redraft proposal

My existing blogs represent ideas that I compiled (after substantial revision) into a draft of my dissertation (which is not posted here). The following is a proposal for redrafting the work as a whole.

In rethinking the structure of my paper (which seems to be the main problem, as the relationship of the content is not too clear in places), I realized that the main error was to separate the theoretical (and objective) discussion of rhythm from the more subjective (and politically volatile) idea of musicality. In the introduction, which was meant to make a pitch for connections between the objective and subjective aspects of music, I hesitated and fell into repeating the same segregation between content and culture I had aimed to relate. Looking back on it (after recovering from quite a bit of lost sleep) I realize this is largely due to structuring the paper before reaching the conclusions.

My proposed solution (toward which I'm curious to know your reaction) is this: Begin the paper directly exposing the issue of vitality. Vitality is a slippery issue for sure, but one with a long history of discussion and controversy. Classical musicians have spent more than a century bemoaning the loss of vitality in the West. This widely held view, that music (composition of new works as well as performance practice of historic literature) has lost something and must be reinvigorated (or else loathed) has contributed to 1) the ethically sticky issue of appropriating exotic material to "inject" vitality into the West's music (to revive a "moribund tradition" (Taylor's Beyond Exoticism, 87), 2) reinforcing the mythology of the past and thus creating an unattainable standard shrouded in the aura of mystery (and in this area, I've found Stephen Jay Gould's work reevaluating the meaning of trends and complete systems in evolution and baseball to be particularly helpful), and 3) developing modern educational methods (such as Dalcroze, Orff, Kodaly, and Suzuki) to compensate for deficiencies in music/talent education.

The last area (education methods) brings us to the very real possibility that something indeed was lost in the transmission of musical culture from past to present, from uncanonized to canonized. I feel, therefore, that confronting vitality in these various ways (defining it, tracing its history, and parsing fantasy from neurological fact) is critical in affirming the relevancy of contemporary music and musicianship and encouraging its future in controversial and uncertain times (the seemingly biased interest in the perpetuation of musical culture is actually a humanistic pitch for the value of music as fundamental human activity, rising out of our evolutionary past and relavent to our present).

Many if not most of my previously written chapters and subsections contribute to what vitality is and how it works. But I think where they fit together loosely along some subconscious frame that I felt intuitively but couldn't really deliver an explanation of, the chapters contribute far more powerfully toward unlocking the very real problem of Vitality. This is a problem that I neither invented nor wished to exist, but one that I've grown up with as a composer, performer and teacher.