Words, words, SAM

Chapter 3 is 11, 829 words, bringing the total word count so far to 45, 625. Chapter 4 is  now titled “‘A solitude ten thousand fathoms deep’: Independence.”

I don’t expect to get a whole lot done this week because I leave for SAM on Wednesday and am pretty much booked there non-stop. But on Friday afternoon–I’m not going on any of the excursions–I may work on the two encyclopedia entries I have coming up and begin some other work for which I don’t need my whole score library, etc., with me.

If you’re going to SAM, don’t forget the Academic Ronin no-host party Thursday night! Email or FB me for details.

Blogging the Book: Chapter 3

Chapter 3 was going to be 90+ pages if I included everything in Talma’s output and life between 1934 and 1952, so with the help of some excellent friends I’ve decided to break it into two chapters. Chapter 3 remains “Conversion and Sublimation;” Chapter 4 will take a title from Auden, probably, and will pick up around 1943, when Talma went to MacDowell for the first time. Onward.

University of Colorado-Boulder to honor creator of pseudoscientific “Mozart Effect”–why?

I have to say I’m really embarrassed for and irritated by the recent decision of the UCB music dept to hold a symposium on the late Don Campbell’s pseudoscientific “Mozart Effect” and other writings. Healing at the Speed of Sound, Campbell’s last book, shied away from more extreme claims but still ignored studies in neurological music therapy in favor of anecdotes, omitting real data in favor of Campbell’s pet theories. The book was first published by the group Advanced Brain Technologies, which exists apparently not to conduct research but to sell “teleseminars” and its products, including books, audio recordings, special white-sound recordings, earbuds, and more.

That the school is re-naming the Susan Porter Symposium the “Porter-Campbell” symposium is just as bad. For The Mozart Effect, Campbell, not a terribly good writer and not at all a scholar, borrowed heavily from studies by Tomatis and Rauscher, Shaw, and Ky on whether listening to classical music–they used Mozart in the tests–did anything for your intelligence, spatial reasoning, and general brain health. Along the way he misinterpreted and misconstrued date to his own advantage. Despite the Rauscher et al answer of NO, Campbell trademarked the idea of “The Mozart Effect” and built an industry around selling recordings and workbooks claiming improved health through listening. Raucher’s own commercial enterprises build upon the research at least avoid false claims and use a variety of activities to stimulate young children’s brains. For Healing at the Speed of Sound, Campbell and his co-author suggest that medical treatments can be foregone for musical therapies, among other things, and that creating playlists with particular characteristics can do everything from “heal” mute autistic children to help prevent cancer.

Campbell’s work is a fraud. Campbell made a lot of money by convincing unsuspecting people that his pseudoscientific theories could cure or assist with brain development, healing, autism, and other conditions.

So I’m rather appalled by UCB’s symposium, everyone promoting it, and those involved. I’d have thought they’d have known better.  If UCB had wanted to honor Campbell, there were better ways of doing it. But really, I don’t think that someone shilling fake science to make money is a person to honor.

Fortunately, most musicians and plenty of other people have realized what a sham Campbell’s books are. If only the University and School of Music at Boulder would, too.

Brief Resources:

Science Daily, “Mozart’s Music Does Not Make You Smarter, Study Finds”: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100510075415.htm

Skeptic, “The Myth of the ‘Mozart Effect’”: http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-02-06/#feature

The Skeptic’s Dictionary, “The ‘Mozart Effect’”: http://skepdic.com/mozart.html

In-depth reading:

Bruer, John T. The Myth of the First Three Years (Free Press, 1999).

Chabris, C.F. 1999. Prelude or requiem for the ‘Mozart effect’? Nature, 400, 826-827.

Chabris, Christopher and Daniel Simons. 2010. The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. Crown.

Kandel, Eric R. & James H. Schwartz, eds. Principles of Neural Science 4th ed. (McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing, 2000).

Thompson, W.F., Schellenberg, E.G., & Husain, G. 2001. Arousal, mood, and the Mozart Effect. Psychological Science, 12(3), 248-251.

