Music and 'us humans'

It's been a while. A long while. But I intend to start posting again, occasionally.

To start with: some music research journal recently tried to convince academics to publish by tweeting the following: "The sciences can help us to make sense of music and its significance in our lives. Contribute your #musicscience research to the academic journal Music & Science."

In order to interpret this tweet correctly, it is crucial that we first shed light on the fifth word of the first sentence of the tweet: "us". Who is this 'us'?

I can tell you one thing, from vast experience with my own and many others' musical lives: the 'us' is not a 'generalized us'. It is not 'us humans'. Because most humans have no trouble at all 'making sense of music and its significance in our lives'. Music has sense by definition and a priori - otherwise it wouldn't be there.

So if the tweet suggests that there is a problem (we, humans, have no clue about the 'sense of music') and that scientists are going to offer humanity the solution (they, scientists, will make sense of music for us, humans), it is just another instance of the usual academic hubris - academics will define 'our' true problems and then 'tell it as it really is'. Ignoring the fact that also academics are humans; they are 'situated' (as we say in social sciences' dialect), they speak from their own standpoint, and we should know about that standpoint if we want to discuss their findings in any meaningful way.

But there is a second reading. A reading in which the 'us' is not 'us humans' but 'us scientists', or 'us researchers', or 'us academics'. Then the tweet becomes different: it is not the academics' task to  answer humanity's questions but is their task to ask questions which normally, in our lives lived, are not asked at all.

(By the way: the reading of the word 'our' in the first sentence then requires extra attention - it suggests in this second reading that researchers, as humans, stand as pars pro toto for humanity. Is that realistic?)

It is this second reading I favour. Because it shifts attention from answer to question; from closure to openness; from convergence to divergence; from truths to suggestions; from seriousness to play.

I'm afraid the tweeters implicitly meant 'us humans'. But let's not bother, and feel free to think otherwise. To offer an alternative interpretation.

Just because academics' lives then become so much more fun.

Huizinga

"In tackling the problem of music as a function of culture proper (...), we begin where biology and psychology leave off. In culture we find music as a given magnitude existing right from the moment culture itself existed, accompanying it and pervading it from the earliest beginnings right up to the phase of civilization we are now living in. We find music present everywhere as a well-defined quality of action which is different from 'ordinary' life. We can disregard the question of how far science has succeeded in reducing this quality to quantitative factors. In our opinion it has not. At all events it is precisely this quality, itself so characteristic of the form of life we call 'music', which matters. Music as a special form of activity, as a 'significant form' , as a social function - that is our subject. We shall not look for the natural impulses and habits conditioning music in general, but shall consider music in its manifold concrete forms as itself a social construction. We shall try to take music as man himself takes it: in its primary significance. (…) We shall (…) try to understand music as a cultural factor in life."

This is not me speaking. It is me paraphrasing a paragraph from the very beginning of Johan Huizinga's famous 1938 study Homo Ludens. A Study of the Play Element in Culture. To be sure, I deleted a couple of fragments which were not appropriate to my ends, and replaced 'play' by 'music'. And suddenly, Huizinga makes the point I try to make: music is not 'in reality' something else (an activity of the brain; a social activity; an aesthetic experience; or an whatever), music is itself. Yes, it is probably also brain activity; yes, it is often a very social activity; yes, it often is an aesthetic experience. But that is rather irrelevant, given the fact that music is music.

I wonder why that sometimes seems so hard to accept. We do not allow ourselves to be just the musical beings we are. We want to explain it as something else - maybe we find 'just music' to be too trivial, or maybe we feel that we need to convince others. So we soothe away our anxiety to lead a trivial life by claiming, for example, that music must have been important for the evolution of the human being (what a pity we weren't there). Or we claim that music is one of the most powerful socially binding media (which is true - just as the opposite is true when we consider the existence of e.g. neo-nazi rock). Or we hype up music by claiming - on too little evidence - that it is a unique braintraining activity, preferably defining 'the brain' purely in terms of grey matter and ignoring the fact that in spite of all their brain training professional musicians for some reason have not become the super-humans they should be on the basis of such claims.


