Artistic citizenship in the age of Trump

Public-facing note taking for Philosophy of Music Education with David Elliott

This week I’m reading about the social and ethical responsibilities of artists generally, and musicians and music educators in particular. That topic is especially relevant at the moment.  

Before we get to the moral philosophy aspect, let’s talk about this performance. Why is it so good? Movies and TV have run “Hallelujah” into the ground, but for good reason. The song blends joy and pain together as well as any song ever has.It’s right there in the first verse: “the minor fall, and the major lift.” It’s the same reason we love “Amazing Grace,” and the blues.

You can hear Kate McKinnon’s Leonard Cohen tribute as the concession speech Hillary Clinton would have made in a perfect world. This verse in particular gave me chills:

I did my best, it wasn’t much
I couldn’t feel, so I tried to touch
I’ve told the truth, I didn’t come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I’ll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

You can also hear it as an expression of Kate McKinnon herself, a queer woman mourning the world of growing inclusiveness that she thought she was moving into, the one we all thought we were moving into. And you can hear Leonard Cohen’s bitter irony, too. SNL had Trump as its host just last year, and they’re as much to blame for normalizing him as anyone.

Continue reading “Artistic citizenship in the age of Trump”

High school masculinity

Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg

This week’s reading was C. J. Pascoe’s riveting study, Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School. If you’re at all interested in gender, or the culture of schools, it’s a must-read.

CJ Pascoe - Dude, You're A Fag

Continue reading “High school masculinity”

Coping strategies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvuM3DjvYf0

Some thoughts gathered from Twitter this morning:

Inspired by Harry Belafonte, we’re reading this Langston Hughes poem in class right now. And listening to the Hamilton Mixtape.

The mood in the Park Slope Food Coop this morning was like a New Orleans funeral–multiethnic people talking about genocide to a soundtrack of funky jazz.

Continue reading “Coping strategies”

Foucault – History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume One

Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg

This was a tougher read than Discipline and Punish. To get our morale up, let’s enjoy some Salt-N-Pepa first.

Also, we should let Kanye West set up the other big theme of the book:

Foucault the haters

Continue reading “Foucault – History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume One”

Music Matters chapter seven

Public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman for my Philosophy of Music Education class. 

This chapter addresses musical meaning and how it emerges out of context. More accurately, it addresses how every musical experience has many meanings that emerge from many contexts. Elliott and Silverman begin with the meanings of performance, before moving into the meanings of composition, listening and so on. They insist that performance is not an activity limited to an elite cadre of “talented” people, that it is within reach of anyone who has the proper support.

We propose that people’s capacities for and enactments of an intrinsic motivation to engage in different kinds of musicing and listening are extremely widespread phenomena, restricted only by lack of musical opportunities, or ineffective and indifferent music teaching. Indeed, developing a love for and devotion to musicing and listening is not unusual when students are fortunate enough to learn from musically and educationally excellent teachers and [community music] facilitators, and when they encounter inspiring models of musicing in contexts of welcoming, sustaining, and educative musical settings, including home and community contexts (240).

Continue reading “Music Matters chapter seven”

Foucault – Discipline and Punish

Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg

This week’s reading is Discipline and Punish, by noted ray of sunshine Michel Foucault. The book begins with a memorably graphic torture scene that pretty well sets the tone for what follows.

Michel Foucault

This video gave me some helpful biographical context.

Continue reading “Foucault – Discipline and Punish”

The title of this book is everything wrong with music education

This is a widely used college level music theory textbook.

Laitz what are you doing

Remember, kids, to be a complete musician, all you need to know is the most formal version of the harmonic preferences of aristocratic Western Europeans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Read a longer, more nuanced critique of this book here.

Music in a capitalist culture

Midterm paper for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg

Max Weber locates the roots of capitalism in vestigial puritanical Protestantism. Émile Durkheim, in turn, gives a theory of how that Protestantism arose in the first place. In this paper, I ask two questions. First: can Weber’s and Durkheim’s theories of religion be extended to explain culture generally? Second, and more specifically: can their theories explain music?

Music is a valuable lens for examining cultures, because while every world culture includes it, the particular form and function varies considerably from one culture to another. Contemporary America contains a variety of musical subcultures and countercultures that overlap and conflict with one another. We might follow Weber’s example and say that America’s culture has capitalism as its single defining feature. And we might say that America’s commercial pop mainstream defines our musical culture. But those two generalizations conceal roiling masses of unresolved conflict.

Continue reading “Music in a capitalist culture”

Marx and Althusser

Note-taking for Learning of Culture with Lisa Stulberg

Unlike most social theorists of his era and since, Marx can actually write. His prose has a rhythm and urgency that feels more like a sermon than a scholarly text. Of course, he has the advantage that he’s writing a manifesto, so he isn’t bogged down by nuance, complexity or the admission of contradictory arguments.

Karl Marx

Continue reading “Marx and Althusser”

Music Matters chapter six

Public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman for my Philosophy of Music Education class. 

It seems obvious that the point of music education is to foster musical understanding. But what is musical understanding, exactly? Where and how do we learn and teach it?

On an emotional level, people seem to understand music just fine without being taught how to. My son, at age three and a half, recently heard “And She Was” by Talking Heads for the first time, and within ten seconds was commenting on how happy it sounds. He might not be able to explain why it sounds happy, but he understands just fine what he’s hearing.

Milo sings

Continue reading “Music Matters chapter six”