Sword returns!

Back from my week off, and plugging away at the one window seat in the Spaulding Room at Loeb Music Library. While the carrel is nice, I sometimes have a craving for natural light. Usually only when it's cloudy...

The past few days have been mostly reading, but here's a SOTD from my notes: 

"A great strength of Rings' work is his ability to draw narrative and interpretive insights out of his theory. The Gotterdammerung, Act III example (58-59) is a good one: he ties the "pivot interval" in the music, as f : i is 'audibly transformed' into Ab : Iadd6, to the physical pivot on stage, as Siegfried hears his own name."

Swotd 9!

The image today is only a piece of the work space. I'm at the carrel for the third straight day, so rather than a picture of the desk, here are some of the cool historic song books I'm using in my research:

SOTD is a pseudo-gratuitous cite of one of my former advisors, Brian Hyer:

Complementing this description, Brian Hyer elucidates one way, tonality, in which music manages the emotions and expectations that McClary describes here:

[Tonality] gives rise to abstract relations that control melodic motion and harmonic succession over long expanses of musical time. In its power to form musical goals and regulate the progress of the music toward these moments of arrival, tonality has become the principal musical means in Western culture by which to manage expectation and structure desire.[1]

Here, Hyer describes the operation of musical desire on a local level, according to a prototypical tonal “phrase model.”

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[1] Brian Hyer, “Tonality,” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 728.

Swotd the eighth

This is the lovely Spaulding Reading Room in Harvard's Loeb Music Library. I went down here to do some reading this afternoon, thinking that it would be better to focus on reading away from my computer. However, I quickly realized that at this late stage in papering, I needed to be writing based on the things I got out of this book, not simply jotting down notes, so I went back upstairs.

Which raises an issue I've been thinking about a lot--outlining. A graduate colleague of mine posted on Facebook recently that, after he spent a few days reading, thinking, and outlining, he cranked out more than 25 pages in two days. My process is slower than that, and I'm wondering if it would improve my efficiency if I spent a while simply reading and researching and outlining exactly what I'm going to say before I actually attempt to write. My current process is to dive right in--write a few pages when I first start and I'm really excited, then a few more as I read more sources, then lots more as I tie things together. While I always start with the general point I want to make, the form of the argument emerges only in the writing process itself. Maybe next semester, I'll start trying to outline in advance more and see what happens...

The Sentence of the Day, the opening line of my Sound Studies paper, is one of the least-musicological one's I've written:

On any of six or seven crisp autumn Saturdays, the north side of Columbus, Ohio is besieged by over 100,000 scarlet-and-gray clad Ohio State football fans.

SWOTD Sieben: From Plato to College Football in Three Moves

Or maybe four. I'm not sure, I haven't finished the paper yet. Workspace time was short-lived, as I forgot my computer cord and had to head home early. So, a wider angle of the carrel.

The sentence:

In his virtuosic study Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning, Daniel Chua reads “the expulsion of music from language” (a separation that is implicit in the division of instrumental from vocal music) as a product of Reformation-era discourses on musical aesthetics, in which the Calvinist Puritans were a significant voice.[1]

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[1] Daniel Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 23.

(I will take any opportunity, no matter how tenuous the connection to the topic at hand, to cite Chua)

S&W OTD: Revision Grind

The nice thing about the carrel is solitude and coziness (see how my stuff is pushed right up against the wall?). The bad thing about the carrel is harsh overhead lighting--my preferred workspace would be dim, just bright enough to read. Which is not very bright.

I also need some decorations. Badly.

I had planned to spend the morning working in the library, go to work around lunch and then find someplace new to work, but I'm happily grinding away at revisions and expansions on my chant paper, that I'm going to stick it out here for a while and go to work later.

But, its not even noon and the SOTD is already written:

Disclaimer: as I am a music theorist who is at this point merely dabbling in philosophy, it is possible, perhaps even likely, that the following unknowingly recapitulates or distorts issues raised in previous Descartes reception…particularly since I intuit that it would not be much of a stretch to classify most of western philosophy since 1650 under the rubric of “Descartes reception.”

S&W OTD III: May Day 2k12

Today's workspace is my carrel in Loeb Music Library. Every music grad student gets one (first years generally have to share, like I do). It's a nice quiet, secluded, and relatively distraction-free place to get work done!

SentenceOfTheDay:

While the bulk of the above passage relates the purported origin of the sequence, my principal concern is the advice Notker receives from his teacher at the end of the anecdote: “the individual motions of the melody [motus cantilenae] should receive separate syllables [singulas syllabus, perhaps more accurately “individual syllables”].


Yep, still on the chant term paper.