What would happen to my song studies field in the real world of academic institutions?
The linguists would view the true subject here as the fit between words and music. They would get NIS Grants to produce highly technical studies and ignore everyone else.
The English department would just see this as Cultural Studies all over again and apply Foucault to analyses of Madonna songs from the 1980s. Creative writers would just add another section to the existing curriculum, placing lyric writing along side fiction and "poetry."
Cultural anthropology would see this as ethnomusicology. They would just continue as before. They were always already song theorists.
The singer-songwriters would want their own niche where they could teach students to write songs, encouraging them to ignore any history or theory. Only the "craft" of songwriting would be taught.
The music department would give voice lessons for aspiring opera singers.
In other words, no one would do anything different from what they were doing before, but everyone would boast of being interdiscipinary, especially the English Department.
3 comentarios:
yeh, down with the English Department, especially at KU.
Are ethnomusicologists song theorists? I feel them as historians and ethnographers, but not as aesthetic theorists per se. They talk about How songs move from place to place, and How they fit in different cultural practices, but -- and correct me if I'm wrong -- they don't as far as I know talk about Why it may be that *this* song rather than *that* song is found in X number of locales, while *that* song is found only in Z locales. And do they talk much about the relationship between words and music?
I'm a songwriter, so it's endlessly fascinating to me; but, alas, I'm afraid you're probably right the feeling of most of my cohorts for history and theory.
It's satire. I didn't mean it to be taken literally. I like the English dept at KU, at least those in it I know. I didn't mean that ethnomusicologists thought of themselves as "song theorists." I was just imagining the typical academic moves that people are wont to make.
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