260f Course Materials

8/14/2019 260f Course Materials

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Musicology260f: Music in Los Angeles: Postmodern Urban Geography and the Poetics of Sound and SpaceDRAFT SyllabusProfessor Robert FinkSpring 2008

Course rationale:

Musicology, a product of nineteenth-century historicism, has tended to move in a tight circle around questions of

music and time: the chronology and ordering of works; how style shifts over time; musical temporality as quasi-spatial structure, as the will of the Tones, as a reflection of subjective identity or sexual desire. But it may well bethat as musical canons (and their historical perspectives) both decay and proliferate, the grand temporal narrativesboth inside and around music will be less interesting to scholars. Instead, we might try toplacemusic, to connect itsstructures to the complex interlocking realities of streetscape, city, region, and world.

Our position in Los Angeles, perhaps the paradigmatic post-modern metropolis, offers a unique opportunity toexplore the intersection of musical and urban structures of feeling, representation, and space. Los Angeles has itsown school of postmodern urban geographers, led by theorist Edward Soja; its mythic history has been exhaus-tively documented in literature, films, and historical studies; its extremes of racial and economic fragmentation haveinspired both utopian theorizing and bitter critique, while its unique status as a network city and the capital othe Third World have made it a fruitful arena for the study of race and power. For scholars of music, the citys po-

sition as entertainment capital of the world makes its urban structure all the more significant: from the experi-mentalism of John Cage, to the pop stylings of Crosby and Sinatra, the film compositions of Korngold andHerrman, emigre composers and musicians like Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Klemperer, and Heifetz, to Rose Maddoxand Buck Owens, Frank Zappa, the Beach Boys, the Monkees, the Germs, the Carpenters, Guns and Roses, BlackFlag, Sublime, singers ofnarcocorridosand proteges of Dr. Dre there is almost no kind of music since 1945 thatSouthern California has not produced, and then disseminated across the world.

I intend the course to be methodologically broad, and not based in any specific repertoire. We will read synopticallybut intensely in cultural geography, urban theory, and theories of spatiality and architecture; consider ideas of thesoundscape and acoustic spaces in general; survey histories and sociologies of Southern California (especially thework of Carey McWilliams and Mike Davis) and analyses of how its urban fabric came to be; sample representationsof the city; and evaluate some key studies of music in Los Angeles (Dje Dje, California Soul; Hoskyns, Waiting for

the Sun; Parsons Smith,Music in Los Angeles: Transforming the Popular, etc.).

All sorts of class projects will be possible, from ethnographic research based in individual neighborhoods; analysis omusical institutions, corporations, and media; critical readings of representations of the city in sound; historicastudies of genres, styles, and musicians; or even formal structural analysis of musical works made in or about LoAngeles and Southern California.

The final project:

I will strongly encourage you to imagine your final project in graphical, spatial, or multimedia form, incorporatingmaps and mapping techniques that we will study individually during the term. I imagine that you will produce somtext, either as annotation of a map or in an independent essay, but one of this classs objectives is to explore the pos-

sibility of spatial thinking and spatial representation of musicological research and conclusions. If you are ambi-tious, you may want to explore the world of GIS (graphic information systems), in which structured data sets arelinked to dynamically-generated maps. There are several open-source GIS platforms available, including GRASSwhich runs on Linux (and thus Mac OS X). But even the technologically-challenged can use some combination oGoogle Earth, Yahoo Maps, and various free geocoding websites to create quite elaborate customized computermaps. I am happy to work individually with 4-credit students to assemble computer resources, since I myself aminterested in getting better at this stuff. For the determinedly Luddite, there is always the use of a physical papermap, push-pins, and string. (Im not kidding here it may be that some types of critical readings work better onpaper and if you are trying to work historically, a paper map from an earlier time may be your only choice.)


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Class Schedule at a Glance:

Week1 (Apr 4): Introduction: This is Los Angeles

I. URBAN SPACE AND MUSICAL SPACE

Week2 (April 11): General and Critical Theories of Urban Space (Simmel, Lefevbre, Lynch, Jameson)

Week3 (April 18): Modern and Postmodern Geographies (Soja and the L.A. School; Mike Davis; Krims)mapping assignment proposal due

Week4 (April 25): The Well-Tempered Environment: Landscapes, Soundscapes, Softscapes (Banham, SchaferThompson, Lally/Young, Klein, etc.)

