I don’t want to completely cross currents with what I’m writing about in the annotation for my song, but I wanted to bring up an aspect of working with GarageBand that I’m not discussing at length there: GarageBand’s drummer tracks are super creepy and I’m kind of afraid of them.  A drum machine, I can deal with, it’s a machine, I program it to play what I want it to play.  These “drummers” though, they know what I want them to play already somehow.  And yes, it is unsettling that the vast majority of them are clearly meant to be white guys, and that the only “women” and “people of color” (scare quotes here intended to be indicative of how weird it is that I’m even for a second thinking of these tracks as people, but technology is really, really weird like that) are in the alternative, hip-hop, and R&B genres.  There’s this almost subconscious association being made between ethnicity, gender and musical styles that is really off-putting. What would Arthur Lee or Eminem have to say about this, or for that matter Meg White or Mo Tucker, to name some drummers?  Still, none of this stopped me from using “Mason” and his “loose, swaggering, fill-heavy beats on a vintage-sounding kit all over my song project, and you know what, he does a damn good impression of Levon Helm if you make him follow a funk beat and nudge up the “Swing” slider.

Maybe that’s the ultimate commentary on the themes of this course. Maybe no matter how much technology’s intrusion into our music and our lives weirds us out, we’ll just keep going along with it whenever it’s convenient.  That’s not to say that the course or the conversation are irrelevant; in fact, I think this makes them more relevant than ever.  Music is one of the basic foundations of our or any other culture, and now it, along with everything else is becoming wrapped up in and inextricably linked with technology.  Whether we’re comfortable with it is irrelevant, it’s happening either way, but it behooves us as educated, informed individuals to keep abreast of the pace and nature of those changes.  If we don’t understand these trends, we will not be able to participate in a culture which changes rapidly and leaves behind all it cannot use.  So, at the end of the semester, I’m really glad i stumbled unknowingly into this course, and not because I already know a ton about American music and therefore some aspects of it came easily to me, even though that’s true. Quite the opposite; this course taught me a lot I didn’t already know about a subject I thought I had delved the depths of, and has helped me understand difficult concepts in new ways. I now have access to an entirely different way of thinking about music, and for that I’m grateful.

I like what I like, and I can’t always describe why that is. To paraphrase Potter Stewart, I’ll know it when I see it. Take my music tastes: when I put my iPod on shuffle, it’s likely that within the first hour, I’ll hear Bruce Springsteen, Radiohead, Dvorak, The Band, Taylor Swift (don’t you dare judge me), James Brown, Coltrane, Hank Williams, Gnarls Barkley, Woody Guthrie, Arcade Fire, the Animals, and myriad other disparate styles of music, and I’ll be bopping my head and singing along to each just as passionately.  So, I’d argue the claim that people will always seek out things that are similar to the things they like already–the things I already like aren’t even necessarily similar to each other in the first place.  So, streaming services have never really worked for me the way they’re intended to.  I need to get recommendations about new bands from my friends, most of whom are voracious consumers of music and always on the lookout for something new–as I am.

What’s more, if I lived in a neighborhood that didn’t have a grocery store where I could get bok choy, tahini, or serrano chiles (“hispanic vegetables” are your friends, they’re delicious!) I’d either burn a lot of gas driving to one that did, move, or become depressed.  My taste in food is also eclectic. I can’t remotely imagine myself going to the same five restaurants for the rest of my life, not when there are a dozen different kinds of ethnic food I’d be in the mood for right now.  Maybe it’s because I’m from Los Angeles, a huge city with an incredibly diverse population, not only ethnically but economically, but I don’t see any value in not challenging myself to go outside my comfort zone.  In fact, I’d go a step further: If I was around a bunch of people who thought and acted and bought the same things as me, first I’d wonder if I was dreaming, since I’m not sure such a place exists, but if it was real, THAT’S when I’d be uncomfortable.  I think when you get large and diverse populations living in a relatively compact area like you do in Los Angeles, the Zip Code thing starts to break down. The Zip Codes are too small, and even so it’s hard to define a specific type of person that lives in any of them.  To expand, I drive through ten Zip Codes on the way to the beach from my house; crossing those boundaries isn;t only not unusual, it’s the norm.