What I would like: that, before we pimp up music by translating it into anything else, we "take music as man himself takes it: in its primary significance".


That's hard enough, as a project, and too little done nowadays.

End of an Era - the Frisian folk music revival 1975-2018

In 1975, some Frisian musicians thought Frisian folk music deserved a revival, in line with the Irish, English, French and Dutch folk-music revival movement. For that reason, they created the group Irolt, which brought out its first album, the 'Gudrun Sêge' (the Gudrun Saga), in 1975. Because no such thing as Frisian folk music existed and therefor nothing could be revived, really, they invented it. The invention was successfull - they made six more albums until they disbanded in 1987.

In the meantime, folk music boomed in Friesland. In 1978, the Frisian Folk Festival 'Tsjoch' (literally: 'Cheers!') was organized for the first time. In 1979, the Association of Frisian Folk Musicians 'Tsjoch' saw the light. Groups and singers like Irolt, Doede Veeman, Roel Slofstra were the heroes of the time. Apart from the yearly Tsjoch festival, various towns had their own folk music festivals (Frjentsjip in Franker, for example).

I became attached to the Frisian folk revival movement quite early on. At the Tsjoch 3 festival, in 1980, I played for the first time with my band. I was 15, or maybe 16. Since then, I have been following it. Mostly from the sidelines, I must say - I moved out of Friesland when I was 18, and folk music has become one of the many musics I have been playing since then. Gamelan, the 'ud, tembang sunda, bluegrass and C&W, the shanty choir all have become part of my musical me in the past decades. But with my Frisian language band Butenom I kind of re-entered the still existing Tsjoch circles more than ten years ago, performing at various Tsjoch festivals and Tsjoch concerts.

And now, I feel, an end has come to all of that. Irolt, not active since 1987 apart from a couple of reunion concerts when their LPs were re-issued as CDs in 1994, did a new reunion tour in 2015, 40 years after the Gudrun Sêge had appeared. They  announced it would be the very very last time they would perform as Irolt. In 2017, the struggling Tsjoch festival - now called 'Tsjoch Nij' (Tsjoch New) - was organized for the last time. The renowned Tsjong evenings, organized by the Tsjoch Association for decades, closed its doors after a final evening in March 2018. And then, the Tsjoch Association was dissolved; its archive will be stored somewhere (I hope at Tresoar, the official Frisian archive), and its website has now ceased to exist.

Nearly 45 years of Frisian folk music revival. An arch beginning and ending with Irolt and one of its main members, Nanne Kalma, one of the most extraordinary musicians I happen to know. An arch I have been a witness of from the beginning to the end. I have been a member of the Tsjoch Association from nearly its very start until its finish; I have played at Tsjoch 3 in 1980 as well as at the final Tsjoch Nij festival in 2018; I heard Irolt perform live in the late 1970s and witnessed the final concert of the farewell tour in January 2016; I played at the final Tsjong evening in 2018.

And then it was over. I spoke with Nanne Kalma about it at the final Tsjong evening, where he, of course, was one of the central performers (although he would never describe it that way). I asked him if he was sad. He said there was no reason - things had been great, and life went on; the time of Tsjoch was over but music, including Frisian music, thrived, and new times need new forms. He was looking forward; on to the future!

And I feel the same. We had a great time, but we are still having a great time, and we will continue to have great times.

But at the same time, I hope this 45-year cycle of all those people active with music will be given the small monument it deserves. The Frisan folk music revival has been, right from its conception, an outright counter-movement in so many ways. (I was going to write a sentence now with all the things it countered against but I have decided not to write that sentence because it does not reflect the ethos of what I noticed.) But it was a counter-movement in a positive way. Many people were part of it because they were looking for wworthwhile alternatives: Frisian lyrics; an orientation towards open and friendly small-scale communities; an openness towards all forms of music making - anyone being able to play two chords on a guitar was welcome to perform, even at prime time on one of the festival stages. It was, to me, mostly a celebration of musical optimism and inclusiveness.

