LITMIR.BIZ

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      WRITING AS A MUSICOLOGIST

      While working on this book, I became acutely aware that my approach differs considerably from those found in most other scholarly books on popular music. My idea of what is analytically and interpretively meaningful, my strategies for placing music into resonant configurations with historical and sociological data, my taste for philosophical questions (treated in a relatively casual way, I admit), my choice of citations, even my prose style, all diverge from the usual generic complex expected in pop music criticism or scholarly writing. In an important sense, this book is not limited to popular music studies; although I write from the viewpoint of a musicologist, I am strongly influenced by some currents in other fields of the humanities. (My citations in the book will reveal my loyalties.) My training has been grounded in the specific traditions of an academic field that grew up in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to comment on the works of the Western tradition of written music. Although I grew up surrounded by popular music, I first learned how to discuss music formally by paying attention to Guillaume Dufay and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, to Guillaume de Machaut and Claude Debussy. Before I had ever attempted to write about disco or progressive rock, I had written about operas or piano sonatas.

      I was always somewhat resistant to some disciplinary strictures of my field, however. Although I spent a good deal of time in rehearsals and concerts, I never could muster the obsessive devotion to practice (of the canon) through which many performers incorporate the normative musical responses that most musicologists would expect. In music theory classes, I was uncooperative about internalizing “common-practice tonality” as the normative language of music because I liked the “ends” of music history—the Middle Ages and the twentieth century—better. When it came to critical or interpretive discussion, I always found it as interesting to discuss Joni Mitchell’s “The Last Time I Saw Richard” as it was to discuss Franz Schubert’s “Erlkönig.” I suspect that my tendency to forget to distinguish between the musicological canon and American popular music is somewhat generational. Born in 1961, I came after most hierarchies of prestige and value in music had begun to crumble. Although the collapse of such musical orders may have seemed terrifying to many scholars, I honestly did not know any better than to talk about what I liked.

      I think that this is important, because in the discourse of popular music that has developed somewhere between the university world and demotic conversations, musicology qua musicology has been relatively absent. Even most musicologists and ethnomusicologists who have acted as pioneers have necessarily spoken to scholars in other disciplines rather than to their own closest associates. Part of the reason for the distance is our forbiddingly specialized lingo for discussing the particulars of musical sound; this language grew up over centuries of practical experience in music making as well as thinking about the results of our activities as musicians, and it is an astonishingly subtle resource. Another part of the reason comes from the ascetic commitment, in musicology at least, to a canon whose transhistorical value has rarely been questioned until fairly recently. For all our historical fastidiousness, musicologists have often wished to let “the music itself” occupy a rather ideal realm. And this music, by being liberated from the distresses of everyday existence, thereby acquired a power to comfort that should not be underestimated. Musicology’s passion for its canon and its canons has frequently acted as a “hedge around the Torah,” keeping the transcendental effects of music from too much contact with the contingencies of reality at the cost of keeping the laity at arm’s length.

      This is disadvantageous for everyone who works on popular music, regardless of field. Many scholars who have come to this music from sociology or cultural studies have been reticent to discuss the structural and affective details of individual songs. But a song is always more than its means of creating, transmission, and reception. Its particulars—as I have already suggested, and as I will continue to suggest—have the capacity to exceed their immediate bounds in complex ways. Thanks to their training, musicologists are especially well placed to pay attention to these aspects of popular song. And we can find it possible to do so by refusing to restrict our sense of canon.²⁴ I hope that my discussions in this book, to the extent that they are musicologically centered, will encourage the further development of a genuinely multidisciplinary conversation.

      EVERYDAY LISTENING AND MODEST SONGS

      The songs I care about in this book are all songs that were performed and recorded with the knowledge (the hope!) that they would be listened to over and over, or rehearsed to ourselves in the mind, or to others in one kind of sing-along or another, in innumerable ordinary situations: on the radio or record player, on the TV, in the mind while taking a bath, driving a car, sweeping the floor, washing the dishes—the list is infinitely extensible. At the same time, these songs would be performed in the distinctly unordinary spaces of concerts as well. If there is anything that defines popular songs, surely it is their capacity to circulate in all these ways. They must have something intrinsic to themselves that allows them to sustain reiteration without surrendering the listener’s desirous attention, but they must also refrain from claiming too much of that attention. They must have the capacity to become background or foreground, depending on our willingness at given moments to bring ourselves to them in greater or lesser degree.

      I raise this issue because finding an approach to modest songs presents musicologists, at least, with something of a problem. The methods that music scholars usually learn for parsing musical structures and unpacking their effects were all designed for music in the grand style. We can scrutinize the smallest details of a musical score or a recording and make astonishingly precise formal arguments, upon which we can base many compelling interpretations. But our most powerful insights have quite naturally come at the price of necessary blindnesses. We have rarely known how to account for music that loves the quotidian because our methods have been based on aesthetic and moral preferences for the extraordinary, the original, and the convention-breaking inspiration. Our commitments as music scholars have been strongest, historically, to music that was never meant to be heard every day. (Listeners with strong constitutions may test this observation for themselves by trying to listen to something like the St. Matthew Passion or Gotterdammerung every morning, but I predict their endurance will fade rather quickly.) The heroic gestures that fill out most of the “great works” in virtually any kind of canon are the ones that modest songs usually refuse—they must forgo too much “greatness” if they are to accomplish their principal goal of living with us instead of living against us in moral-aesthetic agon.²⁵

      But that is not to say that a modest song cannot have its challenging aspects. I think that this music gets interesting precisely at the point that our own subjective worlds reach out to merge with the sounds that we hear. This is a slippery, ambiguous place, a liminal world where the greatest danger comes in our permanent vulnerability to a simple question: When you make claims about a modest song, are you making statements about the song or about yourself? A Wildean answer would be that it does not make a difference; but as Oscar Wilde would also have acknowledged, that is no answer at all. Criticism, as the record of one’s soul, is truly an inexhaustible delight for some, but it can strike just as many others as an especially dishonest form of banal self-regard.

      We face additional difficulties because of the proliferation of recording. The sheer number of musical presences we have on hand in our own everydays tends to overwhelm us, and keeps us from noticing, or helps us to keep forgetting, just how historically remarkable a phenomenon it is. Before the rise of recording, almost no people were in a position to hear “extraordinary” music whenever they wished. No grand marshalling of forces or superhuman feats of performance technique in the everyday for most people. They only had access to modest songs in ordinary time, most often performed by and for ordinary people.

      We could argue that the marriage of music with new technologies of production and reproduction created greater democratization through commerce because music increasingly became available to anyone who had an interest in it, depending on their budget. Even for those who had no budget to speak of, there rapidly came to be occasions where music could spill over into a kind of gratuitous common space. The story of the music industry, with its sometimes near-inconceivable predatory attempts to manage music as if it were tangible property, speaks both to the commercial liveliness of music as well as its tendency to escape profitable management.

      But

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