What’s wrong with this survey question?

Okay, like I said, I was doing this training thing to get me legal to do research with human subjects. I finally finish wading my way through all these modules, a few interesting and useful but many either at the “this is common sense” or “God could this be any more esoteric and useless to me” poles of interest…

We are asked to take a survey about our experiences with the course. I’m plodding my way through all these sort of dopey “strongly agree-agree-neutral-disagree-strongly disagree” questions, when I come to this one:

Recent publications suggest that about 25% of women between 18 and 55 are HPV positive for human papilloma virus (HPV). The HPV is know to cause most cervical cancers. But, not all HPV+ women will develop cancer. Recent reports suggest that about 30 % of girls in the US, between 13 and 17 yrs of age, have been vaccinated against HPV. Clinical research done in 2005 showed that this vaccine would be effective and prevent HPV infection. A previously developed vaccine, subjected to similar testing showed no significant protection. We would like to have your opinion regarding the risks of such research.Given this statement: “The potential benefits to subjects in such industry sponsored, antiviral vaccine human research studies, far outweigh the risks of harm to the subjects”, which response best describes your opinion about the risks of such research. The statement reflects my general feelings about this type of clinical research. I generally agree with the statement, but might still not permit my daughter participate. I generally agree with the statement, but depending on the viral target of the vaccine I might not permit my daughter to participate. I agree with the statement, but I would not permit my daughter participate.

WTF??????????

First of all, the survey fricking ISN’T ABOUT the vaccine, it’s about my spending the last few hours wading through your goddamn modules and how useful and helpful it was to me. Second, what the hell kind of survey gives a statement and all of the possible answers include, “I agree with this statement” as the starting point of all the possible responses?

And third, this was at the conclusion of a course I took to allegedly learn how to conduct responsible research.

(And fourth, the punctuation sucks. But that’s the least of its problems.)

I am aghast. And kind of pissed off.

My Book Report: Why Research Misconduct is Bad

I’m planning to do some case study/qualitative analysis work for my doctoral project. I had no idea how much work is involved just in terms of designing the study and getting approval from the Institutional Review Board for it…there’s a 3 hour online course I have to take online and get certified or whatever to be allowed to even apply for approval…

The entire first “module” (contemporary edu-speak for “lesson”) is about how researchers should not commit research misconduct.  And why. And what can happen to them if they do. And how research misconduct is Bad.

I find it disheartening to think that there might be anyone taking this course who would either be surprised to discover this, or would think it’s silly and untrue.  ”Hey, guess what–when you do research data, you have to do all the experiments. And record the data accurately–no fair changing it to match the result you want!” “Really? Seriously? No shit? Wow, who knew?”

Sigh. Off to module 2.

Webern is SOOO last century…

I am taking a class in 20^th century atonal harmony this quarter.

When I was last taking music classes, theory, history, etc. it still was the 20^th century. In those days, 20^th century music was considered “modern” or “contemporary.” (Even 1910 Stravinsky. Whatever.) We didn’t think to question it.

Our professor is quite young, with that brilliant-nerdy aura coming off him in waves; he has a definite vibe of really being in this academic thing for the research but once the teaching starts he doesn’t really hate it. (You know the guy? I think there are several of him in most music departments of most research universities…and he is way more fun to get for class than the one who is in it for the research but does hate teaching…)

What I find sort of amusing in my own mind is that he does everything via handouts, using Blackboard very little, and doing everything By Hand With Pencil In Print. He uses an overhead projector in class. To complete the first assignment, we had to check the study guide, which sent us to the book but had another handout of more specific directions for each exercise, and another sheet with the answer key…

I find myself thinking, “wow, my 20^th century music professor is stuck in the 20^th century.”

Makes me giggle a little.

I take my small amusements where I can find them. Certainly 20th century atonal expressionism isn’t going to provide many.

Totem poles

When the choral professor is out of town, and two doctoral students are asked to “share” a rehearsal in his absence, and the first (senior) doctoral student calmly and without apology takes the first 65 minutes of the rehearsal, leaving the second (newer and lower on the totem pole) only 15…

Should the gypped student conductor say anything?

