UPDATE

March 2012

Open Court

In the months after publicly announcing my ongoing problems with Open Court in November 2010, I heard from nearly a dozen other Open Court authors who told me that they, too, had experienced problems collecting promised advances, royalties, or both from Open Court, a.k.a. Carus Publishing Company.  In the meantime, the March 31 deadline came and went without me receiving the contractually-obligatory royalties statement from Open Court.  I finally did receive said royalties statement in late July, 2011.  Curiously (or maybe not-so-curiously, given my history with the company), the royalties statement did not include a check for the royalties I was owed.  I have received no further correspondence from Open Court since that time.  It will be interesting to see if they send out the royalties statement for 2011 sales in time to meet their March 31, 2012 contractual deadline.  And, if they actually send royalties checks with said royalties statements.

Hermetic Science

There is no news to report here.  I am asked occasionally if there will be another Hermetic Science album.  My answer is this:  at this point in time no further Hermetic Science albums are planned.  Does that mean there will never be another Hermetic Science album? No.  I do not rule out doing at least one more.  Does that mean there may never be another Hermetic Science album? That is certainly a possibility.

Writing and Other Projects

In 2011, Jonathan Friedman invited me to contribute a chapter to Routledge’s The Routledge History of Social Protest in Popular Music.  I responded by writing “The Music’s Not All That Matters, After All:  British Progressive Rock as Social Criticism.”  I believe this chapter represents the definitive summation of the political and social vision of seventies British progressive rock.  It also marks the first time that anyone has attempted to unravel the two somewhat contradictory strands of “protest” that are equally essential parts of prog rock:  the modernist “protest” against philistinism, which is largely aesthetic, and the populist “protest” against the government-corporate-media complex, which is largely political.  The book is scheduled for a fall 2012 publication.

A few people are aware that before I emerged as a major popular music scholar in the mid 1990s, my area of scholarly specialization was the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, and early twentieth century British art music generally.  As I became increasingly occupied with rock music scholarship during the second half of the 1990s and on into the new millennium, my interest in these composers and their world had to be put aside.  In 2004, I made a decision to reapproach this subject.  I never announced this, because I knew that to write the kind of book I hoped to write would require a tremendous amount of research—seven years, as it turned out.  But in the fall of 2011, I began writing the book which I believe will become my life’s work as a scholar.  I am tentatively calling it Albion Rising:  Medievalism, Pastoralism, and Orientalism in Vaughan Williams, Holst, and Twentieth-Century English Music.

My thesis, put simply, is as follows.  In the crucial period of roughly 1906-10, Vaughan Williams and Holst propounded a new musical style that drew on three important cultural constructs of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain:  pastoralism, medievalism, and orientalism.  That is, these composers created a series of musical idioms, tied at first to specific genres, which could be read as “pastoral,” “medieval,” and “oriental.”  Early on these musical idioms tended to be kept separate, in part because they were tied to specific genres, but after 1910, they began to blend, and by shortly after 1920 they had flowed into a “new English style” that represented an alloy of “pastoral,” “medieval,” and “oriental” elements. 

Furthermore, it is my thesis this “new English style” encapsulates the essential ideologies underlying medievalism, pastoralism, and orientalism.  Politically, it carries on the William Morris-influenced “medieval-pastoral socialism” that animated Victorian medievalism and Edwardian pastoralism; philosophically, the interest in a network of alternate spiritualities, much of it derived from Eastern religion and Western esotericism, that animated late nineteenth/early twentieth century British orientalism.

Finally, it is my thesis that not only the essential musical vocabulary of Vaughan Williams’ and Holst’s “new English style,” but much of its ideology, gradually “trickled down” into popular English consciousness during the course of the twentieth century, and was spectacularly resurrected in the explosively creative and vibrant environment of 1960s and 1970s British rock culture.

As of today, I have completed nearly seven chapters of this book, which I anticipate will probably have about 20 chapters in all; that is, it’s probably just under one-third complete.  I will issue further updates on this web site as the book progresses.

During the past few years, I have transcribed Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Holst’s Egdon Heath for piano solo.  I hope to record both this summer.  It remains undetermined how such recordings might be made available.

The Web Site

There have been several minor changes to the web site.  My 2010 interview with Progression magazine is finally being posted in the “Interviews” section.  I have updated my publications list (go to “Biography,” then click “Scholar”); the last update was 2007, and there have been several important publications since then.  Never-before-available footage of the Macan-Durham-McClimon lineup performing “Trisagion” at an April 1998 show has been added.  The Mp3 page has been cleaned up and simplified.  And a link to the Hermetic Science Facebook page has finally been added.