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the academic year starts today for me.
it is a bit of a shame to think about how the summer shuttled away.
the Big Project for the summer will be unfolded in performances this weekend, so the pivot seems to me to be sunday, when the performances end for the time being.
the first classes:
here is the syllabus kids.
these are the books.
this is why we are reading them.
this is why you cant get any of them yet.
how do you write about music?
how do you link music to social contexts without reducing sound to symptom?
why is there a soundscape recording of a village in new guinea done 10 years ago on the sound system as you are sitting here?
what is going on?
for my first trick, i get to do a jazz history class that vanished into the administrative maze for a while only to pop up again last week, then vanish, then reappear as scheduled for this afternoon but in no particular room.
the up side: the class runs from charlie parker forward, so i get to blast the children with sun ra, the art ensemble of chicago, and, if they are really good, a ton of anthony braxton.
the down side--i am not sure what room this will happen in.
the real down side: it is raining today, so teaching outdoors is not an option. besides, i need sound equipment for this.
if i seperate the content of the class from the possibility that i will be teaching it outside somewhere, then this can be looped about to the problem of a history survey class.
i find that the same problem turns up in a jazz class as turns up in a longer survey---teleology--the result is that i usually do not make strong causal connections between the works at the level of the course logic--rather i set up sort of conversations between works, local things, that work backward (later works reprocess the earlier--there is no starting point to it, rather the recycling is an a priori almost...no origin story requires no absolute beginning so...).
surveys are kinda like juke boxes, greatest hits packages. i avoided doing "europe and everywhere else from 1550 until just now...just now...just now..." this year.... an absurd course that is required for all majors...what bothers me in principle about surveys is their tv-program character--the Great Pageant of History moving in front of the students, who can be set up to feel more secure in thier sense of the present by cramming a parade of the past into it. i would rather the past corrode the certainty of the present. so big narratives do not work. recursive narratives seem to work better.
listening to a repellent radio show about the presedential campaigns on npr as i sit here. the analyses seems to be centered on the assumption that people in "the hinterland" respond to simple-minded messages that emphasize fear. which seems a simple-minded message that emphasizes fear insofar as urban populations are concerned.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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