How could I turn away from a blue cover? Ah, blue.

I’ve been thinking through Colin Gifford Brooke’s excellent book Lingua Fracta: Towards a Rhetoric of New Media lately, especially as I’ve been considering how the canons of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery) apply to musical composition. Two pages from the book are especially sticking to my mind right now, so I’m using this space to explore them, all first-drafty-like. Followers, beware.

Brooke’s chapter on arrangement refashions the canon of arrangement as pattern, a middle ground he describes as between texts that are “painstakingly ordered” (91) or just tossed out there without any ordering. By thinking of “arrangement as pattern,” he avoids the linear world of “arrangement as sequence” (92) that doesn’t adequately allow for the kinds of movement folks do in hyperlinked, new media spaces. It’s a nice reframing of how texts are arranged, given how much bopping around readers do, especially (but not only) online.

I’m reminded of the glimpse into the word-processor-using writer’s mind that Cory Doctorow gives us in “You DO Like Reading Off a Computer Screen,” one of the essays in Content: “I understand perfectly — in the ten minutes since I typed the first word in the paragraph above, I’ve checked my mail, deleted two spams, checked an image-sharing community I like, downloaded a YouTube clip of Stephen Colbert complaining about the iPhone (pausing my MP3 player first), cleared out my RSS reader, and then returned to write this paragraph.” With that kind of readerly and writerly world online, content-creators still organize material, but into patterns can be experienced in multiple ways, not as linearly experienced sequences through time.

Here’s what I was thinking, though: music does move linearly through time. We hear it in a sequence. Yes, like hyperlinked text, there are examples of interactive pieces that change depending on the “listener”‘s behavior (Biophilia, anyone?), but I’m talking in general here. Usually, we experience the arrangement of a piece sequentially, not as a pattern. Different classical forms of musical arrangement (sonata, rondo, theme and variation) are inherently sequential, designed (in part) to reiterate musical statements in time recursively so we hear when those statements are adjusted, played with, developed. So I read this chapter thinking, “This is great and all, but it’s not what I was hoping when I saw pattern was coming up. I wanted to think about patterns cognitively (if that’s the right word, self)—as gestalts that listeners create when they perceive patterns in sequentially arranged music.”

But despite that part of my mind that turned off, I kept hitting roadblocks to that assumption; I kept finding fruitful ways that music (both classical and new media versions? Not sure…) intersected Brooke’s thinking about arrangement. For example:

Brooke spends a bit of time discussing databases, with del.icio.us as his particular example: how information can be arranged in a database that is arranged, patterned, yet still allowing ever-changing narratives as users move through the linked, annotated, rich material. Again, here I felt this discussion was awesome, but not applicable to music. But then Brooke makes a brilliant move toward comparing del.icio.us with Benjamin’s concept of collections, which are essentially databases with personal stories attached to them. “Once a collection loses the intimacy felt for it by its owner,” writes Brooke, “we might argue that it has drifted back toward the database end of things” (109).

And wow, what’s more “collectable” than music? What’s more amenable to the associations we load onto music, High Fidelity-style, as what the music means shifts along with our personal experiences when we encountered the music? Two more questions, from the cover flap of Geoffrey O’Brien’s Sonata for Jukebox: Pop Music, Memory, and the Imagined Life (which I serendipitously snagged at a thrift store two days ago): “How does music infiltrate your life and shape the way you remember it? What do you really hear when you listen, for perhaps the thousandth time, to a well-loved song, a song inextricably tied to who you are and where you’ve been?”

Of course, part of me isn’t sure why I’m bringing up this thought; just because I/we treat music objects collectably, as a database of meaning, that doesn’t say anything about how those musical objects themselves are arranged. In other words, what I do with my music doesn’t say whether it’s arranged sequentially or in line with Brooke’s “pattern.” I know that. I’m brainstorming, remember?

But the musical thoughts kept coming as the chapter continued, ending as it did with a discussion of tag clouds. My thinking went kind of like this: “A tag cloud provides an alternative navigation through a series of texts. You can hop from place to place in direct ways that aren’t possible in analog texts. What would that look like for music–i.e., a way to hop around a sequentially organized musical text in an ordered way?”

And the closest thing that came to mind: comments on SoundCloud files. It’s easier to show than describe (which is itself relevant whenever we’re talking about audio and visual texts):

Underneath the waveform, see all those colorful little icons? Hover over them, and you’ll see the comments that listeners have left on this track–not on the track as a whole, but on specific moments in the sequence where they wanted to comment. I’m not sure if it happens in this embedded version, but on SoundCloud’s site, if you’re watching the music move through time, these comments pop up automatically at the correct time, as if you’re hearing/reading the voice of commenter in real time–but that act of archived notes is replayable whenever the listener wants. And the whole track, linear as it is, is remarkably easy to hop around in, especially when the visual representation of the sounds is marked in key spots by the comments of listeners (or composers). The interface affects the arrangement of the sounds as we experience them. Which is just what Brooke is talking about in his book. Good stuff.

(Note: none of my italics made the copy and paste from Google Docs. Forgive me for not going through and re-inserting them.)

