"You might be omnivorous, but you can never be anywhere near omniscient." — Joseph Epstein
Arturo Toscanini might have been one of the most gifted conductors of the 19th and 20th centuries. Apparently, he drew quite the crowd even in Manhattan, and the queues relied on police assistance such as any forgettable modern pop star might now require. Allen C. Guelzo, in a review of Harvey Sachs' Toscanini: Musician of Conscience reiterates Gunther Schuller's "seven kinds of hearing: for harmony, intonation, dynamics, color, rhythm, balance, and the architecture of a composition....Toscanini had all seven, and even those who cursed his arrogance had to admit that they had never performed under a director who could get them to play so far above their own expectations."
The way—arrogant? commanding? confident? authorial?—Toscanini meanders into the robust sections of his conducting do make for some entertaining spelunking into music's modern history. He appears stoic, like an unsmiling Christopher Lee, as he leads the orchestra through Rossini's famously equine Guglielmo Tell Overture. I've spent some time listening to the recordings of Beethoven's 9 symphonies Toscanini, and have come to understand what Sachs means when he claims Toscanini had all seven kinds of hearing.
And thus I think of my students and Adam Banks's CCCC 2015 address, "Ain’t No Walls Behind the Sky, Baby! Funk, Flight, Freedom." Banks's devotion to the discipline of composition is expressed through his love for Funk, particularly his love for Bootsy Collin's song "I'd Rather Be With You." Even in his ebullience considering how most every college student comes through a composition course, he touts composition is "a discipline and at the same time cannot be contained by ideas of disciplinarity," though Banks finds in this the meritorious adaptability of composition.
For all the passion Banks brings to his classroom (and more importantly, then, to his students), I cannot agree with him vis-à-vis containment. He asks us to forego "pretense and embracing boldness, wildness, and irreverence" and hopes that his own writing will one day resonate with the "electric, kinetic, epistemology" he finds in Lorca and George Clinton's funk. So Banks does ask us to be contained within his conception of composition. Banks states a "major obstacle we have to free ourselves from is the set of handcuffs the same old theory and the same old theorists and the same old scholarship place on us." One of the reasons I distrust nearly all such calls is its very limited self-awareness; by this standard the theories Banks touted will one day be set to the wayside, and what will replace them will have just as much validity as the previous theories. So nothing is truly answered. But, as Banks addresses, the requirements of literacy are changing and will continue to change rapidly. Banks goes on to argue
Technology is what we do—or what we need to do not just because literacy is always technologized, not just because of computers AND composition, but because of the big picture technological issues that are always brought to bear on all facets of our lives and work.
I do not agree, insofar as I understand Banks's meaning. Technology is not what we do; it is not circuitry that steps into my classroom, nor am I trying to rewire circuit-boards to create more functioning citizens. But this is where I believe Banks is prescient. Music and composition are quite related, and the seven hearings are perhaps deep but necessary ways. Harmony can become coherence; intonation precision; dynamics the expansion and conversation of idea; architecture, structure.
As Bank stresses the importance of funk to his pedagogy, I ask myself what disciplines have influenced my own pedagogy. I adore music, which is to say I deplore most of what is produced today with its vapid cadences and architectonics as alluring as parking lots. Even as Heilker and Yergeau demonstrate in "Autism and Rhetoric," there are non-native languages we expect (rightly or wrongly) others to learn and use; why am I neglecting a language that bridges the past and the present to prepare students to engage in the future? And is this possible through bringing in the humanities into the composition classroom?
I have witnessed in my classrooms across campuses a near-paralyzing fear many students have: FOMO. This FOMO is far less social and more insidious, for it is a fear of germinated arrogance, with the expectation that As equate mastery, and mastery equates power, and it is rare for power and friendship to be bedfellows, let alone friends. If I am a practitioner, then I am servant to my discipline, and within my discipline, I am servant to the student. There is always something more to learn, and while, as Epstein states, "reading may not be the same as conversation...reading the right books, the best books, puts us in the company of men and women more intelligent than ourselves." I believe that an engagement with the humanities, writing about them and learning the language of discourse Banks rightly values, keeps practitioner and student humble and allows for our campuses to become what Banks calls "a hub for intellectual life and critical dialogue."
There was a time I took my students to the Cleveland Museum of Art, an institute dedicated to"offer[ing] dynamic experiences that illuminate the power and enduring relevance of art in today’s global society." The Museum is gorgeous, spacious and almost effervescent with light the source of which is undetectable. But the students passed by the works quickly, even a Monet so gorgeous as The Red Kerchief.
As the woman stands out in the cold, my students strutting or pacing by, ready to put the "dankest" filter on a SC or IG story of them standing in front of a unique Monet or a "drab" Diego Velázquez, I wonder if they realize it is they who are ostracized from her, that they are the ones in danger of freezing. Somehow, I doubt it.
The tyranny of the moment feeds the Fear Of Missing Out, and sets us in the era of perpetual change Banks warns we must learn to navigate. I do not disagree; we cannot ignore the changes technology has made on how students learn, but it is still students who learn, and the perpetual kowtow to the screen keeps them from seeing the woman, ready for a walk and conversation, outside the window.
That's not very funky, but I doubt they know it.
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