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Digitizing Public Musicology

2024; University of California Press; Volume: 77; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1525/jams.2024.77.1.255

1547-3848

Imani Danielle Mosley,

Music Technology and Sound Studies

On September 7, 2020, composer, musician, and YouTuber Adam Neely posted a video to his channel called "Music Theory and White Supremacy."1 The video essay tapped into a broader, ongoing conversation in the public digital sphere about the state of music theory as a discipline as well as a praxis. Neely's video was a response to the online debates between Philip Ewell and various Schenker scholars, colloquially known as "Schenkergate," that were primarily taking place on social media, specifically Twitter. Neely's video response to these debates showed his ability to pivot away from the somewhat insular academic spaces of the text-based social media areas of the Internet to the wide-reaching public area of user-generated digital content—in this case, YouTube. While diverging slightly from Neely's usual content, the video fits right into not only his channel's brand but the larger brand of music theory digital content; in fact, many of his videos focus on explaining to his ever-growing audience aspects of music theory and performance, content that many users of the Internet seem to crave. Neely is one of many well-known practitioners of a kind of public music theory. From musician YouTubers, especially those who specialize in jazz, prog rock, or metal, to pedagogues on Reddit, running and populating such spaces as r/musictheory, there seems to be no lack of public music theory in digital spaces.2 One of the website Vox's most popular videos was devoted to the "secret" chord (the half-diminished seventh) within Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" that makes the song "So Christmassy."3 Social media spaces such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube seem to lend themselves naturally to discussions of and around music theory, generalized quite broadly. But for all the spaces in which one can engage with such discussions, there does not seem to be a musicological analogue. And while public musicology, broadly defined, has begun to solidify as a field somewhat in the last few years, the spaces it occupies have not diversified in quite the same way. Most notably, public musicology has not entered the digital space. This essay examines how public musicology has taken shape in the last few years, what the digital content space looks like, and why it seems public musicology has not been able to convincingly enter that space.In trying to determine why public musicology has seemingly been confined to one domain, or rather, has not branched out in the way that public music theory and other types of discussions about music have, I was struck by the adherence of so many musicologists to the written word. This has become particularly clear in the last year with the implosion of Twitter (now rebranded as X). This microblogging website and social media platform was purchased by Elon Musk in October 2022 for $44 billion. Surrounding the acquisition were forecasts of how the site would operate under Musk's ownership: "Mr. Musk, a self-described 'free speech absolutist,' has said that he wants to make the social media platform a more freewheeling place for all types of commentary. . . . Mr. Musk's open approach to speech on Twitter could exacerbate long simmering issues of toxic content and misinformation, affecting political debates around the world."4 In response to the immediate changes on the site relating to speech, many users chose to abandon it, looking for other fledgling platforms to use in its place, such as Mastodon or Bluesky. While it was not surprising that many Twitter users, including many musicologists, were looking for comparable alternatives in the wake of Musk's acquisition, the desire to find another microblogging-type social media platform reinforced an idea that Robin James, Matthew D. Morrison, and I discussed in a review of Musicology Twitter with Lily Hirsch:That desire to cling to the written word has limited public musicology severely; when asked where their public scholarship takes place, many if not most musicologists will mention something that in one way or another involves writing: program notes, blog posts, newspaper articles, tweets, and so on. So why is it that academics in other fields, professionals and laypeople alike, especially in the humanities, have been able to find homes in the digital sphere making user-generated digital content away from the written word?The term "history influencers" does not generally include music history, but rather refers to broad-appeal history that covers just about every area of the field—except music. This may come in the form of a TikToker speaking about historically accurate fashion, an Instagram reel discussing the use of blue paint in Renaissance paintings, or an animated video on YouTube on Australia's Emu War. Some of these influencers have degrees in history and/or education, others are public historians (in the more traditional sense) who work for museums or national parks, and many are just people who are very interested in talking about history online. History influencers who create digital content have generally formed a consensus about how to do history online responsibly; their work is researched and sources are made available to the watching public, often cited directly within the content itself. As such, it sets a standard but also reaffirms the idea that vetted and well-cited research is possible for this kind of content, even if only for a forty-five-second video. These content creators have latched onto the freedom and flexibility of digital user-generated content to create a community based on the sharing and discussion of information regarding a specific subject. So what is this digital content and how does it differ from the text-based platforms that have been the home for most public musicology online?Firstly, it is necessary to define "digital." Digital content is anything that is made up of digital data and includes everything from streamed television and movies to visual stories on social media platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram. "Digital," in this case, refers to both form and content. Digital content, in other words, is anything that can be published online. But there are important distinctions to be made here, especially with regard to understanding how public musicology has yet to move beyond the written word. Digital content creation narrows this field of data and can be better understood through the term "user-generated content." This differentiates the data of general digital content that can be produced by large companies and industries (Netflix, Meta, Spotify) from digital content that