II. THE RELUCTANT METROPOLIS

Week5 (May2): A History of Forgetting (L.A. and narratives of urbanity; McWilliams, Klein, Hise, FultonHayden, etc.)

Week6 (May9): Learning to Love/Hate the Sprawl (Soja/Scott, Baudrillard, Banham, Jencks, Dear, etc.)mapping assignment due

III. THE SOUND(S) OF LOSANGELES

Week7 (May16): Transforming the Popular: Stories of Music in Los Angeles (Smith, Hoskyns, Bryant, DjDje, Loza, etc.)

Week8 (May23): Case Study #1: Walt Disney Concert Hall

Week9 (May30): The (Musical) Capital of the Third World: Sound, Race, Space, and Place in Los Angele(Macias, Avila, Hayden, Lipsitz, Kun, etc.)

Week10 (June 6): Case Study #2: Hip-Hop and the L.A. Uprising

Finals (June 9-13): final projects due; presentation session TBD


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Music 260f: Music in Los AngelesAssignment 1 (Apr 11): Space as a Critical Concept in Social and Cultural Studies

This first assignment is designed to introduce the concept of space as a critical concept within contemporarysocial and cultural studies. There is a clear genealogy of thought, traced out in this assignment, from the firstglimmerings of modern sociology (Simmel), through mid-century structuralist and phenomenological thought(Lynch, Lefebvre), to one of the most canonical formulations of postmodernism as a critical and political concept(Jameson). As we will see, the basic assumption of this body of work is that the absolute space of Descartes, an

objective grid which exists independent of our perceptions and power relations, is a fiction or, at least, irrelevantto the interpretive task of a scholar facing the modern (or postmodern) urban condition.

In its place, Lefebvre proposed a socially-inflected space, a complex hybrid of objective facts about distance andstructure and subjective sensory perceptions and mental projections. The question of the legibility of the city asa space becomes paramount it is a goal to be reached scientifically in Lynch, and an impossibility to be explainedpolitically (through a spatialized reading of post-Marxist political economy) in Jameson.

Two speculative questions may arise: how does this social space relate to the imagined space of musical works?Second: how might a focus on sound, rather than sight (Lynchs image is a visual image, but it wouldnt havetobe, would it?) change our understanding of the politics and poetics of urban space?

Finally, note that both Lynch and Jameson (writing from Boston and North Carolina, respectively) seeminordinately interested in Los Angeles. L.A. as paradigmatic postmodern city is a topic we will take up next week

1. Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchen, and Gill Valentine, eds., Key Thinkers on Space and Place(London: Sage, 2004),pp. 3-15 (Introduction). [for background we wont discuss this]

2. Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1903. (Available online from http://www.altruists.org.)

4. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960)

- pp. 14-45 (Three Cities)- pp. 140-159 (Appendix B, The Use of the Method)

3. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space(1974), trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Wiley-Blackwell,1992), pp. 1-67.

5. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991)- pp. 39-54 (the Westin Bonaventure)- pp. 154-61 (spatialization of time)- pp. 364-76 (spatial historiographies)- pp. 399-418 (how to map a totality)


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Assignment 2: postmodern geography and the l.a. school

This weeks reading picks up quite explicitly from the attempts we surveyed last week to spatialize social andcritical theory (particularly Marxism) by Lefebvre and Jameson. Lefebvre is the patron saint of the so-called L.A.School of postmodern urban geography, led by Edward Soja and several of his ersrwhile colleagues at UCLA andother schools around the basin.

In this weeks reading, some of the excerpts are included because they help us integrate the material we studied last

week: a standard L.A. School thing to do is to draw a genealogy of critical thinking about space that begins withLefebvre and moves through writers like Jameson to get where they need to be. But we will also begin to surveythe practical results of all this emphasize on theproduction of space, and on the spaces of economic activity andpower so concentrated in a metropolis like the Greater LA Metroplex.