Or just fume anonymously on her blog?

Don’t @#$% With My Divine Revelation

I have a lot of knee-jerk piss-me-off buttons.

(Shock! No one who has ever read this blog would guess such a thing in a million years!)

After years of trying to deal with it, sublimate it, make it go away, I’ve now decided the hell with because it’s not going to work, might as well just see what I can learn from it.

For example: I have just realized, after a scan of many years of knee-jerk piss-offs, that one thing I always get p.o.d  about is when anyone offers a grand and sweeping assertion about What Bach Meant, or What Bach Did Here, and This Is It And Any Other Approaches Are Just Plain Wrong. I seldom disagree with whatever they are proposing as an important structural point or lens through which to view a particular work, but I categorically reject any assertion that nothing else could possibly be valid.

Like for example, (hypothetically, this of course isn’t anything that happened in my conductor seminar or anything) if you tell me that the first Kyrie fugue in the B Minor Mass is a five voice fugue and the rest of the choral material is ritornello and that’s it, no discussion, clearly it’s what he did, there is nothing expository about those last three complete and obvious statements of the subject, it will piss me off. Because I am a Bach numbers geek, and the obvious groupings of 4+3 entrances (even if the final two entrances are by voices that have already had a subject turn) is way too in-your-face to just sort of dismiss as “oh, that’s just ritornello material.” Because it gives this beautifully symmetrical 2+1, 7+1, 2, 7+1 structure which just happens to add up to 21 total subject statements, which just happens to be 7×3, which just happen to be cosmologically and theologically VERY significant numbers in Bach’s sacred music. *(Hypothetically.)

What I also realized, though, is that my knee-jerk seminal rage at such things is exactly the same reaction I have when I listen to someone asserting some one-dimensional, monovalent sweeping conclusion about Scripture. “This is what it means. No, you’re wrong, it’s obvious that there is only one way to look at this, and it is mine, and you should believe me, because I know this stuff.”

Which leads me to acknowledge the slightly wacked-out potentially culty idea that I may believe on some level that the music of Bach in some way is a matrix for the Stuff of Ultimate Reality. That if Jesus is the Word Made Flesh, the collected works of St. Johann Sebastian are somehow the Word Made Music. And while I’m not about to get the “God so loved the world that she sent Johann Sebastian Bach” t-shirt or anything, there’s this really strong voice at my deep core that goes Hey dude don’t #&*$ with my Divine Revelation when I meet up with this stuff.

Has this always been this strong, or has it intensified in the year or so since I turned my ample backside onRomeand her red taffeta-clad oh-so-superior male hierarchy? Am I looking for a new religion? Or has it just been a while since I ran into anyone who so vehemently asserted something about Bach I don’t agree with?

Hmmm.

 

*Look, if you’re Bach, and your writing embraces numbers and Pythagoras and cosmonumerology, and you wanted to write a fugue with seven voice entries, you really only have three choices: you can divide your chorus into SSAATTB, you can leave your chorus smaller and give the orchestra some of the entrances independently, or you can re-use some of the choral voices to give you additional subject statements. Hmm…there’s a dissertation topic for someone, the choral 7-entry fugues of J.S. Bach…but just because the How To Write A Fugue Textbook says the exposition is completed when every voice has entered once doesn’t mean Bach read the damn thing, or that there’s any virtue in shoehorning the guy who was the model for writing the textbook into its pedestrian boundaries.) (And yes, cosmonumerology is a word I just made up, right here, today. Although I supposed numerocosmology would have worked too…)

Great, now I’m a cult member

Every once in a while you find an article like this; they pop up like purslane between patio bricks, only less useful and nourishing.

And they piss me off.

