#172: Unfinished Business
Unfinished Business
I’m Todd L. Burns, and welcome to Music Journalism Insider, a newsletter about music journalism. I highlight some of the best stuff I hear, read, and watch every week; publish news about the industry; and interview writers, scholars, and editors about their work. My goal is to share knowledge, celebrate great work, and expand the idea of what music journalism is—and where it happens. Questions, comments, concerns? You can reach me anytime at music.journalism.insider@gmail.com. And if you're not already subscribed to the newsletter, you can do so at musicjournalisminsider.com.
Today in the newsletter: Interviews with Distinguished Professor of Music Carol A. Hess, black metal music expert Bill Peel, and music scholar Patrick Nickleson. Plus! Reading and podcast recommendations! And more! But first…
Anyone Got A Phone Number For Ed Sheeran’s Lawyers?
Source
Reading List
- Ann Powers writes about the role of music in social change
- Kimberly Mack discusses her new book about Living Colour
- Katie Thomas remembers the live event that led to a lifetime of dancing
- James Calemine profiles two promoters who combine punk with wrestling
- Ross Scarano explores the appeal of lost music
- Jordan Darville explains what artists lose when they release rare music
- Max Kepley chats with country zine creator Maddy Underwood
- Leor Galil celebrates one of the most important '90s diners in Chicago
- Rob Smith interviews Neil Mason about the zine Moonbuilding
- Brian Howe puts together a history of Indy Week
Lede Of The Week
“Decades later, Ben Ratliff, former pop music critic at The New York Times, can recall the details of a song he heard once, but that it is impossible for you to listen to.” - Ross Scarano
Q&A: Carol A. Hess
Carol A. Hess teaches at the University of California, Davis, where she is Distinguished Professor of Music. Her book Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain, 1898–1936 won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award and the American Musicological Society’s Robert M. Stevenson Prize for Outstanding Scholarship in Iberian Music. In this excerpt from our interview, Carol reveals what she’d like to see more of in music scholarship right now.
We are all striving to diversify the repertory we teach. It’s an important piece of unfinished business, in which musicology has had some success with respect to Latin American music. We need to keep moving in this direction and do so without forgetting about the canon and the pleasures it offers.
What’s one tip that you'd give a student considering a life in music scholarship starting out right now?
Have a Plan B. In 1978, I was warned that making a career in musicology was risky. That risk increased dramatically after the so-called Great Recession of 2008 and things got even worse with the pandemic. It’s wonderful being a professor. But it’s equally gratifying to be employed by musical institutions such as opera companies or symphony orchestras, to work for the cultural wing of a foundation, or in publishing, editing, music librarianship, and arts management or—as I like to tell students—in jobs that have yet to be invented.
Read the full interview with Carol here.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Carol Hess:
I give to lots of organizations but I doubt you want me to “get political” (nowadays code for “talking about some position other people may not like”). But if you really want to know, I am saddened by the fact that we are sacrificing innocents—including many children—while gun fanatics blather about “mental health.” Certainly a responsible society could have Second Amendment rights, but we have shown a spectacular lack of responsible behavior. Although I’m not a mother, I give money to Moms Demand Action, which seeks to break this tragic logjam.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by folks I’ve interviewed.
Oops
Source
Podcasts!
- Bonefish is a new podcast about Animal Collective, independent music, and the blog-rock era
- Philip Ewell discussed On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone on New Books in Music
- California Love told a fascinating K-pop-related story
- The Exchange delved into the heated debate about techno’s origins
- Billboard deputy director of R&B/Hip-Hop joined Stay Busy
Q&A: Bill Peel
Bill Peel is the author of Tonight It’s a World We Bury: Black Metal, Red Politics, a book described as a “radical re-writing of the history and politics of black metal music.” He’s based in New South Wales, Australia, and has previously written for outlets such as Overland and Kill Your Stereo. In this excerpt from our interview, Bill explains the idea behind the book.
The book is basically my attempt to draw out certain tendencies or conventions in black metal music, and to connect them to left-wing political and philosophical thought. My chapters are centred around these tendencies: distortion, decay, secrecy, coldness, and heresy. Obviously there are more conventions of black metal than just those, but those are the ones I found productive to think with.
Why this topic?
Partly it’s because that’s what Repeater had asked me to do, even with their very loose terms, which I liked a lot. I knew from the start it needed to be about black metal specifically, because even though Repeater had asked for “extreme metal,” I only have an extensive knowledge of black metal.
And I organized the chapters in the way I did for two main reasons. The first is because I didn’t want to write a book about black metal’s history, with a subtitle of something like “The left-wing history of black metal,” because there’s isn’t much there (in my opinion) and because it’s not the kind of book I wanted to read or write. The second reason is because I was reading a lot of Deleuze and Guattari at the time, and I was drawn to the way they’d organized their book A Thousand Plateaus, as a series of chapter-essays that draw on a lot of different theorists and topics and that don’t necessarily have to be connected.
Read the full interview with Bill here.
A Cause Worth Supporting
From Bill Peel:
I spent a little over a month in the Palestinian West Bank during the Christmas holidays, teaching English and doing a cultural exchange sort of thing, so I’d suggest people educate themselves about the Palestinian struggle. That might not be hard, since as I’m writing, the situation over there is fairly serious, particularly around Nablus and Jerusalem. It was relatively tame in December–January, but it’s certainly enlightening to see how the conflict plays out in the open. If you do go the charity route, the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund is meant to be good.
