Week 2

Woke up on the couch at 1am and tried to go back to sleep. …But in the silence of the night thoughts do not sleep. They buzz around, like bees. They almost make me dizzy, so I decide to follow one… I am a little anxious–with publication deadlines approaching in the next 6-8 weeks, my two papers are not even close to being done. No pressure! One doubles up as my qualifying exam. I cannot monkey it up… time. I need more time to compost everything I see, hear, read, think, do if I am to produce something of value, something not pedestrian or banal. Such compost needs time and variety of experiences to decompose that which is obvious and stands in the way of discoveries–of research.

Music class… I realize now I have been thinking of it as a project. A thought experiment. It is a graded class, of course, and I treat it as such–hence an extra layer of anxious thoughts–but it is so, so much more. It is the minor shift  that Manning talks about, the concept that troubled me so much that I reached out to Rob Kapilow a year ago in search of clarity… Ironic that I now return to music to disrupt my thinking. Is it ironic?

In my world–education–music is an abstraction. In the political landscape of (many) school curricula discourses, humanities were sacrificed for postpositivist approach to sciences a long time ago. Art programs are typically first to go when budget cuts threaten public education. Research, too, has been dominated by the postpositivist thought. Studies that rely on statistical analysis are a standard design. Data that can be counted and measured are preferred. Music… music is a hobby. And yet, contemporary connoisseurs of classical music are either trained musicians, or those who boast excellent education. The latter, the non-musicians, are also affluent. Ironic? I think so.

In my preferred niche of research–qualitative–arts based research music is also an abstraction. Music is thought of as language, a form of expression. In research conceptualized by humanist orientation, music can be a voice. I do not think most researchers have the experience and/or the expertise to conceptualize music as method; therefore, it is a giant abstraction–pregnant with potential, yes, for those who actively resist the hegemony of quantitative/postpositivist visions of knowledge, but also out of reach due to its complexity and consequent (?) removal from the philosophies in inquiry. To me, it is an opening to Aladdin’s treasure cave. At the moment, it is shrouded in patchy fog (or desert sand storm if I stick with previous analogy), but it is becoming more clear the more I engage… Last week’s introduction into early symphonic literature sent me down the cave’s chasm–I spend the weekend reading about the five featured composers–Monn, Sammartini, Stamitz, Bachs… the Bachs had most information, of course, and I started piecing together the portraits.

I would be an idiot to think of this type of inquiry in terms of validity or (God strike me dead!) objectivity–all these stabs at constructing reality are highly subjective. We imagine all these worlds, identities, which is why timeline is not even relevant for the most part! There is no way I can be sure that if I conduct an interview with a research question in mind, I will have access to “truthful,” somehow “authentic” data. Sure it will be a snapshot of a person’s thoughts situated in a specific material context, but to distill a “true meaning” from such an event and sell it as valid or objective is not just folly, but intellectual crime. We are imagined. Our interpretations of events are imagined, but also real because reality is not a single universal truth we can come to with our need for knowledge but a multiplicity, always becoming, always subjective, diffractive,  unpredictable, unstable…

My thoughts are like bees… I follow one, and somehow end up far away from where I started….

…so the exercise of thinking with classical music–early symphonic literature–proved fruitful. …Or interesting enough to keep me up at night. I thought of music as a commodity, much like research is a commodity in my world. Like research, music was produced, commissioned, guarded, paid for and sold. It was livelihood, a profession. But this commodity does not exist in a vacuum. There were interesting familial dynamics, of course, the politics. I thought of Christmases in the Bach household… back then, people did not do weekend getaways–the transportation was much slower…the pace of life was slower. If someone came to visit from out of town, they had to stay for weeks. That said, what were family holidays like? I can only imagine the table conversations…or recitals… composers clearly bred composers.

I still want to make the map of monarchs. I should–they would provide an excellent point of departure for analysis of power structures, a possible scaffolding in music production. I think I will next time I plunge into the chasm.

The older of the two Bach brothers under the spotlight, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, made living for a while as an accompanist to Frederick the Great who thought himself an accomplished flautist.  He had a degree in law which no doubt gave him weight and opened doors for career moves that some of his less fortunate peers could not have imagined. It seems that back then, affluence was not measured in money like it is now… an interesting thought in the context of contemporary neoliberal systems…

And the competition! Cut throat conditions, I imagine… How did innovation look at the time? What caused it? Stamitz, who died young, brought in the minuet and changed symphony from 3 to 4 movement structure. Also, what possessed him to incorporate the oboes and horns? Did he have friends who played these instruments and he wanted to help them? Or were they strictly colleagues? Was it a spark of genius induced by wine? These are not even questions–they are speculations, really, but they could be worth the pursuit if I am to “demystify”the newly Enlightened composer.

What of Kant’s philosophy? How did his idealism and transcendence shape early German symphony? Or was it the other way around? or did they meet each other somewhere half way through, during an evening at one of the most fashionable salons of the time? or even court? Another interesting breadcrumb trail leads to Kant’s (older) contemporary Hume who, a trained physician, worked to bring empiricism and skepticism to light–the very kind of empiricism that is squeezing the oxygen out of qualitative inquiry now. People died a lot back then and early… medicine was the human’s way to grieve and refuse to give in to tragedy. J.S. Bach’s family lived through a 6 or so year spell of loss–several children died right before J.C. and his sisters came into existence.  In what ways, then, did Hume shape the culture of the British Empire in which JC Bach found his new home? The music of the latter began with Italian styles which for a while were allegedly en vogue in Europe and London. Yet, Italian culture does not boast much philosophical thought at the time. Dare I suspect a Cartesian, so to speak, split between arts and sciences? Empiricism and humanities are parting ways in mid 18th century? Already? How does music reflect that? How do these ideas imprint on music? What moved innovation then and what moves innovation now?