It’s the sound that plays in the background during scenes from Star Trek: The Next Generation that are set in Main Engineering. The sound is hosted over on the remarkably complete page for “Star Trek Iconic Sounds” at TrekCore.com.

Here’s what got me thinking about that innocuous little background hum: a line from the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual, which a friend dropped off over here the other day after cleaning his house:

Most privileged visitors to our main engine room set are duly impressed with the sense of “really being on the Enterprise.” Even so, there is still something missing. That “something” is the almost subliminal ambience added through background sound effects. The viewer is rarely consciously aware of it, but the characteristic low thrumming sound of the engine room or the instrument sounds of the bridge are a powerful part of “being there.” (87)

I was struck by the passage for a couple of reasons:

1) First, it jumped out because I’ve always been a watcher of DVD special features and a listener to commentaries. Yesterday while doing the dishes I was listening to Joss Whedon’s commentary of the last episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and he used language similar to the Technical Manual‘s when describing the effects he was trying to have on the audience: things like immediacy, emotional power, and the sense of being there all speak to what must be part of the fundamental task of the television creator, or of the composer of any audio-visual text.

That’s right: we’re solidly in the category of rhetoric here. Ambient sounds are purposefully crafted to bring about a desired effect in audiences who will read/hear the cues and respond accordingly, whether they realize they’re being driven that way or not. Obvious, I know–but it’s still wild to me to think about, how subtly and multimodal our communication is. Unwittingly, this passage in the Technical Manual hints at the different rhetorical situation when touring a set and watching a show, how the identifications you’re asked to make are in a fundamentally different realm.

2) The passage also struck me because I’ve been thinking so much lately about ambient sounds and music that is purposefully designed to be either in the background or foreground of our attention. I wrote about this a bit the other day when discussing Thomas Rickert’s brilliant Music@Microsoft.Windows: Composing Ambience. But it’s a topic I’m rather obsessed with these days, as it keeps popping up everywhere I go:

• In one book, I read Stravinsky’s claims that the radio would bring listeners to a point of lousy, inattentive listening (and wrote about that, too).
• Then in another book (Andy Hamilton’s Aesthetics and Music) I read that “Muzak is an evil because it is ubiquitous and so erodes people’s aesthetic capacities–their ability to listen actively to anything–and degrades their response to music. . . . Muzak . . . belongs under the heading of sound-design, and while sound design can have an aesthetic purpose, muzak does not” (54). That is, music’s very classification as aesthetic or not has something to do with how it’s deployed, how much attention it’s designed to be given–and perhaps even how lousy it is.
• Then there’s R. Murray Schafer, who insists on spelling it “Moozak,” presumably to distance it from any phonetic (wrong word?) similarity to the word music. In his discussion, he takes Stravinsky’s tack and claims that “Moozak resulted from the abuse of the radio” (98), as another instance of our filling the world with ambient noises that we don’t like or want or need. And one way to take the offensive, according to Schafer, is through our power of attentiveness: “By creating a fuss about sounds we snap them back into focus as figures. The way to defeat Moozak is, therefore, quite simple: listen to it” (98).

There’s something simmering here that I want to think more about. In what ways are rhetorically created soundscapes different than other rhetorical situations, when it comes to the amount of attention that may or may not be given to them? Do we have theories of attentiveness in rhetoric? Is this really the same thing as when a speech-listener drifts off to sleep to the rhythms of the speech, or when an essay reader starts thinking about something else while skimming a piece of written rhetoric, or–this is the best parallel–when the visual design of an advertisement affect us in ways that we don’t even realize?

In the end, I think the Technical Manual, however ridiculously geeky it is for me to be talking about so cavalierly, makes a good point. There’s a lot of ambient sound that goes into a show set on a spaceship. Listen to how much sound there is in this computerized walkthrough of the Enterprise:

Even a show like Firefly, which makes such a point during its outdoor effects shots to emphasize that there is no sound in the vacuum of space, uses the ever-present engine “low thrumming” when inside. Listen to all the effects in this clip:

As Schafer writes, “there is authority in the magic of captured sound” (90). By attending to it and wielding it, even when it’s as subtle as a background engine hum, we take hold of a magic that not everyone knows how to use rhetorically, like Harry Potter walking around London with a magic wand in his back pocket that no one suspects can do the things it can do. (That’s right: I found a way to insert one more geeky reference into this post. Sheesh.)

Or, to return to the Technical Manual: “The technical ability to exchange data is not in itself sufficient to permit communication. A common set of symbols and concepts–a language–is equally important before communications can occur” (101). Indeed. And sound effects comprise a crucial aspect of the languages we inhabit in our aural soundscapes.

Prep Work: What’s Already Done

The Spreadsheet: As anyone searching for jobs knows, spreadsheets are glorious. Mine is in a Google Doc to which only me and my wife have access. The main tab documents the school, city, job title, if it has a stand-alone writing department, general list of what they’re looking for, teaching load, when the materials are due, how to apply (since mailed documents must be ready long before an online application due on the same date), what materials they want, where I got the info, any notes (maybe people I know who are there, how big the department is, interesting lines from the ad, etc.), and a link to the department’s page.

