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)