{"id":9277,"date":"2014-04-09T09:44:36","date_gmt":"2014-04-09T13:44:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=9277"},"modified":"2014-04-09T09:44:36","modified_gmt":"2014-04-09T13:44:36","slug":"music-writing-and-science-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2014\/04\/09\/music-writing-and-science-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Music Writing and Science Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>No, this isn&#8217;t another blog post lamenting the fact that music writing gets far more attention than science writing. If anything, it&#8217;s a bit of an argument that science writing ought to be <em>less<\/em> like popular music writing.<\/p>\n<p>On Twitter this past weekend Jim Henley, one of the few bloggers I consider &#8220;old school&#8221; (the name of this blog was influenced by his <a href=\"http:\/\/highclearing.com\/\">Unqualified Offerings<\/a>, though he&#8217;s mostly stepped back from that) had a <a href=\"https:\/\/storify.com\/UOJim\/dancing-about-architecture-is-the-best-case\">long series of tweets about pop-music writing<\/a>, responding to some arguments that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thedailybeast.com\/articles\/2014\/03\/18\/music-criticism-has-degenerated-into-lifestyle-reporting.html\">music criticism<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kalyr.com\/weblog\/music\/music-opinion\/why-we-need-better-music-criticism\/\">has degenerated<\/a> and hardly has anything to do with music any more. Jim provides a link to some <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/authors.owen_pallett.html\">attempts to apply music theory to pop<\/a>, and later to an <a href=\"http:\/\/popmusictheory.com\/\">entire blog full of that<\/a>. I also threw him a link to this detailed analysis of a nuclear-powered earworm:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/lHQqNIGQIEE\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>(That&#8217;s from a music prof at Williams, and I found it via a link from one of the college&#8217;s many social-media feeds.)<\/p>\n<p>Jim&#8217;s main argument, though, which apparently comes from a book I haven&#8217;t read (I think it&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Rocking-Classics-English-Progressive-Counterculture\/dp\/0195098889\">this<\/a>) is that a big part of the reason why music criticism doesn&#8217;t do more with music theory is that music theory isn&#8217;t especially well suited to dealing with rock\/pop music. The tools of classical music analysis and criticism are built around a particular type of music, arising from the Western classical tradition, and don&#8217;t work that well for rock and pop music that grew out of a very different musical tradition. As a result, as Jim puts it, the best you can hope for is &#8220;dancing about architecture&#8221;&#8211; fumbling with an inadequate analytical toolkit to give impressionistic descriptions of what&#8217;s really going on, or else falling back to talking about social and cultural issues that aren&#8217;t all that closely connected to the content of the music.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s an interesting argument, not just because I&#8217;m a fan of rock music and very much not a classical music fan, so it speaks right to my personal biases. (I&#8217;m currently obsessing on the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Teeth-Dreams-digital-booklet-Steady\/dp\/B00I1A4VZQ\/\">new Hold Steady record<\/a>, and really looking forward to seeing them play live on Friday). But I also wonder if there aren&#8217;t some parallels to the eternal scientists vs. journalists thing.<\/p>\n<p>That is, in the blogs linked above that do apply music-theory analysis to pop music, you can see them struggling with the familiar issue of <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2014\/02\/24\/science-journalism-vs-sports-journalism\/\">communicating to people who don&#8217;t share your technical vocabulary<\/a>. You can see where it would be a lot easier for the writers to explain what&#8217;s going on if they could use their normal jargon, but they have to define things as they go. In the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/articles\/arts\/culturebox\/2014\/03\/katy_perry_s_teenage_dream_explaining_the_hit_using_music_theory.html\">first of Owen Pallett&#8217;s Slate pieces<\/a> there&#8217;s even an element of the disparaging &#8220;You think you want jargon but really you don&#8217;t&#8221; thing that happens when journalists deliberately write &#8220;bad&#8221; pieces in what&#8217;s supposed to be the style of a scientist. (To his credit, the later ones get better.)<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s definitely a tricky problem, and I think it&#8217;s a contributor to the &#8220;degeneration&#8221; of music writing that people point to. You can&#8217;t count on a typical pop-music fan to have any idea what a &#8220;tonic&#8221; refers to, or a &#8220;V chord&#8221; or any of the many other terms that show up in those pieces. I only have the very sketchiest idea of most of this stuff myself, as I never took music theory&#8211; I played in the band all through high school, so I can basically recognize when a key change happens in a song that I&#8217;m listening to, but I couldn&#8217;t begin to tell you from what to what. (On the one hand, I vaguely wish I knew more of the technical terminology here, but on the other, learning it would probably require an awful lot of listening to classical music, and I don&#8217;t really care to do that&#8230;) So a classically educated music writer is in some ways in the same situation as a scientifically trained writer trying to communicate technical results without being able to use technical language<\/p>\n<p>I also wonder, though, if there&#8217;s a way to bring the analogy in the other direction; that is, a sense in which the oft-cited failure modes of science writing are partly due to applying technical and analytical tools to a subject they weren&#8217;t really designed for. That is, it might be that in some ways writing about science is <em>different<\/em> than writing journalistically about other subjects, in the same way that writing about rock music is <em>different<\/em> than writing about Western classical music, and demands the creation of different tools.<\/p>\n<p>Of course, I&#8217;m so fried right at the moment that I haven&#8217;t really gotten any farther than that, and the next few days are going to be utterly brutal, so I&#8217;m not likely to produce any really deep and useful insights. But I didn&#8217;t want to let this slip too far into the past, so I&#8217;ll throw up this inconclusive post and see if it prompts anyone else to anything great.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No, this isn&#8217;t another blog post lamenting the fact that music writing gets far more attention than science writing. If anything, it&#8217;s a bit of an argument that science writing ought to be less like popular music writing. On Twitter this past weekend Jim Henley, one of the few bloggers I consider &#8220;old school&#8221; (the&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2014\/04\/09\/music-writing-and-science-writing\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Music Writing and Science Writing<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5,139,130,15,7,37,11,131],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9277","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-blogs","category-culture","category-journalism","category-music","category-physics","category-pop_culture","category-science","category-science_writing","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9277","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9277"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9277\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9277"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9277"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9277"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}