Maybe I’m just an iconoclast, but I think that way of living is better, and most of the people I know had similar experiences of being exposed to diversity constantly from a young age, and I think they’d agree that it’s better than never challenging your expectations. Go online and find recipes you’ve never heard of before and make them! Listen to your friend’s iPod in their car even though they only like EDM! Maybe you’ll find something new to love, and either way it’s better than stagnation.  American nationalism can be a celebration of diversity as long as you’re willing to be adventurous, not a weakening retreat into a mosaic of separate, homogenous cultures.

The discussion of the Turing test and the Chinese room analogy was, for me at least, one of the most psychologically rewarding discussions in the entire semester, because of how I think it ties in with some of the other, larger themes of the course.  The immediate question at hand is as follows: can there be such a thing as an intelligent machine, and if there can, how can we as outside observers tell?  Turing’s theory posits that a machine can said to be intelligent when an outside observer cannot tell whether they are communicating with a human or a machine.  Searle, on the other hand, puts forth an example: if someone who spoke Chinese was communicating with someone inside a room who did not speak Chinese, but had an elaborate instruction manual which made it possible for them to give proper responses to any Chinese phrase, the outside observer would be convinced they were communicating with a Chinese speaker, when in fact, the person had no idea what it was they were communicating.  I find this example, which I didn’t know about before taking this class, an incredibly effective and eye-opening rebuttal to Turing.

The larger point to be made here, why Searle doesn’t think Turing’s requirements are enough to label something as intelligent, is a point with which I’ve come to wholeheartedly agree: intent matters, and meaning cannot be interpreted from form alone.  A machine would have to understand what it is communicating before I could label it intelligent.  Soon after I came to this conclusion, I realized it had ramifications for Tosches’ embrace of the minstrel show. Sure, all music is imbued with politics, with boundary-transgression, and often the best music is that which is most bound up in those things, such as the countless white musicians who are influenced directly or indirectly by the black American blues tradition. To say that cultural borrowing should be unacceptable in music is anathema to my sensibilities; I don’t want to live in a world where Dave Brubeck and Bill Evans weren’t allowed to play jazz.  As Picasso said, poor artists borrow; great artists steal.  Music is no exception, and without that (often cross-cultural) borrowing of musical tropes, no creativity would be possible.  However, I can’t go as far as Tosches does. I can’t say the minstrel show was altogether a positive development, even if it’s musically relevant, even if it influenced much of American popular music. The reason why is the same as why I’ve come to accept Searle’s take on what it means to have artificial intelligence: intent matters.  Because the minstrel show was intended at its core to portray overt racism, because it was meant to put down blacks, it doesn’t matter how many black artists got their start there, or how good some of the music was. It’s still a disgusting institution that did more harm than good to American society.

The Book MP3: The Meaning of a Format by Jonathan Sterne offers an interesting and in-depth look at the various factors which had to come together over the course of a century for the file format which holds most of our music files today, the mp3, to come into existence, and subsequently prominence.  As dense as the book is–if there is indeed a less scientifically dense book on the subject, as Prof. O’Malley alluded to in class, why didn’t we read that instead?–learning about all these factors that at first glance would seem only tangentially related to the topic, such as telephony, turned out to have monumental impact on how most of our music sounds to most of us to this day.  Ultimately, I’m not sure what to do with all this information that I now have on the subject though: am I really supposed to consider the fate of the poor lobotomized cats which made my iPod possible when I’m using it to listen to the Beatles?  Sterne freely admits that people who are worried about the fidelity of the music on their mp3 players would be better served buying better headphones and/or speakers, as that will make a greater positive impact on how their music sounds to them than converting their files to a less-compressed format, and for far less effort. “Pre-echo” on percussive passages of music isn’t a thing I ever heard before this book told me to listen for it, and even now I have to be trying to find it in order to hear it.

However, where MP3 hits closer for me is in its description of the testing used to determine the compression algorithm for the format.  It seems that the groups who were administering the testing didn’t have enough of a range of music in mind.  While it’s certainly true that a limit of listening tests is that you cannot annoy the listener, it seems to me that you could have found some people who had the requisite knowledge to understand what they were listening for and wouldn’t be bothered by modern music, or music which focuses more on rhythm than melody, or polyrhythmic music, or whichever of the types of music that seem to be missing from the selected recordings that you want to go after.  At the very least, it would have been possible to have the expert listeners’ study be paralleled by another by a random sample of the population, which would tend to remove some of that middle-brow, “listenablility” bias, and then use some combination of the results of those two studies to determine which algorithm best reproduced the most music.

