Episode 123 - Martha Feldman: "Follow your passions and interests."

Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Music and the College, Professor Martha Feldman, joins us in this episode. Professor Feldman talks about her career journey from training as a professional guitarist to becoming a scholar researching Italian Opera and teaching Long and Song to UChicago students. She emphasizes the importance of believing in yourself and finding confidence to pursue one's passion and shares her upcoming plans in the field of music.

[Photo Credit: Valerie Booth O.]

Transcript

Stephen00:00
Hello, and welcome to The Course. I'm your host, Stephen, and today I'm speaking with Professor Martha Feldman. Professor Feldman is the Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Music and the College. She's a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has served as president of the American Musicological Society, and is the author or editor of several books, the most recent of which is The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds. 

She's here today to talk to us about the many different places her research has taken her, her upcoming book project, and how she became a University of Chicago professor. 

Professor Feldman, welcome to the course. It's lovely to have you. How are you? 

Martha Feldman 00:35
 I'm doing fine. Thank you. How are you doing? 

Stephen00:39
I'm doing well. Thank you. we havemuch to get to, but first let's just get some of the basics out of the way. Could you please tell us what your role is at UChicago and how you would describe that to someone who is maybe not an expert in your field? 

Martha Feldman 00:52
 Well, I'm a musicologist that's a very broad overarching term for anyone who studies music and writes about it. Although it's often used for those who have a kind of historical accent in the work that they do, who are leaning into the historical project. At the same time as it can involve any number of different kinds of practices and disciplinary orientations.

I'm also an affiliated member in Romance Languages and Literatures and in Gender Studies, and I'm on the committee for Theater and Performance Studies. My work ranges from a whole variety of vernacular music practices that are mostly vocal, but that's a big, big bucket. And within that, I'm really doing a lot of different things, or I have been doing a lot of different things over a long period of time. 

I'm more of a fox than a hedgehog in terms of the way I work, although I'm a sort of a hedgehog-y fox. That is, I change fields a lot. I've changed the kinds of work that I do, but I burrow in very deeply. 

Stephen02:18
Well, great. we, we certainly have a lot to cover. Did you always know that you would work in music in some capacity? Like, has that been obvious since you were little or not? 

Martha Feldman 2:30
 In some way, I grew up in a family of five children. I was the second of the five. And  I was kind of anointed the music one in a family of visual artists. I don't really know why, although my mother claimed that I sang Happy Birthday in my crib when I was six months old. You can imagine what kind of a fantasy that was.

But nevertheless, I was given piano lessons and other kinds of lessons, and I listened to music with my father all the time, and I ended up going to, a wonderful high school, public high school, that was an academic magnet school and also had majors in music and art. So for four years I was a music major. When I left there, I was a guitarist, a classical guitarist. I ended up studying for two years in Greece. I masterclasses around the world. And by the time I was almost 21. I went to college, and then I thought I had to be on a very fast track. But I also realized that I wanted to study music and not just practice many, many hours a day. I just wanted to learn more and more about music. It was a very naive way of moving into it. But then I went with it.

Stephen03:52
Is that, I mean, it looks like that's a guitar over your left shoulder.

Martha Feldman 03:55
 It is one of a number. Yes. 

Stephen03:59
Did you assume that you would be performing that that was where your studies would take you? And, and like, how did you, come upon the field of musicology? 

Martha Feldman 04:07
 Well, I was performing, as a sort of budding professional, I guess you could say. But, there were some things that were dissuading me from that path, even as I was on it. And one was that I had bad nerves, and there weren't really solutions for that at the time. Now people take beta blockers and, you know, do all kinds of things. So that was one, but the, I would say even the primary one was that I was kind of bored with practicing all day and I was sort of bored with the repertory. I wanted something else and something more. 

And so I just was drawn to some kind of study. It was sort of elusive because in those days, musicology was a pretty positivistic enterprise. So when I went to graduate school, I actually sub matriculated at Penn into the graduate program while I was in the undergraduate program. Actually, while I was a sophomore, I started taking graduate courses, thinking that I was way behind and I had to sort of put everything on a fast track.