From an academic perspective, here is the unique opportunity to study a music revival movement from its very beginning to its very end. Many of the people involved, even from the beginning, are alive and kicking. Memories are fresh. Archival material still is accessible.

I have been doing a bit of academic work on it. I published a Dutch-language article on Irolt long ago, and hope to be able to rework it into an updated English-language version soon (including materials from a new interview with Nanne Kalma I hope to be able to do soon). I presented some papers at some international conferences on the topic. In he 1980s, I wrote a PhD proposal for a study on Frisian language music at the time - which was rejected, Some years ago, I went for a talk with the director of the academic institute the Fryske Akademy (the 'Frisian Academy', part of the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences KNAW) to talk about a possibility to do research into Frisian music, but it was made very clear to me that the Fryske Akademy focused on different subjects and was not interested in studying Frisian music. That's about it - there has been some writing about the Frisian music scene, but that's more journalistic than academic.

No monument yet.

But I hope, at some point, I will find someone to take it on. To write the book on the Frisian folk music revival, 1975-2018. To show 'what the hell' (Geertz) has been going on these years. To show why it was so meaningful, back then until right now, for so many people. To show how it connected to context - to Frisian regional radio; to Frisan pop and rock; to the Frisian poets; to the upcoming shanty revival movement; to other 'regiolect music revivals'; et cetera. And how it will live on, in different forms, from 2018 onwards. Because the fact that the music institutions have died does, of course, not mean the music has died.

It's worth it.

So let's do it.

Brain pill

We - and I don't know exactly who these 'we' are - we worry about the state of music education in Dutch schools.

We say, in accordance with living in the age of measurement, that it has to become 'more': there has to be 'meer muziek in de klas' - 'more music in the classroom'.

Therefore we make an online 'Handbook for more music in the classroom' and give it as a subtitle 'THE work of reference for a sustainable place of music education at primary schools in your region'.

And if in THE reference work we have to answer the most important (and least answered) question in music education - the 'why?'-question - we write about 'measurable effects' of 'music' to childrens' development. And because we live in the age of measurement, we hire a neuropsychologist who explains that 'music' (and it never becomes exactly clear what that 'music' is, because we all know that, don't we?) is important for the development of kids' brains.

That 'music' contributes to cognitive development - children become better in maths and language. That it contributes to creativity - because the brain relaxes and then new ideas blossom. That it contributes to socialization and the development of personhoood - because empathic development is fostered. That it contributes to motor development - because even thinking of music leads to activity in the motor cortex.

The most noticeable thing: no word about music, really. Not a word about carefully thinking through what music does in human lives, and how - if at all - we might use that in education. Not a word about music education being good for musical development. And not a word about what musical development might be (because we all know that, don't we?). Not a word - apart from that it is good for the brain.

The even more noticeable thing: not a word about education, too. Not a word about 'the beautiful risk of education', about what may go wrong and about what may go right, about the miracle and the magic of teaching. Not a word about the so intricate interaction between a teacher and her pupils; about carefully and lovingly fostering the development of each individual child. About the uncertainties and the anxieties many teachers feel. Not a word - apart from that it is about more brains.

In a country where music becomes a brain pill and education the specialism of serving the brain pill so that it be swallowed, there is no true hope for music education.

Check THE reference work here (Dutch only): http://handboekvoor.meermuziekindeklas.nl/handboek-voor-meer-muziek-in-de-klas

Belief

One of the joys of teaching is that, in the preparation as well as in the classes themselves, one is constantly challenged to explain oneself. So now that I have been teaching a class on ethnography to master students at Erasmus University Rotterdam those past months - just one session to go next week - I cannot feel but thankful for all the old insights it forced me to revisit and all the further and sometimes new directions it forced me to examine.

One of the things we - my dear students and me - read and spoke about right in the beginning of the course was the debate on realism. Can we access reality directly, unmediated by our interpretive frameworks which allow us to make sense of reality?

Hubris

I was at an international conference last week, about conservatoires. I was leading a workshop on audience engagement, or audience development, or similar phrases, visited by people mostly in a managerial position, I guess. The workshop boiled down to the idea that rather than thinking about audience engagement, we should probably think about the engaged musician; and rather than thinking about audience development, we should think about musician development - or even conservatoire development.