There’s also a column where my wife gives the job a rating (1-3, with 3 being awesome) based solely on the location, and a column where I give it a rating based solely on how well the ad fits what I’m looking for. Then I color-code the entire row based on my rating: green for “Yes! Hire me!” and yellow for “Yeah, I suppose it’s alright, even if it’s not ideal,” and red for, “I’m probably not qualified, or I really, really don’t want that job. But I’d take it.”

There’s also a tab in the same spreadsheet called “Links” where I keep track of links to job search sites and list the last date I searched each one. I also list a few other links here that I find myself using a lot. (More on those below.)

Then there’s a third tab in the same spreadsheet where I keep track of every expense for the job search. I’ve heard this stuff is tax deductible! Just in case, and just to be wise, I count it all.

I also download a copy of the Google Doc every once in a while just in case Google fails one day or is bought up by . . . I don’t know, Lady Gaga?

Ooh! So detail-filled!

The Site: But I had a problem. I wanted the sortability of a spreadsheet, but I also wanted to keep track of info that wouldn’t fit well in that format. So, my wife and I devised an awesome solution: a private Google site.

Each job I’m applying for gets its own page on the site, organized under its geographical location for easy navigation. Then, I paste the job ad text into the left column, and then my wife puts some basic research into the area in the right column–things like population, links to city websites, arts and culture in the area, grocery stores, weather patterns, and so on.

The beauty of the Google site is that each page has an easy-to-use comments area and attached file area. So every time I submit anything to a school, I upload the file that I sent to them at the bottom of the page. Yes, that means there’s a host of practically identical CVs on the site taking up space, but it also means I can always know exactly what I told each school when it comes time for interviews–and I know I’ll have access to those files, since they now live online in an organized space. I also add a comment to the school’s page whenever I send letters of recommendation, transcripts, or even exchange emails with a school.

Then, the unique URL of each page on the Google Site goes in a column in the spreadsheet–so as I’m skimming the spreadsheet, if I think, “Wait, is that the school where they’re looking for creative nonfiction people?” or “Is that the city that’s the horse capital of the world?” I can just click through to the site. I loves it.

The homepage of the site also features a slick Google Map showing a pin in every school that I’ve applied to. If it didn’t seem kind of inappropriate to post publicly, I’d post it here, because it’s that awesome. Let me know if you’re interested.

The Dropbox: I want to have access to all my files regardless of what computer I’m sitting at, so I save all of my job stuff in a Dropbox folder (which automatically syncs any changes to online storage that’s accessible through a browser or in a regular old folder on any computer where I’ve installed Dropbox).

In my Dropbox jobs folder, I keep the current versions of any documents (all dated with when I last updated them). Then there’s a folder for older versions of docs (just in case), research of people at the schools I’m applying to or interviewing at, and a folder to keep track of teaching portfolio materials (since they were junking up the home folder).

The Applying: What I Do On a Typical Day

A usual day of job applying goes something like this:

1. In a fresh browser window, I open my job spreadsheet and my job site in different tabs. Then, in new tabs that I spread out to the left (for whatever reason), I open the Carnegie Foundation’s Institution Lookup page (for quick glimpses into the enrollment numbers and research profile of any school), the MLA Job Information List (requires my institution’s password; for double-checks to make sure I have the most recent version of a job ad in my Google Site, and so I don’t accidentally say in a letter that I got an ad from MLA that really came from somewhere else), and the page on the Academic Jobs Wiki that lists Rhetoric and Composition jobs (to see if anyone has made any notes about a job–like if it’s been canceled, or if someone has contacted the search committee chair about a confusing line in the ad).
2. I organize my spreadsheet by “date due” to see what jobs I should apply to next.
3. I click through to the Google site to read over the ad, sometimes editing the page to bold any terms that especially apply to me.
4. I head to the hiring department’s page to see who works there, to learn a bit about what programs they have, and to skim some course listings. (And to judge their webpage? Never!)
5. I open one folder on my computer where I make a new subfolder for each school I apply to. Then I open my Dropbox folder in a new window for easy access to my core documents.
6. Based on what documents the school needs, I copy the core docs into my subfolder for that school. (“Let’s see, they should get the research-focused letter, and the CV with no references, and the list of 6 references, and the 1-page teaching philosophy.”)
7. In the school-specific folder, I open each doc and modify it a bit if necessary. Obviously, the letter needs the most work; I change the date, address, salutation, and change/adapt/add a very little or a very lot, depending on what I learned from the ad and the department.
8. I print each doc into a PDF (unless I’m mailing in a paper application, which is rather rare) and give it a cleaner file name. Instead of “Stedman-job-letter-10-10-11-research-ukentucky.docx,” I name the pdf “Stedman-Letter.pdf.”
9. I upload the docx version of the documents to the school’s page on the Google Site, so I can see some basic info about the file from its long, non-cleaned-up file name.
10. I apply: either by printing out the docs and packaging them up, uploading them to an online application (some of which are far more logical than others), or emailing the docs with an extremely polite cover message.
11. I make a comment on the school’s Google Site page saying that I applied. In the spreadsheet, I note the date I applied (for easier skimming and organizing later). On the Google Map, I add a pin for that school.
12. Repeat!

