The Celestial Monochord

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

(Robert Fludd's Celestial Monochord, 1618)

Who writes this stuff?

Kurt Gegenhuber. I live in Minneapolis and work as a technical editor and webmaster for several associations of scientists who share common headquarters staff. For two years, I edited and assembled archaeological and historical survey reports for a "cultural resource management" firm. I have degrees in astronomy (basically, a bachelor's in physics) and English (a master's). I can sort of play banjo, clawhammer style.

How do I know when something new is posted?

The Celestial Monochord now has a mailing list to alert subscribers when new content appears.

Of course, everybody has their own way of following blogs -- RSS feeds, Google Reader, checking back the old fashioned way, etc.

If an email from me works best for you, let me know and I'll add you to the list. All the usual goodies apply -- I'll try to keep your address hidden from other subscribers, I'll never share your info with anybody for any reason, you can unsubscribe at any time, etc.

Typically, I'll send the alert about 24 hours after an entry appears, since I often pick at new entries until I'm satisfied with them. After about a day, they're aged to perfection.

Whatever your method, thanks for reading The Celestial Monochord.

How do I cite this stuff?

The Celestial Monochord has been sited in a few published works, which I like. Check with the publisher (or professor) to see if they have their own format preferences. Otherwise, I prefer something like:

Gegenhuber, Kurt. 2006. Scientists say so. The Celestial Monochord: Journal of the Institute for Astrophysics and the Hillbilly Blues. January 23, 2006. http://www.celestialmonochord.org/2006/01/scientists_say_.html

What does "celestial monochord" mean?

A monochord is any one-stringed instrument.

The "celestial" part ultimately goes back to Pythagoras (580-500 BC), who studied the mathematical patterns in a single, stretched, vibrating string, and saw evidence of the existence of a basic plan or method of the Universe. Ever since, some people have believed the Universe is somehow rooted in music and that figuring out its harmonies mathematically is like reading the mind of God.

For the cover of his influential 1952 "Anthology of American Folk Music," eccentric record collector and mystic Harry Smith used a 1618 drawing by English mystic Robert Fludd. It shows the hand of God tuning the Celestial Monochord (see above, or go look at your own copy of The Anthology).

To me, the Celestial Monochord symbolizes deep, idiosyncratic exploration of music and cosmology.

What is this blog about?

The Celestial Monochord tries to provide "think pieces" about history and music and science.

The original concept — which I still play with frequently — is to write about music and science, especially astronomy and so-called "roots music." The hydrodynamics of jug bands, hillbilly astrophysics, cosmic sea shanties, etc.

Since early 2006, this blog has more and more become an "author blog" that nips around the edges of my work on Frank Cloutier and The Victoria Cafe Orchestra, a Minnesota dance band of the 1920's.

In any case, it's the "Universe in a grain of sand" concept. When you pull at any thread on Earth, the rest of the planet tends to unravel along with it.

What is "The Institute for Astrophysics and the Hillbilly Blues"?

The IAHB is a spurious think tank founded in March 2005. The Institute has one scholar on staff (me), and conducts research into private policy related to stuff like ... say, quantum washboards ... and maybe ... kazoogenic plasmas. The IAHB consistently loses an annual operating budget of several hundred dollars.

How often is this updated?

Good writing, clear thinking, and rigorous research (well anyway, those are my goals) in a blog format is like fitting several round peds into one square hole. Even more so, if you have a job. I'd love to post every day, but it's usually about once or twice a month.

Who pays for this?

I do. The Celestial Monochord uses Typepad, which costs some money and I pay it out-of-pocket. In other words, at the moment, this site runs at a total loss as a matter of policy. My research into The Moonshiners Dance is getting extremely expensive, however, and I'm thinking about adding a way to support it via PayPal. What to you think?

I have a suggestion for a Celestial Monochord entry. Do you want it?

Absolutely! I've written several posts in response to user suggestions, and I'd be happy to credit you. I have more ideas than I can get to, but it's stimulating to get suggestions, and I wanna know what people want to read about. So please send me your suggestion and I'll think it over carefully. Maybe include a link and why you think it fits The Celestial Monochord.

I want to write a Celestial Monochord entry. Would you post it?

Yes, I hope so. It would be great to have another voice here (the Monochord can be a little too "mono").

I think of The Celestial Monochord as a magazine editor would. We're hungry for material, but we don't publish "just anything." The world is full of interesting things, but The Monochord has a certain subject matter (a "beat"). If you want, feel free to check with me to see if your idea is a good fit before spending your time on it.

I try to keep things short and clear, informative, contemplative (as opposed to heated diatribes), and as little about me and my problems as possible. Basically, I want the reader to say, "Huh. Interesting."

Some blogs have multiple writers, and if I found another writer who really fit the Monochord, I'd very happily increase the editorial staff from its current one. Some blogs have temporary "guest editors."

Where's your "Comments" section?

Most of my recent entries allow comments, which is sort of an experiment for me. They are moderated, but so far, I have never rejected a comment. But I do think like a magazine editor – I ask myself whether any readers of The Celestial Monochord would benefit from reading a comment.