Nothing new or remarkable, really.

A colleague from a conservatoire far away then said: "I have given up the idea that I might change the conservatoire, or the orchestra, or any organization. If I can add anything at all on a small level, I am content."

I recognized what he said. And I remembered that, not so long ago, I had emphatically declared that I did not want to give workshops in this kind of context anymore, because although they were often received favorably they didn't seem to make much of a difference in the end.

Hearing my colleague from the far-away conservatoire, I realized that the sole fact of thinking that I might make a difference on a larger scale than making a small difference for a particular individual at a particular time can only be characterized as hubris. As if I am that important. As if it is not healthy that individuals are not able to exert such an influence. And as if we all not know the perils of individuals who want to be influential in a more major way.

And I realized that me being part of the conservatoire world - albeit reluctantly and in a 'one foot in, one foot out' manner - means that I have to make my contribution to the development of that world, although it is as limited as I suppose it is. Precisely because it is as limited as that, maybe.

Nothing new or remarkable, really. It is just simply that I apparently occasionally need a wise colleague from far away to remind me of the basics of a working life.

Perturbation

Another new word: perturbation.

Of course I knew it existed. But one doesn't hear it very often.

I was in a small meeting in which one of the attendees, a very distinguished professor who is a specialist in the Complex Dynamic Systems Theory, at some point pointed out that one might look at anything - including for example a music lesson - as a Complex Dynamic System. All kinds of interactions are going on, and there is no way to think about what is going on in the simple terms of 'cause' and 'effect', of 'variables' which can be 'isolated'. If I understood him right - and if not, this little blog entry is completely my fault - he considered this as '19th century science'. Of which there is still a lot going on, of course.

Neuromythology

I am learning new words every day.

Recently I stumbled over he word 'neuromythology'. It is a word I, retrospectively, had been looking for for a long time. It also is a word that has been around for a considerable amount of time - at least a decade. It is just that we only met recently.

In music education, there is quite some neuromythology going on. Neurosicience, the mythology tells us, is proving that music enhances empathy, fosters 'cognition' or academic skills, et cetera. It has been proven. It is true. Very true. Music is great. Very great. We must include it in our schools. Must not wait any longer. MUST act now.

Et cetera.

Luckily, researchers are looking into these neuromythological claims. It turns out, I learnt recently in a paper presentation, that neuroscientific researchers in general are very careful with their claims about music. They normally don't confuse correlation with causation, nor the labaratoire with everyday life outside it. But then, journalists popularize their work, and music education advocates take up their popularizations, and neuromythology gradually is born.

Recently, researchers looked into the acceptance of neuromyths among music education students and among teachers in primary and secondary schools. One of the myths presented to them was "cognitive abilities, e.g. intelligence in children, can be effectively enhanced by music education". Over 70% of respondents judged this myth - wrongly - as scientifically substantiated.

(For those of my readers who also believe this is true, I refer to the conclusion of another article: a recent metastudy "... suggests [see how careful resarcers are?] that music training does not reliably enhance children and young adolescents' cognitive or academic skilss and that previous positive findings were probably due to confounding variables".)

What worries me in all this is not so much that we use neuromythology rather than neuroscientific findings in our justification of the importance of music education. What worries me most is that we, in music education, seem to think that the primary justification of the importance of music in education can be derived from neuroscience in the first place. Although of course neuroscientific findings may help to underpin one's thinking about the importance of music education, it is only one of the many sources of knowledge we need.

As long as we think that the question 'why music education?' can be answered by simply pointing to fMRI-scans, I think there is little hope for music education to reclaim its potential important place within schools.

There's no excuse for laziness.


Nina Düvel, Anna Wolf, Reinhard Kopiez - Neuromyths in music education. Prevalence and predictors of misconceptions among teachers and students. Frontiers in Psychology 8 (2017)

Giovanni Sala, Fernand Gobet - When the music's over. Does music skill transfer to children's and young adolescents' cognitive and academic skills? A meta-analysis. Educational Research Review 20 (2017)

On Participatory Presenting II

I like presenting research in front of groups of people. Whether it is a guest lecture at a university, a presentation at a conference, a talk for a local women's society, a class at a school - it is always nice to do.

