The first job postings for 2008-2009 are starting to trickle in, so it occurs to me that the time is upon us for a short recap of observations regarding my friend (or foe) and yours, the musicology job wiki.

I should preface my comments by saying that I didn’t watch the job wiki nearly as closely this year as last.  Part of that was because I spent the better part of my spring preparing/polishing an article and a dissertation prospectus (that is also my excuse for having not written anything for Amusicology since March!).  I did, however, check in enough to sense a significant increase in the number of users.  This is based on the speed at which things were updated (based on what I heard from friends on the market and at hiring institutions) and the extensive comments made in the newly added “general discussion” area.  More on that in a minute.

First some stats (along with the caveat that this info is based on what is currently available on the wiki):

This year there are known results for 96 tenure track, temporary, and post-doc positions in music history/musicology/ethnomusicology.  There are 14 more with unknown acceptances.  Nine searches are apparently still going, 12 have no updates since their initial listing, and 9 more ended with no placement (canceled/failed).

The grand total of positions listed via the wiki during 2007-2008:  140

This is more than double that of the 66 listed during 2006-2007 (see my previous posts on the subject for more on last year, first one & second one).  At the same time, the outcome rate, when we know who has filled the position, is somewhat lower: 68% this year and 79% last year.

Here is how schools did:

# means that one placement is a post-doc.

* means that one (or two if **) placement went to an ABD candidate.

15 Schools placed 1 graduate: Alberta, Arizona, Brandeis, Duke#, Florida, Georgia*, Indiana, North Texas, Northwestern, Ohio State, U of British Columbia, University of Virginia#, Western Ontario*, Wisconsin, and Yale

10 Schools placed 2 graduates: Colorado, Florida State University, Oregon, Princeton, Stanford*, Maryland, Minnesota, UC-Davis, UC-San Diego, and USC

9 Schools placed 3 graduates:  Cornell, CUNY#, Eastman**, Harvard, Michigan, NYU##, UT-Austin, U-PENN, and Wesleyan

4 Schools placed 4 graduates: Columbia#*, Illinois, UC-Santa Barbara#,  and UNC

1 School placed 5 graduates: UC-Berkeley

1 School placed 6 graduates: UCLA

1 School placed 7 graduates: Chicago*

“Top” 3 2007-2008:                                      “Top” 3 2006-2007:

1. Chicago (7 this year, 1 last year)                 1. Harvard (7 last year, 3 this year)

2. UCLA (6 this year, 1 last year)                     2-3. Columbia (3 last year, 3 this year)

3. Berkeley (5 this year, 2 last year)                              & Pittsburgh (3 last year, 0 this year)

Since we don’t know number of PhDs that any of these (or other institutions) granted this year, it isn’t immediately obvious how many of these positions went to newly minted PhDs versus those with previous positions—with the exception of one grad from UCLA.  Regardless, it will be interesting to see the results next year and see if we have another completely different set of “top” schools placing their PhDs as well as those not quite yet there.

An interesting new addition this year was move to indicate the status of a hire as “ABD.”  By my count, that means seven placements went to candidates that didn’t have the PhD in hand when they landed that first job—though I presume they are probably pretty close!  The positions these scholars obtained run the range of ethno vs. historical and tenure vs. temporary.

More stats (based on those searches with known hire information):

Temporary

12 are one to three year positions music history/musicology

8 are one to three year positions in ethnomusicology

Tenure Track[1]

33 list music history or musicology

14 list specialties (post-1800, Baroque/Classical/Rom, 20^th/21^st, etc.)

19 give no further information

19 list ethnomusicology

6 list specialties (Latin American studies, African, jazz, etc.)

13 give no further information

8 list combinations of historical- and ethnomusicology, or broader categories (North American, Critical and Comparative Studies, Interdisciplinary Arts)

7 offer no further detail

It would be great to compare this info to the information from last year.  However, I don’t have the info from last year, because someone deleted the archives (one of the few disadvantages of it being a wiki...))

