The Adventures of a Visiting Scholar in Utah (with link to my talk, “The Morality of Musical Men: From Victorian Propriety to the Era of #MeToo”)

Hello, everyone! If you’ve been following my social media accounts (either Facebook or Twitter), you’ll know that I was busy last week. I traveled to Logan, Utah for Utah State University’s Visiting Artist & Scholar series, part of their Year of the Arts. For two days, January 25-26, I was treated like a musicological rock star. It was an amazing experience, and I want to let you know what I did out there—for those readers who wonder what public musicologists do, or what an academic trip like this can look like, or just like to know what I’m up to.

 Poster for my talk in the lobby of my hotel. 

I received the invitation to USU in late 2016 from musicology professor Chris Scheer, whom I’d met through our shared Anglophilia and membership in the North American British Music Studies Association (the group that I mentioned in my post on Clara Schumann). Honored, I accepted, but I had a lot of concerns due to my health.

Long-term planning is difficult for someone with stage IV breast cancer, especially since my condition has been very unpredictable—in fact, last summer I had such a big setback that I absolutely would not have been able to travel then. I still haven’t gained back all the strength and mobility I lost then, so as my trip neared, I had to trim the trip down to the barest responsibilities of the position, knowing I wouldn’t have the stamina for much more.

Fortunately, Dr. Scheer and everyone else I met was accommodating and sensitive to my medical issues. The schedule was adjusted to four days: two days of teaching, discussing, and presenting, and a day of travel on either end. I arrived in Utah on Wednesday, January 24th, with responsibilities beginning on Thursday the 25th.

Myths about Beethoven's deafness: Guest post for The Avid Listener

After I've been teasing you about it for over a month, The Avid Listener published my essay "Beethoven’s Deafness and the Myth of the Isolated Artist" today! Here’s a preview:

Beethoven’s disability forms a large part of our concept of him as the quintessential Romantic Hero, as it is a tragic flaw he must overcome to produce his great Art.

The above clip [from Mr. Holland's Opus] mentions two stories about Beethoven’s deafness that have circulated for centuries. In one, Beethoven waves his arms at the podium, oblivious to the fact that the orchestra cannot keep up. In the other, he saws off the legs of his piano so he can feel the vibrations through the floor.

Neither of these stories is true.

Read more »

The Avid Listener also has
a spiffy logo.

The Avid Listener is a blog published by W.W. Norton & Company, intended to foster discussion in and beyond the classroom (hence the discussion questions at the end). I’m excited about this collaboration, as I got to blend my interests in musical mythbusting with their house style emphasizing multimedia presentations.

Also, I am very grateful for the input from Robin Wallace of Baylor University. He is currently writing an entire book devoted to Beethoven myths, and he was generous enough to share some of his drafts with me. He goes into more depth than I’m able to on this blog, so if this topic interests you, please check out his work!

I’m currently working on another off-blog essay about the cliché of making classical music look "cool," and I’m expecting that to be published next week. In the meantime, please enjoy the other wonderful essays on The Avid Listener, and keep sending me suspect links as you find them.

Can Music Treat Cancer? Snake Oil Musicology (or, He Blinded Me with Science)

A friend of mine sent me this link with his apologies—he’s aware that, as a cancer patient, I receive a lot of well-meaning links about things that supposedly treat or cure cancer. I’ve developed a thick skin about it; my treatment is going about as well as I can hope for, and I trust my doctors and nurses. I’m not feeling desperate or hopeless about my condition at the moment, so I’m not as vulnerable on this subject as I have been in the past.

But this video about treating cancer with music strikes a nerve for reasons my friend didn’t even anticipate. It’s odd enough that it’s a video about “musicology” posted by ESPN, a sports network. It’s a little more personal than my usual blog post in that I’ve been in the same room as Nolan Gasser, and my prior experience has left me with a very negative view of his work.

In this post, I will do my best to address my problems with what he is saying, rather than the many problems I have with how he presents himself to the world. While I tend to have an inclusive view of musical scholarship and hesitate to point to anything and say, “That’s not musicology,” ultimately I find Gasser’s take on musicology is reductive and harmful.

What did the Victorians think of music and sport?

I awoke yesterday morning to find that two different people had sent me links to the same New York Times article: “Why Not a College Degree in Sports?” In it, Roger Pielke, Jr. argues that college sports have a lot in common with the performing arts—they require specialized skills and training, and people pay to see the students perform—so it should be possible to earn a degree in basketball, just as someone can currently get a bachelor’s degree in viola performance (like I did).

I’m not opposed to the idea. There is a lot of overlap between athletes and musicians, between the psychological pressure of performing in the moment and the need to maintain physical health. Just as I had to take several classes in music theory and history, Pielke cites a proposed curriculum of “sports history, sports law, sports finance.” The sports history aspect is most appealing to me, as that can become a student’s entre into the humanities—pretty much any human endeavor reveals something about the society in which it developed, so I can envision classes like “Politics and the Modern Olympic Games,” or “Ancient Precursors to Soccer: Global Perspectives.”