So, all in all, I really have no idea how to feel about copyright.  I like that, in theory, it protects individual content creators from having their work stolen from them, and ensures that they’ll receive compensation for their work. However, in practice, most of the time it’s being used by corporations to enclose old popular works and keep them from lapsing into the public domain so that the corporations can continue to profit on them.  On the other hand, I have little sympathy for artists like Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams, who didn’t really create anything new or different at all. Complicating matters further, though, I do feel sympathetic towards artists like NWA or Public Enemy, who sampled pieces of music they didn’t own.  Even though that is definitely outright theft of copyrighted material that they don’t own, they changed it, made it new and different, made it their own, transforming the sample into something much less like the original than the knock-offs created by Thicke and Williams, by Sam Smith, and even by George Harrison, whom I personally love.  I enjoy listening to My Sweet Lord, even knowing full well that it’s a rip-off of He’s So Fine, but I do agree that Harrison’s estate should be sharing the royalties with the Chiffons. I think in my ideal world, people would be able to sample music, but there’d be some sort of revenue-sharing system in place where the original content creator and the sampler could both claim some credit.  But, I’m not sure how I’d want to extend that courtesy to people who write songs that are clearly “inspired by” other songs to a greater or lesser extent.  Just changing the key and the tempo isn’t enough. Ideally, I’d want there to be some sort of rule that you have to have created something different in some meaningful way, but I have no idea how to measure that, and even if I did, ruling on that in a court of law would be nigh-impossible.

This class always asks more questions than it answers, and that can be frustrating.  However, my beliefs clearly aren’t really logically consistent in any meaningful way, and I need to figure out why that is.

I’m a huge fan of Wikipedia, I’ve spent (wasted? well, at least I was learning…) many an evening down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, clicking link after link, becoming engrossed in some topic of interesting to me and trying to learn everything there possibly is to learn about it, getting sidetrack by some unexpected interesting tangent that pops up in an article about something familiar and following it for a time before returning to my thread of original interest.  None of this would have really been possible in the same way before Wikipedia; there was an Encyclopedia in my house growing up, but turning page after page and even going between multiple volumes in my quest for knowledge would have taken all of the fun out of trying to learn in this free-form way. That’s the thing about Wikipedia: because it’s so easy to use, it’s actually really fun for any curious person with academic interests. I’d definitely agree that Wikipedia is a perfectly acceptable academic tool, largely because of its user-friendliness: it’s very easy to get a broad base of knowledge for use in organizing a paper in almost any subject. The fault would be treating it as one’s only source, as many Wikipedia articles don’t go into the necessary depth to support an academic thesis. However, another thing Wikipedia is usually very good about, especially when it comes to it articles in more academic areas, is citing its sources. The sources a wikipedia article cites are often perfectly good academic sources worth citing in any paper. Besides which, using ANY one source as the sole one in any paper would be a mistake in the first place, even it was from a well-respected textbook or scholarly journal.

Ok, so that’s all well and good, but the other thing from this weeks’ classes that’s sticking in my craw is the discussion we had about whether it’s good to wear suits when out in public, such as in class.  Prof. O’Malley put forth that showing the discipline to wear a suit reflects the discipline to focus on learning, but I’d argue that it merely reflects the discipline to wear a suit and nothing more. I only own one suit, and I didn’t even bring it to school with me from Los Angeles, does that mean that I’m not willing to really focus on learning? Shouldn’t the definition of what it means to have a public persona evolve with the times? Why should being a public person mean the same thing to me as it did to my grandparents and their grandparents?

I’m not sure I have really good answers to any of these questions I’m raising, and I’m not even sure whether I’m raising these questions solely to subconsciously give myself an academic-minded justification for my personal distaste for suits and shaving and cutting my hair and all that jazz. Nonetheless, I’d have appreciated it if Prof. O’Malley had done more than act as a devil’s advocate for the pro-suit side. At any rate, even if some aspects of that discussion bothered me, I’m glad we had it; I don’t think I’d ever had a reason why I don’t like wearing suits before besides “I don’t like suits”. I like it when I’m stimulated to question my positions, as I may be persuaded to change them, and even if I’m not, as was the case this time, it often leads me to a better understanding of my own beliefs. That intellectually challenging aspect is maybe my favorite part of this class.