is made by individuals and that exists on myriad platforms, oftentimes overlapping onto platforms that are also engaging in industry-backed digital content (e.g., brands creating content on Instagram or TikTok). Web 2.0, the current iteration of the Internet, ushered us into the social media age, primarily with text-based platforms such as websites, blogs, and text-based social media. Initially, these forms were generally static, evolving from what has been termed "Web 1.0," or the early Internet, where websites were just digital versions of newspapers. And even while microblogging (Twitter, etc.) took off, dominating the 2010s, it eventually ceded some aspects of its functionality to images, video, and audio. On the other side of the Internet, YouTube moved from a video blogging service to an Internet video repository. YouTube is currently the most used music (streaming) platform in the United States and one of the most used in the world.6 The success of YouTube led to video microblogging platforms such as Vine and Music.ally, which would later be rebranded as TikTok. Alongside these platforms were hybrid platforms such as Snapchat, which originally focused on communication (text, images, video, and phone calls) but went on to include short-form video content from brands, influencers, and individual creators. These platforms rely on video and audio content that is generated by its users in order to sustain themselves. This is a far cry from the days of MySpace—even Facebook, now Meta, engages in this kind of user-generated content. In its acquisition of Instagram, Facebook folded Instagram's Stories function into Facebook's newsfeed. Facebook/Instagram also created Reels, a kind of short-form video content to compete with the likes of TikTok, and YouTube Shorts. The second half of the 2010s saw an uptick in the use of these platforms, which now make up the majority of what we would term digital content creation. It is this user-generated digital content creation space that has remained generally untapped by public musicology.This does not mean that there is no academic-adjacent digital content creation relating to music on the Internet. While I have been writing this essay, a conversation about notation has been circulating in various online spaces. This is not a new topic by any means, nor is this the first time it has been discussed online. The current discussion centers on Western music notation and is split into two subtopics: whether or not Western notation is a necessary tool in learning music, and whether or not undergraduate students in music must know how to read Western notation for entrance into a program. This relates to a larger conversation about the digitization of public musicology because it is a real-time example of how digital content creation and text-based content for public music theory can and often do exist side by side in a way they do not for public musicology. This example features three varied online social media spaces: Reddit, Twitter/X, and YouTube. Reddit is a social aggregation and discussion website.7 The subreddit (a community of interest) r/musictheory has 549,000 members or redditors. This is in contrast to r/musicology, which has around 11,000 redditors and is a far less active subreddit.8 The topics on the music theory subreddit vary from the most basic and informational ("What do you call this chord?") to the more controversial. Jon Silpayamanant, who is active both on Twitter and on the r/musictheory subreddit, has long used digital public spaces to talk about Western music notation hegemony and the vastness of music studies outside of the Western sphere. And when YouTuber, composer, and UX designer for MuseScore Tantacrul (Martin Keary) released a video entitled "Notation Must Die: The Battle for How We Read Music,"9 the music theory subreddit buzzed with activity10 and Silpayamanant's online resource Timeline of Music Notation received a surge in visits.11 At the time of writing, Tantacrul's video has over 670,000 views and over 5,000 comments. This is in contrast to recent articles published in Music Theory Spectrum, which, according to their available metrics, receive somewhere between 50 and 150 views per article. These metrics are akin to how the aforementioned conversations about notation are being viewed on spaces such as Twitter as opposed to YouTube; one of the tweets with more engagement has around 109,000 views and 1,000 likes. And since conversations on Twitter tend to branch out into myriad threads, tracing engagement with the threads is scattershot and often duplicated. Because online music theory content has both written and digital-content analogues, we can better assess where people are engaging online. Public musicology does not have this analogue; there are no musicology influencers and content creators in the way we might refer to Tantacrul, Adam Neely, 12tone, Chris Cornell, Nahre Sol, and others.Perhaps, in order to think about how to create a digital public musicology, we need to redefine what musicology is, or at least, what doing public musicology looks like. Maybe the aforementioned examples, theoretical in nature, fall within a larger category of public musicology. I hesitate to call certain things public musicology not because they are not academic enough or specialized enough, but because musicology itself, in the public sphere, is so narrow and ill-defined. Emily Ruth Allen has recently assessed the landscape of podcasting as a venue for public musicology, but even this is couched in uncertainty, as she describes the podcasts she profiles as "music(ological?) podcasts."12 I believe that this too is not because of the rigor or the content of the podcasts themselves, but rather because any currently existing definition of public musicology does not seem to account for media that are more informal, technological, and content-focused in nature. I am an avid watcher of more education-based content on social media platforms, and when watching videos that interest me or strike me as fascinating deep dives into niche topics, I often wonder what the musicological equivalent of such content would be. I find myself struggling to come up with something viable. I think the reason why podcasting has been somewhat successful is because it mostly involves conversation or dialogue. Even a podcast like Switched On Pop, whose episodes are often dedicated to explaining a specific topic, uses conversation between the hosts and experts, knowledge carriers, and practitioners in order to do that explaining.13So how does public musicology bridge this particular gap? What are the models to which it could look? Perhaps a podcast like Historians at the Movies could provide something of an initial blueprint. This podcast and social media community began life in 2018 as a hashtag on Twitter (#HATM) created by Jason Herbert, then