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The Duke lacrosse racket—postscript

Near the end of yesterday’s post, I described the liestoppers as having to prop up their claim to be crusading for Truth, Fairness, and Justice on the basis of the lacrosse case by engaging in “rhetorical warfare that brings the battle lines into sharp relief” (I’m using the term “liestopper” loosely for the vehement defenders of the lacrosse team that gather on , , etc.). Right on cue there was a flare-up of that today. The main thing it reminded me was how much of it is hypersensitivity on behalf of the team—more overcompensation, I think, for the fact that the lacrosse players are less than compelling as victims of Grand Injustice. A refrain on the message boards of liestopperland is the many more or less libelous insults that left-wing professors, columnists, bloggers, etc. have hurled at the team, and the oh-so-few apologies that have followed. Today it was one of those revisited—Prof. Claire Potter (aka Tenured Radical) insulted the team back in April and never made good, then a few days ago she took a jab at DIW. KC Johnson came back this morning huffing and puffing about her “reckless, unsubstantiated allegations.”

It seems to me that some of Potter’s original comments were in fact excessive, based on a year-old picture of the team’s behavior on the night in question, when it was spun to make them look as bad as possible. But somehow when a few more or less careful and thoughtful people and a bunch of more or less smug and/or self-righteous and/or ignorant and/or hypocritical ones (take your pick, mix and match)—many of whom have deputized themselves to defend the honor of their fine young men—start posting comments, writing emails, and complaining to the University president, no apology is forthcoming. What a surprise, huh?

Part of it is an internet-era problem. There’s nothing new to say on either side, but there’s outrage to be vented and comment boxes to fill, so on and on it goes. The logic of these things is that both sides find something or other to blow out of proportion, and they did. A smallish swarm of liestoppers peppered Potter’s site with biting comments, most of which she deleted. Meanwhile back at the ranch (DIW, that is), reading the comments is like listening to a roomfull of drunks who are feeling very clever. Not a surprise—self-righteousness in a crowd is intoxicating.

[Dropping back into this post to put in a link that I left out, I’ll take the opportunity to say that, while I still think the image of drunks being clever fits much of the comment thread I refer to at the end, there are some who have put in more serious and substantial remarks.]

If you’re reading through my lacrosse-case series, the next one is about potbanging.

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2007 11 28 Duke Lacrosse Case
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The Duke lacrosse racket

After a few months of dealing with unfinished business, I’ve managed to put together a two-sides-of-the-coin analysis of the Duke lacrosse case that’s been on my mind for a while. For better or worse, the lacrosse case has been a blogger’s boon, and while I was taking stock of my time at Duke anyway I thought I better do my part.

Although I’m a low-level member of the Duke faculty still for at least one more semester, I’m writing more from an outside than the inside perspective. I was part-time and “visiting” for most of my nine years at Duke, and I taught my last class (or so I thought) and moved out of my office at the end of this past spring semester. I haven’t been involved in any faculty or institutional response or discussion of the case, and none of the people at Duke who have played a public role in the controversies are friends or acquaintances of mine. All that makes it relatively easy to express myself frankly, but also means that I couldn’t, even if I wanted to, speak for the university, its administration, or any other member of the faculty. Any interpretations I offer are my own—I’m not in a position to defend the statements or actions that anyone else has made about the lacrosse case, and I’m not offering any such defenses.

I find looking back at the spring semester 2006 through the lens of the lacrosse case to be a little surreal, since the unfolding scandal left almost no impression on my own experience teaching a small and congenial class two afternoons a week. I had a deadline looming at the time and was only sporadically following developments in the news. I can’t say anything firsthand about the major incidents and events—protests and “wanted” posters and the like—except to make the obvious point that they weren’t ubiquitous. It’s a reminder of how selective and unrepresentative a picture of life on campus you get from the assembled highlights of the controversy—one of the things that doesn’t register is how much of it was boringly normal.

What’s on my mind isn’t so much the incident and legal proceedings as the remarkably polarizing and dysfunctional dialogue the case has spawned. The long letter Duke Provost Peter Lange sent to the faculty last January gives a pretty good idea of how it looked from the eye of the hurricane. The letter is so even-handed and deliberative that it’s hard to tell what’s the statement and what’s the statement about making a statement—it’s the antithesis of the quick and dirty texts “intended not to clarify but to embarrass, punish, demean or humiliate” that Lange was writing about. A fine model for a more illuminating discourse, but I don’t see any signs that either form or content made an impression. It is a little odd to read his carefully considered back-and-forth touching on language, rhetoric, debate, democracy, the technology of communication, etc.—all core academic issues—and then get to the part about the challenge ahead for Duke, which is… campus culture. Nothing is more fundamental to a liberal education than effective and responsible use of words, and surely there’s an academic agenda along those lines that can compliment whatever’s been decided about housing, drinking, and athletics. I’m not that tuned in to what’s happening on campus, though, so maybe it’s been press-released and Chronicled and I missed it.