Naturally, the origins of folk MUSIC have been lost to time immemorial, that’s the whole nature of folk music.  however, there are origins of the TERM “folk music” which can undoubtedly be traced in the english language, and in the history of people thinking and writing about that music.  In every case, on every platform on which I looked for the term, there were references to it in ways that would be completely recognizable and consistent to refer to “folk music” to a modern listener–that is to say, in reference to the traditional music of a particular people, in opposition to music in the art tradition such as classical music.  Its first references are often to English minstrels, as well as the indigenous music of african-americans, the Irish, and Native americans. Indeed the first reference of any kind that I could find is in an 1805 edition of the magazine Music (https://books.google.com/books?id=rBGBQ3bHl5MC&pg=PA206&dq=%22folk+music%22&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CDEQ6AEwBDgyahUKEwi91qO8p_DIAhWLaD4KHXuNDuU#v=onepage&q=%22folk%20music%22&f=false), found through google books and n-grams alike, where the reference is to the music of the Omaha Indians, described as belonging “aesthetically…to the primitive origins of melody, proceeding along harmonic lines” and noting that “from an ethnological point of view, these melodies are interesting”.  Similarly we see in the Philaelphia Evening Telegraph in 1870 (http://search.proquest.com/news/docview/171377199/260E886B50CE4739PQ/1?accountid=14541) that “Scotland and Germany stand pre-eminent for folk-music”, a term which is used interchangeably with “people’s music”, hinting at the german origin of the term in the word “volk”, meaning “common people”.  The article also notes that the significance of folk music in the cultures it looks at is two-fold: “not only the number, richness and beauty of these songs, but their present vitality in their fatherlands”.  There are references in an Atlantic Monlthy article from 1873 (http://search.proquest.com/news/docview/171377199/260E886B50CE4739PQ/1?accountid=14541) to Chaucer and how his works are imbued with folk-song traditions, showing clearly just how far back these traditions were recognized to go, even from the earliest days of discussing them. These references makes plain three things: One, that the term folk music is used not only to describe the music itself and how it sounds but also to ground that music in a particular culture and highlight that its study is essential to the study of that culture. Two, that the term “primitive” was clearly less troubling to use in the 19th century than it is today to refer to non-western cultures. Three, that the term “folk music” was probably in use much longer than the time period covered by the databases available, as it’s difficult to see any “evolution” of the term’s use.  Every reference to it is in a recognizable use, the one you’d expect to see going in to this blind.  If I had to guess, I’d say that using the term “folk music” to refer to this traditional, ethnic-cultural music which has value in study not only culturally but anthropologically, and which is defined in opposition to the formal tradition of art music, dates at least back to the 18th Century, and given the resources to study documents from further back, I’d be interested to see the genesis of the term, which clearly predates the available sources in these databases, as I doubt the term emerged fully-formed like Athena from its very first reference.

I suppose if I wasn’t also as interested as I am in Civil War history, I’d be wondering what any of this had to do with music history.  Nonetheless, here we are talking about the Civil War, and whether there were black confederates. I think it’s impossible that there were as many as 3,000 black SOLDIERS in the confederate army which marched from Frederick to Antietam in 1862.  I think it is, however, possible that 3,000 black men were with that army, mainly as servants and cooks and porters, and that Steiner very cleverly avoids giving an exact number of how many of the negroes were armed or even how many were wearing confederate uniforms. He says they were wearing “not only…cast-off or captured United States uniforms, but in coats with Southern buttons, state buttons, etc.” and that “MOST [emphasis mine] of the negroes had arms.”  I believe Steiner is deliberately inflating the number of actual black soldiers, of which there may well have been a few, at Frederick in order to make the confederates look bad.  Indeed, even Frederick Douglass’ assertion that there were black soldiers at Bull Run is dubious, as he certainly had the ulterior motive of wanting the Union to allow black soldiers, and the report of the battle upon which he relied is suspect, as it comes from a report of the battle riddled with other inaccuracies, as the analysis in the link from the email (http://deadconfederates.com/2011/07/30/frederick-douglass-reads-the-paper/) clearly shows.  Ultimately, it shows that if someone were to claim “well, if Frederick Douglass said there were black confederates, there must have been black confederates”, they don’t understand the aim of skepticism.  Frederick Douglass, though educated, esteemed, and a reliable source on many things, also had biases, motives, and faulty source material as much as anyone else of the period did. It would be wrong to claim that his words are unassailable simply because he’s black, and wouldn’t have had the same biased reason to claim there were black confederate soldiers as a white man.   As one last note, it’s worth noting that most of the sources I could find (such as http://www.marinersmuseum.org/blogs/civilwar/?p=2873, which may be a blog, but it’s one run by a museum and it also cites its own sources throughout the post) seem to agree that there were probably around 3,000 blacks who were actually official or semi-official soldiers ever in the Confederate army, which amounts to less than half a percent of either the total confederate forces or the black men of serving age in the south at the time, whichever way you want to look at it.  They also acknowledge that the reasons for serving would have been far more complex than merely supporting the cause, such as the blacks who were tasked with defending Richmond but never got the chance, who were promised their freedom.  Also, a large number of this comparatively small number were probably coerced. So, while it’s probably pretty factually accurate to say blacks fought as soldiers for the confederacy, it’s not like that undermines the claim that the war was fought over slavery. It manifestly was.