“The Cult of the Conductor” by Peter Philips of the Tallis Scholars is one of these offerings, and although it’s not new by any stretch, I hadn’t read it before.  It’s one of those screeds about how all conductors wrongly want to impose their own uncompromising (and often wrong) interpretations onto an ensemble’s music-making and how the musicians would do better to just not have a conductor there at all. Best of all, he takes on Robert Shaw, patron saint of large ensemble choral clarity in the U.S., as the exemplar of this outmoded, unhealthy, overly controlling method. (Why he feels the need to start the article saying he knows very little about Shaw’s methods, and then to continue by eviscerating them, I have no idea. Nor do I know why he would say Shaw didn’t write much about his methods–the man couldn’t shut up on paper or in rehearsal, from what I can tell. And the Robert Shaw Reader had been in publication for two years before this article was written.)

He then waxes eloquent about how polyphony demands that every member of the ensemble know his or her own line well enough, and listen well enough, that no conductor would be necessary or helpful in performances at least of Renaissance music.  And how the very term and concept of “choir” simply “will not do” for those who wish to perform Renaissance music, and that choral organizations are “disinclined to give their choirs the necessary responsibility for their lines.”

To which I can only reply, succintly and with hopefully solid imagery and clarity of expression:  Bullshit.

Any conductor who can find an ensemble made up of people willing to take responsibility, or willing to be shaped into people willing to take responsibility, for their own parts and their interaction with every single other member of the group, would think she’d died and gone to heaven. Most conductors I know, if a piece of music is going well enough that he’s not needed, will get the hell out of the way and let the music happen, and will spend every other moment of their professional careers trying to get their groups to that very point.

Yes, it’s a bit of a vicious circle, a system where the expectation is that the conductor will lead and the choir will follow, and thus no one feels invited to the responsibility of mutual ownership of the music.

Mr. Philips also doesn’t like long rehearsals. He is a crack reader, and of course knowing his own line well enough and knowing polyphony means it’s a big old waste of time to do anything in rehearsals other than make sure all the notes are right.

This sounds supremely boring.

In any case, he should learn a little more about his subject before devoting a whole article to dissing St. Robert.

Bravo, Maestro Davidson!

In one of the best articles or essays about conducting I think I’ve ever read, New York Times Magazine music critic Justin Davidson describes his process of trying to figure out exactly what it is the conductor does–by DOING IT.

This is a wonderful piece–beginning to end, full of really good stuff, and I suspect equally edifying for conductors and non-conductors alike. (There may be some cynical brass players or 5th desk second violins who still put up their noses, but oh well.) Excellent.  Some of my favorite quotes:

“I’m standing on a podium, with an enameled wand cocked between my fingers and sweat dampening the small of my back. Ranks of young musicians eye me skeptically. They know I don’t belong here, but they’re waiting for me to pretend I do. ..”

or this: ” ‘Knowing the score’—the expression implies mastery, but it doesn’t suggest the sustained and solitary study that’s required to achieve it. There are a few miles of roadway that I have driven often enough to navigate them faultlessly in my mind: I know every pothole, every deer crossing. A conductor needs similarly detailed recall of an enormous musical terrain. ..” (yes!!!)

About Gilbert: “A conductor has to be simultaneously ahead of the music and with it, experiencing and expecting at the same time—manufacturing an extended déjà vu. When Gilbert works, you can see the pulse thrumming through his body, diggadiggadiggadigga, yet he also projects a commanding serenity. ” (I want someone to say of that of me someday; it so perfectly encapsulates everything I’m working for…)

My favorite: “Staring at my hands like a toddler who’s just discovered his thumbs…” (That was me in October. Or whenever I try to get a grip on the end of the 2nd mvt. of the Brahms Requiem.)

“The modern maestro tries to at least simulate humility. Mine is totally unfeigned.”

And quotes from his teachers in this process, Alan Gilbert and James Ross–

(Ross) “A lot of great conductors are shy, even though you wouldn’t know that from how they handle large groups of people. That shyness can actually help in intimate music. You have to let people see what’s inside you, even if you don’t do that in the rest of your life.”

(Gilbert) “Your hand shouldn’t make the tempo; it should revealthe tempo.”

(Ross) “We feel guilty if we don’t bring all this energy…But we have to realize the emotional life of the music is going to be there, no matter what’s going on inside us.”

