260f Course Materials

Musicology 260f: Music in Los Angeles: Postmodern Urban Geography and the Poetics of Sound and Space DRAFT Syllabus Professor Robert Fink Spring 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 quasispatial structure, as the “will of the Tones,” as a reflection of subjective identity or sexual desire. But it may well be that as musical canons (and their historical perspectives) both decay and proliferate, the grand temporal narratives both inside and around music will be less interesting to scholars. Instead, we might try to place music, to connect its structures 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 to explore the intersection of musical and urban structures of feeling, representation, and space. Los Angeles has its own “school” of postmodern urban geographers, led by theorist Edward Soja; its mythic history has been exhaustively documented in literature, films, and historical studies; its extremes of racial and economic fragmentation have inspired both utopian theorizing and bitter critique, while its unique status as a “network city” and the “capital of the Third World” have made it a fruitful arena for the study of race and power. For scholars of music, the city’s position as “entertainment capital of the world” makes its urban structure all the more significant: from the experimentalism of John Cage, to the pop stylings of Crosby and Sinatra, the film compositions of Korngold and Herrman, emigre composers and musicians like Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Klemperer, and Heifetz, to Rose Maddox and Buck Owens, Frank Zappa, the Beach Boys, the Monkees, the Germs, the Carpenters, Guns and Roses, Black Flag, Sublime, singers of narcocorridos and proteges of Dr. Dre – there is almost no kind of music since 1945 that Southern 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 synoptically but intensely in cultural geography, urban theory, and theories of spatiality and architecture; consider ideas of the soundscape and acoustic spaces in general; survey histories and sociologies of Southern California (especially the work of Carey McWilliams and Mike Davis) and analyses of how its urban fabric came to be; sample representations of 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 of musical institutions, corporations, and media; critical readings of representations of the city in sound; historical studies of genres, styles, and musicians; or even formal structural analysis of musical works made in or about Los Angeles and Southern California. The final project: I will strongly encourage you to imagine your final project in graphical, spatial, or multimedia form, incorporating maps and mapping techniques that we will study individually during the term. I imagine that you will produce some text, either as annotation of a map or in an independent essay, but one of this class’s objectives is to explore the possibility of spatial thinking and spatial representation of musicological research and conclusions. If you are ambitious, you may want to explore the world of GIS (graphic information systems), in which structured data sets are linked to dynamically-generated maps. There are several open-source GIS platforms available, including GRASS, which runs on Linux (and thus Mac OS X). But even the technologically-challenged can use some combination of Google Earth, Yahoo Maps, and various free geocoding websites to create quite elaborate customized computer maps. I am happy to work individually with 4-credit students to assemble computer resources, since I myself am interested in getting better at this stuff. For the determinedly Luddite, there is always the use of a physical paper map, push-pins, and string. (I’m not kidding here – it may be that some types of critical readings work better on paper – and if you are trying to work historically, a paper map from an earlier time may be your only choice.)

Class Schedule at a Glance: Week 1 (Apr 4):

Introduction: This is Los Angeles

I. URBAN SPACE AND MUSICAL SPACE Week 2 (April 11):

General and Critical Theories of Urban Space (Simmel, Lefevbre, Lynch, Jameson)

Week 3 (April 18):

Modern and Postmodern Geographies (Soja and the “L.A. School”; Mike Davis; Krims) mapping assignment proposal due

Week 4 (April 25):

The Well-Tempered Environment: Landscapes, Soundscapes, Softscapes (Banham, Schafer, Thompson, Lally/Young, Klein, etc.)

II. THE RELUCTANT METROPOLIS Week 5 (May 2):

A History of Forgetting (L.A. and narratives of urbanity; McWilliams, Klein, Hise, Fulton, Hayden, etc.)

Week 6 (May 9):

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

III. THE SOUND(S) OF LOS ANGELES Week 7 (May 16):

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

Week 8 (May 23):

Case Study #1: Walt Disney Concert Hall

Week 9 (May 30):

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

Week 10 (June 6):

Case Study #2: Hip-Hop and the L.A. Uprising

Finals (June 9-13):

final projects due; presentation session TBD

Music 260f: Music in Los Angeles Assignment 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 contemporary social and cultural studies. There is a clear genealogy of thought, traced out in this assignment, from the first glimmerings 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, irrelevant to 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 and structure and “subjective” sensory perceptions and mental projections. The question of the “legibility” of the city as a space becomes paramount – it is a goal to be reached scientifically in Lynch, and an impossibility to be explained politically (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 (Lynch’s “image” is a visual image, but it wouldn’t have to be, 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) seem inordinately 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 won’t 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”)

Assignment 2: postmodern geography and the “l.a. school” This week’s reading picks up quite explicitly from the attempts we surveyed last week to “spatialize” social and critical 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 and other schools around the basin. In this week’s 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 with Lefebvre and moves through writers like Jameson to get where they “need” to be. But we will also begin to survey the practical results of all this emphasize on the production of space, and on the “spaces” of economic activity and power 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/postmodern urban space like the ones first mapped out by Levebvre and Jameson? I’ve included Adam Krims’s work, because it is time we asked these questions of music…

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 Behavior in 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 you’ve 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 Clark’s “Downtown” and 50 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 Tribe Called Quest

Assignment 2: musical spaces and urban geography How might sound enter the complex trialectics of spatial production outlined by postmodern geographers like Soja and Dear? What is the musical equivalent of the Westin-Bonaventure? We will survey some representation approaches to bringing sound into the world of spatial analysis, and spatial analysis into the world of analyzing music. In so doing, we will take up Lefebvre’s invitation to abandon the “double illusion” of space as a thing primarily apprehended 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 Soja’s translation of Lefebvre’s term), in which the symbolic contributions of artists work to sound the lived experience of the (dominated) spaces in which they live and work. Finally, there are implications for musicians in the pervasive, crisis-driven urban restructurings that dominate the earlier work of the “L.A. School” – music is both a commodity and a symbolic form, and thus both participates in the economic intricacies of Dear’s “Flexism” (the change 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 Everist eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 102-108; 120-137. (I’ll provide the entire article, but you only need read the first six pages and then the ending, which picks up from Jameson on postmodern hyperspace and Foucault’s 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 Clark’s “Downtown” and 50 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 Tribe Called Quest - pp. 136-62 (“Music and the Design-Intensive City”) – places classical crossover music in the context of urban restructuring, 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 districts…

urban geography and genre 3. Caroline O’Meara, “Highways, Histories, and the Earliest Days of Hip-Hop,” chapter of Ph.D. dissertation, UCLA, 2006.