“The Wanderer: Public musicology and the logic of content creation”

Varieties of public musicology

Public musicology is one of those things whose definition seems obvious and easy when you are not thinking about it and vexed when you do: the general feeling seems to be that it is one of those you-know-it-when-you-see-it things. So, I ought to begin by asking what public musicology is, though I want to avoid talking about it normatively, in terms of what it should or should not be, or theoretically, in terms of what it can or cannot be. To my ears, such arguments always sound as if their authors are mistaking an ought for an is. Besides, reality has a habit of offering up exceptions to every rule you can suggest. Typologies can be useful, but if you try too hard to force your unruly subject matter into one you will end up losing touch with reality. And I am fond of reality, despite its many obvious flaws, so I will venture a loose typology constructed on the empirical basis (or, less generously, the lazy expedient) of canvassing my colleagues at the Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. I make no pretense of offering anything more than a pragmatic, rule-of-thumb definition of “public musicology,” but such a definition only needs to be good enough to frame the main part of this essay, which is a theorization of my own experience creating “content” as a blogger and podcaster.

Many projects can plausibly be called public musicology, and even within just my own department I discovered a surprising variety of them, enough to make a few provisional categories, although more or different ones could be devised. First, there are books and essays written by scholars for an educated general readership, such as Peter Burkholder’s Listening to Charles Ives.¹ This category also includes articles written for mass-market periodicals (Kerry O’Brien’s piece on Steve Reich for the New York Times is an excellent example)² or the public-facing websites of arts and humanities institutions such as the American Musicological Society or Banrepcultural, which Sergio Ospina-Romero characterizes as “something like the Colombian equivalent of the Library of Congress” and for which he has been a semi-regular blogger.³

Second, there are digital humanities projects that make sources, scholarship, and data available to researchers and teachers, both in and out of the academy. Jacobs professor emeritus Thomas Mathiesen was a pioneer of the musical digital humanities: in 1990, he created the Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum, a searchable database that makes freely available every known Latin text on music from antiquity to the seventeenth century.⁴ In 1998, TML became the cornerstone of IU’s CHMTL (the Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature), a digital humanities lab that hosts several projects from scholars at IU and worldwide. Several of my colleagues have pursued digital-humanities projects outside of CHMTL as well. These include Giovanni Zanovello’s crowd-sourced Inclusive Early Music Bibliography; Halina Goldberg’s In Mrs. Goldberg’s Kitchen, an interactive online version of a physical multimedia exhibition at the Central Museum of Textiles in Łódź; and Daniel Melamed’s BachCantataTexts.org, which offers “historically informed translations for J. S. Bach’s vocal works, with critical texts and extensive annotations reflecting historical usage and theology.”⁵ Now, I am writing in such a way as to suggest that my colleagues are the sole authors of these projects, but these are all collaborations of one sort or another. Collaboration is practically inescapable in the domain of public musicology, and this indeed is one of the chief pleasures (and challenges) of doing this kind of work.

A third category of public musicology projects might be those that center around musical performance, whether in curating and staging events or in the creation of program notes and pre-concert lectures. This category includes such projects as Melamed’s Bloomington Bach Cantata Project, which stages historically informed performances of and lectures on Bach’s cantatas. When he was director of IU’s Jewish Studies Program, Judah Cohen played a role in furthering “aesthetics-based Jewish Studies scholarship,” as he terms it, for example in the Jewish Studies Department’s support of the premiere of a new song by Gerald Cohen.⁶ This is a kind of curatorship, and performing arts curators do another kind of public work in the arts and humanities, similar to the things art history Ph.Ds do when they go into museum work.

What to do about record liner notes? They might fit into my third category (projects centered around performance), or else in our first category of essays written for a general readership, but here I begin to chafe at the limits of typologies, which can only ever give us a digital approximation of the analog Real. A typology is a map, and as occultists never tire of saying, the map is not the territory. In any event, my point is made: there are many kinds of public musicology, not all of which I have practiced, and it would be presumptuous for me to claim special insight into all of them. I have never done anything that could be called digital humanities, for example, nor have I written a musical book for the lay reader. My warrant for making claims about public musicology rests partly on my experience of writing liner and program notes, being a music curator (at the Weisman Art Museum in the 1990s), and creating three years of the Minnesota High School Music Listening Contest.⁷ But almost all my work as a public scholar belongs to yet another category, which I will call, with all due irony, content creation. I will have much more to say about “content” later, but for now I will mention my two projects in this domain: the blog Dial “M” for Musicology, a collaboration with Jonathan Bellman I founded in 2006 and ended in 2018; and Weird Studies, an occult-tinged arts and philosophy podcast I have co-hosted with Canadian writer and philosopher J. F. Martel since 2018.