What do concepts like urbanism and the city, downtown, and the hood, mean in a modern/postmodernurban space like the ones first mapped out by Levebvre and Jameson? Ive included Adam Krimss work, because itis time we asked these questions ofmusic

modern urban geography begins: the Chicago School

1. Ernest W. Burgess, The Growth of the City (1925), in The City. Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behaviorin the Urban Environment(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 47-62. for background only just look at the pictures!

Soja, the influence of Lefebvre/Jameson, and the L.A. School

2. Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Theory(London: Verso, 1989).- pp. 173-189 (Restructuring and the Evolution of Urban Form)- pp. 190-221 (It All Comes Together in Los Angeles)- pp. 222-248 (Taking Los Angeles Apart: Towards a Postmodern Geography)

3. Edward Soja, Thirdspace. Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-And-Imagined Places(Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).- pp. 53-82 (The Trialectics of Spatiality)- pp. 204-218 (Citadel-LA; the Cultural Crown)

4. Michael Dear, The Postmodern Urban Condition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).- pp. 47-69 (Postmodern Bloodlines: from Lefevbre to Jameson) this should be review, since youve

read both of these authors in the original- pp. 140-165 (Postmodern Urbanism) this is the key section

L.A. School-style urban geography and musical forms

5. Adam Krims,Music and Urban Geography(New York: Routledge, 2007).- pp. 1-8 (Defining the Urban Ethos) as intro, his analysis of Petula Clarks Downtown and50

Cent, In My Hood- pp. 106-124 (Marxist Music Analysis After Adorno) KEY section: urban analysis of pitch relations and

the hip-hop sublime in reality and knowledge rap, featuring the RZA/Raekwon and A TribeCalled Quest


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Assignment 2: musical spaces and urban geography

How might sound enter the complex trialectics of spatial production outlined by postmodern geographers like Sojaand Dear? What is the musicalequivalent of the Westin-Bonaventure? We will survey some representation ap-proaches to bringing sound into the world of spatial analysis, and spatial analysis into the world of analyzing musicIn so doing, we will take up Lefebvres invitation to abandon the double illusion of space as a thing primarily ap-prehended by the eye, and thus either transparent or opaque. Soundscapes effortlessly escape this dialectical bind,and encourage other modes of spatial perception. Conversely, music is a classic space of representation (to use

Sojas translation of Lefebvres term), in which the symbolic contributions of artists work to sound the lived experi-ence of the (dominated) spaces in which they live and work. Finally, there are implications for musicians in the per-vasive, crisis-driven urban restructurings that dominate the earlier work of the L.A. School music is both acommodity and a symbolic form, and thus both participates in the economic intricacies of Dears Flexism (thechange in the way the music business works is a good example of flexist restructuring of the mode of production)helps modulate their effects (as in Muzak, or the design intensive sound of classical crossover

(Bon)aventures in music theory

1. Going Flat: Towards a Post-Hierarchical Music Theory, in Rethinking Music, Nicholas Cook and Mark Everisteds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 102-108; 120-137. (Ill provide the entire article, but you onlyneed read the first six pages and then the ending, which picks up from Jameson on postmodern hyperspace and Fou-caults heterotopia, and then analyzes pieces by Steve Reich and George Rochberg.)

post-Fordist urban geography and musical analysis

2. Adam Krims,Music and Urban Geography(New York: Routledge, 2007).

- pp. 1-8 (Defining the Urban Ethos) as intro, his analysis of Petula Clarks Downtown and50Cent, In My Hood

- pp. 106-124 (Marxist Music Analysis After Adorno) KEY section: urban analysis of pitch relations andthe hip-hop sublime in reality and knowledge rap, featuring the RZA/Raekwon and A TribeCalled Quest

- pp. 136-62 (Music and the Design-Intensive City) places classical crossover music in the context of urbanrestructuring, downtown entertainment districts, and the creation of the well-designed subject;very relevant to any discussion of musical institutions (Disney Hall) in L.A.s new cultural dis-tricts

urban geography and genre

3. Caroline OMeara,Highways, Histories, and the Earliest Days of Hip-Hop, chapter of Ph.D. dissertation,UCLA, 2006.

260f Course Materials

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