Nothing is more sublime than listening to all of Van Morrison's "Into the Music" at one sitting.
In my campus office, I always have a CD or MP3s playing, not loud enough to rattle the windows, but because music calms me, keeps me happy, and ... wait for it ... shows my students that I'm cool as shit. (Hardly.)
Q: What music do you play in your office? Do you play it to please yourself? Do you put on something especially cool in case students come by? Do you turn off ABBA and turn on Fall Out Boy when you want to seem hip (or hep)?
A: Reply below.
I like to make students and colleagues with different tastes comfortable when they enter my office. To entertain with a variety of genres, I play both types of music: country and western. If you don't like it, just wait until a David Allan Coe song comes up.
ReplyDeleteI listen to Coheed and Cambria. I'm listening to it right now as I'm grading from home, or trying to anyway but the internet keeps distracting me. Sometimes, when I know students are coming by and I don't want to think that I'm a total weirdo, I listen to the Vitamin String Quartet's tribute to Coheed. That way I can hear the songs I love but it sounds "classy." But I'm in Communications, so I could get away with listening to most anything as long as I could make a good sounding argument about "the message." At least that's what the Mass Media folks in my department do.
ReplyDeleteI would have liked to listen to The Grateful Dead and keep my office hours at midnight, but people would talk.
ReplyDeleteI ALWAYS play The Donnas louder than I should in my office.
ReplyDeleteI confess I have about 7 "hard bop" CDs (Miles, Coltrane, Adderly, Mingus, etc.) that I play to impress people. If that makes me insecure and small, well I've been called worse.
ReplyDeleteAt home it's mostly Starland Vocal Band and John Denver.
I just play the Floyd at home and at work. then I smoke a big bowl.
ReplyDeleteWhat office?
ReplyDeleteDoes the shrill clamor of background cafeteria noise count as music?
You can impress others and please yourself with some Lucinda Williams...
ReplyDeleteIf I'm trying to get my own work done it's usually something appealing in a language I have a hard/impossible time following (Sigur Ros, Natasha Atlas, Joh van Oeckeghem, etc) so that I don't have lyrics messing with my writing-brain. If students/coworkers might be coming by I put on big band swing or something neutral like that.
ReplyDeleteI listen to the music I listened to as a 4th year undergrad and grad student. First, it makes me feel young. Second, I'm guessing that as at that time I was working like a dog in the lab due to the lack of a wife, kids or mortgage to occupy my thoughts and time, my brain somehow became hard-wired to be more efficient at work while listening to this music - I always work better to music. My favourite song from that era? Fools Gold, The Stone Roses. However, I do tend to stop working and fully immerse myself in the music from 3:20 onwards in the song...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4bHMVAKDao
Although their jams are great for working to, I avoid playing the Dead at the office. Too many students have offered me joints, and it's always such inferior shit.
ReplyDeleteI play lots of radio shows, especially from the Dimension X series, here:
http://www.archive.org/details/Dimension-X
I turn on my configured stations at either Pandora or Slacker. Anything could pop up from classical guitar to Interpol to the Byrds to Catherine Wheel to Them Crooked Vultures.
ReplyDeleteBeing polite, I usually keep my headphones on, though.
Loud and heavy. Metallica, Avenged Sevenfold, Disturbed, pretty much anything with some aggressive rhythm and axe work. It's kind of appropriate that Disturbed's new album is called Asylum, since my office is my only on-campus asylum (you can take that any way you wish).
ReplyDeleteI don't play music at school. I get my groove on at home and in the car. At school, I'm all bidness.
ReplyDelete19th Century symphonies. I'm partial to die grosser pan-Deutschen: Brahms, Beethoven and Schubert.
ReplyDelete1970s art-rock and art-techno; anything with Robert Fripp. One of these days I'll own No Pussyfooting again.
My biggest musical regret is that I don't have a copy of Love You Till Tuesday on my computer. Easily fixed, I know, but I'm cheap.
I try to stay away from stuff that's too raucous in the office.
I hooked my computer audio output to the input on an ancient mini-stereo I have tucked into the corner on my desk, and I also hooked up a cheap iPod dock, so I have music on when I can. The closer to Nick Drake or Aimee Mann the artists are, the better.
ReplyDeleteChoral masses and symphonies; am partial to Brumel, Palestrina, and Charpentier. Modern would be Mahler. I'll intersperse that with good Celtic, modern bluegrass (Alison Brown), Middle Eastern, Greek, Russian, and Bulgarian folk dance music, and the Austin Lounge Lizards. If I could work while listening to opera, I would, but I save that for when I am melting glass at my Cricket burner.
ReplyDeleteDuring office hours I used to play stuff I liked, but stuff others thought was crazy ass stuff that would make them to go screaming out of the office. Like what?
ReplyDeletehttp://tinyurl.com/2dsvn67
http://tinyurl.com/24emkd3
http://tinyurl.com/2cjesob
Then I go back to my Glenlevet and Grading.
My tastes are more in line with Chloe and Pat, but my colleague across the hall prefers stuff like what Picky Historian listens to. I don't play my music in the office, but I've been very tempted to crank up Godsmack when he plays his shit so loud I can't even think.
ReplyDeleteNPR and Lucinda Williams!
ReplyDeleteusually put on Pandora or open Itunes and shuffle it. Generally things that are mellow.. Howie Day, John Mayer, Josh Groban, but it usually depends on my mood.
ReplyDeletePrissy Prof: That's precisely the reason I usually keep mine at a low level or use headphones. I don't want to hear yours and I know you don't want to hear mine :)
ReplyDeleteNow, when I'm in our big cavern of a building late and nobody is working in my office suite (or sometimes the whole floor!), then I rock the house with Mahler. (Of course, then I defy the building manager and bring in one of my dogs, too, because that building is just *too* creepy at night. No, nobody on my floor is allergic.)
The progressive rock channel on Slacker radio. I am a seriously aging nerd.
ReplyDelete