The space of the public

Now, for some of the varieties of public musicology that I have described so far, the skill demanded of the practitioner is a kind of translation between idioms. If you are writing a book for the kind of reader who subscribes to The New Yorker, you are going to have to set aside your jargon and translate your ideas into terms that those outside of academia can understand. Translation means more than that, though: you also have to put your ideas in terms that those outside of academia can care about.

Gerald Graff argued that a certain form underlies most academic writing: whereas so-and-so says X, I say Y.⁸ In fact, it is the form that underlies not only academic writing but more broadly the mechanisms and institutions by which academic writers are rewarded (or not) with publications, promotions, honors, and so on. Peer review is the discipline’s judgment on whether you have successfully intervened in some important conversation—whether your Y measures up to someone else’s X. This standard of judgment is so universal in academic life and so urgent for those living it that we often have difficulty understanding how little any of it matters for those not working in academia.

Here is an example of something seeming very important in the academic bubble and not nearly so important out of it and, therefore, a good example of what you have to think about when translating between academic and public registers. When Oxford University Press sent the manuscript for my book Dig to peer reviewers, Reader 2 hated it and disagreed with me on many points, such as whether hipness is a historical or transhistorical phenomenon. This question mattered to me in part because it mattered to Oxford, which was considering whether to publish my book, and Oxford’s judgment mattered in turn because it would determine whether I would get tenure at IU. Which is to say, it mattered a very great deal to me. As you might guess, I pushed back hard in my response.

Fortunately, I had the sense not to let this brawl spill over into my book. It would have been difficult to convey its importance to a reader from outside the academy, to whom it might have seemed an undignified squabble over unimportant differences. But let’s imagine that I believed something real and urgent was at stake in my quarrel with Reader 2 and felt compelled to express it. How might that substance have been rendered in a popular idiom? I would have to have explained the terms of my quarrel with Reader 2, for example in saying what transhistorical means, and this is what I mean by public musicology as translation, swapping obscure terms for more familiar ones. But this would not have been enough. I would also have had to say what’s at stake in it—in other words, why someone from outside the academy should care about it. And to do that I would need to leave my tenure case out of it, because why should anyone outside my circle of friends and family care about that?

Furthermore, I have to ask myself, is the clash between historical and transhistorical interpretations something intrinsically important to the understanding of counterculture, or does it only seem important to me because such clashes fascinate academics, who after all are a quarrelsome and gossipy lot? We care a good deal about what X said about Y and how Z came along and mopped the floor with both X and Y, but this kind of thing can be opaque and tiresome to outsiders. This is why we are always being told that in academia the infighting is so vicious because the stakes are so small.⁹ This truism is right from an outside perspective but quite wrong from the inside: the infighting is misunderstood because the stakes are local. One challenge in writing about something from a non-academic standpoint is to keep this in mind. So, if you aspire to public musicology, be sensitive to the difference between what matters to you, what matters to the discipline, and what matters to your audience. It is easy to get stuck in your bubble; the first challenge of public musicology is to think outside of it.

Which brings me to a story. Back in the mid-1990s, when I was in graduate school at the University of Minnesota and attending Richard Leppert’s Adorno seminar, I fell in love with Adorno’s style of gnomic abstraction leavened with cynical wit and the very occasional flash of heartfelt emotion. And, if I am being honest, I loved it when he trashed sentimental lowbrow crap and stuck up for difficult, unpleasant, and deeply unpopular art. In other words, I was a hipster snob. My Fake Adorno style was a grotesque symptom of ugly pretensions. I mean, look at it:

A contemporary listener without historical terms for comparison may find it impossible to hear Tchaikovsky’s B-flat Minor Piano Concerto as “art”; for such a listener, it has been seized as a mass-marketable piece of culture par excellence, and, through ceaseless repetition in stereotype settings, has been turned into a pretentious species of mass entertainment. Its crashing opening chords and soaring themes are not inherently reified, but they may become inextricably associated with the soft-focus sunsets and lovers’ yearning glances institutionalized by K-tel commercialization. The association of these images with musical “atoms” divested of their originally unreified totality become Pavlovian reflexes in us, the unwitting consumers of a historically locatable institutionalization of meaning.

