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)

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 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.