Colloquy/débat: An Interview with Rob Walser in Toronto

In late autumn of 2000, thousands of music scholars gathered at the international mega-conference in Toronto for five momentous days to argue, breathe, sleep, and talk music. Finding much of interest at the panel sessions, lectures, and round-tables, Teresa Magdanz and Simon Wood nonetheless craved some one-on-one discussion. Immediately following the conference they met privately with Robert Walser, Professor of Musicology at UCLA, to discuss number of questions pertinent to popular music studies, many of which were raised at the conference. In their interview they explored the trajectory of his work, his thoughts on the relationship between music scholarship and performance, and his reflections on popular music and the academy, the implications of which extend beyond popular music studies to challenge the broader scope and practice of musicological scholarship. Teresa Magdanz: Obviously, none of us has chance to do it all over again, but if you did, would you be in academia, or would you be making music somewhere? Rob Walser: I'm pretty happy with the way things have turned out. There was time in the early 80s when I thought I wanted to be an orchestral trumpet player, and I came within hair's breadth of doing that. I came in second for the principal trumpet job with the Oklahoma Symphony, playing week of subscription concerts with them as part of the final round. But I had already started to realize that orchestral trumpet playing is very un-free in lot of ways-very restrictive. You don't have much control over interpretation; the conductor has all that authority. What you have is kind of oral tradition of, i.e., you play it like that because that's the way your teacher played it, and that's the way his teacher played it. And it was around that time that I discovered musicology, not just music history courses which I had been forced to take, and mostly hated, but I started taking courses in the humanities department. Then I ran into Susan [McClary] and she turned me on to different kind of music history where you could actually use your brain in creative way and draw upon the valuable experience you get as performer-that experience wasn't irrelevant, or opposed to scholarship-it was enabling.-And I realize that most of what I've written over the last fifteen years has had some kind of connection to some kind of playing I've done at some point. Simon Wood: Speaking of playing, I knew from your book Running With the Devil that you had lot of experience as player, both on guitar and trumpet. How important is it for us to try and keep playing at some level, when as musicologists we're frequently pushed away from our instruments due to time constraints? Does playing bring something to your work as musicologist? RW: I wouldn't say that it's the only way-that everybody should be doing this and not other things-but it's very valuable for me. There's that quote from Barbara Browning where she says, a lot of what I know about samba I learned with my body first, and only later became able to bring into words. I learn things that way too. You don t always know what you are learning or why . There was summer when Susan was playing French harpsichord music-just playing all summer. She didn't really know what she was learning or why. But it was process of trying to figure out how these pieces really went-what made them tick. The conventional wisdom had been that they didn't really work, that they were just bad imitations of other things. It was just months of playing and not knowing or not being able to talk about what was being learned. I think that's been the case, and I'm trying to push that now with the trumpet stuff. I gave an graduate seminar last spring, and that got me thinking in Armstrong ways and trying to play in Armstrong's style. It really dramatized some things for me, and so over the summer I've been trying to do lot of Clifford Brown, which is whole different kind of virtuosity. …

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