Plagiarism revisited

My colleague and room-mate entered our office with a grin from ear to ear. He is married to a Hungarian woman who still lives there, so he visits the country a lot and keeps up with the Hungarian news. This morning the news was that the Hungarian president had been ripped of his PhD-title because he had committed plagiarism. According to the newspaper we read, 200 of the 215 pages of the thesis were somebody else's work.

My colleague did his PhD a long time ago and I am finishing mine, so this was news we liked. What we especially liked was that the university, although it had withdrawn the PhD title, did not accuse the president of plagiarism, but rather accused itself: the university had not made clear to the future president that this form of "unusual extensive copying" was not allowed when writing a PhD.

We imagined the conversation:
CEO of the university: "Sorry mr. President, but you have to hand in your degree."
Mr. President: "What?"
CEO: "You copied 200 of the 215 pages."
Mr. P.: "Is that not allowed? How could I know? Nobody éver told me! Next thing you're gonna tell me is that bribing the committee is also not admitted! I can't believe this!"

I wrote about plagiarism earlier here, but I hope the next time Dicky Gilbert accuses songwriters of plagiarism because they use C, F and G chords (and maybe even an Am7) he keeps in mind the Hungarian president - who did a bit more than inexcusably using the words "and", "but" and "is" in his thesis, thereby making it a case of plagiarism because my doctorated roommate used exactly those words in his thesis too.

Remedial Teaching for Conservatoire Graduates?

I was visiting the "Reflective Conservatoire"-conference in London last week. It had been a long time since I was in London, so that alone was a great joy. But the conference itself was fun to be, too. Basically, visitors to that conference are people working in conservatoires who try to look critically at what they are actually doing in order to make conservatoire tuition better.

If you have never been in a conservatoire: they are interesting places. They train, as their core business, young musicians to become professional musicians. And, as we always say, that training does not start when students enter the conservatoire. Before entering, they have mostly already spent an amazing amount of time studying their instrument, often from a very young age and with great determination. So within a conservatoire you find a club of very motivated and already very proficient musicians who want to become even better under the guidance of renowned teachers.

It is a great surrounding to be in. But it also has its backdrops, one of them being that conservatoire culture is one of extreme specialism, of entering into an often rigid tradition (be that classical, jazz, pop or world) guided by people who "know", and often of competition. That brings about not only joy & beauty, but also loads of stress and a lot of powerplay (thanks, Rosie!).

When students leave the conservatoire, they are often great specialists suffering under the constant stress of having to operate on what a very select group of connoisseurs considers to be the excellence level of music performing. So what you find in many places is that conservatoires have begun to worry about that, and have started to offer students activitiies next to their constant practising on their instruments in order to cope with that stress and to become more creative, more relaxed, more outgoing musicians.

On the conference some of these practices were demonstrated. I think it is a great thing that there are people in conservatoires who are concerned about the future life of their students and come up with those programmes. So there I was, looking at a great session where students were practising to look each other in the eye, touch each other, listen to each other, and improvise music in reaction to others.

And I couldn't help thinking: how come that we have to offer all those relatively straightforward things on conservatoire, and even post-graduate, level? How is it possible that we - western society as a whole, the music business in particular and conservatoires in the very particular - allow students for long years to neglect the looking, teaching, listening and improvising, then finally re-teaching them those aspects at a basically much-too-late point in their development?

Shame on us.

Teaching Respect (Rachid, we need you!)

Over the years I have given various reasons why conservatoire students should get an introductory course on world music. Because they will work in a multicultural/multimusical society when they have graduated. Because any citizen should know something about his social surroundings. Because it broadens their view on what music is. Because it makes their absolue ideas on Good Music a bit more relative. Et cetera.

All true. But nowadays I tend to think that the basic thing I teach them with a course on non-western music (I still prefer that label instead of the too cosy 'world music') is respect.

I know. Respect is one of the buzz-words of late modernity. Under the banner of respect, many people basically demand the right to do whatever they want to do without being bothered by other people reminding them of values which are not theirs. But it is not that kind of respect I mean.

On Hearing Wilco Live

The first time I heard the group Wilco was when I, by some conincidence, stumbled on a cd they made together with Billy Bragg. At the time I had heard a bit of and about Billy Bragg, the leftist English singer-songwriter, but I had never heard of Wilco. They did a project together in which they put lyrics from the heritage of Woody Guthrie to music. Guthrie's legacy contains a lot of lyrics-without-music, and with consent of the family Bragg and Wilco recorded a cd with Guthrie put to music by themselves. I loved the cd (Mermaid Avenue) basically because Wilco is so great on it - I don't like Bragg's voice too much, but Jeff Tweedy, Wilco's singer, has one of the best voices I know.

