Phil Gentry
@pmgentry
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Citizen of West Philly, musicologist at @UDelaware , organizing at @wpcns . Writing a book about modern Philadelphia’s relationship with colonial history.
Philadelphia, PA
Joined March 2010
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#ใจซ่อนรักEP3
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LINGORM TSOU EP3
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Kyiv
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SAVE Act
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Morning Joe
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Houston
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石丸構文
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Marvel
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THANK YOU KIM TAEHYUNG
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TYPE 1 BY V OUT NOW
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LATAM
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Kh-101
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#ولي_العهد
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KATY PERRY IS COMING
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Pinned Tweet
Slightly cringey, but I’ve started a “professional” instagram to chronicle my current book project. You may follow along if you are inclined.
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I think a man on this train is coming to the slowly-dawning realization that he is on a train about to arrive in Newark, Delaware, but he meant to be on a train to Newark, New Jersey. I can’t watch.
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A professor of mine went to go hear Derrida speak once. The entire talk was about cows; everyone was flummoxed but listened carefully, and took notes about...cows. There was a short break, and when Derrida came back, he was like, “I’m told it is pronounced ‘chaos.’”
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Just to be clear for those not in Pennsylvania, the legislation Jay-Z is supporting here is a Republican-led effort to gut public education, spearheaded by future Trump cabinet member Jeffrey Yass.
Jay-Z's Roc Nation will spearhead an educational campaign in Philadelphia that helps students K-12 from low-income households secure about $300 million in scholarships to attend the city's private schools.
Events will be held by Roc Nation to bring awareness to Pennsylvania
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Very rarely do I get to pull a “I wrote a book on this subject and you are very mistaken” card, but the moment has arrived.
‘the protests are robbing my Columbia students of listening to John Cage’s 4’33, the piece of music that is explicitly designed to force you to listen to…what’s around you.’ absolutely perfect
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Anyways, I don’t even know where to start, but at the premiere of 4’33” in 1952, you couldn’t hear birds chirping either because people in the audience stood up and started yelling at him to get the hell out of town, which Cage quite enjoyed.
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If McWhorter would like to engage with musicological scholarship on the subject in his class on, uh, musicology, he is welcome to read my book, especially the chapter “Making Sense of Silence.”
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Paywalled, but happy to send him a pdf if being a professor at Columbia doesn’t allow him library access.
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Related to me as a true story (from when he was in residence at Riverside), but cannot confirm.
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Imagine sending your kids to a Quaker school and being by outraged at a sign calling for peace. Imagine being a Quaker school and taking it down.
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@michellebhasin
This is the legislation in question—it was a big controversy early on in Shapiro’s administration.
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@AnnieNeikirk
This conductor was being nice but it unintentionally backfired—he had the wrong ticket for our train but she let him stay on and didn’t charge him, not realizing that he had the right ticket for the wrong train!
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I’m talking to a student on Zoom, and I hear my old typewriter clacking away in the background, and then get handed this note.
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Amusingly, John Cage attended lectures at Columbia University in the 1950s, to hear the Zen Buddhist scholar D.T. Suzuki speak, and had trouble hearing him over the outside noise. (He learned a different lesson from this.)
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I met somebody from Palau for the first time the other day, which Pennsylvanians will immediately recognize as our mortal enemy when filling in drop-down forms online.
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Temple absorbing UArts academic programs and Broad Street venues and off-loading the more-easily-converted-and-sold-student housing feels….a not terrible scenario?
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I love that when you ask someone where in Philly they live, if they start to narrate a lengthy story of the various neighborhoods they lived in over the years, you can immediately assume, even before they say it, that they now live in Collingswood.
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There is a guy on Baltimore Ave who goes around with a placard shouting at white colonizers, as you do, and he has an unerring eye for detail—he just clocked my shoes. At the top of his lungs, to all of the neighborhood: “sperry topsiders…I see those boat shoes, white man!” 😭
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If you are seeing Hamilton for the first time on July 3, here are my personal recommendations for scholarly writing on the musical, in roughly chronological order! Paywalls abound, sorry!
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There are five trolley cars (and counting) backed up behind this empty patrol car that is just double-parked on Baltimore Ave.
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pls sir, i beg u, don’t tell my school, i have small children to feed
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The city spent $280 million on new headquarters for the police, and every time you walk down Broad Street cops are just parked randomly on the sidewalk.
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The Jeff Brown person at my polling place just told me she couldn’t do this anymore, borrowed my phone to call someone, stripped off her orange shirt, and walked off. 😬😭
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Love the “make sure your child has a full water bottle because the air conditioning doesn’t work and the water fountains might have lead” twofer on a day expected to get to 97 degrees.
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My 98 year-old grandfather is organizing an extended family zoom call for tomorrow and he is not messing around.
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Some public musicology for your Wednesday afternoon.
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I’m sorry, but Tom Wolfe would have also gotten I-95 fixed quickly, just without a zillion showy press conferences or simultaneously destroying public education.
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colleges that need to get their act together:
DePaul and DePauw
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Miami and Miami
anything involving “Wesleyan”
The Wheatons
USC/USC, UD/UD, etc.
Hobart and William Smith (just too much)
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apropos of nothing, the most recent issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society is entirely devoted to classical music topics, including a lengthy article on Beethoven and theology, and a review of a book about Beethoven. Cancel culture strikes again!
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My 4yo daughter interrupted the zoom graduate oral exam I was sitting on to demand my can of seltzer, then threw her head back and chugged the whole thing in front of everyone.
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We’re really going to just expand a patchwork of random little private street cleaning fiefdoms dependent upon political connections? For the love of god, join the 20th century and have the sanitation department clean all the streets! It’s not complicated!