Ouch. In my defense, everyone starts out imitating someone. It is the only way to learn. But learn from your influences without getting stuck on them. With luck, one day you will wake up to the relative lameness of your derivative prose style. Sometimes this is due to the intervention of a teacher or editor; one thing that broke me out of my Adorno phase was the mockery of strangers. My then-girlfriend (now wife) was the cellist in a group performing Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, and she asked me to write program notes. I have not saved them, but I remember them being in a heavy-breathing version of my Fake Adorno style. I thought they were pretty groovy, right up until I was sitting in the hall, waiting for the quartet to begin, and a couple of cute girls sitting in front of me were reading my program notes and cracking up. They laughed until their eyes were shining, taking turns reading choice passages aloud in pompous, affected voices. They had no idea that the author was sitting right behind them. I squirmed and scrunched up in my seat, trying to make myself invisible. In that moment, I could see myself, my crappy Fake Adorno prose, my hipster snob pretenses, all of it, as if in an out-of-body experience. And if you want to do public musicology, you will need to find your way to that experience, one way or the other. This kind of self-consciousness, however bruising, is the starting point of real engagement with a public.

Clearly, translation from a professional to a popular idiom is one of the fundamental skills that public musicology demands. But it is not the only one. Many who opine on public musicology seem to believe that idiom translation is its main or even sole modality—as if public musicology simply is idiom translation, and as if idiom translation were a linguistic operation only. However, the facts on the ground compel us to define public scholarship more broadly. For one thing, even just among the projects issuing from my own department there are several that do not rely on translation at all. And for another, idiom translation is not just a linguistic operation, but a social one.

Here is the they-say-X-I-say-Y part of my essay: while many believe that public musicology consists in narrowly-construed acts of idiom translation, I would argue that public musicology means more than dumbing down your cherished ideas for the normies. Instead of conceiving public musicology as academic work exported to an alien domain, I would define it as intellectual work conceived in and native to that domain, which I call the space of the public.

“The space of the public” is a domain of human exchange, and when scholars enter it, they form relationships with the people they meet there. Indeed, the arena itself is defined by those relationships. “The space of the public” is perhaps not the best term for it, because to call it the space, or the space, is to suggest a single vast warehouse-like enclosure that exists before and after we enter it and that can be occupied indifferently by us or anyone else. However, there is not one space of the public but many, and such spaces are constituted by those who act in them. So it is a mistake to say that these are spaces that “contain” people; they are spaces of people, spaces of practice, spaces of exchange. Should I call it the domain of the public? The zone of the public? I find myself getting drawn into the sort of mincing and pedantic quibbling over language that academics love but that public scholars would be well-advised to avoid. So “space of the public” it is.

If we understand the space of the public in this way, immediately we find ourselves confronted by an ethical matter. The public musicologist is not something superadded to an existing state of affairs, but is part of what actually makes the space what it is. This is true of everyone else who shows up—that is to say, your audience. They make the space as much as you do. You are the reason they are there, listening to your podcast or reading your book, but they are the reason you are there, too. You and they are interdependent entities. This being the case, you can hardly put yourself on a level above them. You are not a missionary, bringing the light of Reason or political consciousness or your exquisite taste in music to the benighted masses. You are trying to talk to people who are somewhat like you. To the degree that you insist that you are not like them, you are doing both them and yourself a disservice.

Of course, you are a bit different from them. If you did not have something special to offer, some special knowledge or insight, why would anybody care about your project? And it is not as if the space of the public isn’t already full of power-tripping and condescension. You can be perfectly successful speaking to your audience from a position of presumed superiority just so long as you can convince them that you and they are in the same in-group. You see this kind of thing in occult podcasting sometimes: behold the arcane secrets that only we, the initiated, the elect, can understand! It’s a temptation, but if you give in to it, I question how successful the “public” part of your public musicology really is.