This year there were more openings for those with historical leanings.  Increasingly, however, institutions seem to not distinguish what type (ethno or historical) of degree they are looking for.  Of course this sort of thing causes confusion, which prompted one person to begin a “general discussion” area in order to figure out the differences between UT-Austin’s two jobs.  These were listed as “African-American” and “North American” and a mini-debate emerged, “since they're not very mutually exclusive,” as one person reasonably stated.  Someone from the search committee eventually jumped in to help clarify things.  In the end, however, one of the jobs went to a candidate who some felt didn’t really “fit” any of the descriptions, official or otherwise.  A final contributor to this particular discussion chimed in: “I think this shows you should apply for what you are qualified to do and not second guess what the search committee is looking for. Often THEY don't know until they start looking at applicant files!”  A good point to keep in mind--though I don't think any search committee would suggest applying to every program out there.  Some discretion is certainly in order.

The primary objective of this wiki is to keep candidates abreast of the hiring stages of things in the midst of the season.  I think this year it did a particularly good job at that (though some of the discussions weren’t necessarily job-specific (see the rant about AMS program selection)).  Increasingly, it provides us with insight regarding the hiring trends of our discipline--something I hope will continue.  As I prepare to post this, it appears that someone has cleaned the slate and archived last season’s info.  The process begins anew. 

Good luck to everyone on the market this year!  And, as I’ve said before: Congratulations to all of those who gained professorial employment this year - I hope to join you soon!

The international conference, Crosscurrents, brings together scholars from both sides of the Atlantic to examine musical interactions between North America and Europe during the twentieth century, and aims to promote a deeper grasp of the close ties that linked American composers to their colleagues abroad. The types of connections among these musicians span the gamut from individual contacts to institutional collaborations to governmental programs. As appropriate for the theme of the conference, it will be divided between the two locations Cambridge, MA, and Munich, Germany, with the emphasis for the former on the first half of the twentieth century, and for the latter, the second. The aim of the conference is to present new research from an international group of scholars on a topic that is of fundamental importance to the history of 20th century music, but which is often overlooked in an age of extreme specialization: the mutual influence between North America and Europe that affected virtually every aspect of music and musical life during the 20th century. There will be 32 speakers (16 for each part) who come from six countries and have expertise in a wide range of twentieth-century music topics. Concerts are an integral part of the event, and a new work has been commissioned for it by the French-American composers Betsy Jolas.

Read More at the official web site: http://crosscurrents08-09.org

Amusicology will be live-blogging it. Or at least I'll plan to be there.

Drew does a post-op on his first solo class

            For the past seven weeks, I have been teaching a course at Northeastern University, their survey course in American music for majors. Twenty-eight students and I met four times a week, for an hour and a half, in an effort to, as I wrote in my “course goals” document, “introduce students to the main repertoires and themes of American music, from colonial times to the present.” Such an experience was a big departure from my previous teaching experience, which was all as a teaching fellow at Harvard (best of all, my email address while teaching there was dr.massey@northeastern.edu. Lol.) Here is a redux of what I learned:

No such thing as overpreparation

            One of the difficulties in planning the class was not having a feeling for the institutional culture prior to beginning the teaching. How well would the students handle analysis? What would their level be? Would they want to perform in class? Not knowing first hand, it was tricky to plan to far in advance beyond the first week. What, after all, would be the point of planning out a seven-week course, only to find that it was incompatible with the students’ learning styles?

            So preparing the day-to-day classes became the major time investment for this course, and I realized that, not once in seventy-odd hours of instruction, did I feel that a single moment of preparation was wasted. I also realized, late in the semester, that adding “study guide” to a Google search for material could expedite my own work considerably (as in “West Side Story” “Study Guide” for one class).