The proposed sports degree does enter into the ongoing debate about what the “true” purpose of higher education should be. Is college supposed to train you for a career in a specific field, or provide you with a broader knowledge base? Few sports majors would become professional athletes, just like few performance majors are be able to support themselves purely by playing. Yet such a program could help develop the skills to find alternative jobs within the field—and, ideally in my view, intellectual skills that they could apply to other fields, as well.

But that debate is not really in the purview of this blog. This statement, however, is:

And beyond such economic disparities, class distinctions of 19th-century England still shape thinking about sport: Classical music is valued by high society, while sport is for the masses.

The second half of the sentence is a cliché. The sentence as a whole is inaccurate.

Do you have good taste in music? (Snobbery in Classical Music, Part 2 of ?)

If you follow this blog on Facebook or Twitter, then you know that I promised you this post over a week ago. Sorry for the delay, but I was putting the finishing touches on my dissertation, tracking down signatures, and filing forms to complete my PhD. So, I’m now officially Dr. Shaver-Gleason, or at least I will be once all the paperwork goes through.

So! A little over a week ago, Classic FM posted a quiz to help you determine “How good is your taste in music?” It asks you about the last album you bought, whether you approve of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s existence, and which recording of Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations you prefer, then passes judgment on you. You might be told,

You have great taste in music
You are a denizen, a cultural and musical gatekeeper and tastemaker.

Or it might conclude,

You have awful taste in music
You're awful. We don't have time for you and your blanket praise of terrible music.

Did Bach Hate Pianos?

In the comment section of my post “How ‘forgotten’ was Bach?”, reader Cleverson wrote:

Speaking of Bach, you could also write something against a myth that exists among some music teachers, at least here in Brazil, who say that “Bach hated pianos.” They use such a lie to discourage students from making use of specific features of the piano as an instrument when playing Baroque repertoire.

Cleverson also mentioned coming across the explanation that Bach played an early piano and didn’t like that particular model, but when he came across an improved version later, he liked what he heard.

This “Bach hated pianos” idea intrigues me, mostly because of how Cleverson says it’s used to dictate performance practice. I’ll share my thoughts on that in a bit, but first I have to take care of the myth itself: Did Bach hate pianos?

What happened to English music between Purcell and Elgar?

In addition to sporadically updating this blog, I write program notes for classical music ensembles. Part of the reason my posting schedule is erratic is that summer is my busy season; many orchestras like having all notes for their entire season in one booklet, so I have to write them well before their first concert in the fall. When researching my own notes, I sometimes consult program notes by other people, and too often I find examples of how not to write about music.

When researching a piece by Henry Purcell, I found a sentence that made me facepalm:

Purcell's early death, at the age of thirty-six, not only cut short one of the most promising of careers, but also sidetracked the development of a specifically English musical style until Elgar and then Britten emerged some two centuries later.

This was published for one of the world’s most prestigious ensembles, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra! My home city should do better than this.

What is a “Masterpiece”?

UCLA musicologist (and friend of the blog) Robert Fink tagged me in a link to an essay about the watering down of the word “masterpiece.” As a lover of language, I do mourn the loss of specificity of certain words. Even though I acknowledge that language changes (and that it has to), I love the 18th century definitions of “sublime” and “picturesque,” and I wish that the former still conveyed a sense of overwhelming vastness while the latter still connoted variation and interesting juxtapositions.

But while Terry Teachout claims to be defending a dictionary definition in his article “‘Masterpieces’ Without Masters,” his sense of the word is tied up with a lot of Romanticized ideas of art and its production. And by “Romanticized,” I do mean that his way of addressing this topic is filled with ideas that originated in the 19th century. I have two main problems with Teachout’s essay: his rigid division between “popular culture” and “high art,” and his idea that a masterpiece must by definition exclude collaboration. To support this second point, Teachout makes many erroneous assumptions about how works of art, particularly classical music, are created.

You can’t change the canon…or can you?

Earlier this month, the annual conference of the League of American Orchestras met in Baltimore to discuss, among other things, the future of live classical music. Music critic Anne Midgette covered the conference for The Washington Post with an article about how musicians are tackling existential questions, reconsidering orchestras’ missions and even the purpose of concerts in the 21st century. One quote from the conference caught a lot of attention, particularly on Twitter:

No. You're thinking of the laws of physics. You can definitely change the canon. pic.twitter.com/rmba0ftQlV

— Simon Brackenborough (@sbrackenborough) June 15, 2016

I re-tweeted Simon Brackenborough’s response, thinking defiantly, “Hells yeah! We can change the canon!” As a Good Musical Citizen and Friend to Composers, that’s the reaction that feels correct. Despite the religious connotations of the term “canon,” it wasn’t ordained by God. Humans made the canon, and humans can change the canon—in fact, it’s been in a constant state of change since its inception. So, in the literal sense, Laing’s statement is false.

But I don’t think Laing meant his words literally, so I’m not going to pillory him. He’s a musician; I suspect he said it with resignation, maybe even some frustration. Yes, you can change the canon, but inertia has made it difficult to do so. The concept of the canon developed about 200 years ago, and while individual works have gained and lost canonic status, the idea of THE CANON remains a significant influence on concert and radio programming.

