SWOTD 6: Frantic Finishing

Today I'm in that rushed phase when a paper is almost done, but when tiny little flaws and unfinished bits seem to proliferate like magic brooms in the Mickey Mouse part of Fantasia - deal with one and two more show up. I'm working at our kitchen table this morning, looking out over our scenic street, because I've got to grind the end of this term paper out before I go to department obligations starting at 1.

SOTD = the last sentence of the paper, which is perhaps unsurprisingly written already:

The connection between neumes and transformational actions has been sufficiently belabored already, but it is possible that deeper investigation will help to clarify some aspects of Lewin’s enigmatic descriptions of an anti-Cartesian music theory, and will contribute to the continuing exploration and exposition of his richly textured ideas.

Swotd V: Closing in

Another day on the world's most boring blog. Today was mostly consumed with trying to finish up my notation paper for Jane Alden's class. I was pretty restless--work in the morning, then papering in my carrel for late morning, upper level of Buckminsters for the mid afternoon, and then a few hours at the kitchen table at home.

Bucky's is the photo-the white haze is the shades drawn over the window. And that's an open, loft-like overlook just beyond the computer. The iPhone camera couldn't handle the difference between the gloriously dim corner and the bright outside...

Sentence of the Day is from the last few pages of the notation paper. If only that meant I was almost done with it...

"Yet simply concluding, after 25 pages, that plainsong already is a transformational system and that nothing need be done differently in order to regard it as such would be severely anticlimactic. Where, then, has this investigation gotten us?"

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, 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).