Basically I work with two formats: either the 'reading of a paper' (so literally reading; a form I had to get used to but I like more and more because it allowes you to be very precise in your words and your phrasing) or the 'guided talk' where the guidance comes from either some speaking notes or a power point which guides you through your message - and leaves room for some extemporality.

But recently I realize that I am more and more attracted to forms of what I call 'participatory presenting'.  I wrote about one form of it before - see my blog on working with music workshop leader Hannah Conway - and now have another, maybe even more 'participatory' example I would like to share.

On Schizophonia

I went to see the gipsy. Or: I went to hear a Nobel prize winner sing. When I announced it on Facebook, one of my FB-friends asked me which one. I answered that I was not sure how recent Groningen-laureate Ben Feringa sings but that in this case I would go to listen to Bob Dylan.

The concert was great. Dylan sang a collection of his own songs, interspersed with songs from the American Songbook. Maybe he did it for Nobel purposes, to make clear why it is completely justified that he did receive the Nobel prize for his lyrics, rather than the writers of the American Songbook lyrics. The difference between the two is obvious and couldn't be greater. Day and night.

One of the other great things of Dylan's concert was that he is still, at 70+, able to infuriate people during a concert. A guy right behind me took pride in boo-ing every American Songbook song and every piano note Dylan hit. And honestly: I am not a fan of his American Songbook crooning, and neither do I think he is a great pianist. But for me, it is the fascinating play of foreground/background that counts.

On participatory presenting

One of the connections music may make is a connection to time. To the past, to the future. And to the present. When I developed a little model of the functions of music, I called the connection to time 'presenting'. Just a little pun, with a little truth in it.

But now, I want to talk about this other form of presenting: standing in front of an audience and present something you think might be meaningful to that audience. I do that a lot, these days. Tomorrow morning I have to present something called a 'keynote' at the Research in Music Education RIME conference in Bath, UK. I am looking forward to it. I have more time than the usual 20 minutes to explain what keeps me busy: music education and 'idioculturality'. I will try to give a sort of synthesis of the many little building blocks I have been working on those past five years, and hope it works - hope it may be useful and meaningful to the people who come to listen to me. (The doubt about whether I will succeed in being meaningful is part of the package, I know by now.)

Ridiculous question

Recently, the national education authority (‘onderwijsinspectie’) assessed the level of arts education in the Netherlands. I am not going to say anything about their findings, apart from the fact that they were not very positive. What I do want to say samething about, however, is how the national education authority thinks it can assess the level of arts education.

Children were asked, in the ‘knowledge assessment’, subtheme ‘own valuation’, the following question after hearing an unspecified music example (C.P.E. Bach? Martin Garrix?):

“Which word fits the music fragment?

a. solemn
b. rough
c. calm
d. boring
e. gloomy
f. cool
g. wild
h. happy
i. another word:
j. I don’t know
Why does this word fit the music fragment?”

On the brain, unfortunately

A colleague of mine recently pointed out that the difference between psychologists and pedagogues is that psychologists care about the 'how' question whereas pedagogues are concerned about the 'why' and 'what' questions in education.

She immediately added that of course this was a gross exaggeration. Nevertheless, there seems to be a kind of truth in it to me. Let us accept, for the moment, that she is right, and that therefore one needs both psychologists and pedagogues to think about education. And let me then apply this difference to what some people consider to be the most important contribution nowadays to the discussion about music education: neuropsychology.

Serious Request - or: So Deadly Contageous is Music.

There may come a time when the mist that surrounds us all may thicken around me, and thicken and thicken. I will first find my way without any problem. But gradually I will lose sight of this beautiful world I know so well - and I will lose how it smells, and how it tastes, and how it feels, and how it sounds. Or at least, that is how I will look to you.