Willingham, Daniel T. 2006.  “Brain-Based” Learning: More Fiction than Fact. American Educator. Fall.

The Mozart Effect by Michael Linton,  head of the Division of Music Theory and Composition at Middle Tennessee State University

“The Mystery of the Mozart Effect – Failure to Replicate” by Kenneth M. Steele, Karen E. Bass, and Melissa D. Crook in Psychological Science Vol. 10 No. 4 July 1999. Available in PDF format (requires Adobe Reader)

Word dating: “tops” and “bottoms”

In researching and writing about Talma’s relationship with Nadia Boulanger, I’ve found that there is a point in Talma’s letters in which she keeps professing her love and adoration for NB, but abnegates the power of the relationship, placing any further development on NB. And while NB was encouraging of LT’s overtures at first, she seems to have backed off as they continued and became more, well, needy and desperate. As I was working, I wanted to write something like, “at this point LT switched from being the pursuer in the relationship and became what we would today call the bottom, hoping that NB would in this relationship (as in her non-romantic 1-on-1 interactions) take on the role of the top.”

I didn’t know when the terms “top” and “bottom” came into use in the sense of the dominant/passive partner, and I was curious. Obviously “top” has been used to mean “have sex with” for a long time (we see it in Othello, among other places, where it is conflated with the word “tup,” which is what a ram does to a ewe, making it even more offensive in context), and it may have always been related to physical sexual position. But when did it become common to refer to a person as a “top” or “bottom”? How far back can we trace the use of this in sentences that refer to the power dynamic of a relationship and not just the physical aspects thereof?

I posted this question on Facebook, Twitter, and the Chronicle of Higher Education forums (re: which I have just totally outed myself). I got a lot of replies on Facebook and the CHE, but far fewer than I expected on Twitter, which itself was interesting to me. Many fine colleagues chased down definitions and such for me in various sources I myself did not have (I do have a compact OED, which shockingly does not even include these meanings of the words; for shame, OED!) and sent me to very useful sites for further digging.

Alas, the consensus is that no one knows. The OED traces words and meanings to their first print appearance, but surely, like most words, “top” and “bottom” were in the vernacular long before appearing in print. Some sources pointed to definitions from the late 50s and early 60s, while others mentioned Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top” and wondered whether he was sneaking in a gay pun that many straight audiences might not get. Some folks thought the meanings originated from the BDSM community; others suggested they came from the earliest accounts of animal husbandry and suggested power along with position. One person mentioned that this was the second time in as many weeks that he had seen this very query posted. And so, while we can trace the reclamation of “queer” and the origin of “butch” (“tough” from Butch Cassidy in the late 1800s; “a masculine lesbian” from the 1940s), “top” and “bottom” are more nebulous.

So, dear readers, if you have any information on the early uses of “top” and “bottom” not just to indicate sexual positions but also the power dynamics of a relationship or even the personal characteristics of a person (“He’s such a top!”), do let me know here.

Revising Chapter 1 and the news from England

This week I’m revising Chapter 1. Originally this chapter provided a biographical overview of Talma from birth to death, but my reviewers suggested simply making it about her childhood, youth, and earliest (pre-Boulanger) works, and I agree that this makes the most sense So I’m reorganizing the material and combining some already written work from two related articles to create the revised chapter. And, having decided to go with more  descriptive chapter titles, I’m changing the chapter title to “Myth and Meaning in Talma’s Early Life and Career.”

I’m also very interested in the news from the UK about the identification of Richard III’s skeletal remains in Leicester. I’m working on a chapter for the Oxford Handbook of Music and Disability Studies on cinematic music for Shakespeare’s play, and the news has begun to stimulate some discussions and interviews on R3, his physical disability, and how this was translated by early moderns as indicating distortion in the mind as well as the body. Here’s the initial BBC post: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-21063882 and a discussion among actors who have portrayed the king: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2013/feb/04/shakespearean-actors-richard-iii-remains. I’ll be in London for research on R3 performance practice in May.