Where'd you get the design? Why isn't it better (or worse)?

I plan to work on the look of the Monochord slowly, as time permits. My priority is always content, content, content. The current design is intended to faintly evoke the Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music, edited by Harry Smith.

Is The Celestial Monochord copyrighted? Can I quote it? Can I link to it?

Please quote it and please link to it often, but please also credit The Celestial Monochord for the words and ideas you get from it. The illustrations at The Celestial Monochord are almost always from somebody else. Whether they're public domain, or used by permission, or even used in a way I consider legal, varies. (I really try very hard to be legal, scrupulous, or just, and usually some combination thereof.) Check with me if you want to use them and I'll help you figure out what's the right thing to do.

I think of each Celestial Monochord entry as an idea for another, larger, more lucrative project — a documentary, an article, a book, a CD. If you wish to create a commercial work based on something from The Celestial Monochord, please secure my prior permission.

To be more specific,

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

What's In A Name?

Moe Thompson founded The Victoria Cafe

 

My article on the links between "The Moonshiner's Dance" — one of the selections on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music — and Minnesota's Jewish communities has just been published at Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture. None of that article's information has appeared here at The Celestial Monochord, or anywhere else, so Monochord readers and enthusiasts of "Anthology-type music" may want to check it out.

It's a little anxiety-producing to publish on a subject in which I am so inexpert — the history of Minnesota's Jews — especially for what must be Zeek's fairly erudite audience. Also, because I'm constantly finding new insights, I'm painfully aware that anything I write will quickly seem outdated to me.

But as soon as I began researching The Anthology's "The Moonshiner's Dance" in early 2006, I saw that the Jewish aspects of the story I was uncovering would need to be told somewhere, by somebody. The Jewish connections to the recording made me sit up straight and listen, because of a certain hazy constellation of issues I'd already been toying with for some time ...

 

In November 1963, Newsweek ran an infamous article "exposing" Bob Dylan as the middle-class son of a Midwestern appliance dealer. It included a photograph of Dylan with the caption "What's in a name?" — a sardonic reference to the revelation that Bob Dylan started life as Robert Zimmerman.

Exactly why this was presented as scandalous is open to interpretation. The article attacks Dylan for portraying himself as real and authentic while simultaneously hiding and misrepresenting his past. But as I read it, the article treats the specifics of Dylan's past as the real scandal, as what really undermined Dylan's authenticity. The implication was that Dylan turned out to be the least authentic things you can be — Midwestern, middle class, and Jewish. If a folksinger is supposed to be one of "The People," surely he can't be THAT.

And it wasn't just Newsweek. The post-War folk and blues revivals often seem to me pathologically obsessed with authenticity and commercialism, as abstractions, and the idea of Jewishness seems to have gotten drawn occasionally into those neuroses (in part, by conflating Jewishness and commerce — a conflation my own arguments have a habit of reproducing).

Those revered pre-WWII Southern musicians on The Anthology and so many other reissues actually played and loved quite a lot of Tin Pan Alley popular songs and tunes from the New York stage. Dock Boggs himself based much of his repertoire on "blues queens" who gave stridently commercial, nontraditional, and "inauthentic" performances.

Today, younger revivalists like myself have benefited from writers like Elijah Wald (Escaping the Delta) and Norm Cohen (Long Steel Rail) for whom boundaries between authenticity and artifice, between commerce and tradition, are pretty much gone from their world views. You might say it's the new orthodoxy among today's authorities. I think Bob Zimmerman and Elliott Adnopoz could have kept their birth names today.

I often think of Jon Pankake, who Dylan remembers unkindly in Chronicles Volume One ("a folk music purist ... breathed fire through his nose"). But you should read Pankake's liner notes to New Lost City Ramblers: Out Standing in their Field, dedicated as they are to showing a constant sloshing back and forth between professional popular music and supposedly pure amateur folk music — the permeability of those boundaries.

In a 2006 article in the New York Times, Jody Rosen wrote about his work to reassert the important influence that the professional and commonly Jewish music-makers of Tin Pan Alley have had on Rock n' Roll. The "roots" of Rock, he argues, run through the Brill Building as much as through Robert Johnson and his supposed crossroads.

He even takes a jab at the "rock snobs" who would not be caught "without Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music and an Alan Lomax field recording or two" in their record collection.

At least in the text of that particular article, Rosen takes the wrong approach. He's absolutely right to assert the importance of Tin Pan Alley to today's popular forms, but in doing so, he lets The Anthology keep its "authenticity," the myth that it's the pure product of amateur, oral transmissions stretching back to antiquity.

Instead of trying to sweep The Anthology (etc.) off the table and replace it with Tin Pan Alley as the proper source of Rock, why not keep The Anthology on the table, and show that it's a much more commercial, worldly document than we've been told? To me, that's the more deeply transformative insight.

And so ... all of this, rightly or wrongly, was one of the threads running through my thinking on the day I first discovered that Moe Thompson, the Tin Pan Alley-style songwriter and vaudevillian, was behind the founding of The Victoria Cafe.