Schiermonnikoog, Selborne and the States

I was sitting at a breakfast table in the renowned Hotel Van der Werf (nicknamed Fawlty Towers by some, which is not completely fair as it is a great place to stay) and had a chat with an American colleague and his wife. Van der Werf is located at Schiermonnikoog, one of the islands in the Wadden Sea, renowned for its calm (no visting cars allowed, 900 regular inhabitants) and its birds. The colleague's wife was in a state of happiness and excitement - she had just seen a pheasant!

Music, Partying and the Stopping of Time

I was thinking about the small subject of Music and Time. This thinking originated while contemplating the interviews I held with 30 more or less randomly chosen Dutch citizens about what music means for them and what it does with them.

One of the major things music does is connecting people with the past - and especially with their personal past. Yes, yes, listening to Beethoven symphonies connects people with "Beethoven's time" - sometimes; but mostly it connects them with memories about when they were a student and were eating hot apple pie on a frosty Sunday morning while listening to Beethoven with friends.

On Teaching in the Wireless Age, or: Dutch Folkmetal Exists and is Called Heidevolk

I was guest teacher in a neighbouring conservatoire last week. Three lectures of about three hours on `world music' for a bunch of about hundred music education and music therapy students. Just simple, old-fashioned, frontal lecturing - of course with invitations to students to participate, to make themselves heard, but still: my story. I tend to think that in these days, where self-directed learning, working groups, thinking in competencies have become mainstream it is not so bad that occasionally students are confronted with an old-fashioned teacher who thinks that he has something to tell them. An exercise in patience and in humbleness for them, as it were.

And I love talking to - and with - groups.

Yes, Alan Lomax Was Also In Spain - But Who's the Dutchie?

I am reading the biography of Alan Lomax, the American folk-song collector, scholar, ethnomusicologist, radio-man, singer, social activist and what-not. Fascinating literature. He died only ten years ago - and in his early years he was among the first to record blues in the south, Leadbelly being "his" best-known discovery. Speaking of a lengthy life.

Lomax spent several years after the second world war in Europe. He stayed in England for quite some time, doing fieldwork recordings in Ireland, Scotland, France, Italy and Spain. His biography mentions he also undertook several trips to the Netherlands and Belgium, looking for musicologists who could help him in compiling recordings of Dutch and Belgian folklore for a series of records he was producing.

His travel to Spain is an interesting episode (his recordings lead eventually to Miles Davis' "Sketches from Spain"-record). Going just after WWII to Franco-led Spain was hard, specifically if you had no money whatsoever, but eventually Alan Lomax díd go - as the driver of the Romanian ethnomusicologist Constantine Brailoiu who had to speak at a conference in Palma de Mallorca. Along with Lomax and Brailoiu went "a young Dutchman who specialized in Javanese gamelan music". I instantly thought: "That must have been Jaap Kunst", but then realised that Kunst (the inventor of the term "ethnomusicology", one of the founding fathers of my discipline, and someone sadly neglected in the Netherlands, this to the astonishment of the rest of the world) was not a "young Dutchman" any more, being born in 1891.

Lovely Day 2 (Lou Reed revisited)

I wrote earlier about the chimes of Groningen's main church playing Lou Reed's 'Perfect Day' on a sunny afternoon in february. Of course that was a lie. The chimes were not playing, the chime-player was.

I met him this week by coincidence. I had to teach a guest lesson to pupils of my old secondary school, and their music teacher happened to be the chime player of Groningen's chimes (and of many other chimes across the region). He decsribed himself - as being involved with huge sets of huge bronze bells - as the only real heavy metal fan of the school, and admitted he had played `Perfect Day' when hearing that Lou Reed would be in town accompanying his wife Laurie Anderson for a concert. I went to that concert, which I really liked; Lou Reed happened to sit on a chair right behind me, a nice discovery when you turn around for the first time just to check who's also there and look into Lou Reed's grin; he also sang a song, and the culmination point was a small solo played by Anderson on her violin which left the hall silenced - a solo which was solemnly described afterwards by one of the main music connoisseurs of the town as infantile and artistically worthless, one more reason for me to turn away from any form of music connoisseurship whatsoever.