Public musicology demands an ability to listen with openness and humility. One very great difference between academic and public musicology lies in the fact that there is no prior restraint on who may enter the space of the public. If I read a paper at an AMS meeting, my audience will be limited to AMS members, whereas if I post the same talk on a blog there is no such restriction: anyone could show up. It is a droll understatement to say that you meet many more kinds of people in the space of the public than you do in academic life. You will encounter people with ideas, beliefs, and motivations you have never held or even encountered or even imagined, and you might not entirely understand, trust, or approve of them. Who knows what their implications might be? Who knows what kind of strange bedfellows they might make? Who knows what kinds of unsavory characters they might drag into your space? Such paranoid hermeneutics comes naturally to academics.¹⁰ Paranoia will keep you at home in the academy, where you can count on all ideas being vetted for safety. But the whole point of public musicology was to leave home, remember? Given that no notion of which human beings are capable can be entirely safe from low associations and bad consequences, it does not do to be too fussy about the company in which you are seen. The puristical, touch-me-not sensibility one often finds in academia repels those outside of it. A little faith is needed.

If you can listen to the Other you encounter in a space of the public; if you can respect their perspective on our peculiar little tribe enough to see what you look like in the Other’s eyes; if you are willing to act on that awareness and meet those Others half-way and give them something they want in return for what you want, which is their attention—then you might be up for a little public musicology.

Content

It should be obvious that the above remarks do not concern all varieties of public musicology. Personal relations between scholars and their publics matter especially in the kind of public scholarship that I do, which I have called, half-scornfully, “content creation.” The term “content” suggests some indifferent bulk matter stuffed into identical cans with CONTENT stenciled on the label, all stacked in uniform rows in a warehouse, each one as good as the next, one shipment after another going out the door and keeping the product cycle going (see Figure 1). As for “content creators,” there is something generically awful suggested by the term. It connotes a certain kind of person ubiquitous on the internet—clout-chasers, people whose only indispensable talent is for moving the levers of social media to engineer a vacuous and parasitic micro-fame.

Figure 1. Corinna Ulrich, CONTENT (2021).

These are the people mocked in The Nerd Crew, a series of short satirical videos created by Redlettermedia, a Milwaukee film and media company with a large internet following. The Nerd Crew satirizes both “content creators” and the peculiar vacuity of content as such. One joke that recurs in almost every episode of The Nerd Crew is how the hosts never actually get around to saying anything about Star Wars or whatever the episode is nominally about. Every episode is a content-creator Waiting for Godot where the content never shows up and the hosts pitch their empty chatter into the void.

This gives us our first clue into what is signified by that word, “content.” Content is that which fills time, whether the temporal container is a podcast release schedule or a single podcast episode. There does not even need to be a schedule; the ambient pressure to maintain an internet presence is something exerted in the day-to-day and manifests in the thought “I should really post something, it’s been a few days”—or hours, or minutes, depending on how much internet attention you are after. Regardless, niche internet micro-fame (like being “TikTok famous”) is a beast you can never stop feeding. It is not as if you could create a single monumental work and dine off it forever, like David Foster Wallace did with Infinite Jest. As a matter of fact, works and content are opposites. It is possible to create a great work of art or a great work of scholarship, but a “great work of content” is a contradiction in terms. Now, this is not to say that it is impossible to make a valid scholarly contribution in the domain of content, even a great one. I hope it is not, anyway: after all, it is what I’m trying to do. But it will not be the same kind of contribution as those that we might call “works.” I will return to this point.

What I called “content as such” is content conceived purely to fill time—contentless content. Rob Horning writes that in our age, “the content of ‘content’ is assumed to be negligible, irrelevant, a pretense. Content on the internet is pure form.”¹¹ Content as pure form is creative work as conceived by the managerial mind, which is concerned above all with the efficient monetization of time. From this perspective, the most cost-effective way to provide content would be to fill time with nothing at all—to sell the consumer nothing more than the time within which they expect something to happen. When nothing happens (as in a Nerd Crew video, where nothing is the only thing that ever happens), we have achieved the perfection of internet-era commerce, a frictionless perpetual hamster-wheel of pure consumption without satiation. Content is food you can eat and eat and eat without ever filling your belly. Those who know something of the Buddhist folklore of “hungry ghosts” will note some interesting archetypal resonances with the world of content creators.