I was kind of stunned to find out that there was a lot of structural analysis combined with sort of almost forensic work being done by musicologists, handwriting analysis of Bach manuscripts, watermark readings of papers in order to date them. And that wasn't what I wanted to do. So it was, I was kind of rescued by certain people coming to the program who, with whom I could really work on something of intellectual interest.

Stephen06:02
You said you began graduate classes while still in undergrad. So did you actually begin, you didn't begin a graduate degree while still an undergrad.

Martha Feldman 06:12
 Yes, I did. 

Stephen06:14
That's unusual even for the guests on this show.

Martha Feldman 06:17
 I started out by taking graduate courses when I was a sophomore and junior. And I think when I was a junior, I applied to sub matriculate was the word that was used into the graduate program as an undergraduate. 

So I really had a foot in both programs. And by the time I finished my undergraduate work, I had finished more than half of the graduate work. So for me, it was a way of speeding things up. I was working very, very hard. I was always working incredibly hard, I have to say, looking back because I was, I was supporting myself. and I was also taking all these courses and I had at the peak, I had 25 guitar students a week. So I was sort of spinning a lot of plates.

I decided to focus on sort of the way that vernacular language was codified in Italy and specifically in Venice. And its relationship to the codification of a certain kind of vernacular music. And I could see that there had been great difficulty in figuring out how to do this because there weren't formal records of it.

And the people that studied how, how to sort of crack that nut had been, to my mind, going around it, going about it the wrong way. They had been trying to find formal records of academies, Salon gatherings, maybe anecdotes about salon gatherings, as well as reading literary treatises and musical treatises, etc., and looking at repertories.

But I realized that precisely what it was about this city culture in Venice, where all this was happening, precisely what was, what was characteristic of it and endemic to it and crucial to it was avoiding any kind of formal constitution. It was a much, it was based on sort of courtly manners and graces and, you know, sort of notion of civic culture that resisted that kind of formalization.

So I started studying a whole range of different kinds of documents that were literary documents, funny little bizarre, often bizarre, print, forms of print, book compilations that wouldn't even look like books to us nowadays. Some manuscript letters, but a lot of stuff that was printed because early printing really got going on a sort of mass scale in Venice and basically piecing together fragments. 

And I really came to an understanding of how all this was working over a period of time. It's always taken me a long time to, that's what I mean by being a hedgehog. It's always taken me a long time to arrive at a large vision for a project and see it through.

Stephen 09:43
 Well, yeah, I mean, that sounds like such a difficult, undertaking and such a kind of nebulous thing to try to, I don't know, to define or just, you know, suss out. We typically save the advice, you know, what advice would you give for later. But what advice would you have for someone, you know, who maybe has identified a project like that and is questioning whether or not it's possible see it through to completion.

Martha Feldman 10:11
 The one advice I always give to young people and people starting out, and really anyone at any stage who wants to accomplish something difficult and major is follow your passions and interests. Follow your passions and interests. Don't think that there's some model out there, and if you could just figure out what the right model is, and hew to it, you'll get where you want to go.

You are the one who is going to figure out where you need to go, and your intuitions matter a lot in that process. And what drives you matters. You have to have a sort of goal. belief in yourself and your instincts, even at the same time as nothing out there may seem to be reassuring you that you have any right to feel confident and to stride forward, you know, you have to have that. It's sort of the sine qua non.

Stephen11:11
That's, that's a great answer. How, you know, where did, how did your interests and passions evolve from there? I mean, I know we don't have time to get into everything, but sort of summarize for me, like how it evolved between then and now. 

Martha Feldman 11:23
 Well, at the same time as I was finishing up this book on Venice that came out in 1995 with California. Before it came out, I started working on opera in Italy in the 18th century. And I was particularly interested in a type of opera that goes under the not completely historical a rubric of opera seria, serious opera. Wasn't mostly called that at the time, and it was called drama per musica, which just means drama for music. 

And I was interested in it because I thought it held a key to a vast range of issues that had to do with Italian culture, social life, and political life and ideology, but I didn't think that that had really been understood. And I thought the way to understand it was in part through a concept of the event and looking at the practice of the event.

