to what’s going on in the poetry. But it will require more listening, more time, to get the students there. (3) Not surprisingly, the vast majority of students chose Holiday. I didn’t mind them writing about Holiday … if only they had been more careful about distinguishing the song “Strange Fruit” from the Cyrus Cassells poem of the same name …

Wile E. Coyote, back to the drawing board. The F12 plan: (1) I’m going to teach “Strange Fruit” at the very beginning of the semester, using the Lynskey—the song is the subject of the lead-off chapter from 33 Revolutions. This will serve a dual purpose, the second having to do with the research paper … which, as you have no doubt noticed, I will not be getting to this time around. (2) When we get to the jazz poetry unit, we will do the poems on Holiday (the Cassells, as well as Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died” and perhaps Lisel Mueller’s beautiful “Saturday Morning”) as a class, and so focus our poetry review on examples of jazz poetry. This will have the added advantage of winnowing the writing choices to Monk and Coltrane, forcing students out of their comfort zones. (3) I will extend the time for background research (what the 33 Revolutions chapter will have given us about Holiday), as well as for listening exercises in jazz which are more closely tied to the first two units of the semester. Overall, this will mean extending the unit by at least one class, possibly to three full weeks.

If the fool would persist in his folly …

Evaluation and future directions

I hope S12 was a two-steps-forward, one-step-back kind of semester, and not the reverse. On the plus side, I think the class was much more dynamic in terms of how musical and visual examples were integrated into the lessons. Some of the new readings were dynamite, too. Conversely, even the most abject failures seemed productive, revealing something about how to remedy them in the future, at least after mulling them over for a while in The Pit. I have noted many of these, most associated with the course’s identity and the lack of articulation between assignments and readings. In F12, this will be solved, depending on the unit, by either eliminating/reducing the reading (description, compare-contrast) or revamping the assignment to address the reading (narrative). I should add that the jazz poetry assignment did give students a range of choices, creative and analytical, based on the readings … but here, it was the preparatory work that misfired. The performance review remains a riddle to be solved.

I was able to curb something of the many-headed ambitions behind this course, and so give students more room for self-directed learning in S12. That said, some of the old ambitions were replaced by new ones just as quixotic, and occasionally as seat-of-the-pants, the extended unit on jazz poetry being the most flagrant example. And I haven’t even gotten to the research paper, which, though less ambitious, was a bigger flop than in F10; or the blogs, which were only marginally better.

All this noted, F12 will be a somewhat different semester. About half the class will be Digital Music students.§ The couple I had in the course S12 engaged well with the material and raised the level of discourse of class discussions. It will be interesting to see whether and how the dynamic of the class shifts with a critical mass of such students—students, that is, with a bit more historical context for understanding the material, and perhaps more likely to have a musical background.

Funny, as I screw around with the course structure—and I think the next time I teach the course after this fall, which likely won’t be for 2 or 3 years, I am going to do a radical overhaul—I am tending toward something like the shape of Musical Encounters, the music appreciation textbook my colleague used the first time the course was taught at Hostos. I still wouldn’t use that book, but its organization—from the elements of music, to history, to themes—makes a lot of sense. While history would have to drop from the middle, an overhauled Writing About Music course might divide neatly in half, with the first eight weeks dedicated to the elements of music, the writing focused mostly on listening, and the last seven weeks reading-heavy, the writing focused mostly on themes. It seems like this would amplify rather than solve the problem of competing identities, forcing the course to decay into two more stable elements: music appreciation, and music and culture. Another possibility would be to “professionalize” the course—that is, drop the humanities angle in favor of assignments focused on what music writing professionals do, giving more weight to reviewing and researching, as well as building in, say, an interview assignment. The Digital Music program, which was interested in formulating a Writing About Music course even before I approached them, may indeed choose to take the course in this direction for DM majors. Finally, there is the option of overthrowing the reign of the mode in favor of a wholly thematic organization. Such a structure would decidedly slant the course toward ideas in music and culture, subordinating (though of course never eliminating) the listening component.

Well, we can talk about horses and carts, carts and horses, all we like; but there comes a time when carts and horses start to look so much alike I can’t tell one from the other, and I dream of carts that pull horses, not the reverse.