Content-as-such is an abstraction, the ideal type toward which real-world content tends. In practice there is always some minimal thing a piece of content is at least nominally about. But in the regime of content, such things are secondary. That was the joke in one Nerd Crew parody where a podcast about Solo: A Star Wars Story ends up being about some content creators seeing the premiere of Solo: A Star Wars Story.¹² The host’s personality, such as it is, becomes a kind of spackle that can be used to fill any hole.

Here is another, real-world example of content-as-such from a disreputable and mostly defunct fan enthusiasm of my own. The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is the world’s leading mixed martial arts promotion and maintains a near-monopoly on the available talent and audience for the sport. It has a partnership with ESPN, which in 2020 gave the UFC three-quarters of a billion dollars in exchange for putting on 42 events in a year to provide content for their new ESPN+ streaming service.¹³ So come what may, UFC puts on 42 events in a year, and if several athletes on a given fight card are out with injuries, UFC will look around for any plausible warm body to take their place, even in title fights, because the schedule overrides all other concerns. Big individual fights with famous names and high stakes matter much less than they used to. UFC is no longer primarily in the business of staging memorable fights, though of course those still happen. Their business is now to feed the schedule, which is to say, their business is content. As sportswriters Ben Fowlkes and Chad Dundas put it, it is the “just some fights” era.¹⁴ Fight fans would have loved to see Jon Jones face Francis Ngannou for the title, but as UFC did not want to pay them what they were asking and Ngannou was unavailable the month they wanted to schedule the fight, they just gave us two other available heavyweights and called it an “interim title.” This kind of thing bothers people who care about the sport and know something of its history, but enough casuals are satisfied by the spectacle of two big guys fighting—any two big guys, so long as someone is getting punched in the face—that it does not matter what the more hardcore fans think.

One sees this kind of thing happen in every quarter of culture where some entity has adjusted itself to the regime of content. Much as I would like to, I cannot entirely blame UFC for their just-some-fights approach. Money for content is easy money, or at least easier than money for works. It is hard enough for private individuals to take a stand against easy money; how much harder it is for a publicly-traded company. Content has its own logic and its own agenda. Or if we are speaking in a Marxist idiom, we might say that late capital has its own agenda, whose cultural expression is content.

In a 2019 essay-review on blogging I published in this journal, I ended up reflecting on the cultural logic of our age: “We live in a state of ‘liquid modernity,’ where Marx’s line ‘all that is solid melts in air’ seems almost literally true. In William Gibson’s Idoru, the Tokyo skyline melts and re-forms as its nanotech materials make even skyscrapers as fluid and changeable as the stuff in a lava lamp—a poetic image of our situation.”¹⁵ In writing this, I was trying to explain why I was writing about a medium that was already dead. “The blog medium writhed and mutated under our hands before we were even done writing; technological change now moves faster than our ideas,” I wrote—not realizing that Substack was at that very moment proving my point (and obsolescing my essay) by bringing back blogging as a paying outlet for writers.

One sign of the times is the fact that the present-day model of media consumption is no longer ownership but rental: you subscribe to Spotify and stop buying CDs or you buy books for your e-reader instead of owning paper copies. (You don’t really own e-reader books; you purchase a license to use them, and under certain circumstances that license can be revoked.) Present-day capitalism is about fluidity; it deals in verbs rather than nouns, actions rather than objects, or, if you like, improvisation rather than composition.

The Wanderer

Frederic Rzewski tells a story about coming up to Steve Lacy with a tape recorder and asking him to define the difference between improvisation and composition in 15 seconds. Without missing a beat, Lacy answered “In fifteen seconds the difference between composition and improvisation is that in composition you have all the time you want to think about what to say in fifteen seconds, while in improvisation you only have fifteen seconds”—a response that took Lacy exactly fifteen seconds to utter.¹⁶

