Joe Musicology

The AMS is this weekend—in Philadelphia. Great City, I can’t wait to see a few old friends, and maybe meet new ones. The program is, well, really odd. Of course Weber is not on it anywhere, but neither is Bach. There is no real new study of Beethoven, or Brahms. In fact, Jimi Hendrix gets [...]

This past summer as Alice and I were riding to a concert at the Hatch Shell, she yelled out “Daddy! a Dog!!” I stopped only to find the coolest Art-Deco Dog Fountain I’d ever seen (not that I’ve seen more than one Art-Deco Dog Fountain). After a little bit of searching around I found out [...]

Hey folks, My laptop died and I am stuck running linux, but salvation just got shipped.

I recently gave a paper on F. W. J. Schelling’s aesthetics and their expression in early 19th century German culture and art. One of the primary points concerned Schelling’s ideal for the role of extrinsic meaning in an artistic work. In his Philosophy of Art Schelling describes the ideal: The painting is to fulfill only [...]

The other day I ran into Hargrave and she bought me an espresso–fancy that! Anyway, as we took in the weather in Harvard Square, and brainstormed solutions to the world’s problems as well as our own poverty, she suggested that I should bake bread. She said it costs her 67 pennies per loaf. Considering that [...]

Recently a Ph.D. in my field published a plea for help. I have since been horrified by the invective being hurled at this poor musicologist. Invective and “truth talk” with a shocking lack of solutions for the current “job catastrophe.” Here’s an idea, GROW. Stop spewing conservative rhetoric (cut, cut, cut…) and get back to some good ‘ole liberal spending and [...]

Geez, I’ve been gone for a really long time-is there a rule about inconsistent blogging? If so, I’ve broken it. Life has been a little (too) rich lately so I’ve been busy with other, life or death situations. On the job front, still no word and it looks like there wont be–quite a difficult thing [...]

It started off as a pretty odd day. I suppose it began with the radio (shouldn’t that always be the case?) Anyway, the local “alternative rock” station was playing an old Rage Against the Machine  song: “Killing in the Name.” It’s basically an anthem for RATM But, and here is the sad part. At the [...]

I’ve been away for a while–finishing up on my grading for Brandeis (whew!) and one of the courses at the other school (theory for non-majors). It was a good course but I worry. The approach tried to enmesh a course of tonal harmony within a survey of music history. The first section taught melody (chant). [...]

Today I took the day off–not that I’m Ferris Bueller or anything, just couldn’t bring myself to do anything.  Alice performed in the Nutcracker at her school and she was fantastic. What an amazing child. Two new DVDs came today! The famous 1980 Met production of Electra with Birgit Nilsson and the new production of Schumann’s [...]