Wake up, wake up. Classes start Monday.

 

* I am not talking about a distinction between skills and content, but two different kinds of content, one experiential and listening-based, as students might use in a personal essay, the other reading-based, as in, say, an expository paper about literature.

** The pairs were: (1) Friedrich, Wanderer: Beethoven, Symphony No. 9, I; (2) Debussy, Reflections in the Water: Monet, Impression: Sunrise; (3) Schoenberg, String Quartet No. 2, I: Kandinsky, Impression III – Concert; (4) Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie-Woogie: Albert Ammons & Pete Johnson, “Boogie-Woogie Dream”; (5) Charlie Parker, “Donna Lee”: Jacob Lawrence, Play; (6) a Jackson Pollack drip: Roscoe Mitchell Sextet, “Ornette”; (7) Steve Reich, Music for 18 Musicians, VII: Ad Reinhardt, Black Painting. The least successful pairs were the Kandinsky/Schoenberg and the Reinhardt/Reich, the latter partly because the quality of image was poor, and failed to convey what I wanted it to—the minimalist ethos of minute, incremental, periodic change. Once again, I am happy to share any handouts, assignments, etc. with interested, skeptical, and/or hostile parties.

§ No longer true. Likely the same mix as S12. Registration is down across the college. Has the recession gone on long enough that the countercyclical pump has shut down?

 

Postmortem I

As I noted in my inaugural post, Fall 2010 was to be my first opportunity to teach Writing About Music, a course I co-developed with a colleague along similar lines to the Writing About Music course I took as an undergraduate. Now that the smoke has cleared (cough, cough), I thought to post some reflections (cough) about the way we approached the course, and a few of the successes and failures (cough!), in the hope that something of what follows might be useful to colleagues around and outside of CUNY. Think of it as a walk-through … maybe inspired by CUNY’s recent PESH violations, and the risk assessment walk-throughs we just finished at my campus. So, get on a pair of comfortable shoes, and give your back a streeeeeeeetch …

Course organization

The Writing About Music course I took as an undergraduate was structured modally, and in developing the Hostos course my colleague (Prof Tere Justicia) and I made an early decision to follow a similar model. The course is thus more writing- (and listening-) than reading-focused; in some ways it feels closer to the “workshop” model of a creative writing class than to the lit surveys usually taught at this level.

As an undergraduate, I wrote a description, narrative, technical analysis, imitation, and performance review, a voice-based revision of the review, a free assignment, and a free response to music criticism (I may be forgetting one). For the original version of our course, we replaced the technical analysis and imitation with a compare-contrast and a research paper, and ripped out the free assignment. When I revised the course for its second run, I replaced the voice-based revision with an argument. The research paper, which asked students to contextualize a historically significant album or piece of music, was submitted in chapters over the course of the semester, to be revised and resubmitted as a final project. Students also engaged in informal writing during class and on a Blackboard-based blog.

Reading

Because the course is focused on music as a text for inquiry and writing as a process for inquiry, the question, “What to read?” loomed large from the beginning. First, Prof Justicia and I never intended to teach a class on music and culture. There is actually an excellent textbook by a Hunter colleague, Anna Tomasino, called Music and Culture, published by Pearson. Although I appreciate the utility of themes such as race, gender, and economics for writing about music, and adopted some of these for my last formal assignment, they were not the focus of the course we envisioned and designed.

Conversely, I was not teaching (nor would I be qualified to teach) a class in music appreciation. As a result, the excellent music appreciation textbook Prof Justicia adopted for the course’s first run, Musical Encounters, by David Nichols, did not seem suited to the course as I wanted to teach it. True, the basic information about music theory and practice would have been helpful (more on this later). The text’s accompanying CD is exemplary, as are the listening guides. But in an English course where writing is the focus, and fifteen weeks is all we have, my feeling was that this text went too far afield into music history, theory and culture … and said almost nothing about how to write about this odd beast called music.

Finally, there are a couple of academic press books on the market specifically for writing about music, which I found either disappointing or ill-suited to the HCC student body. Richard Wingell’s Writing About Music is largely a guide to writing a research paper with a short introduction about music. The other, A Short Guide to Writing About Music, by Jonathan Bellman, was much closer to what I was looking for, and reading it helped me strategize about how to approach my own course. In the end, however, perhaps because it seeks to appeal to students at different levels, the book contained too much that was irrelevant to my course (such as the sections dedicated to critical theory and to technical analysis) and was too research-handbook oriented to be a good fit.

