I’ve been musing about what I ought to write here for quite a while, jotting down notes on my phone and in notebooks. While I wait for these ideas to ready themselves for sending out into the ether, my attention has been pulled by temporal concerns. To be specific, I mean the future of the academy and part of the past that my slice of the academy is built on. (I fear that this will end up being a mini-series of sorts, so I thank the reader in advance for your kind patience.)
I’m a pianist when I’m not being a music historian. I have long since abandoned any ambitions of making a career out of my skills at the instrument–which is just as well, since there are plenty of far more accomplished pianists out there who are filling the world with music. Nonetheless, I still play for myself, much as I did well before I even considered that I could major in music.
It was in junior high and high school I started to piano seriously and actively sought out things I liked from the radio and from the LPs around the house. Very quickly I found myself drawn to the music of Brahms, even though I couldn’t really play much of it. All I really knew about Brahms was that his portrait (with the huge beard, but with the cigar airbrushed out) hung over our piano and that I really liked his music.
Over the course of my undergrad years this abiding interest in Brahms’s piano music developed into an obsession. Since I still wasn’t up to the task of performing his really great works I contented myself with recitals of smaller pieces and indulged my obsession in academic outlets. On the surface I focused on his structural innovations, trying to suss out some grand new theories. Luckily, these investigations led me forwards and backwards in time and I eventually came upon my current historical lines of inquiry (another story for other posts).
Today I still play his music, and what draws me in each time I do is the same thing that drew me in all those years ago: his constant interweaving of dissonances that simply sit there. The work that brought this to mind again recently is the following (I’ll save the detailed unpacking of my thoughts on this music for another time.):
The whole set is great, but variation 5 (starting at 8:07) has been especially on my mind.
As I was playing through in my slow and careful way, I savored the dissonances and the skill with which they were made into unapologetic and unavoidable bumps in the road of his counterpoint. They aren’t necessarily wrong but they aren’t obviously necessary either; necessary or not, these dissonances are integral to the music and for me, make the piece into something much more satisfying than without them.
For me this observation is inseparable from the fact of Brahms’s enormous talent as a pianist. While I am the last person to exalt piano music by virtuoso pianists simply because of their skill (I’m pro Chopin and Brahms, have only recently begun to warm up to Liszt and have never cared for Rachmaninov…), lately I have been increasingly thinking about a career like his: he had the skills for a piano career and instead found himself on a very different path as a composer and antiquarian-historian hybrid. I won’t say he chose this new path, or that if he did that his choice was founded on convictions about the worthiness of either career path. Nor am I necessarily claiming that he was particularly suited for one path over the other; historically fallacious platitudes about the luck we have that so-and-so did not choose a different path and rob us of his or her great works have hopefully been put to bed by most. What I am claiming is that such a career shift today often falls into one of two cultural tropes depending on the direction of the shift: the wasted talent story or the hard luck turned triumph story.
And this is where the academy joins the discussion.
Recently the internet, which seems to be heavily populated by academics, whether failed, successful, or indifferent, has been home to a variety of articles about why the university system in the US needs to change. A couple of years ago we had beneficent professors advising the world that PhDs were a bad idea; they take too long, cost too much, there aren’t enough jobs to go around, and anyway, most PhDs students to naive and need some waking up to the harsh realities of life. Most of these things are true, barring the final observation (I’ve met naive grad students, but certainly not any more than I’ve met outside of our hallowed walls). We also had at this time a spate of snarky web animations about the foolishness of bright eyed undergrads who think they will change the world with their graduate work and have some idyllic life earning 6 figures when they land that plum college job (complete with scotch and leather chair, no doubt).
Since then, in the face of real cuts to the academy and relatively little drop off in new PhDs, cooler heads have prevailed. The most recent addition that I have seen is this, which appeared recently on my facebook feed. It has some of the most sensible advice I have seen in one place, especially as someone in the humanities who has interests that stretch well beyond the narrow topic on which I am writing my dissertation. I have skills and knowledge that could be useful both in an outside of the academy. Some of these interests and skills are those that I am actively cultivating as I write my dissertation and think about my career path as a musicologist.
Then there are others that I usually keep just slightly below the surface of my daily life. I like to think of these as my own interwoven dissonances–they aren’t strictly necessary to my academic life, but they are an essential part of my daily life and I like to think that keeping them in the picture enriches even seemingly unrelated things.
At the risk of skewing saccharin or platitudinous, I suppose that’s my ultimate point here. As someone who is privileged to have access to information and technology that is in many ways unbounded, it would be foolish of me not to seek out new things that don’t obviously fit into some sort of quantifiable whole that has been defined as “what I do”. I hate hearing other people in my field say things like “oh, I used to play viola” or “I was a singer in a former life”–even if you haven’t been serious about the instrument for years, if you devoted enough time and energy to be able to really play an instrument at one time, you ought still to be able to identify with that instrument. Of course, there is no way to be as good or as devoted as you once were, but surely the benefits of making time for continuing that instrument (or a new one) outweigh the time lost to other pursuits. Similarly, I see no reason not to expand our purview as scholars to include other academic interests outside of our specialties. By this I mean more than traditionally complementary interests such as music and literature of the same period, or anthropology and political science; why not combine some samba with German expressionist art and studies of French and Russian trappers in the Americas? If we can train our minds to one subject, surely we have something worthwhile to say about others.
To sum up, I think that this sort of ecumenical approach to academic life can make us all better thinkers in anything we do. There is certainly something to be said for specialization and finding the unifying thread that interests you and informs what you do (cf., my first post), but it does nobody good for society to be bogged down with specialists who are only fit for one particular job. In the end this might please the foes of academia who go on about our uselessness, but I think it falls in better with more progressive thinking in which we all contribute according to our abilities, receive according to our needs and we have room to change and growth on both ends of that equation.