a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, with the idea that anyone, historians and nonhistorians alike, could gather online to follow the hashtag while watching the week's chosen movie together. Herbert talked about social media as a place that fostered camaraderie: "It changes the dynamic. It exposes you to a larger audience . . . especially for graduate students, it breaks down barriers."14 The community has since grown far beyond its Twitter boundaries, now supporting a podcast and live events. (When attending the joint meeting of the AMS and SMT in Denver in 2023, I happened across a live meeting of #HATM in a brewery, where a huge crowd had gathered to discuss the 1980s American Red Scare film Red Dawn.) While #HATM is not quite the digital content creation model espoused above, what it shares with other successful forms of digital content is community and engagement. It is that focus on engagement and engaged scholarship that I believe is necessary for a successful digital public musicology.Public musicology is by no means a new concept: musicological scholarship and discussion has long taken place outside of academe. In the last decade, there has been an effort to define and solidify public musicology as an offshoot of the discipline. This has happened in part through individual practitioners like myself who have seen the Internet and social media as a way to reach larger, more disparate groups of people. Additionally, partnerships between musicologists and journalistic outlets have seen an increase in musicological content in traditional news outlets like newspapers and less traditional ones on the Internet. The Public Musicology certificate at Columbus State University's Schwob School of Music is an example of this activity, creating a program akin to already existing public history degrees. But this solidification of public musicology as a field, especially within the age of social media, has hampered its reach as much as it has expanded it, as argued by Jasmine Henry: "musicologists most frequently engage the public through pre-concert lectures, mainstream broadcasts, popular publications, social media platforms, and other public media. While these initiatives make music histories and theories more accessible, they do not address the knowledge production issues inherent in music studies."15 Henry continues by asking how a public musicology can be reparative when "its foundation, the field of musicology, is demonstrably harmful to historically marginalized populations."16Attempts have been made to answer this question in other fields, perhaps more productively, through digital public scholarship. Michael Kramer addresses it within his larger definition of digital public history: "If public history is about catalyzing collective attention to focus on the significance of a topic from the past, then digital public history is about the power of refocusing this act of shared scrutiny."17 As Henry and other musicologists have pointed out, the goal of public musicology has long been one of translation, the desire to reword knowledge for nonacademic publics, rather than to reframe or scrutinize. And much of the digital content that does this kind of public academic work, whether it be humanistic or scientistic, goes beyond a simple retranslation of material. That digital content is both engaged and engaging, similar to Naomi André's concept of an "engaged musicology."18 On YouTube, there is a common parlance among commentary and video essay YouTubers, that of "transforming the material." This transformation is primarily what allows them to avoid copyright and work under fair use, but more generally, it is how they describe what makes their content different from simple re-presentation. It could be the writing of a script, detailed animation or filmic techniques, or complex storytelling. But it is this idea of transformation, no matter the scale, that differentiates digital user-generated content found on social media from text-based content. If that is indeed the litmus test, it seems plausible that public musicology might advance to that next stage. But perhaps in order to do that we must address the claims Henry makes about musicology's foundation and our reticence to engage in transformative, communal storytelling: "This requires that we stop treating the public as captive monolithic entities and reflect continuously on the consequences of our knowledge production and dissemination practices."19What all of the examples of public music theory mentioned here have in common is that they are connected by communities. Even though in many cases, like the YouTube video essay, there is one person delivering the initial message (though as anyone who has worked in social media can tell you, digital content often takes a team), the material is presented in a way to engender community, whether through comments, shares, or stitching. Videos by Neely, Tantacrul, 12tone, and others are often discussed on the r/musictheory subreddit, and their engagement on other social media platforms shows that they are listening to these responses to their work. Digital content creators are in constant conversation with the communities they work to foster through their content, as they know they must in order for their content to survive and thrive. YouTuber Jarvis Johnson recently put out a series of videos on digital avatars and artificial intelligence, initially focusing on the digital rapper FN Meka.20 I reached out to Johnson through Twitter DMs (direct messages) to talk to him about his research and interest in it, as I was working on an article that discussed voice, artificial intelligence, and digital blackface. He was gracious enough to respond to my DMs and we struck up a brief correspondence. Later that week, I was contacted by the New York Times to contribute to an article about FN Meka.21 In my interview, I credited Johnson's work and let him know about this forthcoming article. But like so much public scholarship, the conversation about digital avatars that took place in the New York Times stopped after its publication. Meanwhile, Johnson (who received a bachelor's degree in computer science, something that has spurred his interest in this topic) has continued to talk about artificial intelligence in several videos on his YouTube channel, amassing anything from five hundred thousand to one million views for each one. His digital content is transformational and engaged, in contrast to the static nature of the New York Times article. For so long, musicology (and public musicology) has been unidirectional. People may come up to you after the preconcert lecture, or e-mail you in response to your newspaper article, but often the interaction stops there. The audiences for digital content are not expected to be silent; they engage in robust conversation, with each other as well as with creators, in order to share and produce knowledge.