{"id":1724,"date":"2022-12-12T09:55:16","date_gmt":"2022-12-12T09:55:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/collegia\/?p=1724"},"modified":"2022-12-12T09:55:16","modified_gmt":"2022-12-12T09:55:16","slug":"on-careers-in-music-and-academia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/collegia\/2022\/12\/12\/on-careers-in-music-and-academia\/","title":{"rendered":"On careers – in music and academia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Simon Frith<\/strong>
\nVisiting professor, TIAS
\nEmeritus Professor of Music at University of Edinburgh
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When an old cricketer leaves the crease
\nWell you never know whether he’s gone. (Roy Harper 1975)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Martin Cloonan sent me a link this morning to a clip on YouTube of the Liverpool band Scaffold performing their biggest hit, \u2018Lily the Pink\u2019, at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool at the end of October.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2018Lily the Pink\u2019 reached number 1 in the UK sale charts in 1968, the year it was originally released. The three members of Scaffold are now aged 86 (John Gorman), 85 (Roger McGough) and 78 (Mike McGear). Martin said he found their performance \u201crather heart-warming (if only for the fact that they are all still with us!)\u201d. \u00a0I know what he meant but maybe because I\u2019m somewhat older than him the question this clip raised for me was different: what kind of pleasure is involved in watching old men re-enacting (somewhat shakily) their youth?<\/p>\n

A couple of months earlier Martin had told me about going to see one of the Rolling Stones\u2019 Stockholm shows.\u00a0 The Rolling Stones formed in 1962.\u00a0 Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are now 78, Ronnie Wood is 75. The YouTube clip from this show shows Richards concentrating on his fingers much harder than he used to and while Jagger\u2019s pitch control and physical energy are astounding for his age there\u2019s also no doubt that these qualities are enhanced technologically, by how they are amplified and lit.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve long been fascinated by musicians\u2019 careers and how they end: they don\u2019t so much stop work as ease down, and \u2018easing down\u2019 works differently in different music worlds. A voice changing pitch and losing power is more problematic for an opera than a country or folk singer; fingers stiffening and concentration slipping is more of an issue for a concert than a pub pianist. And even the most technologically pampered rock stars can\u2019t stop the ageing process, can\u2019t avoid reaching a point (often quite early in their careers) when their performances mean looking back rather than looking forward, celebrating achievements rather than potential.\u00a0 To grow old in rock is to repeat oneself; as musicians\u2019 powers of invention decline well established routines become easier to manage.\u00a0 The most interesting old performers in rock are those who fight obdurately against this\u2014Bob Dylan, most obviously.\u00a0 For the rest easing down, for performer and audience alike, involves virtuoso feats of nostalgia, making at the this moment the remembered past much more significant than the any imagined future.<\/p>\n

How about academic careers?\u00a0 How do they end?\u00a0 How do scholars retire?\u00a0 My working career started at the University of Warwick fifty years ago, in 1972. It finished at the University of Edinburgh in 2017. What finished? \u00a0Marking, administering, evaluating, meetings\u2014duties that had long been chores.\u00a0 When I gave in my notice I did feel liberated\u2014not from an academic life but from having to worry about my department\u2019s future.\u00a0 My research career didn\u2019t end there.\u00a0 This very day, at the age of 76, I delivered to the publisher the final manuscript of Made in Scotland<\/em>, a book I co-edited and wrote with Martin Cloonan and John Williamson.\u00a0 I\u2019m still thinking, I\u2019m glad to say, and I still get bored by my old ideas. What I no longer do, week in and week out, is perform\u2014in lecture theatres, classrooms, conferences and seminars.<\/p>\n

Universities changed greatly during my working life; in essence they were professionalised\u2014for better and worse.\u00a0 But they didn\u2019t define or confine my working environment. This was always a much broader community of scholars, past, present and future.\u00a0 The only thing I miss about my job is the weekly postgraduate seminar that I started at Strathclyde University in the 1990s and took with me to first Stirling and then Edinburgh. The seminar was open to anyone\u2014students, staff, from other departments, other universities, other countries even; the participants were ever changing.\u00a0 We agreed on topics; I usually introduced them.\u00a0 Discussions were essentially interdisciplinary, serendipitous, surprising and revealing.\u00a0 Every meeting made me think about things I hadn\u2019t thought about before, gave me the first inkling of the arguments in everything I wrote.<\/p>\n

I was, then, very grateful to Martin Cloonan for inviting me to TIAS to run five seminars on the model of my old weekly sessions: a different topic each day for which I had to think through introductory comments; a multidisciplinary and subtly changing gathering of smart researchers; conversations flowing in odd directions.\u00a0 There were moments when I wondered \u2018can I still do this?\u2019, \u2018have I got anything to say\u2019, \u2018am I too old?\u2019\u00a0 But I quickly realised these were the wrong questions.\u00a0 What I found (what I had missed) was not a cleverness competition but the ever-inspiring experience of scholarly community.\u00a0 Every research topic every Fellow addressed was fascinating; every answer meant more questions.\u00a0 The quality old scholars have is wisdom, which just means a lifetime of reading, talking, observing and listening as widely and idiosyncratically as possible.\u00a0 Wisdom is the effect of scholarly sociability, of the kind of curiosity that drives all good research.<\/p>\n

It was good to discover that I am still curious and even better to realise that there are so many new researchers who think differently and better than me.\u00a0 In the final seminar one of the issues we discussed was progress.\u00a0 Scholars, like musicians, start out with the determination to do something new, but that means, eventually, handing the future over to another generation.\u00a0 I understand the rock concert pleasures of reliving a sense of the future, as it were, of being absorbed by memories that something new once happened.\u00a0 But I prefer the sense of being past it.\u00a0 A sense of the future necessarily belongs to younger people than me. Nostalgia for the way we used to do things, the way we used to think, is not a becoming academic emotion.\u00a0 In the academy there\u2019s no fun in continuing to be right; what one always wants is to be shown to be wrong.<\/p>\n

November 30 2022<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> See https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=gFlFWC0gFa0<\/a><\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> See https:\/\/www.google.com\/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=rollingstones+in+stoxkholm+2022#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:3d17c785,vid:x7sVd6IoE8I<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Simon Frith Visiting professor, TIAS Emeritus Professor of Music at University of Edinburgh   When an old cricketer leaves the crease Well you never know whether he’s gone. (Roy Harper 1975) Martin Cloonan sent me a link this morning to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":183,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/collegia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/collegia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/collegia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/collegia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/183"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/collegia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1724"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/collegia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1727,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/collegia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1724\/revisions\/1727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/collegia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/collegia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogit.utu.fi\/collegia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}