Be clear, firm, and flexible

            I once heard someone portray their undergraduate students as “linear.” In its original context, this had a faintly pejorative connotation of describing students who were preoccupied with what was on the exam. But on the other hand, if assessment is viewed as integral to the course (a not infrequently recommended “best practice”), there is really no offense in being completely explicit about what you think the students should take from the class. At the same time, since I was building the class out as I went along, often the defining take home that I imagined would change over the course of the week. So my solution was to circulate both a preliminary study guide on Monday, as well as a final one on Thursday. For the students who took the time to review these, it is clear that they sailed through the midterm and the final.

Use the textbook

            Textbooks are somewhat anathema at Harvard (excepting ones written by the professor actually teaching the course), for reasons that are not hard to understand. Faculty want latitude to shape their course, and teaching without a textbook also establishes the professor as the overriding authority in the classroom. After all, without a textbook, no student can be confused when the course departs from it.

            In this, my first solo flight, I decided to use Richard Crawford’s admirable textbook, which includes with it a three CD set of recordings and has a companion volume of primary source readings. For one thing, it expedites students’ studying, since there is a definitive text to work from. It also gave a clear shape to the lectures, so that I could focus on “adding value” in the classroom rather than merely delivering information.

Don’t use the textbook

            As I became more comfortable with the pace of the class, though, I found my plans for each class meeting departing more and more from Crawford’s  shape. With musical theater, for example, I decided that students would be much better served by looking at two individual musicals (Oklahoma! and West Side Story) in more detail, rather than trying to cover numbers from several shows. Also, since students in this class were largely in the Music Industry program at Northeastern, they had a conversancy with contemporary popular music which I thought helpful to underscore the contingent nature of history books in general. Allowing students to “discover” that the textbook is only representative, not comprehensive, had to be managed carefully. Nevertheless, I felt that a number of them understood by the end of the course that a survey course like this necessarily skipped a lot. If that ignited their imagination to go and find out more, I feel I accomplished my job as their teacher.

The students get tired faster than the teacher does

            This was more of a lesson that I learned about summer intensive classes, but I think that it is probably true for courses during a normal academic year, as well.  I realized by the fourth week or so that the level of energy of the students (as well as attendance) was beginning to fluctuate considerably. So I gave myself permission to “ease off the gas” some, since I realized that the students might be at exactly their saturation point. Having taken an intensive summer Italian course a few years ago, I know that by week four I had definitely checked out. So I gave myself permission to cover less, in more detail.

            All in all, I felt like a learned a lot in this class, and, as I grade my students’ finals, I think that they did too. The format of intensive summer courses seems particularly well suited towards practice-oriented subjects (like speaking a foreign language).  Since teaching itself  is highly practical (and the classroom is where the most beautifully crafted plans can quickly disintegrate), I would highly recommend nabbing the opportunity to teach a summer intensive course to anyone who has the chance, both for the benefit of students who may not be able to take it during the academic year and as a crucible for your own teaching practice. Having just finished one though, I am ready for a nap.

Happy Birthday Amusicology!

Time flies.  I almost let the day go by unmarked, despite the fact that I’ve been telling myself that I’d write something for the anniversary of our little blog.  And here it is, 11:15pm and I’m exhausted—it is hard to imagine the energy to have a “Very Musicological Day” like the one I wrote about a year ago.

Not to say that I didn’t have a very musicological day today:

8:00am – Final prep for teaching a section on the “Dream Ballet” from Oklahoma! for course on American Musicals in American Culture taught by my advisor, Carol Oja

10:07am – Section meeting #1

11:00am – Rewind

11:07am – Repeat (aka Section meeting #2)

1:00pm – Attend lecture for aforementioned course

2:00pm – Teaching staff meeting

3:00pm-5:00pm – Dissertation support group #1 (Students writing American music dissertations)

6:30pm-9:30pm – Dissertation support group #2 (Third years graduate students finalizing prospectus—is the plural of prospectus really prospectus?)

While it doesn’t sound as glamorous as other musicological days I’ve had recently (the SAM conference in San Antonio was full of them), it was a productive one—both professionally and personally.  And, like most career choices, that’s a good thing.  The reality of our field is that it’s not every day that you meet a “famous” musicologist (my wife likes to remind me to put that word in scare quotes), give a conference paper, or are blessed with a publication.  The day to day is sometimes nothing more than just the day to day, but looking over the course of a year progress emerges—exams are passed, chapters get written, hires are made.

