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:

Announcement: Musicology Now guest post!

Although I haven't updated the blog recently, I've spent a lot of time writing about it. This week, I wrote a post for Musicology Now (yes, the same Musicology Now that I criticized in a previous post, now with a new editorial board). In it, I reflect on my experience with this blog and what I've learned about doing public musicology on the internet, in the hopes of passing along some advice to others who want to try it for themselves. I don't debunk any musical myths in this essay, but if you're interested in learning about my process and goals, please check it out! Here's a preview:

• Your job is to stimulate enthusiasm, not quash it. Since I threw myself into the business of debunking myths, I’m at risk of being the pedant who derails an interesting conversation with, “Well, actually…” Sometimes I worry I’m so caught up in correcting misconceptions about music that I give the impression I don’t actually like it. That’s motivated me to write more than just corrections, to explain why the history matters and hopefully replace the warm fuzzies of a feel-good false narrative with an awed appreciation for history.

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Also, in the wake of articles celebrating Beethoven's birthday on December 16th, I've been working on a post about myths pertaining to his deafness. That post will probably be published early in the new year.

Have a merry Christmas, happy new year, and marvelous any other holiday you're celebrating! I look forward to busting more musical myths with you in 2017.

Is this flute concerto a long-lost Mozart composition? (Probably not.)

Last week, my news feeds were full of stories about musical manuscripts and rediscovered compositions:

1. On November 27, A manuscript of Mahler’s second symphony auctioned at Sotheby’s set a record for the highest sale price of a musical manuscript.
2. At the same auction, a manuscript of a Beethoven piece failed to sell, and Sotheby’s blames a musicologist for voicing doubts that it’s in Beethoven’s handwriting. 
3. On December 2, Austria’s Tutti Mozart Orchestra premiered a long-lost flute concerto purported to be by Mozart.
4. Coincidentally, that same day saw the revival of Stravinsky’s “Funeral Song,” which was lost in the Russian Revolution and recovered in 2015.

Since this blog’s primary purpose is to debunk musical myths, I’m going to focus on event #3: Is this a lost concerto by Mozart? The answer, unfortunately, is: It’s VERY unlikely.

Did WH Auden "uncloset" Benjamin Britten?

In looking for subjects for this blog, I often rely upon my friends on social media. More people encounter more articles (obviously), but I also appreciate that they possess different knowledge than I do and therefore spot problems that I would probably miss on my own. They also tend to be the type of people who can’t stand when someone is being wrong on the internet and will post that wrong thing to social media so we can all share in the wrongness of the thing. Without that trait, my blog probably wouldn’t exist.

So, when I encountered this post in my feed from UC Riverside musicologist Byron Adams, I had to investigate further:

I asked Dr. Adams to point me toward some context, and he recommended Philip Brett’s essay “Music, Essentialism, and the Closet” from Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, which is available on Google Books.

While investigating the initial link from Interlude, however, I noticed a major discrepancy between the headline listed on Facebook (“How WH Auden Helped Benjamin Britten Come Out Of The Closet”) and the headline of Georg Predota’s article in the link (“Coming out! Britten, Auden, and Berkeley”). So, my blog post is going to address two separate issues, both of which are timely: 1) historical treatment of LGBTQ+ figures, and 2) the spread of false information through social media.

Why is modern music so ugly? (Make Classical Music Great Again!)

So…some election, huh? I don’t know about you, but I was surprised (and honestly, horrified) by the outcome. In addition to my fears for the future, I also feel profound confusion because the results of the US presidential election showed me that the world isn’t exactly how I thought it was. I realize that my perception of the political landscape is shaped by being a white woman who has lived in liberal areas for most of my life. I had no idea that Donald Trump had that much support; I didn’t know how many people supported—or at the very least, could overlook—the very behaviors I found unacceptable. I thought the country was mostly like me, and the election tells me this is not the case.

I take my identity as a scholar very seriously, not just in my work, but in my life. When I am confronted with evidence that contradicts something I believe to be true, I should not ignore it. Though it would comfort me to look for other, different evidence that would confirm my previous worldview, that’s ultimately bad practice for a historian. I’m still trying to make sense of the information we received last week, and this blog post is part of that.

A few weeks ago, I received a message from reader Kenichi Ikuno on Facebook. He sent me a link to a blog post proclaiming that “Modern Classical Music is Dead,” and feminism killed it. He thought it would be a good addition to my ongoing series on snobbery, since the author, Max Roscoe, repeatedly asserts the superiority of classical music (up to a certain era) and supports his opinions with assumptions not supported by history. Normally, that is ideal fodder for this blog!