The picture Lange paints is of extremist rhetoric silencing those who don’t want to be pummeled and pulling the rest toward the fringes. That fits with my impression that zealots have set both the terms and the tone of the discussion, kept it stoked with resentment, and whittled it down to stick figures and false choices. As a way to look at the mechanics behind all this, I’ve picked out two parties to the war of words, one collective and the other individual. Representing one side, the ““—activists who rallied on March 26, 2006 to denounce the lacrosse team at the site of their disastrous party on Buchanan Blvd. For the other side, , a professor at Brooklyn College and outspoken critic of critics of the lacrosse team, who blogs on (DIW). Continue reading ›

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2007 11 26 Duke Lacrosse Case
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Teaching jazz as a learning experience

It looks like the whole goodbye to teaching thing may have been premature. I was out of the country and away from easy internet access for most of the summer (thus no blogging). While I was away I got an email asking if I’d be interested in teaching the songwriting class again in the spring (maybe we can repeat the cycle a few times and I’ll be able to teach swan song writing). But the retrospective on almost a decade of teaching felt like a good idea—valuable for me if not for anyone else. I said a fond farewell to songwriting and gave my two cents worth on classical music in the college curriculum. The last thing I’d like to mull over is my most challenging and dissonant teaching experience, the five semesters starting in 2001 that I taught Introduction to Jazz. It would be easy to just complain about the students—almost as easy as it was for them to complain about me, since I’m not the most animated and fluent of lecturers and so not the ideal professor for a large survey class like that. I’ll try not to get too grumpy, though, and instead write about my efforts to make it into something more academic than “music appreciation,” and the interesting but ambiguous results.

It was a big surprise—a nice one—when I was asked to teach the class. It came with a special obligation, though, a personal debt to the music that changed my life and made me have to become a musician, and to the jazz musicians I’ve known for their amazing warmth and generosity. The only way I could see to do the subject justice was to make it a serious, challenging class. At the time I started teaching it the course had a long-standing reputation as one of Duke’s easiest, and I’m afraid it was the reputation instead of the music that attracted many of the students. Even without that history I probably went in with too little experience and too many big ideas for anybody’s good, but at first there was an especially stark contrast between my enthusiasm for the subject and the students’ interest level.

The class could be frustrating but the material was always a pleasure.
Continue reading ›

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2007 08 29 Duke University
Jazz
Music
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Music and Lyrics

I saw Music and Lyrics on the airplane a few days ago. It’s cartoonish in the usual Hollywood romantic comedy way. Hugh Grant’s character (Alex Fletcher) especially is too much of a chameleon, changing color from pathetic to sexy to serious at the plot’s convenience. But it’s true enough to the music and has enough real tenderness to be a lot of fun. I liked the bit about setting things on the piano—Sophie Fisher (Drew Barrymore) does it constantly—even a watering can, and people have been shot for less—and Alex scampers up every time to move the stuff somewhere else. It’s a wonderfully economical way to show what a middle-aged musician he is and how impulsive and oblivious an outsider she is, and the fact that he never says anything speaks to his laissez-faire generosity of spirit, too. Other details didn’t ring as true, Continue reading ›

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2007 06 15 Music
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Gettin’ that canon off the pedestal

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a bit about the songwriting class I’d been teaching at Duke. I’m going to continue in the mode of self-debriefing, I guess you could call it, with some thoughts about how classical music fits into the general undergraduate curriculum.

I’ve never had much sympathy with the point of view that puts classical music above and apart from other music. Over the past 9 years I’ve taught songwriting and a couple of music appreciation courses, one about jazz and the other quite eclectic. I’ve also taught the introductory theory and composition courses a few times. And I’ve ended up quite convinced that classical music has no special claim to make in the university classroom, at least not in courses of the kind I’ve taught—introductory classes, music appreciation, and history (setting aside theory, though—it’s a separate issue I’m not going to get into). It’s not that I’m disenchanted with the music—I’m as infatuated as ever, and I hope it always has a prominent place on college campuses, just not as the perennial prima donna.

