More Swotd: PITF training

Swotd:new digs

Swotd 16

Today's workspace was Widener Library's Loker Reading Room, probably the most...Harvard-y location on the blog so far. I think I may prefer the Cambridge public library though. Both rooms are gorgeous, but CPL is both smaller and cozier, and covered with wood rather than stone. I'll have to revisit both and think more about it...

SOTD:

A brief, page-long aside on Cartesian dualism is a welcome recapitulation of Klumpenhouwer 2006 (one of the more significant pieces of recent, philosophically-oriented Lewin reception), and hints at the larger issues at stake in one’s choice of analytical “technology.”

Swotd 15

Today's workspace is the reading room in the 'old' side of the Cambridge Public Library, which is located conveniently close to my apartment. The most beautiful space ive documented here so far, I think.

SOTD:

This complete reorientation is in one sense unwieldy, but also extremely intuitive, accurately capturing the sense that a pitch class associated with one quale can take on an entirely different character just a few measures later; the shifting qualia of modulation can make the same acoustic signal sound quite far from its previous iteration.

Swotd 14: Quiet. Too quiet...

I spent the morning at work and then at the department. It was incredibly quiet around the music building, possibly because everyone's avoiding campus due to the commencement hubbub today and tomorrow. I found myself craving coffee and decided to come home to make it, so here I am happily writing away on the couch.

Note taking is mostly over, it's time to beef up my short review from Suzie's class into a more substantive "Review Essay" that I can actually do something with. Here's a sentence of the day:

Although Rings wears the methodological and orthographic influence of David Lewin on his sleeve, it becomes apparent in the course of reading Tonality and Transformation that the third word of the title could just as easily be intentionality. 

Swotd 13: Rain

I realized as I was looking through the archives, that I seem to have skipped number 8. So, this title seems to be a lie. However, I'm not going to go back and fix all the previous entries, so unlucky 13 it is.

It's pouring rain outside, so after work I took shelter at the Andover Theological Library at Harvard Divinity School--the closest library to home, and the only one between the NW Lab building and my apartment. The building is gorgeous and gothic looking, although the library is somewhat disappointingly renovated and modern. I was hoping for something Hogwarts-y. Still, its very nice, nearly empty, and pleasantly reminds me of the Oxford Lane Public Library, where I spent many happy hours as a child. So, I have no complaints.

I've once again staked out a window seat so I can enjoy my third-favorite kind of weather (first: snow, second: thunderstorm, third: rain)

SOTD, again from notes:

Rings, perhaps referring to the methodological pluralism described earlier, apes Lewin's "Behind the Beyond" when he writes, 'Analytical representations can, however, function suggestively, acting as goads to specific acts of intentional hearing, or as a means of focusing and refining prereflective hearings. Such analyses can encourage us to direct our ears to the tonic in specific ways, via the mediation of specific theoretical categories.'

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."

Non-Workspace of the Day

In celebration of turning my last paper in and finishing up the year, I'm taking some relaxation time. So, no workspace today, but rather Minecraft, which I haven't fired up since before the full version was released.

Swotd, Part 11: One year down

Just like the title says: I survived my first year at Harvard! I turned my last two term papers in just now, so I'm free until the end of June, when Latin starts. Time to get something published!

Final word count: 49,951

Final page count: 182 (double-spaced, 12-pt, Microsoft Word, lots of pictures. Which are called 'Figures' when you're a big important music theorist...)

Footnotes: 197

Counting the book review and final project from Suzie's class as one regular sized term paper (which together, they basically are), my average paper is 8,325.166 words or 30.333 pages long, and has 32.888 footnotes. #nerd

The workspace today is my desk at my part time job, where I'm an office assistant in the Molecular and Cell Biology Department. Nobody's here because it's the Center for Brain Science retreat today, so I'm pretty much having a Tom Cruise Risky Business kind of afternoon...

Sentence(s) of the Day is one of the last passages I wrote in my Sound Studies paper:

It is thus hardly surprising that Lloyd Adams Noble believes that the selections in Songs of Harvard belong vividly “to Harvard, to the stadium, to the torch-light progression, and to commencement-day,” because, in a sense, they literally do belong to those locations and events. As “aides-memoires,” as DeNora calls them, the songs in Noble’s book bear traces of memory, for him and for his intended audience. This accounts for the intense popularity of college songs, then as now: they offer a glimpse of our treasured past. 

Swotd 10: in which my phone finally stops trying to turn the initialisminto the word "sword"

Seriously, iPhones learn in a sort of scary way. They're much smarter than Microsoft Word...

Rainy today, so I hung out at home. Luckily, I'm reaching the point in writing where I don't need too many books, I just need to put it all together...

SOTD: 

The spectacle of the pre-game show is both an expression of Ohio State’s traditions, and a perfectly calibrated and choreographed piece of theatre. As described throughout the foregoing analysis, the ritual is saturated with tension; not only does the pre-game show as a whole serve to build the crowd’s anticipation for the eventual entrance of the football team, but with each successive section, it “telegraphs” its own next move, tantalizing fans with what will come next, while forcing them to wait for it.

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. 

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.

***

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.