(Brief statement of intent: I in no way want this to be read as an insult to the web programming of an important online journal. Browser weirdness is incredibly difficult to predict, especially in this age of rapid updates from the biggest names. I’m merely exploring a fun point of departure, an intriguing glitch.)

The story: I happily browsed to Thomas Rickert’s “Music@Microsoft.Windows: Composing Ambience” in the most recent issue of The Writing Instructor (a journal subtitled “A networked journal and digital community for writers and teachers of writing”)–and it’s an awesome article. But when I arrived (in Chrome 14.0.835.187 m, Windows version), I heard this:

Which is, my friends, the sound of Rickert’s four audio samples playing at the same time.

It also looks funny: notice the (wrong) placement of the (not functional) media player in the upper left of the screen, and the black box where the media player ought to be:

And it’s just a Chrome issue; in Firefox 6, the clips play perfectly, and the page loads just fine:

I’m not sure why it happens, since I have only the most rudimentary knowledge of web design–and the why isn’t really my point anyway. I can see in the page source that the article uses the HTML 5 tag, but beyond that I’m not sure. (I’ve been having trouble with Chrome’s auto-update feature, so it’s possible that this is a bug that’s fixed in the most recent version.)

Here’s what I keep thinking about: my glee at discovering what was happening. I kept reloading and reloading the page just to hear that crazy sound again, the odd echo of two of the nearly identical clips playing just barely out of sync, Steve Reich-style. My emotional response is part of what I’m trying to figure out here. Why is this glitch so exciting to me?

There’s the nostalgic element, which I’m always a sucker for–the memories this glitch brings up. I remember the sounds that my friend Matt and I made with a two-cassette karaoke machine, a bizarre TV/shortwave radio combo set, and my brother’s Talkboy, which would slow down the speed of tapes.

Here’s one bizarre example, which layers the bonus track from a Better Than Ezra album, some random talking we found on the shortwave radio, a clip of a preacher on one of my parents’ tapes of sermons (which we were recording over), and Matt saying “I don’t want you to blow on my candle,” slowed down over and over again with the Talkboy by playing the slowed-down version into a microphone, then playing that slowed-down version at a slower speed, and then playing that slowed-down version at a slower speed. . . .

There’s also the “stick it to the man” aspect of my glee. For these aren’t just random sounds layered on top of each other, but sounds that were carefully crafted (as Rickert so eloquently explains) by Microsoft to convey a specific mood surrounding the release of subsequent Windows releases. It’s fun to hear those careful desires so thoroughly thwarted, and all through an accidental glitch. Perhaps the more you dislike Microsoft, the more poetic justice you hear in these layered sounds.

And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit some degree of “I found it!” emotions, too. I mean, here I am writing a blog post about a glitch that I doubt anyone else has written about (though maybe they have!). It’s something like people must have felt when they found that they could walk through that wall in Super Mario Bros. World 1-2: “Hey, look what I found! Something that doesn’t work the way you’d expect it to!” Of course, things work inexactly for us all the time; we’re excited only when something doesn’t work how we expected but then is still found to have new value. That value might be a simple as an aesthetic slickness, like seeing Mario slide through that wall, or hearing these sounds make some sort of coherent sense even when layered on each other, but it still makes it feel more value.

But I’m also intrigued by the Rickert article’s misfire from a scholarly perspective. I’m reminded of a paper from Martin Schlesinger I was paired with at the Remake | Remodel conference: Martin shared all kinds of glitchy screens from videogames, theorizing about the effect of these misfires as accidental art that defies the designs of creators. And in Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction, Caleb Kelly describes a number of musicians who take a similar approach, exploiting glitches and clicks and misfires. He writes, “Experimentation with readily available tools and resources is central to contemporary artistic practice and is at the heart of the crack” (6)–and I’m especially interested these days in questions of what concerns those involved in “contemporary artistic practice.”

From a rhetorical perspective, the glitch takes the focus away from the composer, who has little or no control over the effect the audience hears. How does that change how the audience hears the sounds? Would the same meaning be read into sounds that were purposefully composed as glitches–if, say, Rickert had purposefully layered all these sounds onto each other and explained why he did so?

I guess that’s the closest I have to a “point”: I’d like to think more about accidental composition and its place in rhetorical communication.

In the domain of music the importance and influence of its dissemination by mechanical means, such as the record and the radio—those redoubtable triumphs of modern science, which will probably undergo still further development—make them worthy of the closest investigation. The facilities they offer to composers and executants alike for reaching great numbers of listeners, and the opportunities they give those listeners to acquaint themselves with works they have not heard, are obviously indisputable advantages.

This was surely the understatement of the year. Indeed, Mr. Stravinsky, mechanical music distribution did surely “undergo further development.” (Wait a second while I shuffle to another mp3, or skip this song on Pandora, or search for anything I can imagine on Spotify, or stream radio from Germany, or. . . .) But with a warning that I’ve sometimes felt as well, he continues:

But one must not overlook the fact that such advantages are attended by serious danger. In Johann Sebastian Bach’s day, he had to walk ten miles to a neighboring town to hear Buxtehude play his work. [Footnote in my edition: that's probably not true.] Today anyone, living no matter where, has only to turn a knob or put on a record to hear what he likes. Indeed, it is in just this incredible facility, this lack of necessity for any effort, that the evil of this so-called progress lies.

