Thoughts on Public Musicology

Public engagement is something academics increasingly are being encouraged to do by their institutions, be they universities, conservatoires, museums, or scholarly societies. It’s probably a good thing to get people out of their ivory towers but is “public musicology” really that new or needed now more than before?

Richard Taruskin (RT). I hope it’s true that scholars are being encouraged to work in public media. It used to work against academic promotion in the USA. My own colleagues and administration did encourage me, and I encouraged my colleagues and pupils, though with limited success. Opportunities are becoming scarcer in the newspapers, which are less hospitable to serious arts coverage than they were even two or three decades ago. Program notes and pre-concert talks are good outlets so long as they are free of interference from presenters who regard such things as advertising. Real public engagement means engaging with real public issues. The great thing about James Oestreich, who was my editor at the New York Times, was that he welcomed controversy (which I was always happy to provide), and so did his superiors at the paper. When I filled up the letters column with vituperation, which happened four times in the quarter century I was writing there, the paper was happy (and I got used to it, too).

Laura Tunbridge (LT). When the music appreciation movement took off at the start of the twentieth century, the impetus was toward educating the general public in the music they should learn to like, for social and cultural gains. I think most people would back away from those associations with improving one’s status now. That is doubtless the right attitude, but it has perhaps contributed to music’s diminishing position within schools and in public life more generally. (Western classical music is primarily what I’m referring to here but too often there is also an unwillingness to treat any kind of music as an intellectually and socially worthy subject for discussion and debate.) And it might explain the recent investment in public musicology. All of these things connect: for people to become interested in music, or to think that their children or grandchildren should, they need to be made curious—doors need to open, be that through controversies in newspapers or being introduced to new sounds by tantalizing Twitter feeds.

Technology makes it much easier to reach larger numbers of readers/listeners with short, punchy, pieces. At the same time, those readers and listeners can more easily respond but letters pages are becoming less common means for challenging people than anonymous comments online. The opportunity for sustained debate seems to be diminished—what are the knock-on effects?

RT. Well, some debates I’ve been involved in seem never to end—Shostakovich, Klinghoffer, etc.—though maybe I’ve just been “lucky.” The problem with blogs is that, being unregulated, they contain so much empty irresponsible verbiage that that becomes what one expects to read there. (Anonymous posts are irresponsible by definition.) So I never encouraged my own pupils to air their opinions in such spaces. If you want to do more serious blogging work, you face the problem of attracting readers to a medium that has to be sought out. But if a blog is to be used to show what makes musicology (or musicologists) tick, it should show, above all, what responsible rhetoric looks like. Short and punchy, on the other hand, is OK, and not at all in conflict with responsible writing. I learned to be those things at the Times, and—don’t laugh—I carried it over to the big-form projects, even the Oxford History, which I consciously tried to make “read short” even though it was super-long. Letters pages are drying up, it seems. (Blogs and social media now perform that function.)

LT. What to do, though, if your chosen topic “unluckily” does not elicit the same degree of debate? If you judge a blog’s success by its click-rate then choosing something contentious works. Writing style, though, is something else: assuming you can attract readers and keeping them, as RT says and has shown in his own work, depends on writing in an engaging way. How to be responsible is more challenging because it depends on an agreement that all interlocutors are going to behave in the same way. Weighing in on a blog in a heavy-handed critical way can shut down discussion rather than foster it or, at least, tends to make everyone defensive.

There’s a particular risk that views of a composer or piece become common currency in journalism, programming, textbooks, and curricula, and are no longer debated. What strategies can stop that?

RT. Calling it out, to begin with, especially when the conventional wisdom had been based on spuriosities—as in the case of Shostakovich and his “memoirs.” One has to be patient. It takes repeated explanation and repeated correction.

LT. Working with other musicians and organizations can also be helpful. This isn’t a one-way process. It can be frustrating when you are asked to contribute to a program booklet or festival study day and offer your insights but feel as if they bear no relationship to what then happens on stage. If dialogue is encouraged between musicologists and performers or programmers, though, there’s a chance research findings can be discussed and maybe even tried out.

What status should the “public musicologist” have within the academy? Is the notion that research should have “impact” (economic, political, cultural) outside of the immediate institution something musicology should embrace or rather be suspicious of?

RT. “Impact” as such is a neutral quality. It can serve good or evil. Encourage the good and stamp out the evil. (See above on patience.) Quantity is another neutral matter, accorded too much weight in job evaluations. So there is no simple answer to the question of status. Forgive me for mentioning a name, but the fact that Allan Ho (of Ho and Feofanov infamy) is a PhD-carrying musicologist makes his transgressions on the veracity Shostakovich’s “memoirs” worse than that of his pianist/lawyer partner Dmitry Feofanov. We scholars are judged by Ho’s misdeeds. But seeing the work of young PhDs in musicology, say, in the New York Times—Will Robin and Micaela Baranello most recently—can reflect credit on the profession. The thing to beware (and I’ve brought this up with some of them) is not to confine oneself to the line of least resistance in a newspaper, and the kind of thing unimaginative editors seek: namely, puff pieces. What musicologists do needs to be distinguishable from advocacy, or else musicologists have no raison d’être.

LT. I think another important thing to bear in mind is how impact is valued within a scholar’s workload, particularly for early career researchers. It’s not unusual to be distracted by presenting research on radio, vlogs, or even television, as well as in print media, rather than producing the books and peer-reviewed journal articles that weigh in more heavily on CVs. It’s tremendously time-consuming to do all that stuff and there’s often little editorial control from the musicologist’s point of view. And there is a hierarchy of how activities are valued by institutions: reviewing CDs isn’t the same as being consultant for a new opera production, say, but then doing small tasks may lead to larger and more prestigious gigs. Particularly when starting out it’s hard to judge what’s worth doing; it also raises the question of whether everyone has to “go public” or whether every topic needs to have that aspect written into it.

Is there a risk of “dumbing down” what we do when undertaking public musicology? What practical advice would you give younger scholars engaging with the public?

LT. I’m less concerned about dumbing down than talking down to an audience. I’ve learned that you never know who is in an audience—always treat them with respect rather than patronizing them—and that it’s a continuum: it is as important to explain yourself clearly in a university lecture as it is to a pre-concert audience. So far as practical advice is concerned, less is almost always more with regard to information and verbiage. That needn’t mean you have to change the substance of the point you’re making. I only properly realized how long and multi-claused my sentences can be when I heard myself holding forth on the radio. Learning to cut back, in speech and also any kind of writing, I think has helped me be more engaging (at least I hope it has).

RT. I always took it as a productive challenge to say what I had to say in the Times or in a general interest magazine (or when lecturing to nonprofessional audiences) without using insider language. I never found it impossible. One of the best examples I can give is something I remember Will Crutchfield doing decades ago. He is now a conductor, but started out as the best young classical music reviewer I ever read, and in one old New York Times piece, he defined appoggiatura for his readers by writing “Think of the Beatles’ ‘YESterday’.” (I’m not sure that example would be as surefire now.) As a result of my New York Times experience I have become very intolerant of jargon and of “difficult” writing generally. I used to preach to my pupils till I’m sure I exasperated them that nothing is easier than to be difficult or more difficult than to be easy. Achieving that easiness is what makes you a real writer. A beloved parable from one of John Updike’s “Bech” books: the eponymous American writer, meeting what he called a Bulgarian “poetess,” asked her condescendingly whether her poems were difficult. “They are difficult,” she replied, “to write.” Yes!