[Smt-talk] degree terminology (and compartmentalization vs. generalism)

[art samplaski]

Dear list:

First off, my deepest apologies to Dr. Clendinning. In no way whatsoever did I
mean to suggest that she was being non-collegial!! Rather, I had thought that
some of the issues she raised in her posts suggested that possibilities for
non-collegiality might arise by _OTHERS_. (That is, the consequences of
misrepresenting oneself on the c.v., the problems caused by degree nomenclature
that might make someone innocently commit such while applying for jobs, and
frictions with other faculty arising from it.) I am very sorry that in an attempt to
get a post done quickly, I used a syntactical shortcut that could be misconstrued
in that way.

As another source of embarrassment: I realized after sending my post that
I had not included the URL to the CMS history, went to look so as to send it,
and found to my horror that I couldn't find it! The "History of CMS" page,
where I thought it would be, only contains a publishing blurb to a book on
the history of CMS. This morning I've had time to try to search the site more
thoroughly, and found the solution: the history -used- to be posted there,
containing electronic versions of a series of six articles, "Annals of the
College Music Society" by Henry Woodward, which had appeared in _College
Music Symposium_ between 1977 and 1979, and which cover CMS' history
from the discussions of its founding through 1972.



    My thanks to Prof. Meeùs for correcting me as to how many sub-disciplines
Adler first described (I'd only been taught an overview of it in grad school;
gotta go read the actual thing myself now!) and for clarifications on the
19th c. connotations of "Wissenschaft." I'm especially pleased to learn
about the 1827 book by Logier, a volume I'd never heard of.:)


    Daniel Wolf raises several interesting points. Re music theory vs., say,
math, it's definitely true that math has gotten waaaaaaaay worse for
compartmentalization than in Poincaré's day. While visiting a friend who'd
just defended his math Ph.D., out of politeness I started reading his
thesis; the first 4 words were "Let Q be a...", after which it might as
well have been the Voynich Manuscript. When I asked why didn't he start
with a page or two of background for people not in his particular cranny of
group theory, he replied that math had become so specialized that if one
didn't already understand the problem to start--he estimated there were
about 20 people on the planet in his eco-niche--they had no prayer of
following the argument anyway. (He admitted to being disturbed by that
state of affairs.) We aren't this bad by a long-shot; but there are
definitely problems both within MThy and vis-a-vis the other parts of
Musikwissenschaft.

Daniel writes:
> As sophisticated as  
> music studies may be, I don't believe we have a real parallel to maths or  
> the natural sciences in which, say, an operator theorist cannot make heads  
> or tails of the latest major journal article in topology; a music theorist  
> is unlikely to have a similar difficulty with anything published in a  
> major historical or ethnomusicological journal.

I agree that few theorists will have problems with a historical or ethno article,
but the two converses are not true. _Parts_ of MThy have become highly
mathematical, e.g., GMIT; Lewin et al. have really developed a new
musica speculativa, but with an additional 1500 years' or mathematical
rigor behind it (and Boethius was bad enough already!:). Furthermore, even
within MThy, I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of students and
"post-students" are deficient in math even below the level of group theory
in GMIT, etc. As one further anecdote: in a rhythm+meter seminar we were
discussing David Epstein's then-just-published _Shaping Time_, and we were
looking at the comparisons of accelerandi. Myself and the 2 other guys who
had significant computing background got into a discussion of, so gee, are
these things better fit by cubic curves, by an Arctan, or what; after about a
minute of just the 3 of us going away at it, I looked up to find the other 6
students frozen with deer-in-headlights panicked expressions of, "My God,
I've been teleported to a classroom on Mars!" Yet everything we'd been
geek-speaking was just high school trigonometry, something I would
expect ANYONE at the undergraduate, never mind graduate, level to have
studied. (It brings a new level of meaning to students' "lack of preparation"
in this and a prior thread... I shuddered to think what would've transpired
had they been around when Xenakis was a visiting prof at IU--one teacher
who, in _Plan Nine's_ phrasing, was one of "the miserable souls who
survived this dreadful ordeal," said it was, ahem, unpleasant...:):):)

That issue aside, I very much agree with Daniel about the positive aspects
of having music generalists a la Riemann, as well as the apparent negatives
re "institutional obstacles" (his words).

> Certainly,  
> the "new musicology" of recent decades benefit from from an appeal to  
> methods long more familiar in ethnomusicology.

David Huron just spoke last week at the Eastman interdisciplinary "Music
Cognition Symposium," a forum that has people in MThy, linguistics,
cognitive science, performance, and MHist as regular participants.
(Anyone is warmly welcomed there, btw--contact Betsy Marvin for
details.) One of David's talks was, "That Complex Whole: A Vision for
Musicology." (And here his words worked for all portions of
_Musikwissenschaft_, not just historical.) It was an absolutely fascinating
set of perspectives on addressing issues in music studies from a _WIDE_
variety of disciplinary angles, ranging from formal analysis of tone-rows
to figuring out why, when you can finally get boys onto a dance floor,
they very much prefer slower tempi than girls. (If David himself doesn't
reply in the next couple of days I'll say his results, but he by rights should
speak on his own work.) IMO, he should give it as a keynote to a joint
AMS/SMT, since I think every one of us would greatly profit from thinking
about the necessity of interdisciplinary approaches as he suggested; but
failing that, I hope he'll at least record a presentation of it to make
available on DVD or for download.:)

And my apologies for a long post.

Art Samplaski
Ithaca, NY

 		 	   		  
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