How unlike the way we talk today, right? “Facility” equated with “evil.” It sounds like Calvin’s Dad. I wouldn’t quite go there (usually), but still, I have felt that odd personal sense of uncertainty about what happens to my mind/attention/(and even) character when I can get whatever I want when I want it–as is quickly becoming the case with streaming music. Continuing:

For in music, more than in any other branch of art, understanding is given only to those who make an active effort. Passive receptivity is not enough. To list to certain combinations of sound and automatically become accustomed to them does not necessarily imply that they have been heard and understood. For one can listen without hearing, just as one can look without seeing. The absence of active effort and the liking acquired for this facility make for laziness.

This is hard to hear, in some ways. I’ve used Spotify to listen to more concert music in the last month than I ever had heard before, exploring contemporary and 20th-century stuff that I never was quite ready to spend money on. (Schoenberg, I’m looking at/listening to you.) But on the other hand, I almost always do so with “background music” as my main concern, with perhaps a flavoring of “I ought to check this stuff out” dusted on top. But essentially, Stravinsky is right: a lot of my music listening is separated into background or not-background music, and pretty much everything that he thinks I ought to listen to more carefully (i.e. serious concert music) goes in the background–right next to a lot of world music and a lot-lot of videogame music; strange bedfellows. (Today I’ve listened to a bunch of Schoenberg, a bit of Debussy, and a lot of Yoshino Aoki, composer of the Breath of Fire IV soundtrack.)

But I’m finally a bit less chastised when I get here:

The radio has got rid of the necessity that existed in Bach’s day for getting out of one’s armchair. Nor are listeners any longer impelled to play themselves, or to spend time on learning an instrument in order to acquire a knowledge of musical literature. The radio and the gramophone do all that.

This is where Stravinsky’s position in history really shows, I think. Yes, it’s perhaps true that people pick up traditional instruments less than they used to. (Anyone got a study on this? I’m curious.) But surely more than ever can use digital tools to create complex and satisfying music in ways he couldn’t have dreamed of.

Early this morning, my buddy Steven tweeted this:

A couple others jumped in. Harley Ferris pointed out:

And the inestimable DocMara directed us to this video, by my kind-of-hero Vi Hart:

I responded with a vague recommendation that everyone read David Burrows’s Sound, Speech, and Music. I had this kind of thing in mind:

Seeing is like touching, hearing like being touched; except that the touch of sound does not stop at the skin. It seems to reach inside and to attenuate, along with the distinction in Field 1 between here and there, the biologically still more basic one between within and without. In this way sound can ease some of the tension that goes with the duality of the organic condition. (21)

So there’s all that: essentially, some sound-loving rhetoricians trying to figure out what the heck sound does, and how that relates to the solid world our bodies inhabit. Weird, when you start thinking about it, right? In some ways, this is heart of the CCCC panel that I’ll present on this March along with Kati Fargo and Steph Ceraso: the physical nature of sound as something our bodies experience, not just as an idea we theorize about.

Even weirder: two (perhaps competing) things I read later in the day that hint at the topic of sound solidified–if perhaps only tangentially. Both are from interviews in Vivian Perlis and Libby Van Cleve’s Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington, part of the Oral History of American Music endeavor.

First, composer Leo Ornstein made an intriguing claim that I’m still trying to wrap my head around:

And besides–now I’m saying something very, very important–one has to be particularly careful of one’s own style because it’s so easy to simply operate almost unconsciously within the style, forgetting altogether about the substance, substituting style for substance. . . . The trouble is it takes the most astute kind of person to be able to distinguish when the artist is operating on his style or when he is operating within substance. And an audience can easily flounder. (91)

Within the context, he’s criticizing composers who are “much more interested in experiment than they are in music,” saying that those are the ones interested in “style,” in composing as a solely intellectual activity as opposed to something that’s supposed to move an audience. Instead, he’d rather hear composers who are interested in “substance,” in having some sort of musical meaning that can be communicated to an audience. (At least that’s what I think he means; that last line about audiences who “flounder” makes me second-guess myself.)

Interesting metaphor though, right? Substance. I picture “style” music as like lasers and lights flashing through the air, unable to be grasped and moving so fast that you can’t make out what they’re doing there, how it all coheres. But I picture “substance” music as food-like, able to be chewed and swallowed and cooked again later to better understand the ingredients.

Second, I read these lines from experimental composer Edgard Varèse:

My aim has always been the liberation of sound; to throw open the whole world of sound to music. . . . When I was twenty I came across a definition of music that seemed suddenly to throw light on my groping toward the music I sensed could exist: “the corporealization of the intelligence that is in sounds.” [Quote from Josef Hoene Wronski] It was new and exciting and to me, the first perfectly intelligible conception of music. It was probably what first started me thinking of music as spatial–as moving bodies of sound in space, a conception I gradually developed and made my own. (102-03)

Here again was the idea of sound as having substance, though in a very different way than Ornstein meant. Instead, Varèse is frustrated with the rules of music that Western concert music has followed for so long, and he sees an answer to that in reconceiving the basic metaphors we use to discuss musical form at all. Instead of music being recursive, or structured like an oration (in the Baroque period), or grown organically (in the Romantic period), music to Varèse is a physical thing hurtling through the air at you, like a pillar of cloud, or of fire.