How "forgotten" was Bach?

Today, I'm getting back to one of the original goals of this blog: debunking myths about composers that have been repeated so many times that they're accepted as truth. This particular myth has resurfaced because Sotheby's recently auctioned the original publishing contract for J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion, the work that rekindled interest in Bach's music when Felix Mendelssohn performed it in 1829, over a century after it was written. Or, as our friends at Classic FM put it, "Bach would’ve been completely forgotten by history without this document."

The myth is that Bach's music had been forgotten until Mendelssohn resurrected him. You'll find it in biographic profiles and lists of interesting facts. It's an appealing tidbit because it seems so contrary to our perception of Bach today. Bach is one of the few classical composers that most people have even heard of; even if they can't name him, people can at least recognize a few bars of his work. Whenever we see a television character appreciating some Bach, we know we're meant to understand that their brain is processing information at a higher level, thanks to popular culture linking Bach's music to depictions of genius (a phenomenon that started in the twentieth century, as studied by my friend Kristi Brown-Montesano). Since Bach is ubiquitous nowadays, it would be easy to assume that it’s always been that way. Finding out that it was the exact opposite way for decades after his death is pleasantly surprising, in that it's something you can say to impress people at parties.

Like most myths, this one is based on a kernel of truth. Bach was not famous in his own time, certainly not an international superstar like Handel. Mendelssohn did organize a performance of the St. Matthew Passion, and that concert did much to popularize Bach. But it would be inaccurate to call Bach "forgotten" up to 1829, and Mendelssohn is not solely responsible for launching Bach's posthumous career. Though the myth of Mendelssohn "discovering" Bach might lead one to imagine him as a musical Indiana Jones stumbling across a dusty manuscript, eyes widening as he gradually realizes its brilliance, that just wasn't the case.

Will these suggestions make classical concerts less "stifling"?

Classical music needs to attract new listeners. This isn't news. Pretty much anyone who cares about the future of classical music realizes this, and to believe otherwise is to be in denial. This isn't another  hand-wringing pronouncement that "Classical music is dying!"—it's an acknowledgment that classical music is subject to cultural forces and needs to build audiences with each generation in order to endure.

How to attract these new listeners remains the subject of debate. Some have proposed augmenting the concert experience, adding features that might help the highly sough-after "millennials" feel more at ease during a live performance—such as these listening guides by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, which use notation that resembles video games such as Rock Band to explain form. Some argue that the concert experience itself need to change, due to classical music's image problem: it's too stuffy and old fashioned, and concert traditions are alienating.

Toronto critic Michael Vincent falls into this latter camp (though the positions I mentioned are not mutually exclusive, nor are they comprehensive). Earlier this week, he published a list of "Nine Things That Should Change About Classical Music." He explains, "[T]he concert etiquette at classical music performances can be a stifling experience for newbies attending symphony concerts."

Having taught music appreciation classes at UCSB, I agree with that assessment. Many of my students expressed confusion over certain traditions, including ones on Vincent's list. I like that Vincent focuses on the rituals surrounding music rather than the music itself; despite the headline, he is pointing out aspects of classical concerts he thinks should change.

Beethoven's Humanity vs. Mozart's Divinity

In my previous post, I looked at an article written by someone who probably does not have much experience covering classical music (at least, judging by the other articles she's written). It addresses some of the problems that arise when publishers assign staffers who do not have the background to write knowingly about their given subject. For this post, however, I examine an article by The Telegraph's regular classical music critic, Ivan Hewett. While his article also contains historical falsehoods, I'm more concerned about the way Hewett resorts to the most familiar stereotypes to preach to the choir.

First, some background: In a survey conducted earlier this year by Classic FM, a UK-based radio station, Beethoven had more compositions on the favorites list than Mozart. This was the first time this has happened since the annual survey started in 1996, which is enough of a change to warrant some comment. The first article The Telegraph ran on this coup, "Beethoven beats Mozart to be crowned most popular composer for first time," offers an explanation: Beethoven's seventh symphony serves as the soundtrack to an intense scene in the popular movie The King's Speech, which prompted people to seek out more of his music.

Perhaps this article was a bit too dry in its cold reporting of facts and analysis. Where is the breathless adulation of these Great Masters? So, Hewett offers his own explanation in "Why Beethoven rules supreme over Mozart."  Rather than discuss why people might have adjusted their answers in the poll, he effectively proclaims that the poll has finally gotten it right.

"Beethoven is classical music's titan. More than that, he is the perfection of the romantic artist-hero," Hewett declares. Here's where my perspective as a musicologist differs from that of most music fans. I cannot argue against Beethoven being a "romantic artist-hero," but rather than using that as proof of his greatness, I see it as an interesting product of nineteenth-century culture. Our concept of the "artist-hero" is based on the Romantic perception of Beethoven, so of course he's the best example of it; it's a tautology. This statement should be unpacked and explored, not taken as evidence in itself.