So what kinds of things happened when these serious operas, which existed by the thousands in all different polities in Italy, what happened when they were put under extraordinary kinds of pressure? One of them was, for example, um, the Great Famine in Naples others had to do with turning what had been, a more sovereign state into a more democratic state, so a city state in this case. I felt that I succeeded in that, but only through studying many different situations that had come under pressure of that kind. 

And part of what interested me was the charismatic position of the singers, because these were either King's theaters, or they were the theaters of a kind of sovereign body. So it might have been a group of oligarchs. It might have been a sort of Republican society. So there are all these different polities in many different commercial theaters, but they have ties to sovereignty of different kinds. And I'm talking about not democratic sovereignty, but pre democratic early modern sovereignty. 

So the singers in that situation are the ones who are in quotes narrating, uh, this story, which is a kind of mythical story, but they are usurping the charisma of the sovereign in the process of doing so, because they're the ones who are attracting the attention of the audience, who are becoming stars in a burgeoning kind of mercantile commercial sort of proto capitalist environment end. 

And therefore, if you want to understand sort of how sovereignty is actually negotiated, you also have to understand the position of the singers and the position of audience members in these theaters and, and also outside the theaters. How I got into studying Castrati, these castrated male singers who existed in great numbers and who were the biggest stars. Often playing princes, and that, that project broke off from my opera book and became a book on Castrati. 

Stephen14:57 
There's so many follow up questions that I would, I would like to ask if we had more time, because I mean, this, it's a really fascinating journey. I will say one, one thing that we always ask about is, you know, have you had to, have you traveled for research, etc. I am always tiny bit, skeptical of people whose interests just happen to mean that they have to spend tons of time in Italy.

Martha Feldman 15:21
 Spent tons of time in many places. But most, more in Italy. Well, I have many reasons why I've spent much time abroad, and only some of them have to do with this aspect of my work. But I will confess that before I started my first project on Venice, I was sort of bedazzled by the idea that if I do this project, it could actually be in Venice a lot and then you find out that you're actually working and you're doing the grimy work of getting up early and going to the library.

And I would go to libraries from 8:30 in the morning till as late as 11 at night. I knew when all the libraries would be open and closed and on which days. And you're just working. And a lot of times it's not only hard and exhausting, but it's lonely. It's quite solitary. 

So, I think the fantasy that this is just, you know, a delightful way to live and you're going to have wonderful meals and sort of hang out with your friends and go to the opera or what have you, is a little shy of the truth. But of course, I established strong bonds with the places where I worked. The sources that I use were dispersed all over. 

Stephen16:40
Well, yeah, I think, I think that's, that'll actually be great for some of our audience to hear. May I just ask what are you working on right now? What are you, interested in right now? Like what are you currently, pursuing and like what's motivating you at this moment? 

Martha Feldman 16:52
 Well, I'm just finishing up. I finished drafting a book on the period of the last castrato and the last castrati, and the aftermath of that period in Rome, the Castrati withdrew to Rome out of necessity because they were removed basically from the stage, the operatic stage, in 1830. They were effectively removed from, many parts of Europe where they had acted on the stage, sung on the stage, and had to work in Rome, and the whole Castrato phenomenon was perpetuated in Rome by gathering boys from villages outside of Rome.

When I was working on the last Castrato in Rome, one of the things that happened was I encountered a base in the Sistine Chapel, who was also a collector of modern documents. Modern meaning mid-19th century to the present. He told me some things I didn't know. I didn't know that the last castrato had lived with a woman for a while. And I didn't know that she had had a child. So that interested me.

Questions arise, and the next time I met him, he told me that the Castrato's effectively granddaughter had married Fellini's brother, the famous film director Fellini's brother.

That really interested me, but I was still working on the Castrato book, and I was trying to reconstruct a genealogy of Castrato singing that went from the 18th century more or less to the present day.

So as time went by I scratched around and I found out that Fellini's niece who was the daughter of this particular brother was living in Rome, and I went to see her and her husband. I found out that she didn't know anything about her father's singing, really, because parents separated. She didn't remember him practicing. But they started to tell me the story of the family, and they really wanted me to be kind of the preserver of memory for the family and they even gave me the whole family archive, which I now have and I'm going to deposit in an institution, fairly soon, because I've recently finished drafting the book.

