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Dear list:<br><br>First off, my deepest apologies to Dr. Clendinning. In no way whatsoever did I<br>mean to suggest that she was being non-collegial!! Rather, I had thought that<br>some of the issues she raised in her posts suggested that possibilities for<br>non-collegiality might arise by _OTHERS_. (That is, the consequences of<br>misrepresenting oneself on the c.v., the problems caused by degree nomenclature<br>that might make someone innocently commit such while applying for jobs, and<br>frictions with other faculty arising from it.) I am very sorry that in an attempt to<br>get a post done quickly, I used a syntactical shortcut that could be misconstrued<br>in that way.<br><br>As another source of embarrassment: I realized after sending my post that<br>I had not included the URL to the CMS history, went to look so as to send it,<br>and found to my horror that I couldn't find it! The "History of CMS" page,<br>where I thought it would be, only contains a publishing blurb to a book on<br>the history of CMS. This morning I've had time to try to search the site more<br>thoroughly, and found the solution: the history -used- to be posted there,<br>containing electronic versions of a series of six articles, "Annals of the<br>College Music Society" by Henry Woodward, which had appeared in _College<br>Music Symposium_ between 1977 and 1979, and which cover CMS' history<br>from the discussions of its founding through 1972.<br><br><br>
My thanks to Prof. Meeůs for correcting me as to how many sub-disciplines<br>Adler first described (I'd only been taught an overview of it in grad school;<br>gotta go read the actual thing myself now!) and for clarifications on the<br>19th c. connotations of "Wissenschaft." I'm especially pleased to learn<br>about the 1827 book by Logier, a volume I'd never heard of.:)<br><br>
Daniel Wolf raises several interesting points. Re music theory vs., say,<br>math, it's definitely true that math has gotten waaaaaaaay worse for<br>compartmentalization than in Poincaré's day. While visiting a friend who'd<br>just defended his math Ph.D., out of politeness I started reading his<br>thesis; the first 4 words were "Let Q be a...", after which it might as<br>well have been the Voynich Manuscript. When I asked why didn't he start<br>with a page or two of background for people not in his particular cranny of<br>group theory, he replied that math had become so specialized that if one<br>didn't already understand the problem to start--he estimated there were<br>about 20 people on the planet in his eco-niche--they had no prayer of<br>following the argument anyway. (He admitted to being disturbed by that<br>state of affairs.) We aren't this bad by a long-shot; but there are<br>definitely problems both within MThy and vis-a-vis the other parts of<br>Musikwissenschaft.<br><br>Daniel writes:<br>> As sophisticated as <br>> music studies may be, I don't believe we have a real parallel to maths or <br>> the natural sciences in which, say, an operator theorist cannot make heads <br>> or tails of the latest major journal article in topology; a music theorist <br>> is unlikely to have a similar difficulty with anything published in a <br>> major historical or ethnomusicological journal.<br><br>I agree that few theorists will have problems with a historical or ethno article,<br>but the two converses are not true. _Parts_ of MThy have become highly<br>mathematical, e.g., GMIT; Lewin et al. have really developed a new<br>musica speculativa, but with an additional 1500 years' or mathematical<br>rigor behind it (and Boethius was bad enough already!:). Furthermore, even<br>within MThy, I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of students and<br>"post-students" are deficient in math even below the level of group theory<br>in GMIT, etc. As one further anecdote: in a rhythm+meter seminar we were<br>discussing David Epstein's then-just-published _Shaping Time_, and we were<br>looking at the comparisons of accelerandi. Myself and the 2 other guys who<br>had significant computing background got into a discussion of, so gee, are<br>these things better fit by cubic curves, by an Arctan, or what; after about a<br>minute of just the 3 of us going away at it, I looked up to find the other 6<br>students frozen with deer-in-headlights panicked expressions of, "My God,<br>I've been teleported to a classroom on Mars!" Yet everything we'd been<br>geek-speaking was just high school trigonometry, something I would<br>expect ANYONE at the undergraduate, never mind graduate, level to have<br>studied. (It brings a new level of meaning to students' "lack of preparation"<br>in this and a prior thread... I shuddered to think what would've transpired<br>had they been around when Xenakis was a visiting prof at IU--one teacher<br>who, in _Plan Nine's_ phrasing, was one of "the miserable souls who<br>survived this dreadful ordeal," said it was, ahem, unpleasant...:):):)<br><br>That issue aside, I very much agree with Daniel about the positive aspects<br>of having music generalists a la Riemann, as well as the apparent negatives<br>re "institutional obstacles" (his words).<br><br>> Certainly, <br>> the "new musicology" of recent decades benefit from from an appeal to <br>> methods long more familiar in ethnomusicology.<br><br>David Huron just spoke last week at the Eastman interdisciplinary "Music<br>Cognition Symposium," a forum that has people in MThy, linguistics,<br>cognitive science, performance, and MHist as regular participants.<br>(Anyone is warmly welcomed there, btw--contact Betsy Marvin for<br>details.) One of David's talks was, "That Complex Whole: A Vision for<br>Musicology." (And here his words worked for all portions of<br>_Musikwissenschaft_, not just historical.) It was an absolutely fascinating<br>set of perspectives on addressing issues in music studies from a _WIDE_<br>variety of disciplinary angles, ranging from formal analysis of tone-rows<br>to figuring out why, when you can finally get boys onto a dance floor,<br>they very much prefer slower tempi than girls. (If David himself doesn't<br>reply in the next couple of days I'll say his results, but he by rights should<br>speak on his own work.) IMO, he should give it as a keynote to a joint<br>AMS/SMT, since I think every one of us would greatly profit from thinking<br>about the necessity of interdisciplinary approaches as he suggested; but<br>failing that, I hope he'll at least record a presentation of it to make<br>available on DVD or for download.:)<br><br>And my apologies for a long post.<br><br>Art Samplaski<br>Ithaca, NY<br><br> </body>
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