My advisor recently said something that I’ve really come to embrace—her original phrasing was much more elegant than my summary here:  Many of us musicologists started our musical lives as performers.  For those of us that are pianists, our transition into the world of scholarship meant trading one type of keyboard for another.  Words are our art and, just like music, we need to practice continually.  To create truly enjoyable (and readable) scholarship, we need to spend some time each day in front of our instrument refining our skills.

Some days I share my “practice room time” with the world.

My first post to amusicology got one comment (from my sister (who made fun of me (fair enough))).  I think she was the only one who visited the site for a few weeks.  Since then, Drew and I have been fortunate enough to create a small group of dedicated readers.  Google Analytics informs me that we’ve got a core readership (people who visit at least once a week) of just over 1000 readers, which is quite humbling, really.  Thank you to everyone who stops by—especially those who take the time to comment.

We’ve had a great deal of support (and traffic) from the musicological blogosphere.  Dial M, Musicology / Matters, Soho The Dog, Phil Gentry (aka Barnet Bound), People Listen to It, Musically Miscellaneous Mayhem, to name only a few—visit them if you don’t already.

I’d also like to thank our guest bloggers: Jake, Gina, Zoe, Sarah, Ben, and Jack.  If you haven’t read their insightful posts, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to do so now.

Also, a reminder:  We’re always open to submissions.  Click “Contact” in the top left corner if you’ve got an idea you want to share.

Thanks for reading!

Recently, I experienced this very sensation that Key advocates; it was a revelatory experience and an empowering moment for a young, budding musicologist. I took my knowledge of music and my unique analytical approach and delivered it to a knowledgeable audience outside of the claustrophobic world of music scholarship. This transcendent moment just so happened to take place at an interdisciplinary academic conference.

OK, I know, it’s not as though I was really scaling those ivory tower walls that close in academia. Yet in a room of about forty attendees at the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association and American Culture Association Annual Conference in Albuquerque, NM, I felt myself break through that boundary between musicologist and everyone else in the world, and truly feel as though I was (dare I say?) helping people by imparting my knowledge to them.

The conference itself is a hodge-podge of topics dealing with American culture in the Southwestern U.S. and Texas. Unlike a typical music conference, panels are not merely broken up into subjects, but there are certain “areas,” each with their own track of sessions. The interdisciplinary nature of a field as broad as popular culture or American culture allows, even necessitates, this partitioning. So there is the Cowboy Culture area, with eight or nine panels devoted to this topic, and presenters from various academic fields, from anthropology to history to sociology and so forth. There’s a hip-hop area, and an atomic age area, and a Marvel Comics area. And then there’s the Grateful Dead area.

The Grateful Dead caucus, as it has become known, has met consecutively under the auspices of this conference for eleven straight years. The presenters are sociologists, communications theorists, computer scientists, political scientists, independent scholars, musicians, ethnomusicologists, music theorists, historians, and American studies scholars.

This year I presented a talk called “Harmonic and Geographic Ambiguity in the Grateful Dead’s Terrapin Station.” It was (I thought) an excellent paper that drew on the connections between the musical representation of place (my current intellectual kick) and a Dead song called Terrapin Station.  In the paper, I talked about how the opening section of the song is basically a strophic modal exploration, alternating primarily between F major and C major with a beautiful F Lydian vocal melody above. I did what musicologists do, breaking down the harmonic and formal parameters of the song to illustrate the lack of a definitive tonal statement, no V-I cadence to tell which key the song is in. Not until the second section of the song do we hear an authentic cadence, and by that point, it is in A major.[2] The synthesis of all this analysis is that, much like the geographic location of the fictional Terrapin Station, the harmony of the song is ambiguous, wandering, and never wholly tangible in any way that can be pinned down.