Finding “the right book” can be a porridge-too-hot/too-cold exercise in futility. So, inspired by my own college writing-about-music experience with Dr John Spitzer, whose bibliography I shamelessly raided, and with the help of intrepid writing fellows & musicology students like Mr David Pier (formerly at the GC; commented on an early version of the syllabus) and Ms Angelina Tallaj (currently at the GC; worked with me throughout the semester, Robin to my Batman, or probably the reverse), I decided to play the bricoleur and assemble my own readings. After all, the world of academic publishing presents us with the fantasy that we’re all engineers, and they can fashion our perfect tools. But every teacher knows that we’re really bricoleurs, and proud of it, regardless of whether we adopt a textbook or cobble one together.

Finding words

Writing about music tends to go in one of two directions. Either it is technical and analytical, which presupposes an academic musical background, or it is poetic and imagistic. I think the best writing about music tries to strike a balance between these two tendencies: it uses technical language sparingly, in such a way that the lay reader is both hailed and challenged, and it uses image and metaphor both imaginatively and precisely—that is, focusing on what is happening in the music. Good writing, then, requires good listening. Finally, because of the subject’s abstractness, music writing demands (and I think rewards) familiarity with a range of music, and to an even greater degree, with a store of cultural capital with which to think analogically. That abstractness is why so many music-oriented humanities classes tend to focus on history or biography or culture: they serve as a variety of mirrors, shields that permit us to look into the music’s Medusan face without turning to stone.

So, the challenge. Even after a year of college—imagine!—students come into a class like Writing About Music with limited vocabularies, little to no technical background about music, and little in the way of easily-accessible cultural capital. (I don’t just mean “culture” in the Western, Great-Tradition sense: I mean their own cultures.) As such, they have an excessive tendency to fall back on describing their emotional response to music, and to describe it in the most clichéd, vague terms. It’s not that the emotional response to music isn’t valid. It’s that they can neither describe these emotional states (what Aaron Copland, in one of our first readings, calls “the expressive plane” of listening) with any sort of nuance or depth, nor can they connect those emotional states to what is happening in the music (for Copland, “the sheerly musical plane”). So much of good writing about music is about finding precise words to describe a sound, or an emotional state, or a relation, or a mental image.

So, after an initial reflection about music, which invited students to write about the simple prompt “what does music mean to you?” (as gleaned, on Mr Pier’s recommendation, from the book My Music, together with some representative responses for class discussion) in very much the vague, general, emotion-drenched terms described above, the goal for the first several weeks was to begin to move them beyond this. Again, not entirely. And not only because we took music as our subject: it could be argued that this class is “developmental” in the sense that, unlike reading skills, which I could hazard students had spent a year improving, I could not assume that students came into Writing About Music equally prepared to listen, or knowing anything about how to effectively translate that listening into language.

Our models and advice came from Copland and Jacques Barzun, from Alex Ross and Whitney Balliett; our listenings, Earl Hines and Igor Stravinsky. We examined the vocabulary the writers used, where the language becomes poetic or technical, how elements of genre and biography help contextualize or ground a description. But of everything we did leading up to the first assignment—a 2-3 page description of a piece of recorded music of their choice—the most productive was an in-class group exercise on finding words. It was simple: I put together a mix of short pieces from different cultures and genres (Ms Tallaj suggested an emphasis on vocal music, which I followed); I played each 2 or so minute piece twice, the second time more quietly; all the groups did was try to find words to describe what they were hearing. They were invited to use a dictionary and thesaurus, and even their goddamn f&@!ing phone, to look up synonyms for the bland words that first popped into their minds; they were invited to find not just adjectives, but nouns and verb (parts of speech matter so much, as Virgil Thompson reminded us). My only regret is that I didn’t spend two full class days doing this, instead of just one. For the assignment itself, I privileged specificity above all else. I wanted to know what was happening in the music, and when it was happening, as best they could describe.