So I became a fan of Wilco - of Tweedy's voice - and bought at some point one of their cd's, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and recently their newest cd, The Whole Love. It is hard to describe their music; it is essentially American roots music, Americana, but quite loud at times and sometimes rather experimental. But through all that you keep hearing basically Jeff Tweedy singing his songs.

Epiphenomenia - Teaching a Music Lesson

I taught some music lessons at the primary school of my children these days. It had been a long time since I stood in front of groups of small children, I normally teach students between 20 and 30 now. So I will not deny I was slightly nervous. Would I still be able to handle them? Would they pick up what I had thought out for them, or would my ideas be completely misdirected? Would I have lost touch with teaching children or still be able to do the trick?

I will be honest: I was kind of satisfied, but not because I gave them great tuition. I kind of still could do the trick; what I did was okay, but probably more in the sense of "okay" like many parents who can teach an "okay"  lesson when asked to teach children about their work. I could teach them the lesson not so much as a music pedagogue but as a musicologist having a fun talk and a nice song with a classroom of kids.

Eine kleine Eismusik

There was ice, the last two weeks. That means several things. Apart from the fact that our country, traffic-wise, turns into a complete chaos - as I described earlier - many people are suddenly completely focused on outdoor skating. People who seldom go to skate on indoor ice rinks suddenly feel the urge to skate in the open, on `natural ice', as we say - either a rather limited round on a pond-like outdoor skating rink, or a proper tour over our canals and lakes.

I used to skate a lot (one year even up to three times a week - nothing else to do in the evenings) but fell out of that habit when starting a family 7 years ago. And this was about the first time in those 7 years I went out skating by myself. I had been on skates various times the past few years, but only on small ponds in order to help the kids getting used to being on ice. But now I could do an afternoon of skating by myself.

Marktzicht - Kylie Minogue on ice

When we arrived in café Marktzicht to play a gig, after a 45 minutes drive in the frost and with some fog, we heard that the weather conditions had led to a "code orange" from some authority. Meaning: stay at home if you do not necessarily have to go out. So we played for a small audience. But cosy.

Of course, anywhere else in the world people will laugh their heads off. A bit of fog at -8 Celsius, what's the big deal? Life is dangerous because eventually you'll die. But the fact is that in this country a bit of snow inevitably leads to a complete grinding halt of pubic life, mainly because so many people inhabit so few square kilometres. One incident on any railway line leads to a chain reaction with enormous consequences because the train schedule is so busy; and one accident at a slightly snowy highway leads to a national traffic jam because too many people drive in too many cars on too few highways. And in order to prevent complaints on all that - for the Dutch love to complain - authorities sometimes give "codes orange" at the slightest breeze. Which leads to complaints, of course - and also nót giving code orange leads to complaints, by the way.

So there we were, in café Marktzicht, feeling as if we were a chosen lot put together by rough weather circumstances and making the best of it. Snowed in for weeks, that feeling. And the fact that the audience spoke Frisian and we sang our songs in Frisian felt fitting. Friesland is connected with winters - it is the most northern part of the country, it boasts a great skating history, and its name is Freezeland after all.

Adding to that was the fact that our singer only two days ago disappeared in an ice hole on a skating tour on a far too thin layer of ice on one of the lakes near Groningen. Some people need to skate as soon as there is some ice somewhere. When his wife complained, our singer said rather grumpily that he had done nothing wrong. After all, hadn't he stopped his skating tour and went home after climbing out of the ice hole, where normally he would have skated on in wet clothes as he always did in his youth ("I'd put my skating cap in my trousers to prevent the freezing of vital parts, though")? Frisian guy, him.

So when we sang our version of Kylie Minogue's great "Can't Get You Out of My Head", which we turned into a song about nostalgia for the days when Friesland's monster 200-kilometre skating tour was organised regularly (days that have never existed but are a favorite nostalgia-target nevertheless), a song with lots of rain and ice holes in it, it added to the pleasure of an imagined winter's night in a pub in Friesland.

And basically, that's what we do when we play with the band - imagining. We go somewhere and change the place into something else for a couple of hours. I never know in what we change the place precisely, because that's different for every individual present. But when we succeed in changing the place for enough people in the audience, then the place changes also for us.

Or at least for me.

That's why I'm in it.