I faced an interesting challenge in presenting this material to a non-music audience. While everyone in the group was a music lover, not all were music literate. Needless to say, five minutes of my talk were given over to what I affectionately called “The Idiot’s Guide to Common Practice tonality,” a little primer on the basics of tonic, dominant, cadences, and what it means to cadence on the tonic — how that feels as though you’ve come home.

My intended reaction was that people would see the links between the song’s geographical identity and its harmonic identity, and understand that the slightly airy, ephemeral feeling of the modal section was tied in some way to the ineffable and intangible nature of this place, Terrapin Station. But the actual reactions were so much different, and personally, more rewarding.

One of the conference attendees, a sociologist well-respected in her field, exuberantly informed me that my presentation had “explained that, musically, there is a rationale for something Deadheads have all felt and known for years.” She was so happy, because she finally understood that musical moment. Other participants echoed her sentiments. It was as if the entire room had experienced a communal “Eureka!” moment.

And it suddenly occurred to me: these fellow scholars benefited from my talk in ways I never imagined. My intent was never to “explain” why the song does what it does—it was always to illustrate the unique connection between musical place and harmony. That, in itself, I thought was interesting enough to generate some lively discussion. Yet it was an entirely unintended effect that my talk had on the audience. My colleagues were, to use Dead-esque terminology, “turned on” to the inner musical workings of a song that they all knew, inside and out. I had never felt this way before: what I do academically could actually help non-musicians better understand their world.

Musicologists can save the planet! Susan Key hopes so, my cynicism thinks slightly better of that notion, though I’ll keep the dream alive. However, we can certainly bring our knowledge, approaches, methodologies, and critical elucidations to a group of individuals who are educated and intelligent, but not necessarily musically-literate or musically-knowledgeable. These individuals just so happen to remain within those very walls Key asks us to scale.

The so-called “new musicology” was ushered in by the first Gen X PhDs—the move towards critical approaches to traditional subjects eventually opened up the floodgates for what was considered musicologically worthy, which in turn opened up even more approaches to scholarship.  Over the past decade (and the rise of iGen technologies) the resources of the “information superhighway” [a term used here tongue in cheek] have completely changed the rules of research and scholarship—and pedagogy.  We’ve securely entered a new phase which I think should be called “Millennial Musicology.”

Type “Millennials” into google and after the seemingly obligatory initial result link to wikipedia, is a page on “Managing Millennials” in the workplace—increasingly a concern in academia as well. 

As the iGen label implies, digital and web-based information is an overriding characteristic of members of the Millennial generation.  Last week on the AMS listserv was a series of emails which began with a practical question of how someone’s student should properly cite a YouTube video in a paper.  This quickly followed the arc of most threads related to web-based scholarship, calling into question the same old questions about the reliability of sources, copyright issues, and the dangers of wikipedia—all adversarial responses to the internet.  As such, I followed the thread with only limited interest.  I would, however, like to mention that one message offered an even better site for capturing streaming video than the one I had been using before: www.vixy.net.

And while I don’t have a problem with making a personal archival copy of YouTube video (from a VHS recording) of a television broadcast from 1984, it becomes an awkward source to recognize in footnote form.  This was ultimately why the question was first posed to the listserv.  Due to the instability of YouTube clips, referencing the original web link is impractical—my aforementioned clip from 1984 is now “unavailable.”  Ultimately, I’m not that concerned about it.  I have a copy on my desktop and when it comes time to make the proper citation in the dissertation, I’ll do it the old/traditional way: by tracking down the original broadcast information and formatting it as dictated by Turabian.

My current students would (almost certainly) never take the time to do this.  Not only is it the case that many web clips carry no indication of the original source, but I also don’t get the sense that many Millennials feel that the tracking down of such information is necessary, despite our insistence on proper footnotes.  A growing assumption is that if you found something once, you can find it again.  Another assumption (supported by last week’s listserv emails) is that many professors don’t accept such material as legitimate research data.  Telling students not to use web-based resources goes against their internet-fueled worldview—one that I find provides very interesting and current attitudes to historically based discussion.

