Hey, Siri! Are You a Musicologist?

When Apple announced their HomePod in June 2017, press releases and advertising touted its new features, as would be expected of any competent marketing team. For my colleagues and me, one word stood out:

Hey Siri, how many Mass settings of
“L’homme armé” have been discovered?

“By saying, ‘Hey Siri, I like this song,’ HomePod and Apple Music become the perfect musicologist, learning preferences from hundreds of genres and moods, across tens of thousands of playlists, and these music tastes are shared across devices. Siri can also handle advanced searches within the music library, so users can ask questions like ‘Hey Siri, who’s the drummer in this?’ or create a shared Up Next queue with everyone in the home.”
—Press Release, 6/5/17

Oh, we had a lot of fun on social media with that!

If we've never heard of women composers from past centuries, does that mean they didn't exist? (Tweets about Women Composers, part 1)

Amy Beach, an actual woman composer of the 19th century!

Hello, everyone! This blog post is going to be in a different format due to a recent, complicated, multi-threaded Twitter discussion. Since there's no platform that organizes Twitter threads as intuitively as the human brain, I'm going to do my best to untangle them here. I chose to embed the Tweets so you can explore some of the branches I've left out, if you so desire. However, the post is so long that I'm going to have to break it into two parts! Here we go:

It began with musicologist Kendra Leonard asking a music history account about their OTDs ("On This Date"):

Hey @musihist, what happened OTD in music history that isn't about a man? How about tomorrow? And the day after that?

— (((Kendra Leonard))) (@K_Leonard_PhD) December 15, 2017

Follow us and find out.

— MusicandHistory (@musihist) December 15, 2017

Since Dec 1, you've posted more than 150 tweets. Only two are about women. That's a terrible ratio. https://t.co/8Uq1C94YtP

— (((Kendra Leonard))) (@K_Leonard_PhD) December 18, 2017

We can't change the fact that until very recently, women in western music were discouraged from pursuing composition. But we try to make known those who did, and are, creating great works.

— MusicandHistory (@musihist) December 18, 2017

And THERE is the myth! Dr. Leonard summoned me:

.@LindaHyphen want to take on the fallacious argument here that this site/account can't post equally about women because of biased historiography? https://t.co/kfbl7osESZ

— (((Kendra Leonard))) (@K_Leonard_PhD) December 18, 2017

Note: She used my personal Twitter handle (@LindaHypen) instead of the one I use only for this blog (@MusHistCliches). Feel free to follow this account for musicological discussions like this one, but be aware that I also tweet about my cancer, my son, and my cat.

Like many myths, it is based on a bit of truth: Women have historically been discouraged from composing. (Unfortunately, this continues today, for reasons that will be explained by someone else later in this post.) I've even gotten into a different Twitter discussion about this, with Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel as the prime example.

Just as women in general have been encouraged to focus on domestic matters and not work outside the home, they were discouraged from seeking advanced training in composition because it would distract from their household responsibilities. As Abraham Mendelssohn told his daughter Fanny, "for you [music] can and must only be an ornament, never the basis of your being and doing."

So, what makes this a myth?

Has Elgar’s Enigma finally been cracked? (Spoiler: No.)

Check out this sensational headline, fresh from Facebook!

“Did a Violin Teacher From Plano, Texas Solve
the World’s Greatest Classical Music Mystery?”
I don’t know, but all these superimposed notes look pretty convincing!

This story has something for everyone: An unassuming person from Middle America finds the solution that has eluded scholars and specialists for generations! If you’re into classical music, this is a major finding that may change the way you listen to a major piece in the repertoire! If you’re an average dude, your kind has just scored a major victory over educated elitists with nothing but gumption and a little help from, yes, God above.

Ah, but remember Betteridge’s Law of Headlines (which I’ve discussed on this blog before): “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.” Admittedly, this “law” is intended more for humor than accuracy, but it holds true in this case. No, Bob Padgett did not crack the “Enigma” of Edward Elgar’s famous variations.

Announcement: Guest post for The Outline

Happy New Year! I hope you’ve had a wonderful holiday season. I’ve been busy writing. Fortunately (for me, but perhaps unfortunately for this blog), I’ve been working on articles for other sites. Unlike my post for Musicology Now, however, these articles are in line with the aim of this blog: busting musical myths.

Today, The Outline published my article, “You Don’t Need Science to Tell You Why You Like a Song.” This essay is like a companion piece to one of the first posts on this blog, “Science Proves Your Favorite Music is the Best.” My earlier post explored how classical music media outlets tend to be self-congratulatory about scientific studies involving classical music. Since The Outline doesn’t focus on classical music, though, I wrote about why we place so much emphasis on scientific (or scientistic) studies of music in the first place. I still mention the Mozart Effect, but I pair it with a ridiculous formula that claims to have determined the “10 most uplifting songs ever,” which are astonishingly all Dad Rock Standards. Here’s a preview:

What is unique about classical music? (Snobbery in Classical Music, Part 4 of ?)

This blog is almost exactly five months old, and in that short time I’ve noticed a bit of mission drift. I started this blog with the intent of correcting mistakes, acting like a classical music Snopes to inform people that no, Salieri didn’t murder Mozart, and Tchaikovsky didn’t commit suicide after writing his Pathétique symphony. But as I started thinking about what gives these myths their staying power, I found myself explaining my view of history and articulating how I practice musicology. This morphed into a defense of the discipline, calling out misunderstandings, misapplications, and snobbery.

I bring this up because it’s important to point out that my definition of “musicology” is not shared by everyone, even fellow musicologists. Fortunately, the internet is a big place, and there are plenty of other musicological bloggers out there doing their own thing and showing the world how they do musicology (I list a few of my favorites at the end of this post). Anyone can read these blogs, which makes blogging a powerful activity in the practice of “public musicology”—another term on which musicologists have yet to achieve a consensus.

Many musicological blogs are like mine in that they’re the independent musings of one (or maybe two) scholar(s). This blog is not affiliated with any institution; the views expressed are mine alone. While I’d like to think of myself as a good example of a musicologist, I don’t speak for the discipline. However, there is an American Musicological Society (of which I am a member), and in addition to publishing a prestigious research journal and holding a huge academic conference as its annual meeting, it has an official blog: Musicology Now. Given that the blog’s header describes it as “lively facts and opinions on music, brought to you by the American Musicological Society” and is hosted on AMS’s website, one might assume that it’s representative of the discipline, and it’s the way the society chooses to present musicology to the public at large.

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.