We took a couple of detours in this first unit as well: Debussy’s “Sunken Cathedral,” accompanied by three short readings about it, and paintings by Monet, Turner, and Redon; a one-week unit on jazz poetry. My intention was to give students a range of strategies for approaching music in language, as well as some intellectual fodder for thinking about the relationship between image, music, and text. (One of the “Cathedral” descriptions actually resorts to sketching church arches, and compares them to how the score looks from a distance! It was not a great piece of writing, but maybe better than any other dramatized the challenges of the task at hand.) Anyway, the problem here is probably self-evident: way too much in too little time, particularly for the jazz poetry, which should become a unit in its own right.

My intention for the second assignment/unit was for students to build on the skills practiced in the description paper by comparing two pieces of music. I settled on the idea of “cover versions” because I figured these would provide clear similarities and differences between easily-approachable pieces.

We began by listening to a few different versions of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” (Ladysmith Black Mambazo, The Tokens, etc.) and discussing the similarities and differences between them. This was intended as a platform for the weekend listening on which the formal assignment was based. Although the “Lion” lesson was moderately successful, given the students’ level and time limitations, I think it would have been better to focus the entire unit’s listening around the songs they were assigned to compare in the formal essay. Of the five possible pairs, the most popular was the two versions of “I Will Survive” by Gloria Gaynor and Cake, followed by “Imagine” by John Lennon and A Perfect Circle. (Interestingly, despite the large number of Hispanic students, no one chose to write about The Beatles Cubanos!) Ms Tallaj designed the excellent assignment, which included two creative choices: contrasting assessments of the “original” and cover, and a mock interview with the cover band.

Interestingly, the topic of “covering” songs generated heated discussion. Students were fascinated by the aesthetic, economic, and moral implications of “covering” someone else’s song—which is more than a little ironic, given the ubiquity of sampling and “mash-ups” in today’s pop music, to which our discussion and listening eventually turned; but also given the ever-growing problem of plagiarism, which had led me to believe that these cultural shifts were partly responsible for students’ seeming inability to understand what “giving credit” means anymore. Anyway, the blog went nuts on this question, with a few students sticking to the position that great songs should never be covered!

One other note: I’ve found that nothing works for generating animated discussion like giving the students a list of juicy quotes from the readings (in this case, a pair of articles from Popular Music and Society and Crawdaddy) at the beginning of class and asking them to pick one or two to write about for ten minutes. (If you’re unfamiliar with Crawdaddy, look them up on the web; they have an interesting history.)

Music in Context

I haven’t read much in the way of pedagogical theory, but in organizing my courses, I generally strive to begin with some basic skills, and then integrate these into more complex (although potentially more familiar) tasks over the course of a semester. In expository writing, for example, I start with representing ideas (summary, paraphrase, quotation), and then ask students to integrate these into comparative and argumentative essays. (I’m about to throw this model out the window, but never you mind.) I do this because my experience has been that students coming out of high school or a bout with the ACT know how to structure an essay, but have no idea how to write about texts. (This may change a little now, what with the CATW replacing the ACT.) I tried something similar in Writing About Music by beginning with description and compare-contrast, which asked the students to (try to) focus on the music per se, and then having them integrate these listening/writing skills into reviews, stories, and arguments—that is, into the contexts of performance, literature, and music videos. I suppose it will be objected that without context, there is no listening experience, and hence nothing for a student to write about; perhaps even that there is no such thing as “the music itself.” I see the point, and my students’ reactions to jazz seem to bear this out. But there is also something to be said for getting students to “face the music” in whatever way they can—for trying to force something out from under the comfortable folds of context, context, context. Like the description assignment I often do with my developmental writers, which asks students to really look (and listen, and smell, and …) the place they are describing, ideally the music description forces students to really listen to something that they think they already “know.” (By and large students chose music they were well familiar with, but in hindsight it occurs to me that I could add this stipulation to the assignment instructions.) My intention was to pull away the crutches for the first few weeks, and then hand them back halfway through the semester and say, “Yes, but look at how well you can walk!” True, they might have been limping, and more than a few fell right on their butts; but at least they were trying things they wouldn’t have tried otherwise.