Not that I have to, but I reconcile these kind of views (really, a very old debate) the way Andy Hamilton, a philosopher, does in Aesthetics and Music: he’s comfortable saying, essentially, there’s sound-based art over here, and there’s music over there, and they’re both awesome, but it’s okay for them to be different. Music, to Hamilton, has to deal with “tonal organization” created with some degree of will: “…with limited exceptions, tones not produced by human intentional action do not count as music” (49). Our pal Varèse would see that as limiting.

Side note: after reading about Varèse, I decided to listen to whatever came up of his on Spotify (a program I’ve written about before, and which I can give you an invitation to if you need it) while writing this post, beginning with “Arcana.” I expected heavy-handed, grating, noise-music–but at least in that track, what I got was something that sounded an awful lot like the score to the original Star Trek (this kind of stuff). Bizarre. Much nicer is the piano music of Ornstein I’ve got going now instead.

• YouTube & Fair Use
• YouTube & Fair Use (Part II)

While YouTube doesn’t deny users their Fair Use rights, as such a practice would be illegal, they certainly frame the debate in such a way to make exercising Fair Use difficult. . . . However, even when “educating” the public about copyright, YouTube errs on the side of copyright for owners’ rights.

Why Study Rhetoric? or, What Freestyle Rap Teaches Us about Writing

The website eHow has a page on “How to Freestyle Rap” (“Difficulty: Moderately Challenging”), and I’m trying to figure out what I think about it. On one hand, it seems like it would be against the ethos of an authentic rapper to use a page like this to brush up on freestyle skills. After all, the page is hosted on a corporate website owned by Demand Media, Inc., the same people behind, among other things, a golf site.

But on the other hand, the advice seems solid. The eHow page encourages me to follow an easy, seven-step model:

1. “Learn the basics.”
2. “Just start flowing.”
3. “Write down some good rhymes ahead of time.”
4. “Work on your wordplay.”
5. “Practice at home in your spare time.”
6. “Have a rap battle.”
7. “Rap what you know.”

The page treats freestyling as an art that can be practiced effectively by anyone, as long as the rapper is willing to research, take risks, spend time developing the craft, practice with a community and for an audience, and stay true to him/herself—i.e., to keep it real.

And here’s the thing: I think rhetoric is the same way. That is, it’s an art that can be practiced effectively by anyone, as long as the rhetor (the person who is communicating rhetorically) is willing to research, take risks, spend time developing the craft, practice with a community and for an audience, and stay true to him/herself.

You don’t hear me though.

***

That’s right: rhetoric is an art. But not necessarily art the way we think of it. The ancient Greeks called it a techne, a word they used to mean “a craft or ability to do something, a creative skill; this can be physical or mental, positive or negative, like that of metalworking or trickery” (Papillion 149).

Other examples of techne? Ship-building, for one.[1] You’d better not muddle your way through the art of building a ship, or you’ll ruddy well sink.

Rhetoric developed as an oral art, the art of knowing how to give an effective speech—say, in the court, in a law-making session, or at a funeral speech. And if you muddled your way through a speech, not convincing anyone, not moving anyone, looking like a general schmuck in a toga, you’d ruddy well sink there, too.

***

If rhetoric is an art, it’s an art of what? The shortest answer: an art of communication, whether written, spoken, painted, streamed, or whatever.

But how do you judge when communication has worked, when it’s effective? In other words, how do know when someone has used rhetorical skills well?

That’s easy: when an audience says it’s effective. So:

• An anchor on a conservative news show makes a jab at President Obama. Conservative watchers thought the jab was well-deserved and well-timed; it was rhetorically effective for them. Liberal watchers thought it was a cheap shot; it wasn’t rhetorically effective for them.
• A student writes an essay arguing that advertisements are so pervasive in the U.S. that he can’t even go to the bathroom without seeing Coke’s logo. His roommate reads it and doesn’t think advertising is a big deal; he’s not convinced, so it’s not a rhetorically effective essay for him. But his teacher reads it from her point of view and thinks it’s cleverly argued and bitingly true. It works for her; it’s rhetorically effective for her.
• Eminem ends a rap battle to raucous applause from the people in the room, but the old grandmother in the back of the club thinks it was all a lot of noise.

So rhetoric can’t be judged completely objectively. It wouldn’t make sense to say that someone’s rhetoric was “right” or “wrong.” It all comes down to if it works for the audience it was intended for.

Also, notice that all of those examples describe situations where the rhetor is being persuasive in one way or another. That’s a common part of definitions of rhetoric—that it’s the art of persuasion. And that’s important—we’re constantly trying to convince people, either subtly or overtly, to understand our points of view, and people are constantly trying to convince us of their points of view.

But I like to think of rhetoric as being about more than just persuasion, which starts to sound all bossy and manipulative when I think of that way. Instead, I think rhetoric is the art of making a connection with an audience. It’s a series of techniques to help me share the way I see things with someone else. And depending on who I’m sharing with, I’ll use different techniques. I wouldn’t communicate my views to my wife in the same way that I’d share my views to the U.S. president, or to Jay-Z.

