I often say critical things about Ted Gioia's musicology, but sometimes he hits the nail on the head. This post is an example: My Lifetime Reading Plan. The eerie thing is that some of it sounds a lot like how I approach reading:
Some people will tell you that this is elitist. But I have the exact opposite opinion. For a working class kid like me, this was my way of overcoming elitism. Some elites even tried to steer me away from this project—as not appropriate for somebody from my neighborhood and background.
I felt that this was patronizing in the extreme. In any event, I was determined to pursue this path of wisdom even if others tried to stop it.
I felt that my best way to do all this was through books.
In fact, that was the only way. Now that may surprise you, because most people think that learning of this sort takes place at school. This leads me to my first tip or technique:
WHAT YOU LEARN IN CLASSROOMS IS IRRELEVANT, AND SOMETIMES EVEN WORTHLESS—YOU MUST TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR OWN EDUCATION
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. The most important learning you will ever have will come from your own efforts. It may be adjacent to the classroom, but it will rarely be in the classroom. You are responsible for your own education. It is deeply dispiriting to observe what is happening with educational institutions lately because they seem to be going in exactly the wrong direction. You should go and read the rest of Ted's essay. I'm going to muse a bit about my reading experience.
I think my father taught me to read--I don't really recall because I can't remember a time when I couldn't read. When I got to Grade 1 I was already an accomplished reader. From the time I was eleven I have been a fairly heavy reader. I estimate that I have read about four books a week since then, exhausting a couple of small municipal libraries in the process. When I was studying guitar in Spain for ten months or so, literally all I did was practice guitar five hours a day and read Russian novels (ok, and go for lunch with my Finnish friend). While there I read pretty much all of Dostoyevsky except the second volume of The Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy (War and Peace and Anna Karenina), Turgenev (Fathers and Sons, I think), Gogol (Dead Souls) and Sholokov (And Quiet Flows the Don). I've read Trollope, Balzac, Flaubert, Sterne, Proust, Joyce and hoards that I don't remember. In first year university, apart from the classroom reading I also read the first few volumes (up to Kant) of Copleston's History of Philosophy as well as Dante, the Divine Comedy (all three volumes, not just the Inferno) and other stuff I don't remember, mostly philosophy. I also did a prodigious amount of listening as I had access to a serious listening library for the first time. In later years I spent one summer listening to gamelan music and another listening to Haydn string quartets.
Recently I have upgraded my reading to adopt the practice of doing pencil annotations on every paragraph of the original on the advice of a professor of philosophy. You have to take notes!
Anyway, that's all I will belabor you with today. For our listening, how about the String Quartet, op. 20 #5 by Joseph Haydn:
Although I've been to schools, I definitely consider myself self-educated. I am constantly reading, too much because I should be practicing my instrument more but often drift into reading, like I just did to end up here....
ReplyDeleteSchool is a good place to start learning, and I'm grateful to my professors decades ago who assigned me to read books and articles I wouldn't have found on my own. But most of our education is in how we respond to not just our reading but to every experience, and how we construct our understandings through testing and revising continuously. I'm at the point in life and learning now that when I take interest in a new field, I don't think of taking a class but rather I buy books and talk to people further along in the subject than I am.
The critique of self-educated people used to be that they lacked the professional discipline that forces you to read the difficult things as well as the amusing and entertaining ones. But as the educational landscape seems to have shifted to using students as mere vessels for ideological transmission, I suspect this criticism bites rather less.
ReplyDeleteIn light of the severe weak spots in Gioia's reading I would say one of the more formidable weaknesses of the self-educated is they have no idea when the literature they've relied upon for their self-educational ends have been systematically debunked. Anthropological work in the last fifty years has all but obliterated the viability of the James Frazer Golden Bough thesis, for instance. Contemporary historians have come around to viewing the "burning times" literature as an intra-scholastic super-myth that can't be backed up by slogging through centuries of papers written by Dominican inquisitors who didn't actually think most self-reported cases of bewitchment were legit, let alone the hard-nosed Anglican clergy who knew that some kids faked being demonized to get gifts and not have to go to school. We've discussed this in the past but you nailed it, Bryan, when you said Gioia has a penchant for torturing evidence until it gives him what he wants.
ReplyDeleteTake Gioia's claim that the history of music as sorcery and magic has somehow been "suppressed". But didn't Gioia himself cite Johannes Quasten's
Music and Worship in Pagan and Christian Antiquity? Why, yes, in Music: A Subversive History. Here's the book in reference.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Music_Worship_in_Pagan_Christian_Antiqui.html?id=ItcZAQAAIAAJ
But if Quasten wrote "the" reference to pagan worship using music as far back as 1927 how does that fit with Gioia's conspiracy theory that experts tried to suppress the connection between music and magic? it doesn't, at all. Gioia has to pretend that Quasten's work, which has been the standard academic reference on the topic for about a century now, didn't blithely confirm that the Greeks and Romans used music to summon gods and drive away chthonic spirits and that was why chthonic god rituals tended to lean away from music.
The downside of the self-taught path is that you have no scholars whose work can counter yours which can lead you to spend your entire life pursuing an implausible crackpot theory and think your lack of reading or selective reading of available sources proves your theory correct. The auto-didact has nothing like a peer review process. Peer review can entrench stupid ideas and THAT part Ted Gioia "has" noticed, but Taruskin has more and better receipts on that front. :)
So I reiterate, the better version of what I think GIoia is getting at is that formal education is no substitute for genuine and sustained curiosity. You won't get THAT from any amount of schooling. If that's what Ted Gioia is trying to get at then I agree. But that's not what he actually wrote. Saying formal education can be irrelevant or worthless plays too readily into the "anti-intellectual" tendencies Americans too often already have.
Very well-said, Wenatchee. I think you offer an excellent riposte to my overstatement about the lack of value in classroom education. Your last sentence is exactly correct. My impatience with most classrooms I have found myself in (until I ended up as the teacher) really has more to do with my personal biography.
ReplyDeleteThere can be a kind of peer review process for auto-didacts: I have a self-educated, enthusiastic friend who is working on a large book on some aspects of Renaissance counterpoint on the vihuela and, knowing I do have musicological credentials, he approached me for a peer review. Alas, he didn't much like anything I had to say!