Blog Entry 3

In my Project on belief/story, I made a video about a friend of mine and her experience marrying two people. It conveyed a belief in spontaneity and confidence, and was told through voice dictation and brief sketches on a chalkboard. That medium lent itself well to conveying a feeling of charm and lightheartedness, but perhaps excluded aspects of that experience which were truly frightening as well as ignoring the aspects of the event which were deeply personal and complex.

In Project 2, Information and Proof, I found that things often included are many primary sources with regard to thought of different persons across a long period of time, and something excluded was the sense of life in music that can be covered by extensive, well-intentioned “research”.

Project 2 Summary and Reflection

Summary:

I organized my webtext to be easy to navigate and interesting to read. I tried to not give it an obvious or required flow between pages; to some extent, all the pages flowed into and contributed to each other, so I laid out the links to each page at the bottom of the page, with no intentional order. The audience that I imagined for this webtext was an audience of music students. I assumed that this group of students would be familiar with the ideas I offered and the examples I used, especially with regard to the types of texts. I imagined that my audience were musicians, and therefore pointed out things that they would be familiar with but may not have noticed. Rather than attempting to prove something that musicians might disagree with, I offered concrete examples to show them things they probably could support with their own experience. In terms of the images I used, I mostly just used snapshots of the pdf texts themselves. Sometimes this only included text, and other times it showed a graph; although these are not necessarily visual “hooks” like you might see on a blog post, this was not meant to be a blog but rather a scholarly commentary on other scholarship, so I didn’t think that anything more than that – like adding stock photos of music notes – would be helpful.

Reflection:

This project gave me great insight into how to zoom out and see the field of music scholarship as a specific worldview in itself. In terms of argument and proof, I found that information was never absolutely trusted as authoritative, nor was it ever considered entirely false or useless. As I suspect is true of many fields which study art, the grey area between fact and opinion is where scholarly conversation exists. When mounting an argument, no one authority could be cited as sufficient evidence; rather, a mountain of separate but congruent opinions could prove that a theory was legitimate, but could not prove anything as fact.

The topics of discussion in music are also quite varied: in the three sources I chose, one argued for the historical influence of an ethnic group on a single composer, one argued over the meaning and inspiration of a single piece, and one argued for a specific approach to a specific field in music theory. This shows that often it is not the music itself that is topic for discussion, but rather the context and surroundings of music which are discussed – most likely because it is the context, the composer, and the audience itself that gives music any meaning at all. So I suppose that scholarly writing in the field of music is a discussion of the source and foundation of meaning which inevitably people and composers find within music.

As for the creation vs. discovery of knowledge within music, I think there is a wide variety of opinion and worldview. Depending on how a person thinks about it, new music is either created out of nothing by people or it is discovered to some extent, and brought to the forefront of where it already existed. Through this project I think what sticks out to me about knowledge in music is that musicians are still digging up knowledge about composers who died centuries ago, and this new information finds life in the re-playing of the music these composers wrote. New discoveries about how a certain instrument was played or what certain notation meant can give new life to old music.  It is for this reason that musicologists and music scholars continue to interplay with the field of history.

Situating these topics in the context of a worldview, I am first inclined to note that one cannot lump all musicians or music scholars or music historians or musicologists into a single uniform “worldview”. With this said, it is at least interesting to speculate on the effect that studying music may have on those persons, and how it affects their “information paradigm”. It seems to me that there is at least a common belief in beauty, and in the human being as a source or a conduit of beauty. Whether this beauty comes from within a person, or is the product of that person’s context, or is a reflection of a power much beyond a single person’s senses, is a subject for further discussion; but what all musicians may wrestle with more than many other fields is a fundamental belief in the value of music as art, as expression, as communication, as history, and as so many other things.

Knowledge and Context in the Music Discourse Community

In the article “Beethoven and His Jewish Contemporaries”, Malcolm Miller makes a case for the importance of Beethoven’s Jewish contemporaries on the Beethoven himself as well as the music of the time. This article represents a specific and interesting discourse community within the larger music community, and represents a category of Music literature that focuses on the composers and the context of the times, and provides insight into how information is collected and presented about composers and how these conclusions can be applied to other fields of study in the arts.

The author of this piece is someone from the University of London, who is evidently both a music scholar and a Jewish Studies scholar. In the abstract for this article it is noted that the audience was originally a crowd at a Jewish music festival in 1997, and it was originally presented as a lecture before it was converted to an article. The festival was also hosted by the Beethoven Piano Society of Europe. The evidence of this audience is evident in the article: first, Hebrew words were used, such as “Haskalah” (referring to the Jewish Enlightenment), which a Jewish audience would most likely be familiar with. Similarly, a given familiarity with Beethoven  is assumed in the article, when it refers to his life, works, and relationships without much explanation. One such example is when the article references the “four note motif” in Beethoven’s string quartet in c# minor, assuming that the audience is familiar not only with this motif and this piece of music, but also with the Jewish music it supposedly takes from. I think this is very common in historical writings on composers in the field of music – most music scholars assume that their audience is familiar with a rather specific set of famous works by the most prominent composers in Western Music History (I’ve experienced this even in my classes, when a professor assumes the students know a specific piece). This is evidence that often, scholars write to other learned scholars in their field; rarely will a scholarly article come out that is written for non-professionals.

The source of information referenced in this article is also telling: in many cases, primary source documents such as letters, schedules, and contemporary writings are used to shed light on what a composer’s social life looked like. I chose this article because it focused not on the music of Beethoven so much as his social world and historical context, which is common in music – scholars are always either studying the music or connecting that music to its context. So, when context is studied, primary sources are used in conjunction with encyclopedias. Encyclopedias such as “the New Grove Dictionary for Music and Musicians” are used for basic information like birthdates, where composers were and when, and the works they made and when. An example of a primary source being used in this article is when the author presents a letter from Beethoven to a Jewish composer, written with obvious affection, simply to prove that they had a healthy relationship. In music literature it is equally important and difficult to identify why a piece of music was written – important because music is in nature reactionary and a commentary on the times, and difficult because it is often a matter of opinion. Yet this identifies a key subject in music literature as well as a paradox within its values.