The reality of “googling” it is that it more and more frequently leads to the best information out there.  It used to be the case that the search bar would lead you to misinformation hosted on amateur websites.  Now some of the first google results are academic articles (via JSTOR), full/partial scans of serious musicological studies (via google books), and free high-quality streaming audio (via Rhapsody).  At the same time, fed into the mix are items such as streaming video and blog entries—items Millennials see as reasonable and valuable data.

I too consider it reasonable and valuable, which is why I’m considering this generation jump.  My biggest reason for embracing non-standard sources is the simple fact that I use them all the time myself.  Like my students, I often begin research on a new subject by typing it into Google.  Yesterday, a single search yielded sources like those above as well as other valuable bits of data for my dissertation.  That said, I did have to trek uphill in the snow (serious) to get to the library for some non-virtual sources.  I also planned a research trip to an archive.  While the internet will never make every manuscript, royalty statement, or interview available, resources continue to surface which provide easy access to such information.  Aaron Copland oral history podcast, anyone?

I began my higher education amidst the flurry New Musicology, but as I approach the end of my PhD, we’re clearly in a new phase.  My research methods and ways of thinking are greatly shaped by the internet, aligning me more with Millennial Musicology—a mode of scholarship that also fuses the critique of the New Musicology with the data-driven approach of the so-called positivists (and a healthy serving of ethnography).  There are certainly important aspects of millennial musicology beyond these.  However, the change in access to and the dissemination of information will clearly be the strongest markers of the current generation of scholarship.

Not so much a musicological statement this morning; perhaps more of a "this is our future" one.  Please go vote in the primaries if you live in a state that is holding them today.  I'd hate to see New York win again...

If you still need help choosing, I suggest Phil Ford's post from a while back.

Throughout most of the first act, George spends his Sundays fastidiously sketching his surroundings on La Grande Jatte: a tree, a lady with parasol, a couple lunching, a boatman and his curious dog—all receive the undivided attention of the artist. No one can quite grasp George’s excessive interest in these and other seemingly random/mundane subjects which catch his imagination. In fact, most people think him insane.

I see here a curious link to my dissertation in all this. I saw Sunday after completing a few days of archive digging in the New York Philharmonic archives. This work yielded some interesting new clues in my ongoing work on Leonard Bernstein and his complicated relationship with Rhapsody in Blue—a relationship that greatly influenced the reception of the work in American culture. I went to the NYP archives after the head archivist called to my attention a series of marked-up Rhapsody scores used by Bernstein over the course of his career. After completing my work with these, I followed some tangential paths of inquiry. Down one of these I found myself wading through a vast collection of clippings, memos, and other ephemera from the NYP’s 1959 tour of Europe and the Soviet Union. This included everything from Greek-language responses to the orchestra, to a memo from the State Department informing the gentleman of the orchestra to leave their wives at home, to Lenny’s notarized request that his father, Samuel, be extended the same diplomatic courtesies that he would receive.

Both the archivist and her assistant were extremely gracious with their time and knowledge—but I couldn’t help but get the feeling think they found what I was doing (if not me too!) slightly insane. Such self-imposed sentiment isn’t unique to my experience here, but in most places in which I’ve conducted research. At the same time, my requests and questions are probably no more peculiar than any other musicologist doing research. And, at the close of my time there, I had several nice, if slightly imperfect “sketches.”

I have two favorite moments in Sunday in the Park with George—both, I think, relevant here. The first is a song/scene called “Finishing the Hat.” Here’s a YouTube clip of Mandy Patinkin’s performance. After all his efforts, which have come at the sacrifice of all that surrounds him, he proudly concludes: “Look, I made a hat...where there never was a hat.” While I certainly try not to lose site of what is really important, I do identify with his point. After all the interviews, archives, and conference papers...what will I have? Something that never existed: a dissertation chapter. While my hat—in all its effort—will be something to be proud of, it is still just a hat. And what good is a hat on its own?

