Several decades ago, when my dissertation advisor told me to “spice up” my writing, I realized that the better my prose became, the more I moved away from the facts–what I saw as “the truth.” Whereas I knew for a fact that “in March 1347, the papal treasury paid five silver pounds for fur hats for the pope’s eight singers*,” I didn’t really know if this was a “benevolent gesture by the supreme Pontiff.” But since I needed to please three readers, something that was always in the back of my mind, I suppose it ultimately didn’t hurt to insert gratuitous phrases periodically into what otherwise amounted to a 500-page spreadsheet.
As I’ve moved along in my teaching, I ask myself, “What is it that these students should know? What do they care about? What can bring them closer to the music and to the historical period?” At this point, I can honestly say that some of the information I now convey to my students is . . . uh . . . less than factual. At best, I suppose, it can pass as historical speculation. I’ve moved far away from factual detail in my lectures to a gray area of broad generalization and rhapsodic rambling.
Is it important that Mozart wrote a certain number of operas, or is it better that students know that he and his Italian librettist (Lorenzo da Ponte) were Masonic proto-revolutionaries? Should we call Mozart a “lofty genius” or rather think of him more as a musical Rainman with a touch of dyslexia perhaps and a smidgen of ADHD, as a contemporary scientific account alludes? When covering the 19th century, I want my students to think of Robert Schumann struggling with bi-polar disorder (and/or was it with his symptoms of late-stage syphilis?). I offer the class Schubert’s hypothetical pedophilia as explanation of a 17-year-old’s sensitive setting of “Erlking.”
There is certainly some evidence for these notions, but what do we really know? We really know dates for events and numbers of compositions, however, this is not the substance of a lecture; these facts are not worthy of study at anything but the graduate level. This is not history. All the trashy little tidbits that I spew paint a broader picture of Enlightenment and Romantic ideals. I want my students to identify with these historical figures as real people perhaps with lives similar to their own. Or so what if I have to sketch out characters as olde timey pop stars whose every move would today be covered by ET (Entertainment Tonight)? So, over time, I’ve moved away from a fastidious accuracy that marked my youthful scholarship. The broad sweep, the hyperbolic–that’s what works for me in the classroom. The factual details have become for me the dust of history.
Lol! This was fun to read! Aside from your passion for perjury as a new form of artistic expression, what struck me was the central question/theme: What do we want students to know? I think the more important question (which you hint at) is: what do we want students to be able to DO? To the extent that competing (“factual”) accounts of the past encourage explorations of meaning-making and power, the related facts are important. To the extent that they contribute to the telling of a story and provide a model for weaving a tale, they are expedient. Facts are useful to the extent that they propel something else (says the postmodern Rhetorician); that something else is what we’re paid to teach. I would conjecture that that something else involves the doing of a craft (e.g., of story-telling, of analyzing economic conditions). And as faculty, we’re more than Microsoft Excel’s minions. We’re skilled tradespeople apprenticing the next generation. In your course, they are gaining musical skills (as well as talents that will solidify their reputations as the “fun” aunts and uncles of the family.) This gift of hyperbolic flourish has only one real downside: it’ll crush their ability to win at Trivial Pursuit.
Your post reminds me of my conversion to Mozart. As a teenager, I found his music boring . . . until I watched the movie “Amadeus.” Intrigued, I did research and discovered his often funny (although outrageously scatological) correspondence (e.g., with his cousin Anna Maria). Having a soft spot for eccentrics, Mozart came to live for me after that.
The immersion into the personalities of famous people easily backfires, though . . . too many egocentrics with questionable ethics among them. Rodin’s and Gauguin’s works, for example, lost some their luster for me after I learned about their serious character flaws. I actually wish I didn’t know as much about them.
So, I don’t know. A little historic flavor may help, but in the end, I think we should be careful.
I have two thoughts about this. The first is how spectacularly important it is that you know you are lying. Once we start believing this stuff we’re finished — we become the RV’s of the world (no one but Tomasello will know who RV is; let’s just say someone who did not get tenure at Baruch many years ago).
Second thought: the best music appreciation teacher I ever saw — one of the best teachers period — was Ken Levy. He routinely kept classes of 400 mesmerized at Princeton and moved many to a lifetime of “appreciation.” On stage in front of that class he was a performer of grand gestures and grand generalizations; in our graduate seminars he was more like a monk, hesitant to suggest that we actually “knew” much of anything. I once asked him about the difference. His theory was that “teaching is lying”: that for intro classes sweeping generalizations were necessary; in upper level courses one needed some additional qualifications; in graduate seminars qualifications were still more necessary; you could lie much less in journal articles; and that the only place you really needed to tell the whole truth and nothing but was your dissertation. (Hmm, Levy was at Princeton; according to Tomasello they must have followed a different model for dissertations at Yale.)
