Since many roads lead back to The Who for me, I’ve been looking through some of my collection and re-reading things I hadn’t looked at for some time. In the “Director’s Cut” edition of Quadrophenia, I found this striking observation from Chairman Pete Townshend, and it made me think about parts of my approach to teaching online during pandemic time:
In 1971, as the chief songwriter for The Who, I faced a new problem: our audience apparently hoped for another rock-opera. No one else had picked up the system, not properly; quite a few people thought it was a rotten system in any case. I was already running with it, and I felt there was more mileage in it. After a lot of scrabbling around with various other ideas, I landed on the dystopian Lifehouse that gathered a lot of the futuristic ideas that had bee presented to me when I had been at art college. This failed as a rock-opera collection, but produced Who’s Next, an album of separate tracks that with ‘Baba O’Riley’ and ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, developed the rock-anthem trick we had stumbled on almost by accident in the finale of Tommy. The high energy presentation of songs like this soon made it possible for us to perform with some intimacy to much larger audiences in the open air as a matter of regular occasion from this album onwards.
I’m always intrigued by the counterintuitive, especially when it seems to describe a hunch or intuition I have had and am puzzled by myself. (Yes, my intuition is often counterintuitive, which you must admit is a genuinely puzzling state of affairs. Or a colossal failure of understanding.) So I’m drawn to that idea that going toward a high energy presentation of a rock anthem helped The Who maintain a sense of intimacy when performing to larger audiences.
Maybe that’s what I’ve been experimenting with in my larger classes (N>100). Not sermons, not lectures even, but learning-anthems. A way of taking all of us out of ourselves, if only for a while, and thus creating an opening for thinking, re-thinking, and hopefully that sense of nearness and empathy that conveys the feeling of community. If the feeling is there, the thing itself may follow.
Maybe I am trying to design learning experiences that are anthemic.
I do not believe that critical thinking [sic] and anthemic learning experiences must be mutually exclusive. Like Milton, I think “the sober certainty of waking bliss” is both desirable and possible.
Listening to you, I get the music.
I had never heard any of TOMMY before the summer of 1970, when I saw the WOODSTOCK documentary. I had recently heard Handel’s MESSIAH for the first time, complete, and I was struck by the sense that “Listening to You” was akin to the Hallelujah Chorus. “Anthemic” is a great word, and it characterizes much of the music that moves me, from “Teach Your Children” to the finale of Mahler’s Second.
Agreed on all counts! I wish I’d known about our anthemic connection, but I am not really surprised.
I feel the same way about the finale of Mahler’s Second, by the way. What a moment that is, for all its length.
I never tire of Tommy, which was the 2nd Who disc I owned after starting with The Kids are Alright which we should give the proto anthemic nod to “A Quick One”. I am sure I got the album after having seen the sappy movie version and just loved how rich it was in just the listening, that the visual was not needed.
This goes to something about it’s really not about the size of the class in terms of seats, but the size of the experience created. You can have anthemic performances in large venues and yawning bombs. Why do we just ascribe the experience based on the numbers of audience?
“Do you think he’s all right?”
I remain more than impressed you are doing this more classes in the 100s range. I am fairly confident that Garrdnerness scales well.
Tommy was and is always a spiritual experience for me, embodied too because rock-and-roll.
I love the idea of the “size of the experience.” How big was this course of study this semester? Or to get all cosmological, how much of a macrocosm could you see, or begin to see?
I sometimes ask students if they think about the arc of the semester, the way the course takes them through an experience. They’re puzzled by the question, almost always. I get that the lessons come in a series, but why not like chapters and less like one thing after another? Every course is also a curriculum.
Thanks for the kind words. I’ve just graded a number of free-response analyses of a clip from Citizen Kane, and I’m not feeling like anything scales at all–certainly not whatever said it was college prep but seems not to have been.