Please post a question here for Anne Shreffler. It might concern the reading for this week or last, her work on the Cold War and music, or musicology in general.
Please post it by Monday night, so we can vote on the best five in time for Thursday. I'll be in touch about how to vote.
I find it extremely valuable having time at the AMS conferences to speak with professors about what they look for in applications for graduate programs. That is, what specific items make an application stand out in a sea of qualified candidates. The answer varies greatly depending on the individual but I have found this question to be exceptionally helpful both for preparing my own applications and for understanding the goals and desires of different institutions. As many of us will be applying to further graduate programs in the near future (many of us in less than a year) I would like to pose that same question to Dr. Shreffler: What are the common characteristics of successful applications to the PhD program at your institution and are there any specific things that you or your institution like (or dislike) seeing in a prospective student’s file?
ReplyDeleteIn the essay “Music Left and Right”, Dr. Shreffler mentions two different models of music for politics. I haven’t come across a great number of 12 tone serialist compositions for voice (perhaps I am just missing out on a great deal of repertoire though). I was wondering if vocal music more generally fell into the category of tonal or if there was the same shift to the 12 tone technique as we see with instrumental music? If not, what were the possible reasons for this?
ReplyDeleteHow did Dahlhaus deal with the music of people who had left-wing affiliations yet composed what he saw as autonomous music (if this happened)? It seems as though acknowledging that their politics affected their music would accept that these histories are not only parallel but intertwined, and yet given the Cold War mentality, scholars like Dahlhaus seemed to recognize left ideology as causing blindness and promoting leftist political inflections as a result.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, please have Dr. Schreffler discuss Mark's question as I think it will be relevant to many of us in the class, myself included.
ReplyDeleteOn page 218 of the article "Ideologies of Serialism," Dr. Shreffler states that "the Western avant-garde's claim for political neutrality through aesthetic autonomy has been taken at face value by mainstream critics." Obviously, the critics point-of-view contrasts with the ideals of McCarthyism which led to several artists such as Aaron Copland being interrogated. Why was there such a contrast in the way that critics viewed avant-garde music and the government's view of the music?
I would like to ask a question not related to musicology specifically but research in general. One of my professors recently mentioned in conversation the term bibliographic control. He expressed it as the struggle that researchers face of gaining complete control over the available sources related to their topic. I appreciate this idea because I always find myself struggling to achieve it in my own research pursuits. I would like to know your thoughts on this idea and whether you believe that there are more beneficial ways to approach a topic.
ReplyDeleteLast week we read the very public dialogue between Richard Taruskin and Charles Rosen which revealed some very prominent biases that resulted from their Cold War experiences. What are some of the academic biases and prejudices that you have encountered in your career as a Cold War scholar? Are there ways for North American musicologists to avoid a Western bias when approaching Cold War music?
ReplyDeleteGood question - I would very much like to hear Dr. Shreffler's response to this
DeleteIn the article "Music Left and Right", Eisler's Comintern Song, although very singable and aimed at the masses was unsuccessful in that its message did not get through. I would like to ask Dr. Shreffler if she could comment further on why this was the case.
ReplyDeleteOne case study of the relationship between music and politics in the Cold War, that I have been thinking about all term is the video game Tetris, initially released in the Soviet Union in 1987, and then worldwide in 1989, for the Nintendo Game Boy. It was one of the first entertainment exports for the Soviet Union, and was decidedly successful.
ReplyDeleteOn the issue of its music, players have the choice to use Korobeiniki, a 19th-century Russian folk song, or two other original songs by Hirokazu Tanaka, as background music in the Nintendo version of the game. Given the success of this game in the United States and countries outside the Soviet Union, do you think that this "choice" had anything to do with its perceived "neutrality" or "innocence"? In other words, how are political associations with a musical work altered when listeners have a greater degree of control over that work? Tetris is a thoroughly populist entertainment object, but it also involves a more "active" participation in its consumption. Could this activity be likened at all to the experience of engaging with Modernist music, or am I going too far out on a limb here?
Tetris theme (Korobeiniki): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmCCQxVBfyM
An interesting advertisement for the Amiga version of the game: http://americanhistory.si.edu/sites/default/files/blog_files/a/6a00e553a80e10883401a73e18b7e0970d-500wi.png