S&W OTD, Part the Second

Today's workspace is our apartment, namely the ambiguous zone where the second couch cushion becomes the third couch cushion, and the right two-thirds of the coffee table, where I worked from 8 to 1 on my final composition project for Modal Counterpoint class, and am now working on my Notation term paper. This space is also where I very recently learned that it is entirely possible, even likely, that I do not know how to spell the word "cushion."

Your Sentence of Zen today was mostly not written by me, but rather by David Lewin, one of the more famous contemporary music theorists, and a figure whom I am addressing in not one but TWO of my term papers this semester. In one, I assess his disciplinary contributions; in the other, I attempt to put some of them into practice in new ways. Either way, his voluminous writings have left a lot of really big ideas for music theorists to think about. What follows is just one, but it's a good one. Bracketed by my interpretation, this passage is a shot across the bow of music theory circa 1986, a celebration of the complexity of music and musical experience, and a launching pad for the ideas (even careers) of dozens of theorists that have followed Lewin.

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Under a Cartesian, intervallic methodology (as exemplified by Lewin’s GIS methodology and, by implication, most other music-theoretical discourse), there is a division between the analyst (res cogitans) and the objects of musical analysis (res extensa), which are arrayed before him as detached, visually-apprehended entities in some conceptual space. To borrow one of Lewin’s locutions from another one of his essays, “Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception,” such an attitude

arise[s] from a tradition in studies of perception…that there is something X that perceives, and something Y that is perceived … Classical European philosophy and Indo-European sentence structure suggest to us that we call X a “subject” and Y an “object,” mentally supplying a verb that describes a relationship in which X is doing something to Y-that-is-not-X; X is “observing” Y or “perceiving” Y, or something of that sort.[1]

Under the influence of this received Cartesianism, music theorists attempt to describe musical phenomena in terms of “this acoustic signal here as I listen to it over this time span, that is impinging upon me (but is not me).[2]

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[1] Lewin, “Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception,” in Studies in Music With Text (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 93.

[2] Lewin, “Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception,” 94 (emphasis added).

What is this?

In honor of my propensity to seek different kinds of workspaces depending on my mood, and in order to remind myself of the need to write something every day, I'm dipping my toe into the world of blogging in order to better chronicle my fabulous graduate student lifestyle. Voyeurs of the world, enjoy.

Sentence and Workspace of the Day

The workspace: security desk at Paine Hall during an awesomely scary-sounding new music concert

The sentence(s):


The position of college songbooks on the shelves of Harvard’s Loeb Music Library is itself rather suggestive; two shelves of songbooks (Mus 560x) are located directly between the anthems and marches of various national traditions (Mus 540 – 559), and several collections of sea shanties and work songs (Mus 569). This juxtaposition neatly captures the territory occupied by a college song—it incites and focuses the crowd’s fervor in the same way that a work song establishes and regulates the rhythm of rowing or other repetitive group activity; and it signifies and strengthens a communities and traditions.[1]

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[1] Ironically, another tiny themed collection was discovered upon closer inspection during a later library excursion: half a dozen pocket-sized “temperance songbooks,” wedged between the musics of two presumably hard-drinking populations: students and sailors.