I would appreciate it if by then, you would help me a bit. Nothing serious - I hope others will be able to do the serious stuff - but when you visit me, play me a tune, sing me a song, put on the radio.

Play me 'Go Leave' by Kate McGarrigle, because I love this voice (and that of her sister Anna, of course), and because she sings 'ears have a way of calling...'.

On the 'Added Value' of Music

I was at a conference where numerous projects were presented in the domain of 'Arts and the Elderly'. It was good to notice that, where ten years ago activities in this domain were hardly visible and actors hardly met, now this domain has constituted itself as an actual domain with actual key questions and a growing network of people who know how to find each other and appreciate each other.

One of the key questions, a persistent and recurring one, is that of advocacy for and, ultimately, of financing of activities for frail and vulnerable elderly: those with dementia, those in hospitals or in care homes, those living a lonely life at home devoid of meaningful social contacts, et cetera.

The communis opinio is that the arts may contribute to physical and mental health, and to a general sense of well-being and meaningfulness of life. There are many strong examples to show that, and research is carried out both to give 'deep' evidence (through, e.g. ethnography, case studies or action research) as well as 'broad' evidence (through larger scale but more superficial effect measurements). And slowly but surely the knowledge of what the arts contribute to the elderly is building up.

But in the back of my head there is this persisting and recurring question of my own: why do we, suddenly, in the case of the vulnerable older woman, have to explain something that was taken for granted when that same woman was not yet vulnerable and older but just simply living her everyday life. When it comes to music: why do we have to argue that there is something missing in the life of this vulnerable older woman if music has no place in it in the same way as it did before? And why do we have to deliver the 'evidence-base' for the simple, widely accepted notion underpinned by libraries of research that human beings are learning beings, and that therefore life is incomplete without the possibility to be surprised by new music, new images, new movements, and that even the very vulnerable should be given the opportunities to living by learning?

I was in a session on the said conference where we were making an inventory of 'the value of the arts', and where we were talking in terms of 'added value': the arts give you the opportunity to express yourself, to bond socially, et cetera. But the idea of 'added value' gives one the idea that the arts are not part of the basis of life, but form an 'extra' in order to reach specific 'goals'. That may be the case in for example the therapeutic use of the arts, but even arts therapy nowadays is firmly grounded in the idea that it works precisely because the arts are nót an extra in life, but rather an undeniable part of life.

Speaking for music - the only 'art' of which I really know something - I would like to draw your attention to the fact that 99,9% of our population leads an intense and deeply satisfying - and very idio-syncratic, and often not very 'canonical' - musical life on a day-to-day basis. If at an elderly age people get less and less opportunities to continue their musical life, it is very simply part of a human health care system to provide those opportunities. The questions may be who should be doing that (contrary to popular belief in my circles I do not see why 'music professionals' should suddenly take the lead here), how we organize it, and who pays for it.

But the fundamental position should be: music is not an added value. It is a basic value. Music for elderly people should not be judged on the basis of the fact that it is 'fostering well-being', or on any other kind of 'added value' of music. It should be judged on the basis of the fact that human life by definition is musical, and that living the full life till the end means also living the musical life till the end. And if a care system is a 'care' system at all: simply taking care that that happens.

Long live the Italians - but no.

I had a long blog break. A long, long blog break. But I was nearly back writing, if not for our Italian friends.

The break was not due to a holiday. Oh yes, I had one; we went to a Foreign Country, I renovated a room of one of the kids, put together at least 10 IKEA bookcases, built a sort of play house for the kids in the garden (it looks more like a hunting lodge to shoot at the neighbors), swam in a lake, hurt my foot, read books (Michel de Certeau, Bruno Latour, Gert Biesta, T.C. Boyle, books on the death of Yugoslavia), and what not.

And hardly wrote blog entries.

I wrote other stuff, of course. The not-blog-writing-period started way before the holidays and lasted until way after the holidays, and as my working life consists of talking, listening, reading and writing, I wrote articles, grant requests, research field notes, memoranda and addenda, bibliographies, little pieces about the history of shanty singing, and much more.

But no blog entries.

