[Smt-talk] Degree terminology (was Re: Princeton and Theory)

[Daniel Wolf]

On Sun, 21 Nov 2010 23:22:14 +0100, art samplaski <agsvtp at hotmail.com>  
wrote:

> Shouldn't those of us in the U.S. work
> to make sure our field is less fractious than the
> Congress?:)

While departmentalization may well be a practical necessity in organizing  
teaching in the largest US institutions, I'm far from convinced that it is  
of advantage to music teaching and scholarship in general to insist on  
rigid divisions between sub-disciplines. As Art points out, all of these  
sub-disciplines have a common origin (and common originators, for example  
Charles Seeger, a founder of the AMS, the SEM, the IFMC and not a slouch  
theorist either, with appointments in theory at Berkeley, Juilliard and  
Yale) and there is also an all-to-frequently positive charge still to be  
found in teaching or research when a theorist wades into the territorial  
waters of the historical musicologist, an ethnomusicologist into the  
theorist's, or the composer or performer into any of the above. Certainly,  
the "new musicology" of recent decades benefit from from an appeal to  
methods long more familiar in ethnomusicology.

One major disadvantage of a insistence on these rigid divisions is that  
exciting work may well get overlooked by scholars working on similar  
problems but under different job titles.  For example, recent works by  
Marc Perlman and Michael Tenzer — on central Javanese tonal theory and  
Balinese composition and orchestration, respectively — appear to have  
become stuck in the ethnomusicology niche and have yet to receive  
substantial attention from theorists although their content is  
substantially theoretical with implications for music and music  
scholarship far beyond the particular music cultures of those two islands.

May I also put a word in for the music studies generalist?  Hugo Riemann  
did serious work in both systematic and historical musicology, he also  
composed, performed, taught piano and wrote criticism with his writings  
addressed to both specialist and non-specialist audiences.  Perhaps this  
diversity of activity came primarily from the long struggle he had in  
acquiring an academic appointment (a  professorship was granted Riemann at  
the age of 52 in 1901) and the necessity of taking on as much freelance  
work as possible, but it's clear that this diversity was used to scholarly  
advantage and it would be discouraging to think that the contemporary  
university music faculty is less able to accommodate it than was the  
university of 1901.

It is frequently said that Poincaré (1854-1912) was the last mathematician  
to have a comprehensive overview of the entire discipline; the field has  
diversified and intensified to such a degree that it is no longer possible  
for a mathematician to work productive in all major fields of mathematics  
as Poincaré did.  I may well be wrong about this, but my impression of  
music studies as a whole is that it has not yet become impossible to have  
a productive relationship to all areas of the field.  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. That is to say that there  
are no intellectual obstacles to a contemporary working with the scope of  
a Riemann, but there appear to be some serious institutional obstacles, in  
the form of rigid degree definitions, job descriptions, departmental  
organization, and perhaps in terms of peer structures (peer review,  
scholarly societies, etc..)

I suspect that the advantage of the generalist is recognized today mostly  
by accident, in smaller institutions and those in which personnel  
resources often must be combined for reasons of cost or efficiency.  It is  
often useful to have a staff member who, in a pinch, can competently teach  
second year theory or conduct a choir.  More importantly, these teachers  
often come to these tasks with refreshing insight and the energy  
associated with a non-routine performance.  Perhaps there is still some  
balance to be found in the relative concentrations of specialists in big  
schools and generalists in small liberal arts schools, but the influence  
that the big schools have over defining state of the art scholarship seems  
to be moving the smaller schools ever more in the direction of  
specialization.  One prominent private liberal arts college with which I  
have some familiarity had, twenty years ago, its undergraduate theory  
courses staffed by a composer/pianist, a musicologist/organist, and a  
vocalist/musicologist; the same course sequence is now staffed by two  
theory PhDs.  While the courses are ably taught by these two fine  
musicians, I do think that there is something lost that was unique to this  
particular school and set it apart in significant ways from a large  
university with a full theory department.

Dr. Daniel Wolf
composer, Frankfurt