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

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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.