We stepped out of compare-contrast into performance using the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth. I thought it would make a nice transition for a couple of reasons: because of the extraodinary number of versions that have been recorded over the years, from salsa to disco to all manner of parody; and because it begs questions about ideology, sublimity, and transcendence, raised in the readings by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Lester Bangs, E.M. Forster, and Virgil Thompson. The first of the two assigned Thompson reviews was meant as a linchpin: Thompson hears a martial performance of the Fifth in 1945 and connects the interpretation of the piece with the historical moment. The goal was for students to be able to look backwards (to ideas about “covers” or “interpretations” of a classic piece of music) and forwards (to the role of performance in music-making).

If any assignment failed last semester, it was the performance review. Here it was an issue of the chefs trying to get too creative with what should have been a relatively straightforward assignment, which resulted in a few gems and a lot of nicely-detailed botches. That admitted, let me focus on a couple of things I thought did work. (Don’t worry, I’ll liberally salt a few wounds at the end of the post.) First, I “outlined” a review of an Aventura concert from the New York Times using the “Comment” feature on Word, and then asked students to do the same with a review that they found on their own—this by way of giving them some viable models for how to approach the assignment. The other thing that worked well here was an in-class exercise where students met in groups to answer questions about excerpts of two performances we watched in class: Glenn Gould performing the Goldberg variations, and Tito Puente’s band in Calle 54. The point was to get students noticing different aspects of performance, which would serve as a template for gathering material for the formal assignment.

For the narrative I used a prompt that the fiction writer Ron Carlson once gave to my graduate workshop: “The first time I heard [song title] by [artist], I was with [person] at [place] and we were [doing something].” My original idea had been to give this prompt the first or second day of class as a diagnostic, and then to hand it back with comments later in the semester, to be revised into a formal assignment. It’s a great prompt for two reasons: from a narrative perspective, it forces students into a moment in time, and hence away from the sort of dull abstractions that become a crutch when they try to write a story; from a musical perspective, it automatically connects music, emotional memory, and culture. Anyway, we did draft this one in class; it was traded, extended, turned in, returned, and revised. In the end—and in some cases, from the very beginning—it delivered some of the semester’s best writing: learning to dance salsa with an aunt, getting lost on the way to church, creating hip hop culture and community on the stoops of the Bronx in the ‘80s …

As for reading, I had wanted to give students three stories relating to three different genres or periods of music. “Sonny’s Blues” was a shoe-in, and I confess that we spent every moment of class discussion during the unit on this complex and beautiful story, which (not surprisingly) captivated the students like no other reading this semester. (The other two selections were E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “A Tale of Don Juan” and John Cheever’s “The Music Teacher.” The Cheever story is wonderful, weird and dark, but I doubt I’ll assign it again—I’d rather something contemporary. Suggestions?)

Finally, argument. I thought videos would be a great focus, as it would give students the opportunity to work with visual texts, and think critically about one of the most common modes of delivery for the popular music they listen to. Ms Tallaj was instrumental in getting the material together for this unit, from suggesting vids to coming up with viable readings. We ended up with Juan Luis Guerra’s “A pedir su mano” and Calle 13’s “Pa’l norte,” Matisyahu’s “King Without a Crown,” Madonna’s classic sex vid “Justify My Love,” Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” the old Aerosmith/Run DMC crossover “Walk This Way,” and a Pepsi commercial to “Forever Young,” the last of these suggested by my colleague at NYU’s Gallatin Center and professional trombonist Greg Erickson. (Confession: I became totally obsessed with Lady Gaga videos for a day or two there; unhappily, I am almost fully recovered.)

I thought the readings worked really well in this unit for their variety and depth. First, a paper about the Matisyahu video by Kevin Holm-Hudson … who, in the small world of popular music scholarship, turns out to be the same Holm-Hudson (is there another?) who edited and introduced an anthology on progressive rock which I’d used in my own scholarly work. The talk discusses Matisyahu’s Rasta-Jewish cultural context, and then analyzes the  “King Without a Crown” video, and so served as a great jumping-off point for thinking about the assignment—that is, about what elements of a video are there to be read: color, dress, motion, visual planes, and narrative content, and how these connect to the music.