Stephen19:22
Wow. It’s I mean, all of that basically because of one conversation or sort of like one meeting. That's really incredible. 

Martha Feldman 19:31
 More or less, it turned out that the Castrato had married in 1896, this woman. They used to go to the opera. She had a baby who was not his progeny, although he declared it as such to the municipal authorities. In she abandoned them both the castrato and the baby. The castrato raised the baby, on his own as a single parent, but it's very complexly imbricated with the Fellini family.

Stephen19:59
There's so much more I wish I could ask, but we're speaking now, like pretty close to the end of the semester, but what does your sort of day to day life, as a professor look like? You know, what are your day to day interactions with students like? And, what do you find fulfilling about it? And is there anything that you don't particularly enjoy? 

Martha Feldman 20:16
 There's some kinds of administrative work that nobody particularly enjoys. And it has to be done. It's part of, you know, being functional as opposed to dysfunctional and, running a sound program and a sound institution, but I adore my students. I have so many brilliant students and those are at least as much the undergraduate students. I mean, they're equally the undergraduate students. 

I just finished teaching opera cross media, which is my signature course. the level of engagement, critical engagement by those students. It's just astounding. It's at such a high level. I feel that I always learn as much as I teach.

And that teaching is a form of learning. But it's very reciprocal because of this particular body of students. And then I have fabulous dissertation advisees and students in my graduate seminars. I also just finished teaching a graduate seminar called Love and Song, which sounds, on the face of it, some sort of ordinary. And that very ordinariness drew me to it. I realized I had been writing about love and song for a longtime in various contexts. And when I started to  explore it in order to make this seminar, it took me a year to do it. 

And I found so little of real value that thought about the relationship between love and song, as if it was almost too banal and ordinary to bear the weight of any signage.  So It was my pleasure to sort of bring these two things together and figure out what the relationships are in a variety of contexts. And the students helped me greatly in doing that. We made a song archive together that reflected on a whole variety of readings and different cases.

Stephen22:32
Interesting. So this class is actually, and I should say I can, I can see in your face how much fun this was, just as you're describing it, so this class involved actually compiling an archive.

Martha Feldman 22:43
 Well, we made what we called an archive on a Google sheet and it was effectively an archive that reflected sort of our thinking and the different byways we took. But, of course, we also did all kinds of other things and yeah, it was just wonderful. 

My wife is actually a jazz musician and a composer, a pianist, a singer. And when I told her I thought I'd teach a seminar on love and song, she just burst out laughing as if, hasn't that been done before? 

And it ought to have been done before, but it hadn't been done in a way that I found satisfactory. And I think in the end, I convinced her of that, which was an accomplishment because she's a very significant composer and has written many, alternative love songs, let's say. 

Stephen23:37
Congratulations. Yes, that's, that absolutely is an accomplishment. We do have to wrap up shortly, but I guess I would just end by asking, are there any avenues that you are looking forward to exploring? Like any ideas that, that you hope to pursue, in the near to middle future?

I know you're wrapping up a book right now. So that might be all you can think about, but yeah, just kind of, what do you think is on the horizon?

Martha Feldman 24:00
 No, it's not all I can think about. I just barely and recently started turning to Greek music and working with some Greek scholars. There's an international sound and theory workshop in northeast Greece. That's had a lot of traction for me last summer, when I went and I'm going back this summer, I wrote, I led one of the sessions and wrote a piece that related to memories that I have of Greece from a long time ago when I moved there.

But also Greek music of that time I'm gonna keep exploring and see where that goes, but I'm probably going to end up writing more about love and music in some way. I think it's something that needs to be written about. Behind me, I have a whole shelf of and more of things, but very few of them really put the two together in a meaningful way, so I think I can do it.

Stephen25:05
Thank you, Professor Martha Feldman, for your time today. And Course Takers, if you enjoyed today's interview, please check out the other ones. Leave us a comment, subscribe, follow, and share this episode with your friends and family. You can find out more about the University of Chicago through uchicago.edu or the university's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk. Stay tuned for more, and thanks for listening.