So, having finished Where Dead Voices Gather, I have to say I’m disappointed that my initial reactions held true throughout the book, and my hope for a greater focus on the admittedly fascinating story Tosches is telling never materialized. Ultimately, Tosches seems to care more about letting the reader know that he’s a great authority on the subject, and going off on tangential rants, and being weirdly critical of Elvis, and proving how smart he is, and cramming in every opinion he’s ever had about music prior to 1960, than actually informing them about the subject at hand. Sure, maybe that makes for a shorter book, but I wish an editor had told him to cut to the chase. I always felt like most double albums–The River and The White Album come to mind immediately, but I’m sure there are more examples–would have worked better as one fantastic single album, with higher standards for what makes the cut and what doesn’t.  I feel the same way about Tosches’ book.  I get that he’s trying to do a kind of stream-of-consciousness narrative, but in the end he’s not Bukowski or Joyce or Faulkner, and it just comes off as pretentious to me.  It makes it all the more frustrating a read that I was truly fascinated by the story of Emmett Miller, to the point where I think I’d love a better telling of his life story–I don’t think there are enough known facts for a full-on biography, but this feels like it’s begging to be a movie to me.  For all its obvious and glaring faults, the minstrel show is perhaps the spark from which all of American show business and pop culture sprang, and learning about it was fascinating, if repulsive on a visceral level, as I imagine seeing a minstrel show were I to go back and time and do so would be for me.  However, Tosches, for reasons which I don’t even begin to understand, feels the need to defend the minstrel show rather than present it as an ultimately flawed, backwards, and horribly racist institution–yet one that perhaps did some good, was influential and interesting, and even allowed many black performers to get their start eventually.  He more or less calls us the real racists for rejecting the minstrel show, and basically argues that all pop culture is racist anyway, and besides which some of his favorite musicians are black!  While there may be racist elements in many parts of subsequent pop culture, that doesn’t make it alright that the minstrel show was racist to the core. I find Tosches repulsive and his position indefensible, which makes the vigor and vitriol with which he dies on that hill all the more offensive. I wish someone else could have told this story.

I was intrigued by Prof. O’Malley’s comments in class today about the parallels between movies and music recording.  It struck me that I’d never really considered why a close-mic’ed drum kit sounds more “real” to my ear than one recorded with one microphone, even though I’d never expect drums to sound that way if I was standing in a room with a drummer.  I had also seen Saving Private Ryan before and agreed with many critics who praised its realism, and it was slightly shocking to have it pointed out, cut by cut, that modern movie editing techniques are inherently unrealistic.  So, I decided to re-watch Saving Private Ryan with an eye to discerning what effect Spielberg’s directing and the movie’s cinematography have on me as a viewer, and whether the movie is truly “realistic” or just vivid.  I came away without a clear answer, I think.  However, I can say that while the movie’s portrayal of the events is quite true-to-life, and while the writing and acting is eminently believable, the movie is not presented realistically–had I taken part in the WWII story it’s telling, that’s not at all how I would have experienced it.  However, I think that this preference for an omniscient perspective is inextricable from the medium of film, at least as it’s developed over the last several decades.  However, the counterexample of the silent movie we watched in class proves that film doesn’t HAVE to be that way, and yet it nearly always is. Is the early film merely a product of technical limitations and a nascent medium whose creative potential had not yet been realized? Is this inherently unnatural omniscience in movies somehow ingrained in the human psyche? Or does the fact that movies developed this way represent some shift in human understanding, conscious or unconscious? I’m not sure I know the answer to this yet, but my interest has certainly been piqued. I will be seeking out more information on this topic in the weeks to come as I try to understand why I, like most people, prefer vividness to realism. I think I may need to start listening to music differently for a little while, too.