***

The best rappers are surprising. You lean over laughing at wordplay that you didn’t expect. You smile, get into the groove, listen more carefully, and later you remember how much you enjoyed it. The communication was effective.

***

I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in my senior year of high school, but I didn’t really get it. The author kept talking about rhetoric, and even after I looked up the definition, it didn’t make any sense to me.

Looking back, I think that’s ironic: the beating, blood-pumping heart of rhetoric is a consideration of audience. Speaking or writing or composing something that works the way you want it to for the audience you want it to work for.

But I don’t think senior-year me was the intended audience of Zen. If I had been, the author was pretty lousy at being rhetorical, because he didn’t explain well enough what rhetoric even means. The concepts he wanted his audience to be convinced of after reading his book didn’t leave me convinced and riveted; instead, I was glassy-eyed and dreaming about angsty 90s rock.

He was thoroughly un-rhetorical in his discussion of rhetoric.

I read the book now and I’m moved and touched. He shared his views effectively with me. Without the text changing at all, I became his audience. I get it now.

So he was being rhetorical after all. It’s both.

***

Why study rhetoric? It’s the same as if you asked, “Why study freestyling?” Both are a set of skills and techniques that often come naturally, but which people can learn to do better by studying the methods that have proven effective in the past.

“Why study painting?” Because by studying how other people paint, you learn new techniques that make you a more effective painter.

“Why study business?” Because by studying how other people do business, you learn new techniques that make you a more effective businessperson.

Why study ship-building, or basket-weaving, or trickery, or anything else that you might be able to muddle through but which you’d be better at with some training and practice? Isn’t it obvious?

It’s the same with rhetoric, but in realm of communication. Why not learn some techniques that will increase the chance that your audience will think/feel/believe the way you want them to after hearing/reading/experiencing whatever it is that you’re throwing at them?

And that’s only thinking about you in the composer’s role. What about when you’re in the receiving end, hearing/reading/experiencing things that have been carefully crafted so that you’ll buy into them? A scary of list of rhetorically effective people: politicians, advertisers, super-villains. (You want rhetoric? Just listen to the slimy words of the Emperor in Return of the Jedi or the words Voldemort beams into everyone’s brain in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part Two.) Studying rhetoric has the uncanny effect of opening your eyes to when people are trying to be all rhetorical on you, wielding their communication skills like an evil weapon.

***

My friend to me, the other day: “Ugh. Carrie just wrote something inappropriate on her fiancée’s Facebook wall again.”

Me: “What’d she say?”

My friend: “I don’t even remember. It was something all gushy and uncomfortable. I skimmed back a bit and saw she’s been doing that a lot. Doesn’t she know that she can write messages that go just to him and not the rest of us? She doesn’t have to post that stuff on his wall!”

As I thought about this conversation, I realized that Carrie (not her real name) was in some ways being a rhetorical failure. Yes, her fiancée (one person), who was certainly the primary intended recipient of her message, probably found the wall post very rhetorically effective. That is, he surely felt the gushy emotions that she meant for him to feel. Her message worked. How rhetorical!

But because a Facebook wall is to some extent public, there are others who will read her post too (hundreds of people). What is the intended message for them? If we trust and like Carrie (and if she’s lucky), then we may think, “Oh, it’s sweet when people are public about their love for each other!” If we’re kind of sick of Carrie, we might think, “She just plain doesn’t get that we don’t care about her digital smooches and hugs.” And if we’re mad at her, we might think, “She’s publicly declaring her love to him because she wants us to feel bad that we don’t have the kind of true love that she has!”

In short, the message to most of us is either A) that’s nice, B) oh, gross, or C) that hussy.

Why study rhetoric? Because so many people so often seem to have no no no idea about how to communicate well.

***

We’re still beating around the bush about what rhetorical skills actually look like. Up to this point, you could say, “You keep talking about all these different collections of skills, but besides freestyling, I barely have any idea how to go about being effective at this stuff.” Fine—pass the mic.

Mic passed. Among lots of other things, some of the skills practiced by rhetors (and composition students) include:

• Basics that effective communicators keep in mind (like discovering the best time and place to communicate, clarifying what the communication is about, and learning about your audience)
• Techniques for deciding the best kinds of ideas and evidence to use for a given audience (like freewriting, open-minded research, and other forms of what we call “invention”)
• Techniques for deciding on the best way to organize material for a given audience (like models for organizing information into a business report, or a classical six-part speech, or a thesis-driven research essay)
• Suggestions for how to shape your style in ways that will be both understandable and exciting for your audience (like using rhetorical figures to liven up your sentences or varying sentence length and type)
• Considerations on the best way to get your communication to your audience (like a speech, an essay, a video, a recording, a painting, a post-it note, a letter made from words cut out of magazines)

Yes, I keep writing the word audience over and over. That’s because it’s the core of any rhetorical endeavor. Remember? All those bullets can be summed up in one sentence: thinking rhetorically means thinking about your audience.

And that means communicating in a way that doesn’t make you look stupid, mean, or confusing.

And that means you should communicate in a way that makes you look smart, nice, and clear.