Maybe, I thought, I had grown tired of words. Maybe I had lost inspiration and suffered from writer's block. Maybe the world simply had changed, and nothing happened that required a blog entry to be dealt with. I mean, I could write about reading De Certeau or getting stuck in Latour; or about the way Bob Dylan's album 'New Morning' coloured my stay in the Foreign Country. But somehow, it didn't feel right.

But then the Italians nearly got me back to writing. I read in a news item that they give every kid turning 18 500 euros to be spent on culture. Or rather: on Culture. There seems to be a list made by the Italian Ministry of Culture, containing the Culture one can choose from. Italian Culture - because, as the government has stated, that is good for personal development and societal coherence. And it is an anti-dote against the terrorist attacks of IS. The Dutch corespondent in Italy added in his news item that the 500 euros could probablyy not be spent on Justin Bieber concerts, because Bieber would most likely not be on the list.

For a moment I thought this might be something to write about - the combination of astonishment and irritation is probably the greatest catalyst for writing any blog entry. But when the Bieber-stuff came up at the end of the news item, astonishment as well as irritation seeped away. Sometimes reality is so boringly and outrageously stupid that one can do nothing else but loose all interest.

Sorry, my Italian friends. Sorry, Justin. I am sure the world will soon be interesting enough again to write about. But there apparently are limits to what one can write about, limits beyond which all writing becomes useless.

As Wittgenstein said: "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen". And indeed, it feels like 'muss', not 'soll'.

Kanye West, a guy called Uwe Diegel, and a sickening confusion of categories

I was checking out one of the social media last night and some-one I respect posted this:

Uwe Diegel is chief-executive of a medical firm. He also has a past as a classical concert pianist.

So let us get the equation right: the music world may be compared to the Muslim world. And in that case, it is okay to compare Kanye West to a terrorist.

I checked out Kanye West on Wikipedia because I don't know much about him and maybe I overlooked a recent atrocity. I also checked some other sites on news about him. Found nothing to be deeply anxious about. Yes, the usual Famous American rubbish; little scandals, bigger scandals, cross-libelling, et cetera. Nothing to be too shocked about if you follow the show bizz from the side lines.

I cannot draw any other conclusion: it is okay for Diegel to compare Kanye West to a muslim terrorist because West makes music Diegel dislikes. (And, maybe: because Music, to Diegel, is Religion.)

Special Needs

I think I told this story before: I once told a group of music education students about my developing ideas about 'idiocultural music education', a form of music education that acknowledges the musical individuality of every child and takes that as its point of departure. (Many people say: "Oh, I do that all the time. What's new?" I take the liberty to doubt that - true idiocultural music education is a severe paradigm shift once you think it through. And, I would like to add for those interested, it has something to do with Gert Biesta's idea of 'subjectivation' as one of the three functions of education.)

An embarrassingly auto-ethnographical piece of writing

Although it is rainy and windy now and one would not say it is late spring, only a couple of days ago the weather made us believe it was summer. One afternoon, I was cycling home after a quite busy day. I was good-humored, due to the fact that the last meeting I attended showed signs of improvement in a field which had given rise to worries and even conflicts in the past year.

These days I often listen to music while biking to my work and back. I put some fifty or so albums I like on my phone and listen over those small earphones which deliver a quality which never stops amazing me. Occasionally I listen to Soundcloud - I subscribed to a couple of channels of EDM-artists just to keep an idea of what is going on in the world of my son, musically: Skrillex, David Guetta.

The M4 Principle

This is a little note about the M4 Principle: the Miraculous Meaningfulness of Musical 'Mediocracy'.

I was in Sarajevo last week, as I have been every year those past few years to deliver guest lectures to master and PhD students. I was, to be honest, not looking forward to go, because I have been too busy lately to enjoy travel and I did not want to leave my family. But of course, once I was there I was happy to be back, meeting my Sarajevan colleagues who have become very dear to me over the years, working with those nice students, and wandering around this beautiful city, scarred by history and teeming with life. The smokey smell of Cevabcici-fires. The beautiful mosques, the guilty mountains. Bosnian coffee.