SWAN | Ithaca and Its Natural Waves

Last year I took an elective that touched on the study of sound design, or the ways in which sound is organized — or unintentionally disorganized — in various settings. A big philosophical topic of interest in this field is the use of headphones by individuals in personal transit. By using headphones, are we effectively silencing the natural soundscape of a place? This initially seems like a rather pedantic point, one best mulled over in a musicology elective. Yet, shouldn’t we be worried about so many people dismantling the collective identity of a place, just as we are worried about climate change or the tearing down of the Nines?

Koyaanisqatsi Coming to Bailey Hall With Live Music

God, I hate Philip Glass. Well, that might be a little too harsh. For an hour I’ve been sitting in a chair listening to Glass’ soundtrack to the film Koyaanisqatsi, swept along by the frantic, synthesized arpeggios (not unlike the soundscape of Stranger Things, but the real, authentic artifact) while trying to figure out what the whole damn thing means. It is an afflicted affinity I have for the work of Philip Glass and other avant-garde composers of the twentieth century. On one hand, composers of this era sometimes seem the least liberated, despite their supposedly experimental, unbound underpinnings.

SWAN | Bowling and More Art to Augment the Debate

This past Sunday night, the United States witnessed yet again another worst mass shooting in modern American history. Dozens of people are dead, and hundreds of individuals will have the rest of their lives marked by this violent catastrophe. It’s heartbreaking to think that all they were trying to do was have a good time and a catch a Jason Aldean concert. Now, in a near formulaic fashion, some media outlets are dominated by discussions on matters like effective gun control and a little less on issues like access to quality mental healthcare. A strongly partisan and highly rhetorical battle ensues, where conservative voices become increasingly creative in their defense of the present lack of gun control while liberal writers become continuously more pessimistic in their hopes that stringent laws will ever be passed.

SWAN | The Artist’s Struggle

The last column that I wrote for this paper considered my own identity as a student of ethnomusicology and the importance of experiencing the art of different cultures. I was planning on broaching a different topic this week, but then an actual hate crime occurred in our community and to ignore that would be blissfully ignorant and cringingly self-indulgent. In my last column — and in other previous ones — I feel as though I stopped just short of explicitly commanding everyone to go engage with black art. Well, now I would like to say it explicitly: everyone really needs to go engage with black art. It might seem somewhat trivializing to attempt to connect these recent events to some lesson about artistic consideration.

On Ethnomusicality and Listening

Cornell’s Department of Music is an institution so wonderfully varied in its scope that one must step back from it occasionally and ponder the vastness of the thing. Once, in the middle of a piano lesson during my freshman year, before I even considered myself a real member of the department, my instructor hilariously described to me this great divide. “On one half, it’s like 1750 all over again. ‘Alright everyone, let us put on our pantaloons, sit down and play our harpsichords!’ Meanwhile, on the other side of the rift, people are busy questioning whether ‘music’ even exists. ‘What is music?

SWAN | Reflections and a Plea for Humanity(ies)

I find myself undergoing a mid-college existential crisis as I finish what has proven to be a rather formative sophomore year here at Cornell. It is not so much a cerebral catastrophe, one marked by some bleak, emotional indifference, but rather the overwhelming curiosity one experiences when discovering the utter vastness and complexity of the world, or less loftily, our own university’s community — less L’Étranger and more the end of Boyhood. I recall a moment that occurred in one of my first lectures at Cornell, ECON 1120: Introductory Macroeconomics back in the fall of 2015, when our professor offered us a bit of sage guidance: “During your freshmen year of college, you do not know anything, but you do not know that you do not know anything. In your sophomore year of college, you realize that you do not know anything. At the end of your junior year you definitely know some things, but you do not know that you do know something.

SWAN | On Freaks and Geeks and Music

I would like to initiate this piece by making the rather bold assertion that Freaks and Geeks is a most profound creative portrayal of white, suburban and American high school life. Although it was tragically cancelled after its first season, it has surely attained cult-classic status. Yet, for those of you who do not know about this masterpiece of American television culture, Freaks and Geeks takes place in 1980 Michigan, and follows student Lindsay Weir in her attempt to abandon her confining, “mathlete” persona and hang around the burned-out group of “freaks” in her high school. This is not some desperate call for attention, or a problem that needs resolving, but rather an act of personal expression on the part of Lindsay. This is perhaps the thesis of the entire show; that youthful expression is both liberating and emotionally healthy, and it is crucial that young people surround themselves with accepting peers in the process.

SWAN | Not a Review of La La Land

I haven’t even seen La La Land, so this is not a review of that film. The picture accompanying this article is only related to the subject in spirit and is primarily there for bait to increase readership. La La Land seems like a pretty cool movie, and from the brief snippets I’ve heard of its soundtrack, its music is probably intoxicating, jazzy, and maybe even original. Its two starring actors manage to look highly attractive and suave in all of the ads and stills I’ve seen and I bet that this translates into captivating motion on screen during the actual event of watching La La Land. I’ve gathered from some media outlets, including Saturday Night Live, that La La Land may represent yet another tiring instance of Hollywood “whitewashing,” as it is a film about jazz that stars two white actors (this criticism resting on the implication that jazz music was gradually formed by the profoundly unique experiences and reactions of African-Americans in the twentieth century – an assertion I can adamantly defend).

SWAN | Well Well Well Well; Thanks for the Memories Fall 2016

“Well this is some old-school, Ivy Leaguer, boys and girls, three-feet-on-the-floor stuff,” I thought to myself. We were going to Wells College for a semi-formal. My friend’s girlfriend goes there, and his girlfriend has a friend, and through the potentially awkward workings of social arrangement, it was established that I would be her friend’s date for the evening; so it goes, so it goes. For those of you who don’t know, Wells College is a small, liberal arts institution situated on a dreamy, picturesque campus in Aurora, New York, about 25 miles north of Ithaca. Founded in 1868 as a women’s college by Henry Wells, the institution — in true, 19th century Utopian fashion — was intended to produce the “ideal” contemporary woman.

SWAN | Expression in the Era of Trump and Pseudo-Masculinity

When I was much younger, around four or five years of age, I played soccer on a YMCA little league team. Yet, as I’ve been subsequently told, rare was it that I actually joined in and played the game with the other kids. I possessed no interest in the ball and I instead preferred to run around carefree behind my team, acting out my own fantastical Power Rangers- or epic action-adventure. After soccer came a brief, two-year stint in little league baseball during elementary school. My brazen defiance of the rules in both of these sports indicated to my parents that organized sports were indeed not my forte (and around this time I began taking piano lessons).