It sounds obvious, right? I think so too. But then, why are people so bad at it?

***

Those are the failures of a failed freestyle rapper, too. He gets up to start a rap battle, looks impressive at first (i.e. he has a strong ethos—a word we use a lot when analyzing communication from a rhetorical angle), but then things go badly when he gets the mic.

He starts out blundering around, looking like he’s never done this before. (He should have followed eHow’s advice to “Write down some good rhymes ahead of time.”)

In desperation, he lashes out at the other guy with attacks that seem like low blows, even for a rap battle. The audience groans; he broke an unspoken rule about how mean to be. Rhetorical failure.

He can tell that he’s losing the audience, so he changes his tactics and starts blending together all kinds of words that rhyme. But he fails at this too, since nothing he says makes any sense.

Eventually, he’s booed off the stage.

Why study rhetoric? So you can succeed in rap battles. I thought that was obvious.

Works Cited

“How to Freestyle Rap.” eHow. Demand Media, n.d. Web. 15 July 2011.

Papillion, Terry. “Isocrates’ Techne and Rhetorical Pedagogy.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 25 (1995): 149-63. JSTOR. Web. 19 July 2011.

Pirsig, Robert M. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values. New York: Morrow, 1974. Print.

I opened up my Google Doc “Dissertation Research Journal” and started to write this out there as a freewrite to figure out some thoughts, but then I decided this was as good a place as that to think “out loud.” (Auditory metaphors are unavoidable, no?) I feel that sense of scholarly unease that often leads to good things; someone (who?) once wrote, “I always wake up in the middle of the night and realize that my current project is completely uninteresting, but by figuring out my way around that terror I get to the really good stuff.” I feel like I’m getting there now.

Here’s the thing: musicologists write about rhetoric all the time, but it’s generally boring. Here’s what I don’t mean by that:

• I don’t mean that musicology is boring.
• I don’t mean that exploring the intersection of music and rhetoric is boring.

Still, this stuff (which I’ll politely not cite in this informal space, I think) is often boring:

• It’s boring because rhetoric is interpreted as a series of techniques. (“Here is how you arrange a speech. Here are figures to make your style effective.”)
• Building from that, it’s boring because musical rhetoric is described as a series of techniques. (“Here is how you arrange a sonata. Here are musical figures to make your style effective.”)
• Building from both of those, it’s boring to read a technique-driven analysis of any text. (“Then, Cicero/Bach moves into the confirmatio section of the speech/piece, which has x effect. Then, Cicero/Bach uses anaphora, which has y effect. Then . . . .”)
• It’s also surprisingly boring to read the original manuscripts of 17th- and 18th-century musical theorists (mostly German) who loved listing every single way that rhetoric and music seem to be similar.

So. As I’ve been weighed down by this boring-ness more and more in the last few weeks, I’m increasingly led to a deeper question: how do I view rhetoric? Is it just a compilation of techniques that can be roughly categorized to help people invent, arrange, embellish, memorize, and deliver arguments? Or is it something more? I felt this desire for the ineffable recently when I was writing a fun, student-friendly piece called “Why Study Rhetoric? or, What Freestyle Rap Teaches us About Writing” (which I’ll post here one of these days). I kept talking about why rhetoric mattered, but suddenly I realized I hadn’t actually gotten specific about what rhetorical techniques actually look like, and in the end that section is what I’m least happy with.

Maybe this is the heart: one of my dissertation readers emphatically said to me once, “How can anyone in other fields know what rhetoric is? We don’t even know what it is!”

But that’s not how it sounds when you read musicologists, past or present, write about rhetoric. They seem to know. Rhetoric is always a set of techniques. It’s depicted an art, a techne, a set of technical knowledge about what’s most likely to move a crowd. Certainty all around! And in some ways, they’re right. Rhetoric is indeed an art and a series of techniques. It really is. But it’s more, too. Right?

When I was writing that piece about freestyle rap, I asked a question on my Facebook wall that now feels particularly apt:

Did I ask these people for permission to post this? Nope.

Marc mentions Corder’s article, and here’s how it ends:

Rhetoric is love, and it must speak a commodious language, creating a world full of space and time that will hold our diversities. Most failures of communication result from some willful or inadvertent but unloving violation of the space and time we and others live in, and most of our speaking is tribal talk. But there is more to us than that. We can learn to speak a commodious language, and we can learn to hear a commodious language.

Musical rhetoric can work the same way, and it’s even better suited to this kind of “commodious language” than words are: music can be carefully crafted to “hold our diversities,” to be loving, to honor the inherent “violation of the space and time” that music brings as it insistently attacks our ears and minds.

And did you see Corder’s sudden move to the auditory in his 4th-from-last word–his request that we “learn to hear” this new, connection-bridging model of rhetorical communication? Maybe he hears it too. . . .

So what does this have to do with my dissertation? It means that I’m not just “interpreting musicology’s work on rhetoric in terms that the rhetoric field will appreciate,” which I always say is one of my many goals. Instead, it means that I’m coming at that work–again, both historical and contemporary–with the new lens of pointing out how our view of rhetorical music can be so much broader, so much lovelier, so much more engaging, than a simple study of arrangement and figures. And there’s nothing boring (to me) about that.