Check out all of the causes highlighted by folks I’ve interviewed.
Bits, Bobs
- Irv Lichtman has passed away
- Rainbow Rodeo has launched a blog
- Michelle Mercer and Philip Sherburne have started newsletters
- Adeerya Johnson has curated a new exhibition on hip-hop feminism in history
- Marissa R. Moss and David Cantwell have won the Belmont University Curb Music Industry Award for Country Music Book of the Year
Trivia Time
How many album reviews has Philip Sherburne written for Pitchfork?
Pivoting To Video
- Sound Field wonders what they mean when they call hip-hop “alternative”
- Conversations in Ethnomusicology and World Music presents a conversation with Stephanie Shonekan
- PBS News Hour looks at the rise of Arabic music
- The Punk Rock MBA details the rise and fall of MTV’s TRL
- Mic the Snare exhaustively details the history of rhythm video games
Rashomoan
Source
Q&A: Patrick Nickleson
Patrick Nickleson is the author of The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music, and Historiography in Dispute, a book that “draws attention to disciplinary practices of guarding compositional authority against artists who set out to undermine it.” He’s also an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Alberta. In this excerpt from our interview, Patrick talks about why he was interested in writing this book.
[It] was less in expanding the repertoire than in asking how we wound up with that repertoire, and what it tells us not just about minimalism, but about musicology and its whole dream of a cohesive thing called “art music” that amounts to very little in particular if you start naming the Eurocentric, paternalistic, white, property-oriented, settler-colonial dimensions of it.
What I settled on as a focal point is that minimalism is really defined by these really close, interpersonal collaborative relationships in the 1960s and 1970s. People like Reich and Glass worked really closely together to get their work performed, to share resources that allowed them to tour their work rather than having to get commissioned by major institutional ensembles. A similar thing was true for La Monte Young and Tony Conrad, and later on for Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca in the early 1980s. People have commented on this history of dispute—most importantly Branden Joseph and Jeremy Grimshaw in their fantastic books—but mostly in passing. My thought was that it was specifically the fact of dispute that helped cohere the story of minimalism, but that it had to kind of go unmentioned; it was simply treated as the inevitable end point of any effort to collaborate in “classical music,” which is too often understood to be hierarchically more important or better in part because it was written down and created by one person as opposed to things like rock or jazz that are associated with the more collectivist band formation.
Read the full interview with Patrick here.
Academic Stuff
- New issues: Acoustics, Sound Stage Screen, Music Theory Online, Music Analysis, Musicologica Austriaca, Fontes Artis Musicae, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, Popular Music and Society, Music Education Research, Cambridge Opera Journal, Indiana Theory Review, Journal of Singing, Ethnomusicology Forum, Music & Letters, Twentieth-Century Music, and Organised Sound
- Registration is open for Instruments, Interfaces, Infrastructures: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Musical Media
- Call for Papers: 10th International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology [Paper due June 30]
- Registration is open for Instruments of Global Music Theory
- Call for Papers: Music, Press, and Transatlantic Cultural Relations [Proposals due June 1]
- SUNY Press is actively soliciting proposals for new books on world music of all types
- Call for Articles: MUSICultures, previously The Canadian Journal for Traditional Music [Submissions due September 1]
The Closing Credits
Thanks for reading! In case you’ve missed any special features, I’ve published a number of them in the newsletter, including articles about music journalism history, what music journalism will be like in 2221, and much more. You can check out all of that here.
I also do a recurring column in the newsletter called Notes On Process. The premise is simple: I share a Google Doc with a music journalist where we go into depth on one of their pieces. It hopefully provides an insight into how music writers do their work. You can check out all editions of Notes On Process here.
How Can I Support The Newsletter?
Here are three easy ways you can support the newsletter:
- Forward it to a friend
- Buy me a coffee
- Become an ongoing supporter of the newsletter
What sort of perks are there for ongoing supporters?
Insider Extra - An additional e-mail from me each week, usually featuring job listings, freelance calls, and more
How To Pitch Database - Access to a database with contact information and pitching info for hundreds of publications
Reading Recommendations - Access to a resource page collecting great pieces of music journalism, sourced from great music journalists
Advice - Access to a resource page devoted to collecting advice from journalists and editors on how to excel at music journalism
Interviews - Access to the hundreds of interviews that have appeared in the newsletter, with writers and editors from Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, the Guardian, and more
A Friendly Reminder
If you can’t afford to subscribe for access to ongoing supporter extras, no matter the reason, please hit me up at music.journalism.insider@gmail.com. I’ll be happy to give you a free one-year subscription to the newsletter. This offer is extended especially for college students and recent grads, but is open to anyone.
Trivia Time Answer
Philip Sherburne has written 552 album reviews for Pitchfork.
A Final Note
Thanks for reading! I make playlists every single week. Check them here! And full disclosure: my day job is at uDiscover Music, a branded content online magazine owned by Universal Music. This newsletter is not affiliated or sponsored in any way by Universal, and any links that relate to the work of my department will be clearly marked.
Feel free to reach out to me via email at music.journalism.insider@gmail.com. On Twitter, it’s @JournalismMusic. Until next time...