Whatever we think of the rhetoric — Levy’s or Tomasello’s — I think the basic point is sound: one needs to generalize in class. After one of my first observations at Baruch, George Hill pointed out to me that I had qualified almost everything I’d said in class that day (“on the other hand…”). God knows what my students got out of those early lectures, but I’ll always be indebted to George for pointing this out. I started lying — but I knew I was doing it.
The circles of truth that Dennis outlines above seem to be missing one important level–the undergraduate essay, a main site of assessing what students are able to do. So what level of truth/fact (and thus, documentation) do we expect from our students in their formal writing? In the spirit of fun, it seems only fair that it should correlate with whatever standards we establish in our classrooms–wouldn’t we create a double standard by rhapsodizing around the not-quite-facts in class, but then requiring students to cite the source of each fact & quote, and scold them for wandering off-topic? Of course, we hold much more exacting standards for student writing, and rightly so–a matter of learning one’s scales before learning to improvise (though I don’t really believe there needs to be a rigid separation between these two processes). I suppose this points to a need to teach students to recognize when they earn the right to academically improvise, to make the rationale for our teaching methods clear, and to provide guidelines and models of what we expect of student work.
Is this what “revisionist” history is all about? No sooner is the definitive work about a person or a period written (and largely accepted) than an alternative perspecitive is published. The interpretation of the “facts” changes over time. One, because there is no one “right” way to interpret the “facts,” and two, because the overall “standard perception” or interpretation of things changes over time.
For example, as you point out a figure like Mozart once seen as a genius, may now be classed as possessing ADHD, or Joan of Arc’s voices and visions, may be seen as schizophrenia.
Also, it may well be that teaching Music and/or Music Appreciation is quite different than teaching History. In the former Music, per se, is the primary focus and the historic setting or milieu play a supporting, though quite important, role. Speculating about the meaning of specific facts in a composer’s life, or the meaning of his, or his patron’s actions, or lifting him out of his historical context and placing him in ours, piques one’s interest in the figure and in the changing nature of society.
All of which would seem to be permissible as long as notice is given that you are in fact speculating. And that notice need not be explicit, a wink of an eye or a wry smile, would appear to be sufficient.
The funny thing about Joan of Arc is that the last thing I heard about her is that she might have suffered from ergotism (St. Anthony’s Fire). This is a theory that has also been offered for the explanation of the Salem, Massachusetts hallucinations. In addition, Salem was analyzed as an in-group/out-group thing at one point. The competing-theories idea is sometimes too much for our students to bear. It’s often distressing news to our students that Shakespeare may or may not have been Shakespeare.
Yes. History is wonderful in that many of us have gotten tenure through fabrication and effective persuasion. But it does teach students something about how a unified approach or theory (whatever it may be) can organize an explosion of “facts.”
And what do they say about Homer? He did not really write the Illiad and the Odyssey. They were penned by a different gentleman who had the same name. But while we are at it, is there any proof that Jesus Christ existed, or that Moses parted the Red Sea, if, in fact, he did exist. Heresy? Which kind? Religious or academic? Or is there a difference?
Curious! I have the same teaching experience. Across the years I noted I was changing the way I conduct my lessons: less information and more contextual spirit. But I think these changes occur too because I know now something better the subjects I teach. Then, I can offer my students a more mature perspective and not just some facts without cement linking them. Of course there are allways gains and losses in this process.I can’t be sure now ev erything is better.
Casimiro, I performed a peer-observation of an immature teacher once who played 15 musical examples to illustrate one specific style of music. It felt more like listening to a radio DJ (sans weather and traffic) than witnessing a college lesson. And, remembering that music is durational–that it takes up time, you can imagine that there was no much time left for “cement.” It is indeed a problem when beginning music instructors see every fact, every nuance, every slight stylistic variation as equally important.
My head was swimming by the end of the 75 minutes, and I know the repertory. I could only imagine where the students minds were in all of this. It’s up to us to extract these gross generalizations and leave the details for the students’ hypothetical second go-round (re-read of the book, upper-level course, masters degree, etc.).
The immaturity of this poor observee was only underscored by the “comments” that were attached to my report. Pity.