This is not going to be a 30 column where I describe the
difficulties of running my job at the Daily Bruin. I won’t
give you examples of hardships, how I slept overnight in the
office, none of that. Honest. So don’t grab your hanky cause
I won’t be pulling heartstrings.
Instead I’d like to talk about the exciting world of
interdisciplinary studies. Yes, it’s that great new plane
from which wonderful new ideas spring. This is a relatively new way
of thinking about academics and it’s time it became the
norm.
Separating genres of learning is arbitrary. For example, the
music department is a separate entity from the music history
department which is separate from ethnomusicology. The three
don’t necessarily cover the same range of topics, but they
are about the same fundamental thing: how music has meaning within
a cultural context. The separation is not merely cosmetic. In fact,
there is quite a lot of animosity among the departments, each of
which think they have some kind of validity the others
don’t.
I missed classes to do interviews.
The music historians love looking at historical context, but the
music theorists charge that this often leads to reading too much
biography/circumstance into the purely abstract works. The division
is so complete that years ago the American Musicological Society
even created an off-shoot, the Society of Music Theorists, to
afford them safe, like-minded company. But, without putting too
fine a point on it, it’s ridiculous. Theorists have long used
history to put music in cultural contexts, and historians have long
used theory to discuss musical technique. Ethnomusicology is an
offshoot of anthropology, but its idea that Western music is Music
with a capital M is at the core a fallacy. The methods of
scholarship may be a bit different and they may come from different
traditions, but they are still coming to terms with the same
issues: how long to make music, how loud to make it, who to allow
to sing and listen to it, how complex to make it, what instruments
should be used to make it, what purpose does it serve, and how does
it achieve emotional/spiritual/intellectual depth. Dichotomies
amount to ego-trips which get in the way of fruitful musical
discussion.
I don’t want this year to end.
I’m double majoring in communications studies and music
history. These two majors have no common courses in the upper
division, but it’s obvious that music is a form of
communication. The media is a primary form of music dissemination.
The connections between the seemingly disparate subjects require
intense diplomacy between scholars-cum-bureaucrats. These issues
need to be addressed institutionally in the very structure of the
unfortunate science versus art mind-set of university
education.
I slept overnight in the Bruin office to work on stories. I even
have the toothbrush to prove it.
Ho was a Daily Bruin Arts and Entertainment assistant
editor.