As Rzewski points out, Lacy’s answer does not tell the whole story, but I find it helpful in understanding the difference between the work I do on Weird Studies and what I do in an essay like this one. On the podcast I have expressed versions of ideas I am expressing here, but whereas in the present case I have taken several weeks to choose my words carefully and craft a coherent structure for them, on the show I had no such luxury and had to spit them out as best I could in the moment.¹⁷ We edit our conversations but do not script them, and for the most part the refinement of ideas in the show happens as they return in successive conversations, each time getting a bit more solid and filled-out. The pattern is repetition with variation, which is a consummately improvisational pattern. The appearance of these ideas is bound up in time; they are integrally connected to the conversational events of which they are a part. In writing these ideas later in an essay such as this one, sitting at my desk and staring pensively out the window as I search for the mot juste, I am marshaling those ideas and developing them in time, as well, but it is my time, not yours. You do not have to suffer through someone else’s ordeal of getting words on the page. If I publish my ideas in the Journal of Musicological Research, all that time spent writing and woolgathering has been bound up in a smooth, univocal object of prose. This is what I mean by a work: it is something in which the time of its making is wound up. In an improvisation, the time of making is the time it takes you to play the improvisation and for someone to hear it.

I have two caveats I want to make in passing. First, I do not want to imply that improvisation is any easier or less valuable than composition. It takes a lifetime of practice for a musician to get to the point of being able to improvise a great solo, a point made in a story about John Ruskin insulting James McNeill Whistler for demanding 200 guineas for a painting he made in two days. Whistler’s response was that the payment was for the years it had taken him to become a master of his art. Secondly, I should also point out that what I have said about podcasting as improvisation goes for written as well as audiovisual content: in writing you are engaged in “composition” to a greater degree than in recording a conversation, but the awareness of passing time still nags you to replenish your stream of content, and so blog writing ends up bearing something of the same relationship to academic writing generally as speed chess does to regular chess.

If we are thinking of music as if it were the sum of its themes, motivic linkages, harmonic movements, and so on—all those things that we could put in a conventional music analysis—then we have reason to distrust improvisation, and this is one reason it took so long for improvised music to be taken seriously by musicologists. If I believe that great music should have complex and developmental multi-thematic forms like a sonata, I am not going to find much to satisfy me in a jazz solo because it is impossible to improvise such forms in anything like the complexity with which they can be composed. Composition means winding up time in works the way we would wind up an old-fashioned watch.¹⁸ But by now musicologists have learned that improvisation is its own art form and is to be judged by its own aesthetic principles. One of those principles is that its time is bound up in its making, and another of those principles is that character is destiny. Jazz improvisers and freestyle rappers routinely talk about “telling your story,” which is a way of saying that the content of an improvisation is in part the human energies that go into its making. This means that when you are doing a public musicology project in the “content creation” category, you are always the content, no matter what else you might be talking about, and this has consequences for the kind of scholarly work that can be done in this domain.

Scholarship in the domain of content finds itself far afield its usual haunts: the scholar’s relationship to time and to the audience is different. As a public musicologist, you find yourself in a strange land where judgments proceed along lines different from those you are used to. In this zone, your work appears clothed in its becoming, not its being, and people engage with it partly because of the work itself and partly because of you.

This is an uncomfortable place for scholars to find themselves. For one thing, it is infamous to say that someone cannot work in a given subfield because they are not the right sort of person, much less that they are not entertaining enough—it is and should remain an immovable principle that the value of scholarship is intrinsic to the work and not to the person who made it. Neither should scholarship be valued for its popularity, nor whether it can make money. Should we musicologists then shun content creation, where such things do matter? Do the tendencies of content media circumscribe scholarly activity to the point that its products are no longer recognizable as scholarship at all? I would forgive you for saying “yes,” because I have not given you any arguments to the contrary, aside from expressing the wan hope that making a valid scholarly contribution as a content creator is at least possible. I can point out that the category “improvising musician” includes both John Coltrane and any kid playing a solo at a middle-school stage band concert. The “Nerd Crew” type of content creator no more sets the ceiling on my own efforts than the novice improviser establishes the limits of what is possible in jazz. But this does not answer the question that is surely on your mind by now: how is one to make a valid scholarly contribution as a content creator? How can the musicologist flourish in the wilds of content?

In this sort of situation, it is always wise to consult the I Ching, the ancient Chinese system of bibliomancy. J. F. Martel and I once tried and failed to record a decent Weird Studies episode on The Green Knight and, facing the unrelenting demands of our release schedule, found ourselves stuck for a show topic. I thought of asking the I Ching how we should tackle the new academic year and then basing a show on its response, which is similar to how Carl Jung wrote his foreword to Richard Wilhelm’s translation of the book. However, I first asked the I Ching whether it approved of this idea, and it gave me an adverse answer (Hexagram 23, “Splitting Apart”). I then asked what we should do instead, and I got Hexagram 15, “Modesty,” whose moving lines transform it into Hexagram 56, “The Wanderer.” This was suggestive. At the head of the chapter on the latter hexagram, we read “Strange lands and separation are the Wanderer’s lot.” Surely this is the condition of the scholar abroad in the wilds of content.

