You can tell a lot about a people by scanning their CD shelf. Superficial it may be, but take time and talk to them about their music collection and closets open, offering glimpses into their youth, intellect and personal history. To wax philosophical, music permeates our daily life, pandering to the moods, rhythms and complexity of our nature. Music is as complementary to our mirth and misery as it is to hips and asses. The motivation in talking to Macalester administration and faculty about their musical tastes is as much its universality as it is our curiosity. I found, in fact, that Macalester faculty can talk as much, if not more, about their musical palate than their given academic specialty.

I happened to spend a portion of an afternoon talking to German Studies Professor Kiarina Kordela. It was quickly apparent why she couldn’t just give me an answer in two to three lines or an e-mail with what she was listening to. It was too complex to illustrate it in the abstract—there had to be discourse. The same for English Professor Stephen Burt, shooting back e-mails with questions as if he were a student who didn’t understand the essay topic due the next day.

When it comes to music there is too much love on the part of the listener to say just a few words. Rather it evokes stories of concerts, family history, children and the recognition of growing old.

Kordela’s music collection looks a lot like anyone else’s—there are bands you know, bands you’ve heard of and bands you didn’t know existed. Each CD had a different history linked to it as it came off the shelf: an older sister, a local group, how this group draws from that, why this CD is fantastic and why this one isn’t.

Scanning Kordela’s shelves, one sees Bob Dylan, The Doors, Tim and Jeff Buckley, The Cure, The Magnetic Fields, Edith Piaf, The Velvet Underground, The Dirty Three, Frank Zappa, Yo La Tengo, King Crimson, The Lounge Lizards and Charles Mingus, among others. The influence of her father’s classical, jazz and swing preferences and her sister’s sixties rock taste is apparent.

Kordela’s own stylings, for lack of a better term, are noisy, experimental post-rock, like Canada’s God Speed You Black Emperor! and Australia’s The Dirty Three. Sit and listen with Kordela, you’ll get a nuanced argument on why and what she likes and the feeling that she is like most of us when she tries to squeeze in one more song at the risk of being late to class.

The same goes for just about every professor I talked to, so much in fact that this feature will appear weekly.
 

Stephen Burt, Assistant Professor of English

“Currently listening to: Stars, Heart—lush, deliberately ‘overproduced’ and very beautiful synth pop, recommended-if-you-like Magnetic Fields, Postal Service, or the quieter songs of the Pet Shop Boys. Before that, Halloween Alaska, a Twin Cities project with a far gloomier mien but similar working methods: check out their cover of Springsteen's ‘State Trooper’! Most of the new stuff that interests me, right now, seems to be either indie-tronic-pop (like the act I just named) or chartpop; probably all this will change again when Desaparecidos release their next disc—whenever that is. Into the car at least once a month, and closer to once a week: Game Theory, Distortion of Glory (or anything, really). Web-only inclusive: Statuesque, Live from Lake Vostok: www.statuesque.org.uk—a virtual necessity for fans of Sebadoh, or the Fall or the Smiths.”