Bringing Berklee to Cal: in conversation with Eric Falci

Eric Falci is a professor at UC Berkeley in the English Department, as well as the head of the Irish Studies Program in the Institute of European Studies, and Associate Dean of the Graduate Division. Within the English Department he has created a special topics course titled “Literature and the Arts.” In his class, students explore the vital links between music and literature, examining both written works and musical pieces. The course begins it’s exploration with examining works from the 19th century Romantic Era, through 1960s Harlem Renaissance with jazz and blues poetry, and wrapping up with speculating the literary aspects of modern day genres like folk, pop, and hip hop music.  I had the opportunity to take Professor Falci’s special topics course, and spoke with him about why he created the course (and demystify the English major a little bit, too).

Could you tell us about your course, “Literature and the Arts” for people who don’t know?

Sure. It’s a class that tries to take seriously why, throughout modern history, so many poets and writers look to music for inspiration, energy, form, and ideas.

There’s lots of forms in which poetry and music is joined: opera, musicals, psalms. Not only does opera have music with the words of the song, but also these literary tags that embed some sort of principal of music but obviously don’t actually contain music.

Music wasn’t taken as seriously as an art, but in the middle of the 18th century and into the 19th century it became more and more central to discussions about the philosophy of art: What is art? What is the aesthetic? What happens when people experience art? There was this convergence of things that brought music together with literature and philosophy, so the course builds on that.

What is the competition, or what is the process in trying to pitch a class? How does that work?

It works differently from department to department, but we have a director of undergraduate studies who gets a committee assignment. We’re then asked to select courses that we might want to teach the following year, along with others who will teach in case they’re needed. Then this director of undergraduate studies, along with the staff member in rule of the department, will look at everyone’s preferences, look at what needs to be taught, see what matches, and try to put everything all together. We have a lot of flexibility in terms of what we teach; some of us don’t mind teaching lectures, so maybe we’ll teach more lectures, and other folks might really like doing seminars. The expectation is that there’s some balance, so that we’re all teaching roughly the same amount of seminars, lectures, and graduate courses over the course of a couple years’ span.

One of the interesting things about Berkeley, and particularly about the bureaucracy, is it’s a very centralized campus. Obviously financial aid is very centralized, as are the admissions, and the registrar. But in terms of the academic structure of the campus, each department is its own entity. It feels more egalitarian, I guess.

What inspired this course? I understand you have a book that’s tentatively titled, Poetry and the Problem of Music. Did you curate off of your research or was the process the other way around?

They’ve been working in tandem with one another in the sense that when I started thinking about this book it was much smaller in terms of scope. As I have been teaching this class “Literature and the Arts,” it’s gotten bigger and bigger in the sense of the historical time frame that it covers. So, it’s morphed and changed but also just kept growing, and that’s because the research and the teaching kind of get intertwined.

If we use our literary tools, or analytical tools, and close reading skills that we value when reading a novel or poem, and use those same tools to look at “Pop Song X,” we’d probably be pretty disappointed because that song is not built to withstand sustained tension on the particular textures of it’s language. This isn’t just a recent thing with today’s popular music though, like go back to an early Beatles song, “she loves you yeah, yeah, yeah” — you’re not going to pour over the meaning of these lyrics in the way you’d try to pour over the meaning of The Wasteland.

What is the background on your relationship to music? How did you grow up with music influence around you?

In certain ways it was pretty standard, the music that was part of my teenage years and part of my early twenties was during the early to late 90s. So it was like REM, that kind of indie rock, is what I listened to. Also, folk music revived with singers like Ani DiFranco – I was a huge Ani DiFranco fan. She was born and grew up in Buffalo, New York which is in Western New York, right by Ohio and I grew up in Syracuse, New York. So when I was in college, Ani DiFranco was just starting out so I would go see her in small little venues in New York City. I was big fan of hers and that kind of music.

The other thing is that, not the major portion, but the big part of my musical life was that beginning in fourth grade I started to play the tuba. I was good at it and kept playing, and in my high school years, I spent my entire summers playing in arts camps.

It’s interesting because my parents were not musically inclined at all. But, I went to public school in New York that had a vibrant music program starting in the fourth grade so everyone could choose an instrument.

At my public high school, there was four bands with 50 or 60 kids, the marching band, an orchestra, and a chorus. In retrospect, I realize that I took it for granted that at the public schools I went to that you’d have band instruments and spaces to play, and stages, and concerts every year. I don’t know if it’s feasible for every high school to have really vibrant arts, drama, music programs, but it’d be great if it could happen. There’s so much evidence that exposure to music, dance, learning an instrument even if it’s a recorder, something simple really has important cognitive benefits.

My undergraduate degree is actually in Musical Performance, focusing on playing the tuba. Until the very end of college, my plan was to be a professional musician. But then I really realized what that life would be like and how difficult it would be to get to that position. So then I kind of shifted, and I went to graduate school and got a PhD in English.

The community college I attended is near CalArts, and CalArts literally sits on top of a hill, which is symbolic of this idea that music and the arts seem so unreachable.

And that is one of the interesting things about the class, too. We imagine poetry to be an elite art, we imagine the symphony to be a more prestigious form than a popular song — and probably for good reason: symphonies are expensive to put on, there’s lots of people playing, lots of different instruments. Whereas a popular song feels more democratic, everyone can have access to it, I think those are kind of broken down, there’s more chaos now, and it’s hard to say what is high culture or prestigious, and what is not. There is no hard sense of how that works, but it’s interesting that these things that we think of as prestigious or elite are only for people who can afford them, are things that humans have been doing for as long as there has been human civilization. It’s so interesting how central art making is — music, dance, visual art, poetry — to human culture, and how it often gets put to the side as something not essential, something that is outside the main important real-life things.

Yes, and especially the idea of stratification — you touched on the idea of popular music as more democratic.

The same thing with poetry. Poetry costs nothing. Especially now with the internet there’s a million poems accessible online, right away. So in that, anyone, no matter how many financial resources they had or what kind of equipment they had, can write a poem. All you need is something to write with, something to write on, and the ability to use language. But still we have this sense that writing poetry is this elite thing.

For me, moving from Los Angeles, I think Northern and Southern California are like two different planets in terms of community and the arts scene. Because of Hollywood and the media industry in Los Angeles, it feels like there are gatekeepers.

I think that’s true. If anyone wanted to start a dance company or press in the Bay Area, it seems doable. Even in New York, it feels like there are gatekeepers. Whether it’s an old venerable publisher, or a taste-making magazine like The New Yorker, or the The New York Review of Books, these things function as cultural gatekeepers. In Southern California, the gatekeepers are Hollywood and the celebrity industry. Here in the East Bay, it’s just maybe less clear what the gatekeepers are, which is amongst the reasons why art scenes started here, spend time here, or ended here – there was that feeling of kind of openness, freedom, and politically it’s such a liberal area. People tended to settle here because of that, and that kind of perpetuates too.

One last question, do you still play tuba?

I don’t really play much anymore. It’s funny, it’s not a neighbor friendly instrument – I only now realize how forbearing my parents were dealing with a tuba being practiced at the house everyday. I keep saying I want to get back into it, but you know how it goes, (laughing) life is busy.

Written by Celia Davalos