THE JUDGMENT

The Wanderer. Success through smallness.

Perseverance brings good fortune

To the Wanderer.

When a man is a wanderer and stranger, he should not be gruff nor overbearing. He has no large circle of acquaintances, therefore he should not give himself airs. He must be cautious and reserved; in this way he protects himself from evil. If he is obliging toward others, he wins success. A wanderer has no fixed abode; his home is the road. Therefore he must take care to remain upright and steadfast, so that he sojourns only in the proper places, associating only with good people. Then he has good fortune and can go his way unmolested.¹⁹

Indeed, the Wanderer is not only the emblem of the public scholar; it is the very personification of public scholarship itself. Scholarship finds itself no longer on its turf. Cut off from its usual sources of stability and support and far from familiar faces and customs, it is forced to live on its wits and adapt to changing circumstances. The Wanderer is an aspect of Wotan, the All-Father of Norse myth, whom Wagner made the tragic hero of his Ring cycle and who is also the basis for Tolkien’s Gandalf. In myth, Wotan would sometimes get an itch to join human society and go wandering through the northern wilderness, disguising himself in a dusty traveling cloak and a broad-brimmed hat pulled down over his blind eye. It was said that he might appear at the door of any lonely farm, testing the hospitality of those who dwell there. In Wagner’s Siegfried, he appears at the hovel of Mime, who fails the test of hospitality and forfeits his life in a game of riddles. Wotan is a god of battles but also of poetry—the Icelandic Sagas are full of tales where a warrior stands over a fallen foe and drops an ice-cold verse to mark the occasion—and for the Wanderer, it is as shameful to shirk a chance to trade words as it is to shrink from a fight.

This might give us an indication of how we might approach the domain of content: stay home if you must, but to heed the call to adventure and poetry is glorious! Or if not exactly adventure and poetry, at least the call to put your wit and words out there on the road. And if you do decide to hit the road, be courageous and courteous in your dealings. Courageous, because the situation calls for you to get yourself involved in the lives of strangers and to talk with them. Courteous, because you are not on your own turf and it is unwise to speak to those you meet as if you are somehow above them. “[The Wanderer] has no large circle of acquaintances, therefore he should not give himself airs.”²⁰ Remember what I wrote earlier: you can do public musicology if you are willing to listen charitably to the Others you meet in the Space of the Public and if you are willing to meet them halfway. Showing people this kind of respect is the right thing to do, I believe, but for the Wanderer it is also a matter of simple self-preservation.

This I Ching reading also tells us something about the nature of scholarship conducted in the Space of the Public and especially in the domain of content. “A wanderer has no fixed abode; his home is the road.” The temporal axis of works is vertical, while that of content is horizontal. If I switch up my divinatory imagery from the I Ching to the tarot, I could say that the work is a Tower, a castellated structure of bound time, year upon year of writing and research piled up to the sky, where one holes up and prepares to repel any onslaught. (Though as you can see from the card in Figure 2, that does not always work out so well.) Content is the road, perhaps the road that runs between the towers in the Moon card (Figure 3), where one is out in the open and unprotected but free, off on a quest of knowledge that is always in part a quest of self-knowledge. Content, in its highest form, is the quest itself. Knowing that gives us something to aspire to.

Figure 2. A. E. Waite and Pamela Coleman Smith, “The Tower,” from the Smith-Waite Tarot (1909).

Figure 3. A. E. Waite and Pamela Coleman Smith, “The Moon,” from the Smith-Waite Tarot (1909).

I still have not given concrete and detailed advice on how to do scholarship with integrity in the domain of content. Content creation is such a new form for scholarship to take, there are few if any maps of this domain, and given the liquid state of our culture they would be outdated before you laid eyes on them anyway. Really, the main thing is to begin. If this kind of work interests you, grab your hiking staff and start walking. Solvitur ambulando is the only real advice I have. Things will get messy and you are bound to look foolish from time to time, but you will also get to go on adventures and meet some amazing people. You will meet trolls, too, but so did Gandalf. Again, I advise courage, as well as a certain willingness to make it up as you go. Out in the wilds, it’s not as if you have much choice in the matter anyway.