(Gilbert) “Assume good will. The orchestra wants to play wonderfully for you. If you hear the perfect performance in your head, then you can just conduct along, and you’re creating the conditions for that to happen.”

And from Davidson again, the crux of it all, stated in a way I have never heard before but instantly resonate with: “In Italian, the word maestro also means teacher. As we power toward the final cadence and I exchange glance after glance with the young musicians, it occurs to me that they are bombarding me with unspoken questions and it’s my job to convey answers. That’s what a conductor does: mold an interpretation by filtering the thousands of decisions packed into every minute of symphonic music. The clarinetist inclined to add a little gleam to a brief solo by slowing down slightly, the tuba player preparing for a fortissimo blast after twenty minutes of nothing—each will look to the podium for a split-second shot of guidance, and the conductor who meets those fleeting inquiries with clarity and assurance will get a more nuanced performance.”

Yes. He’s got it. If I can someday conduct as well as he writes about conducting, I’ll be happy.

Once in Royal David’s City…

I don’t know why, but this is the first year I have ever gotten off my butt to figure out when and where I might be able to hear the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols broadcast from King’s College in Cambridge…

WFMT lost the feed for a few minutes, but they got it back somewhere in Peter Cornelius’s lovely “The Three Kings.” (I love that…once I got to sing the solo part with my women’s quartet in the SSAA arrangement, although the other 3 didn’t love it the way I did, and it’s far superior with a nice rich baritone on the solo, my mezzo pride will even let me admit.) I miss the old not-as-exciting Willcocks descant for Once In Royal David’s City, the one I learned when I was about 8, but I do love that they use the chestnut descants for O Come and Hark the Herald.

This Christmas, especially musically, I’m thinking a lot about my grandmother, who died three Christmases ago sometime in the small hours of the morning. I returned from Midnight Mass and moments later got a phone call from my mom saying that she’d just quietly gone. I still hold in my heart the thought that she wanted to hear Silent Night sung at church one more time and slipped her spirit over to my sleepy parish church on her way home, because the timing was perfect.

My grandmother was where my love for Christmas music was born and grew. Silent Night. Once in Royal David’s City–she had the LP of Lessons and Carols and we listened to it every year. (I can to this day recite the first lesson, complete with sweet chorister Queen’s English accent, from memory.) The Boston Camerata–she loved the baritone’s rendition of the Gloucestershire Wassail…

I find I’m missing her more this year than any other Christmas since she died,  and weeping more when I hear particular pieces of music. She loved Christmas so much–the music more than anything.

Virtual Choir 3 is coming

I didn’t discover the existence of the virtual choirs until the second one was in post-production (which was about the time I saw Eric’s first TED talk and discovered that he is not, as I had very wrongly assumed from his name and music, a short middle aged Englishman with thinning hair and tweed suits and questionable social skills which nonetheless would be part and parcel of his ability to write lovely other-worldly choral music), and I was pretty much blown away.

Now Virtual Choir 3 is here. Apparently the fangrrls and boyz broke the internet in its early moments online, but no doubt the Jedi Master and his followers will have it repaired shortly. This time I’m totally in–I want to be part of this.

(*snort* In the time it took me to type the above, the link appears to be repaired.  The Force is strong with this one.)

So…who else is in?

Murder Your Darlings

I love to read books on writing by writers. Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. Stephen King’s On Writing.

Anne Lamott talks about the “Shitty First Draft.” It is she who got me through the first blathery draft of my manuscript, now ready to be gone over and reorganized into something that can go to the copy editor.

Stephen King, when talking about that very process of self-editing one’s shitty first draft into an actual piece of writing, tells us “you must murder your darlings.” (Leave it to King to find such a picturesque way to put it.) No matter how much you like a particular sentence or paragraph or image, if it doesn’t serve the larger work, out it goes. Kill it. Murder your darlings.

I just cut my favorite 3 pages of the introduction, because it works better without them.  I hate it, but it had to be done.

Sigh.

[UPDATE: My editor has since asked me to put them back, because he liked them too. So there.  At least this darling gets to survive...]