My other favorite part of the show is the final scene of the first act—“Sunday.” Here is a clip. All of the cast members (each the result of a different Sunday’s sketching session) are on stage. It is only as George physically moves them around, positioning and repositioning, that the audience becomes fully aware of what is going on. On the final chord, each of these individual characters freeze in place completing Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte. The power of this is diminished when not experienced live, but it is one of those rare “aw ha!” moments. The painting is now imbued with all the detailed, focused efforts of the artist as well as the back-stories of each carefully explored person and element—especially the hat. Even those intimately familiar with the painting are taken aback by this new perspective on a classic work.

I’m hoping to do the same thing with Rhapsody in Blue. I’d tell you how I’m planning to do this, but based on the recent conversations I’ve had with those further along (or recently done with) the dissertation, my final canvas will look vastly different than it does now. Regardless, I continue to sketch relentlessly—hoping that all my neurotic work eventually coalesces into a coherent and valuable statement.

I fared well in Paris last summer, not least because I was standing on the shoulders of giants. Lurking in footnotes in monographs and dissertations by scholars of the French eighteenth century, I found call numbers to several obscure nouvelles à la main, as well as a number of other leads I was curious to explore in greater detail. One Rameau scholar cites an extant draft of this or that treatise; another corroborates; still another warns that the surviving sources paint a stranger, richer picture. I remember being dumbstruck to finally find that the extent and copying profile of one manuscript draft of Rameau was neither as detailed nor as informative as previous writers have described. It is without a doubt necessary to go to Paris, go to the archives, and confirm such details for oneself. I could not imagine confidently releasing research results to the world without first coming to my own conclusions in the archive, even as so many other scholars have preceded me.

As I concluded the first of several such archival investigations in Paris last year, I wondered when I would return, and for how long. Beyond this, I thought about the somewhat ironic nature of my even being there in the first place, a minority, to be sure, as an American presence in the archives. With all of the history and repertoire that exists for me to research in my own country, from the dance of colonial New England to the music of the civil rights movement in the 1960s to modern rock soundtracks and beyond, why have I chosen to direct my energies beyond the American border? I am a foreigner in France, culturally and politically, and yet the crises of taste formation and musical aesthetics I see brewing in Paris, from the seventeenth century all the way to the present, speak to me on a personal level as manifestations of a much more universal condition: the struggle to put our experiences of music, and its performers, into words.

Perhaps it should not pique my curiosity as much as it does that I come to French studies as an outsider. Or perhaps it should. As I look around myself in libraries in Paris, the larger part of my colleagues are French men and women researching the history of their own musical culture. Here and there, one person is at work on lutenists in the seventeenth century; another peers intently at the recent edition of Rameau’s Platée by American musicologist M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet. I hear nobody paging materials related to Charles Ives’s brief stint in Paris in the early 1930s, nor do I see my French colleagues engaged in archival investigations into pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s storied relationship with the Paris Conservatoire. Instead, many of the French scholars at work in Paris last summer were investigating Rameau or the history of French opera, exactly as I was.

As I ponder these patterns more carefully, I am pleased to remind myself that my research on the history of French music, however paradoxically, has brought me into closer contact with fellow American scholars. It would have been unthinkable for me to reopen the case file on Rameau in the archives of the Académie des Sciences without first consulting Thomas Christensen, among the most recent scholars to devote considerable attention to one of the composer’s theoretical drafts housed there in manuscript. I was also pleased to make the acquaintance of Roger Briscoe as part of my project on Rameau’s theoretical works in the middle of the eighteenth century. Though he no longer researches music theories of the French Enlightenment, his advice to me as part of a new generation of young Americans at work in Paris was indispensable. I look forward to other such connections, at home and abroad, as I continue reading and reconsidering primary sources from the French eighteenth century.