Notes

¹ J. Peter Burkholder, Listening to Charles Ives: Variations on His America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

² Kerry O’Brien, “Steve Reich at 80: Still Plugged In, Still Plugging Away,” New York Times, September 30, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/arts/music/steve-reich-at-80-still-plugged-in-still-plugging-away.html.

³ Sergio Ospina-Romero, e-mail to author, January 3, 2022. For an example of Ospina-Romero’s blogging, see “‘Con la emoción apretando por dentro’: música y protesta social en Colombia en tiempos del Coronavirus,” https://www.banrepcultural.org/noticias/con-la-emocion-apretando-por-dentro-musica-y-protesta-social-en-colombia. This is the fifth installment of a series on protest and political violence in Colombia.

⁴ Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum, https://chmtl.indiana.edu/tml/.

⁵ Inclusive Early Music, https://inclusiveearlymusic.org; In Mrs. Goldberg’s Kitchen, https://jewish-lodz.iu.edu/mrs-goldbergs-kitchen; Sonic Histories of Cork City, https://shoccproject.wordpress.com/soundscapes; and BachCantataTexts.org.

⁶ Judah Cohen, “Artistic Control and Partnership: Jewish Studies Programs and the Incubation of New Musical Works,” Studies in American Jewish Literature 38, no. 2 (2019): 198–217.

⁷ This also happened in the 1990s. My invocation of the MLC incidentally brings up another potential category of public musicology: music history textbooks and curricula.

⁸ Gerald Graff, Clueless in Academia: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003); and Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein, They Say / I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing (New York: Norton, 2010).

⁹ This is so-called Sayre’s Law: political scientist Wallace S. Sayre liked to say, “the politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low.” Sayre, quoted in The Yale Book of Quotations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 670.

¹⁰ The paranoid style of academic thought and expression has been much-discussed of late, thanks to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of “paranoid reading.” See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–51. In explaining the concept, William Cheng writes that academics “are trained to write in a manner that preemptively repels potential knocks against their work. With abundant qualifiers, quotes, caveats, and precautionary self-disparagement, the savvy scholar anticipates and suppresses others’ grievances before they can be aired.” William Cheng, Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2016), 3–4. Needless to say, paranoid reading can also be applied to those outside of the academy as well.

¹¹ Rob Horning, “Fear of Content,” Dis Magazine, http://dismagazine.com/disillusioned/78747/fear-of-content-rob-horning.

¹² “The Nerd Crew—Solo: A Star Wars Story Premiere! Plus reactions!!!,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = NeK889V5M88.

¹³ Soma Biswas, “UFC Vows to Keep Fighting Despite Coronavirus,” Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/ufc-vows-to-keep-fighting-despite-coronavirus-11586251802.

¹⁴ Fowlkes and Dundas have written for many sports publications, including Sports Illustrated, ESPN.com, and The Athletic, but they are best known for their podcast The Co-Main Event, where they have termed the present state of UFC “the just-some-fights era.”

¹⁵ Phil Ford, “What Was Blogging?” The Journal of Musicological Research 38, no. 2 (2019): 175–79.

¹⁶ Frederic Rzewski, “Little Bangs: A Nihilist Theory of Improvisation,” Current Musicology 67 (1999): 377–86, here 378.

¹⁷ For preliminary versions of some ideas presented in this essay, see Weird Studies episode 106, “The Wanderer: On Weird Studies,” https://www.weirdstudies.com/106.

¹⁸ I am borrowing this notion of wound-up time, and the associated image of the wind-up watch, from Douglas Rushkoff, who coins the term “overwinding” to describe a 21^st-century relationship to time whereby we “make the ‘now’ responsible for the sorts of effects that actually take real time to occur—just like overwinding a watch in the hope that it will gather up more potential energy and run longer than it can.” Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (New York: Current, 2013), 136. My own use of this figure is a little different from Rushkoff’s, as I am using it to differentiate the temporal forms of improvisation and composition—a use that takes us some distance from Rushkoff’s social critique.

¹⁹ Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes, trans., The I Ching, vol. 1 (New York: Pantheon, Bollingen, 1950), 231.

²⁰ Ibid.