Report from "Music and Musicology in the Age of Post-Truth" (with link to the paper I delivered there)

Hello! If you haven't been following this blog on Facebook or Twitter, you may be wondering why I haven't updated the blog for a few months. I was preparing for a conference last week in Dublin, Ireland, where I delivered a paper and had some incredible conversations with fellow music scholars who share some of my concerns about music and its role in today's society.

When I saw that the  conference title was "Music and Musicology in the Age of Post-Truth" and read the call for papers, I knew it was a great fit for my views as a scholar and the mission of my blog. Mythbusting is a quest for verifiable truth, and I do my best to explain how certain myths endure and why people choose to believe them.

Programme booklet for the Music and Musicology
in the Age of Post-Truth conference.

Since this conference intended to reflect on present culture, I realized I had to step away from my nineteenth-century comfort zone and find something recent to investigate. I pitched a paper that would be an offshoot of the lecture I delivered at Utah State University last January, which dealt with the perception of classical music as cultivating better morals in its listeners. Since the presentation could only be twenty minutes long (with ten additional minutes for questions and discussion), I had to narrow my focus. So, I chose one of the hottest topics in classical music at the moment: the scandals surrounding former Metropolitan Opera conductor James Levine.

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.

Did Bach raise 20 children? Writing composer biographies for kids

Hello! It’s been months since I’ve last updated, and I regret that the hiatus lasted so long. It was mostly due to medical issues; after my successful round of brain radiation, I started a particularly brutal chemo treatment that saps me of energy and makes it difficult to walk. But I’m still recovering.

As I mentioned in the intro to Andrew Dell’Antonio’s guest post, I was indeed on Jeopardy! You can watch the full episode online (assuming Sony hasn’t had the video removed), or if you just want results, you can check J!-Archive. (I was wearing a wig for that episode because radiation left me bald.) If you watch the show, you’ll see that I talked about this blog in my one-on-one with Alex Trebek! I made a passing reference to Mozart and Salieri before mentioning that Bach wasn’t quite forgotten after his death. Wrapping up the interview, Alex mentioned Bach having “lots of children,” and I agreed.

In the very first post on this blog—indeed, the very first sentence—I mention that Bach having a bunch of children is one of those facts that nearly every classical music lover already knows. It is technically correct that Bach fathered twenty children.

And technically correct is the best kind of correct.

However, I’ve discovered that this fact leads some people to create a mental image that is inaccurate. For example, I recently found a description on Amazon of a Bach biography that says it shows, “how he helped his wife Magdalena put the twenty children to bed every night.” This is completely false.