Years ago, when he was "floundering in dissertation land" at the University of Toronto, Durrell Bowman recalls commiserating with a friend. "She thought I was joking when I said I was going to do a dissertation on Rush," the Canadian progressive hard rock band, he says, but that's exactly what Durrell is nearly finished doing. Not without a few twists and turns in the road, however.

When that conversation took place, Durrell says, the usual route to a PhD in musicology was "picking an obscure Renaissance composer and doing a life and works." Durrell, on the other hand, was proposing a dissertation at the University of Toronto about the music in film adaptations of Shakespearean plays. His adviser was congenial, but his specialty was North Indian music.

Durrell lingered in Toronto for a couple of years as a research assistant for an anthropologist at Trinity College, helping him set up a computerized database using his old recordings of mortuary ceremonies among Australian aborigines. Durrell "invented a notation system for the music so the melodic contours could be analyzed and compared." Although the project gave him useful computer skills, it was some distance from current music in film adaptations of Shakespearean plays.

Soon, Durrell began looking for a place to study musicology that might be more receptive to his interests. At UCLA, Susan McClary, then chair of the Department of Musicology, was well known for her studies of gender and music. Although she teaches graduate seminars in areas such as early Baroque music and 19th-century romanticism, she also teaches on 20th century music and writes on contemporary artists, including Madonna and Prince. Moreover, Durrell had admired a book, Running With the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, which brought the perspectives of musicology to popular music. McClary told Durrell that its author, Robert Walser (her husband), was also a new faculty member at UCLA. Walser is now department chair and Durrell's adviser.

It might seem that UCLA, with its renowned Film School, would be a great place for a fellow who wants to study music in Shakespearean films, and indeed, Durrell wrote two related papers during his first year, one on Mendelssohn's music for A Midsummer Night's Dream and the other on an adaptation of that music for a 1935 film. But at the same time, he was thinking about that old idea his friend had taken for a joke.

Like many of his friends, Durrell had been a Rush fan during high school, but he'd lost interest in the mid-1980s, about the time the band reached its peak of popularity. Even though the band has been very popular in the United States (selling about 30 million albums from 1974 to the present), the band's three members have remained Canadian citizens, and they're almost never mentioned in mainstream rock journalism or on VH1, Durrell says. "It seems wrong that they don't come up more often, even in histories of rock," he says. "It's too easy to leave Canada out."

And so Durrell launched his study of the band, which consists of drummer Neil Peart, bassist/vocalist Geddy Lee, and guitarist Alex Lifeson. Peart, who is also the group's lyricist, often works the theme of individualism. One piece was based on the philosophy of Ayn Rand, and another, called "The Trees," involved two groups of trees bickering about equal rights. "My own work focuses on doing pretty detailed readings of how the music connects to the larger meanings," Durrell explains. "I talk about how the music contributes to Peart's statements, how it amplifies what's in the lyrics, or in some case, deflects what's in the lyrics."

An article based on chapter four of Durrell's dissertation is appearing in a book later this year, and he has presented several conference papers based on his work. Durrell is also hoping that his dissertation will interest the University of Western Ontario, which is starting a new program in Popular Music Studies. But he has alternatives in mind, if that doesn't work. For one thing, he applied to 27 music history teaching jobs. And for another, he's continued to explore the interface between computers and musicology.

As a graduate technology consultant for the humanities computing facility (and later), Durrell helped professors build web components for their courses. In some cases, these merge existing course reader material with audio clips in a web format. Durrell also used the web for his own courses-a general survey of film music and a look at music in film noir and Hitchcock, adding a homework component. For example, he provided a descriptive list of themes and asked his students to identify them in a series of video clips. The film noir and Hitchcock seminar was part of this year's Collegium of University Teaching Fellows, and Durrell also received one of this year's Dissertation Year Fellowships.

As Durrell looks to his future, he sees that these skills might be used "as a consultant to help put together web-based courses for professors in existing institutions" or as an entrepreneur creating his own "music history web place." Should he go in the first direction, he's already got a web site: www.music-page.com; but he's also got a web site for the second direction: www.music-page.com/mha. The demonstration selections reflect Durrell's range of interests and his activities as a singer: a chanson by Renaissance composer Janequin, works by Baroque composers Monteverdi and Bach, a weird choral adaptation of Mel Torme's "The Christmas Song," and a cover version of a rock song.

Published in Spring 2000, Graduate Quarterly