The other readings were an article from Popular Music and Society about Caribbean women’s attitudes toward gender in Caribbean popular music (by an old colleague of Ms Tallaj’s at John Jay, Peter Manuel), and a short article by Camille Paglia about Madonna (discovered in Prof. Tomasino’s earlier-discussed reader; many thanks). For the assignment I gave students a few choices. In one, they were asked to write a letter to either Madonna or Lady Gaga arguing that their videos reinforced negative gender stereotypes, and then a second letter from the artist to the writer defending the video/music. (This was inspired by Manuel’s ambivalent conclusions about representations of women in Caribbean popular music; students were invited to draw from his article and/or Paglia’s.) In the other two choices—one a formal argument, the other a dialogue—students considered the theme of “crossing” as it appeared in the songs and videos, whether in terms of race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, genre, generations, or national boundaries. Should I be surprised that most students chose to write the letters … or that the best papers addressed one of the other two choices?

Reflections & regrets

A few things occur to me. The first is that I was not assiduous enough in the second half of the semester making sure that students carried over and honed the listening and writing skills they had begun acquiring in the first half of the semester. In the future, I will have to set some specific requirements regarding those skills in the assignment instructions. That may seem like a no-brainer; but a new course tends to pull one in many different directions, and sometimes one finds oneself putting out so many other fires that the one in the boiler room gets neglected.

Second, misgivings about the role of the readings. I’ve always been a stickler about college writing being writing about readings. Every other sophomore-level elective I regularly teach (if once every couple of years counts as regularly), like Latin American Literature and Studies in Fiction, is focused entirely on writing about readings. But in those five formal essays, which amount to half their grade, students did almost no writing where they were asked to engage with readings. Only the research paper provided that opportunity. I salve my conscience with the idea that this is a different class, that it is in some ways closer to teaching a writing workshop than literature, that it is doing all sorts of other important things … and yet, I still can’t rid myself of the idea that I failed my students on a very basic level for a sophomore-level English course because they didn’t really write about readings!

Third is the very sticky subject of student preparation. My students last semester ranged from a few immensely talented and self-motivated writers to those with almost no facility with English who had somehow managed to pass their two first-year writing courses. In terms of musical background, there were students who had played professionally and students who could not name a single instrument in a small-group ensemble. There were also several students who, at the beginning of the semester, had never been to a live musical performance. Prof Justicia raised similar issues after teaching the course for the first time, and some of my revisions were intended to address these disparities. Altogether, it raises the question of whether an introductory music class should be a pre- or co-requisite for the course. The question then becomes whether in a community college like Hostos we could get sufficient enrollment to run it, and if not, whether we need to re-tool the course to accommodate the reality of the institution. There is also the possibility of working with the Humanities department, and particularly our rapidly-growing Digital Music program, on recruitment. More on this as we move forward.

Fourth is the issue of trying to have one’s cake and eat it too. As I’ve alluded to a couple of times, this was an overloaded course—not in terms of the total amount of writing or reading, but in terms of the diversity of tasks built into each unit. I had to make some adjustments for that over the course of the semester, but more remains to be done. I like the idea of students applying skills and ideas to a new text as a means of scaffolding; but for such a difficult (albeit attractive) subject, I think that students could use more focus on the formal assignment itself from the beginning of each two to three week unit. That means no jazz poetry unless I cut an entire other unit and rearrange the course, no “Lion Sleeps Tonight” unless it becomes the subject of the formal assignment, and so on.

Finally, I want to work on putting themes up front. This is a modally-organized class, at least as it is currently conceived, and I think there are advantages to this in terms of clarity of tasks and close attention to writing. At the same time, in the readings and in our listening experiences, a few themes kept cropping up: the romantic and sublime; secular and spiritual music; ideology, appropriation and creativity; culture and memory. Listing some “big questions” on the course syllabus, as is done on the syllabi for the ESL intensive program I’m currently teaching in, and trying to loop back to these questions at every opportunity in discussion, should help to weld the semester together in a way that the disparate tasks and diverse musics students engaged with over the course of the semester didn’t.

*

In a second, shorter installment, maybe a few months hence, I will go over the elements of the class I have not had a chance to discuss yet: the research paper and the listening blog, as well as how listening was integrated into the semester. But this is enough for now. I need to take five. By the way, I’m happy to share syllabus, assignments, etc.