The fat lady sings on, though, no matter how false the pretenses. And it tends to be pretty alienating. Listen, for instance, to this vociferation from blogger A.C. Douglas…

Continue reading ›

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2007 06 08 Classical Music
Duke University
Music
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HIPster’s guide to not winning friends and not influencing people

A couple of days ago I picked up a recording of Fidelio in the library. It’s conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, a “historically informed performance” (HIP) specialist, meaning that his ideal is to calibrate the performance of a piece based on what is known about musical practices and instruments at the time it was written. When I got home I noticed that Opera Chic (OC) had blogged some mean things about “Niki The Anaesthesiologist,” as she calls him. I listened to the disk right away, and, well, to my mongrel ears there’s a wonderful clarity to Niki’s Fidelio, and nothing soporific about it. It was kind of disappointing—why do I always have to be one of the uncool ones? After I read the comments in OC’s blog I felt better. There are worse things that being uncool.

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2007 05 26 Classical Music
Music
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Coffeehouse goodbye

A few weeks ago my 8th class full of songwriting students met in the Duke Coffeehouse on east campus to sing their final-project songs. It was a final for me, too—my last significant act as an instructor at Duke—and it was a great way to close things out. I don’t remember the event ever going more smoothly. There were no major delays getting the doors unlocked, the technical glitches were all small, and everyone played either solo or duo—no complicated setups—so we managed to get through 17 songs in about 90 minutes. There were, as usual, a few very polished performances and a few that staggered along in fits and starts, with the rest somewhere in between. Charley—the only one who really put on a show—got onstage with a long black wig and a lighter and warned us that we’d better prepare to rock out. His song was called “Hard.” This is the chorus:

You make it hard
You make it hard
You make it hard
You make it hard for me
You make it hard for me

It was a doo-wop number, with backup vocals played from a recording, so the double entendre had a playful, guileless feel that’s infinitely more innocent than the stuff you’ll find on top-40 radio these days. Since my 9-year-old daughter was with me, I was glad for that—she thought Charley was great, and so did I. (The thing that really got the little wheels in her head turning was the graffiti in the women’s room.)

Continue reading ›

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2007 05 20 Duke University
Music
Popular Music
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Operatic ambition and operatic reality

A few days ago that most incisive of gossip columnists, Opera Chic, had a little thing about Rufus Wainwright’s operatic ambitions, which are pretty high-flown (“My dream is to compose three operas that will be performed for the next two centuries”) but also seem to come from a sincere attachment to the genre. It’s refreshing, and a hopeful sign, to hear him talking up a great but non-iconic composer like Janacek, though.

He has a commission from the Met to write a two-act opera. I wonder what will come of it. Continue reading ›

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2007 05 06 Music
Opera
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Going to town with “Going to a Town”

I’ve had it on my list for a while to look into Rufus Wainwright’s music. The time finally came late last week, when Roger Bourland posted a YouTube clip of “Going to a Town,” Wainwright’s new single. Bourland started his blog in connection with a freshman seminar on Wainwright’s music he was giving at UCLA. The blog has diversified, but Wainwright still crops up regularly. Among other things, Bourland sometimes channels composition lessons to Rufus from various dead but still pedagogically-inclined classical composers (Ives, Debussy, and Berlioz, and maybe others I haven’t seen). This strikes me as a fun and clever way to highlight the contrasting musical mindsets and values involved, though I don’t think that’s Bourland’s agenda.

Bourland had only one thing to say about the “Going to a Town,” in reference to its refrain, “I’m so tired of America”:

I guess Rufus is tired of America. Hmm, well I say people act like people no matter where you go.

I completely agree with Bourland about people acting like people wherever. From that point of view, it’s reasonable to wonder why the refrain isn’t “I’m so tired of humanity.” Continue reading ›

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2007 04 28 Composition and analysis
Music
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The Father of Us All

Never mind the overblown dust-up about Joshua Bell in the Metro station. The big classical music news of the moment is The Classic FM Hall of Fame 2007, this year’s list of the top 300 classical works. Thanks to the astonishing reach of Topix.net’s Classical Music news feed, I’ve just become aware of a UPI story being carried on moldova.org that cuts right to the heart of the matter:

The 18th-century German baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach failed to place any of his music in the Top 30 favorites of 67,328 listeners who voted in Classic FM’s 11th annual poll.

Poor Bach, huh? Having given his all to break the top 30, he’s probably moldering away faster than ever. Continue reading ›

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2007 04 11 Classical Music
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