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[phallelujah]

Some friends were requesting updates on my adventures out East with respect to both la belle province and school so I'll try to summarize my life as of late.

Montreal

We got our first snowfall not too long ago (I think about 4 days?). zemus had some pretty awesome pictures on the montreal community:

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[phallelujah]

The seminar is titled "Crossover." It deals with how "music changes over time, with a focus on the role of social identities and musical styles in crossovers between the large categories of Westn music (popular, classical jazz, folk, non-Western), as well as within these categories" (Quoted from course outline).

Our instructor is really big on critical theory so he wanted us to read those articles so that we could apply their concepts to researching, writing, teaching, performing, composing, etc.

Derrida's "The Law of Genre" was assigned to problematize the simplistic labelling of categories. With any of these theoretical articles, my first step is Wikipedia followed by an attempt to read the actual article (which may or may not be fruitful) followed by a trip to the citation feature on Google Scholar. That last step with Derrida's "The Law of Genre proved hilarious since nearly every author who cited him cited the same passage in his conclusion where he finally reveals what he's been writing about.

Foucault's "The Unities of Discourse" was loaded with admonitions that we were supposed to apply to the study of large categories of music. I read the article twice (very carefully with highlighter, pen, pencil, etc.) but I still misunderstood him. "I think he means this..." According to my instructor apparently not. Instructor's comment on my write-up: "I don't think this is what Foucault means." To this day, I still have no clue.

Baudrillard's "Consumer Society" and "The Masses: The Implosion of the Social in the Media" were assigned during a week when we were looking heavily at marketing, Billboard charts, public opinion polls, and the like. He's another guy that I'm going to have to reread slo-o-o-o-wly - but not too slowly or I'll forget where he was going. My last advanced English elective gave us a metaphor of the "reader's desktop" to keep in mind while we write. These authors demand a very wide desktop or at least a reader who can manage a cluttered desktop well.

There seems to be a lot of confusion within the general public as to what exactly musicologists do. And to be honest, I haven't quite figured it out either. I've seen dictionaries describe the discipline as "the scholarly study of music" but that's so ridiculously broad and perhaps appropriately so. We don't necessarily play instruments - or if we do, it's on our own time as a secondary interest. People often call us music historians but does that apply to popular music? Am I documenting history as it happens? Sometimes it feels like we're sociologists who narrow our field to only music to do the "nitty gritty" stuff that sociologists without a musical background can't do. I'm not even sure of that either since I never took any sociology electives during my undergrad. Oh well. Crashcourse in Baudrillard it is then!

I'd like to hear dsch answer the question "What do musicologists do?" I think I answer it differently every time I'm asked.