But back to the chime player. He said that not only I had heard `Perfect Day' chimed all over town, but that within a couple of minutes Lou Reed's management was on the phone, and an hour or so later Reed was in the tower and spend some hours having the chimes explained and demonstrated to him.

Sometimes people wonder if chimes still have a reason for existence in our age. I think they have a-reason; it is called Lou.

Plagiarism revisited

My colleague and room-mate entered our office with a grin from ear to ear. He is married to a Hungarian woman who still lives there, so he visits the country a lot and keeps up with the Hungarian news. This morning the news was that the Hungarian president had been ripped of his PhD-title because he had committed plagiarism. According to the newspaper we read, 200 of the 215 pages of the thesis were somebody else's work.

My colleague did his PhD a long time ago and I am finishing mine, so this was news we liked. What we especially liked was that the university, although it had withdrawn the PhD title, did not accuse the president of plagiarism, but rather accused itself: the university had not made clear to the future president that this form of "unusual extensive copying" was not allowed when writing a PhD.

We imagined the conversation:
CEO of the university: "Sorry mr. President, but you have to hand in your degree."
Mr. President: "What?"
CEO: "You copied 200 of the 215 pages."
Mr. P.: "Is that not allowed? How could I know? Nobody éver told me! Next thing you're gonna tell me is that bribing the committee is also not admitted! I can't believe this!"

I wrote about plagiarism earlier here, but I hope the next time Dicky Gilbert accuses songwriters of plagiarism because they use C, F and G chords (and maybe even an Am7) he keeps in mind the Hungarian president - who did a bit more than inexcusably using the words "and", "but" and "is" in his thesis, thereby making it a case of plagiarism because my doctorated roommate used exactly those words in his thesis too.

Remedial Teaching for Conservatoire Graduates?

I was visiting the "Reflective Conservatoire"-conference in London last week. It had been a long time since I was in London, so that alone was a great joy. But the conference itself was fun to be, too. Basically, visitors to that conference are people working in conservatoires who try to look critically at what they are actually doing in order to make conservatoire tuition better.

If you have never been in a conservatoire: they are interesting places. They train, as their core business, young musicians to become professional musicians. And, as we always say, that training does not start when students enter the conservatoire. Before entering, they have mostly already spent an amazing amount of time studying their instrument, often from a very young age and with great determination. So within a conservatoire you find a club of very motivated and already very proficient musicians who want to become even better under the guidance of renowned teachers.

It is a great surrounding to be in. But it also has its backdrops, one of them being that conservatoire culture is one of extreme specialism, of entering into an often rigid tradition (be that classical, jazz, pop or world) guided by people who "know", and often of competition. That brings about not only joy & beauty, but also loads of stress and a lot of powerplay (thanks, Rosie!).

When students leave the conservatoire, they are often great specialists suffering under the constant stress of having to operate on what a very select group of connoisseurs considers to be the excellence level of music performing. So what you find in many places is that conservatoires have begun to worry about that, and have started to offer students activitiies next to their constant practising on their instruments in order to cope with that stress and to become more creative, more relaxed, more outgoing musicians.

On the conference some of these practices were demonstrated. I think it is a great thing that there are people in conservatoires who are concerned about the future life of their students and come up with those programmes. So there I was, looking at a great session where students were practising to look each other in the eye, touch each other, listen to each other, and improvise music in reaction to others.

And I couldn't help thinking: how come that we have to offer all those relatively straightforward things on conservatoire, and even post-graduate, level? How is it possible that we - western society as a whole, the music business in particular and conservatoires in the very particular - allow students for long years to neglect the looking, teaching, listening and improvising, then finally re-teaching them those aspects at a basically much-too-late point in their development?

Shame on us.