And aren’t such connections the reason we set out to become musicologists in the first place? I do enjoy the solitude of the archive, without a doubt: the days spent rummaging through files and boxes, taking a break for a meal alone, conversing with one or two librarians at most. But I sought out musical scholarship as a way to connect with other people, to continue to turn over that fascinating question of how best to put our experiences of music into words. The more opinions I hear about this and other challenges in the musical and literate realm, the more I am convinced that we exist as colleagues to lighten scholarly burdens for one another, whether we find ourselves engaged in research at home or abroad.

    The benefits of submitting my work to a journal, I thought, far outweighed the possibility of a negative outcome.  Ideally, of course, the article would be accepted and after a few harried corrections, it would be published.  Alternatively, I might be asked to revise and resubmit, thus strengthening my submission when it actually appeared in print.  Even if my work were rejected outright, I would still get valuable reader comments so that my article would be better for the next attempt at publication.

    My utopian view of journal publication was quickly shattered after the first journal rejection.  Editor #1 offered only potentially deprecating comments about my work with little helpful feedback.  The opening line, stating that the article was 'pedantic yet supposedly well researched,' inspired little confidence that this editor had taken my work seriously.  Editor #2 was less vitriolic, stating that the article was an interesting one, but not musicology.  To this day, I am still not sure what this comment means.  Certainly my work is closer to cultural history, but I would not classify it as outside of the discipline entirely.  At any rate, a lesson was learned: research the journal more carefully prior to submission.

    For the second attempt at publication, I made several amendments to the article, taking out the section analyzing the piece (which Editor #1 of Journal #1 had found extraneous) and toning down some of the more speculative sections.  I also had a colleague read it over prior to submission, hoping that a new set of eyes might provide a better perspective.  Off it went, only to be rejected five months later.  This time around, according to the reader, I had not provided a sufficient political context for the piece – a comment that struck me as odd since much of the article argued against politicization until a far later date in its reception history.  A quick glance at the editorial board clarified the comment.  One of its members has done work examining the politicization of music that overlaps with the time and place I discuss.  Another lesson learned: along with researching the journal, consider precisely who will be asked to assess the article.

    One of my mentors from grad school pointed out to me at this point that three journal rejections was a bad sign.  Her practical sagacity was undoubtedly true, but I felt that another round of revisions and the advice of another colleague, this time around the article was stronger than ever.  It was more concise, less speculative, and presented a clearer case.  Furthermore, the complaint of pedantry leveled against it by Editor #1 of Journal #1 had been addressed.  The venue for publication I had chosen was headed by a scholar who had long advocated for cultural context in musical studies; even more promising was that his scholarly interests matched the time and place as mine.  I optimistically attached the revised article and sent it off via email.  The editorial assistant assured me that a decision would be made about the article within three months by the editors and if viewed as a potential match for the journal, then passed along to outside readers for assessment.

    Imagine my surprise seven months later when the article was rejected outright because it was not what the journal is looking for at this moment.  No additional feedback was provided.  This situation was my dystopia of publication, the absolute antithesis of what I had imagined when sending out this article a year and a half prior.  After receiving the rejection I asked the editorial assistant if there was any chance at getting some more concrete feedback.  I'm still waiting.

    My impassioned Facebook status about the situation garnered the sympathy of friends in academia.  One bemoaned that her article had been rejected on no concrete grounds (in fact an editor had commented that it was quite good) but likely because her topic was unfashionable.  A social scientist produced statistics demonstrating that a mere 0.6% of articles submitted to the most prominent journal in his field were accepted.  Another agreed with my assessment that the journal had behaved in a socially unacceptable manner, adding language that would likely be rejected by most academic journals.  In short, I was not the only one.

    The challenge and worries still remain.  I have another article that I hope to submit soon, but conflicting comments from my mentors (one loved it, one did not find it convincing) have me concerned.  If my story demonstrates anything, it is that handing the right article to the right person at the right time can ensure publication, but many factors can derail the process. To paraphrase the rejection email sent by journal #3: it's not me, it's them.  Such an answer, though, does little to alleviate concerns that without publication, there will be no tenure.  Or maybe it is me…