Mayor Parker debuted a $246M five-year sanitation plan for Philly today
It calls for more street cleaning, more trash cans, a twice weekly garbage collection pilot & more
The plan is also very complex, and relies on the city outsourcing much of the work:
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Looking forward to the forthcoming publication of The Cambridge Companion to Oxford Handbooks.
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There's a lot to say about this journal issue, but first and foremost it contains a truly egregious and overtly racist contribution by Timothy L. Jackson that deserves wide censure.
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Our program still has a traditional linear music history sequence, and my small act of protest is that if we have a snow day I refuse to make up the material. GOODBYE ROBERT SCHUMANN YOU WILL NOT BE IN MUSIC HISTORY THIS YEAR.
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Protests indeed work. BUT this viral tweet is completely wrong in almost every single respect, and is doing precisely the work Kenney and Clarke wanted their sham budget to do, which is to get people to stop protesting by pretending they won.
PHILLY JUST TOOK $33 MILLION FROM THE POLICE BUDGET OVERNIGHT and restored our African American museum and cultural fund with it!
But keep saying
#PhillyProtest
isn't working.
#DefundThePolice
is still happening.
#Philly
#BlackLivesMatter
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Working on this study of historical performance practice for a decade and the New Yorker cartoonist goes and just...says it.
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Down the street from vote counting at the convention center, the statue of Octavius Catto, murdered in in 1871 for trying to vote in Philadelphia.
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All I want is one mainstream Democrat with as much strength in their political convictions as Mitch McConnell.
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I love you all, but when you joke about musical minimalism you can’t just repeat something, you need to have an additive process or something like that. I have tenure you have to listen to me about this.
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I have a musicology joke, but it is more about “the music itself.”
I have a history of science joke, but it’s epistemologically unstable.
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My kids were supposed to have a sleepover, so I made myself C a large cocktail, and then my daughter wanted to come home, and so that’s how I ended up walking the streets of west Philly with a negroni in a crystal glass with a 5yo and her large stuffed animal. 🤷🏼♂️
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The leadership of Philadelphia consistently choose to abandon the children of this city. Even if vouchers helped those who get them (they do not), what about everyone else? If one student in my kid's class gets money to attend a private school, what happens to the 26 other kids?
Philadelphia Building Trades president Ryan Boyer has lent his name to the push for school vouchers in PA. The mailer was paid for by Commonwealth Action, a dark money nonprofit tied to the Commonwealth Foundation.
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Wish my daughter luck today, she signed up to play a piano piece at her afterschool program showcase this afternoon. (She has does not know how to play piano; never had a lesson in her life.)
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The future of Philadelphia is (literally) in our city’s schools. Helen Gym didn’t develop a plan to fix our schools because she is running for a mayor; she is running for mayor because she has a plan.
Philadelphia mayoral candidate Helen Gym has unveiled an education proposal that includes guaranteed jobs for teenagers, free SEPTA passes for all city students, and a $10 billion plan to modernize school buildings.
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Literally the most embarrassing thing my school’s PR people could catch me saying in class. I deny everything.
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Periodic reminder that six years after local slumlords SBG management forced all of their low-income tenants out of the Dorsett and Admiral Court apartment buildings in west philly to “renovate” them, they are just still standing there empty and disintegrating.
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I have to love that in a decade of tweeting my two viral tweets are on (a) Panera and (b) Derrida. I don’t have a ton of experience with either.
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It's the smallest issue in the world, but: musicologists, please, please stop using the for-profit scam-ridden site Academia*edu, and open up a free, non-profit, open source and easily accessible Humanities Commons account instead. I beg you.
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@beansandbikes
@legalizewalking
This block also owns its own set of bouncey houses that it keeps in someone’s basement for their frequent block parties.
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I love going to trombone recitals because we all sit there pretending the performer isn’t dumping a bucket of spit right on the stage every two minutes.
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As someone who likes Wagner’s music, studied him in grad school, and understands the nuanced nature of how music, especially in historical context, “does” politics, I nevertheless have to say: what on earth???
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This will make for an excellent dissertation chapter by an enterprising musicologist in 25 years.
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I cross Washington Ave three days a week with my 8yo and 6yo, and shame on
@PhillyOTIS
for deciding their safety wasn’t important.
This year, Washington Avenue will be repaved from Grays Ferry Avenue to 4th Street and improved to increase traffic safety for all users. Learn more about the latest engagement and next steps for the project ➡️
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Congratulations to the School District of Philadelphia for threading the needle and finding the solution that doesn’t work for literally anyone!
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One amusing anecdote here is that Valerie Ross is attempting to kill a bike lane six blocks away from her house because she thinks it is being supported by a “dark money PAC.”
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I once again point out that the vast majority of students in Philly attend traditional neighborhood public schools; if well-funded and politically-connected charter school lobbyists get their way, they will have no voice on the school board.
Please join us in urging City Council to approve Mayor Parker’s nominations of Wilkerson and Streater to the School Board. Our children deserve high quality schools, whether charter or traditional.
@CouncilmemberJG
@CMThomasPHL
@CouncilwomanKGR
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Do I think Philly tourism can support two dueling recreations of colonial-era taverns? No. As someone writing a book about attempts to recreate the past in Philadelphia, will that failure be a very useful anecdote? Yes.
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Just because I know tweets can sometimes fly into unfamiliar contexts, if you haven't read Philip Ewell's wonderful, sensitive, and thought-provoking work on the subject of whiteness and music theory, you should read it:
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I’ve been with my kids pretty much 24/7 since before Christmas, through a week of break and two weeks of virtual school, and I just made them noodle soup from scratch for dinner—like roasted a chicken and everything—and they don’t like it. That’s all. That’s the tweet.
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I am but a humble Twitter leftist with no grip on reality, but in the spirit of unity, I might suggest that the real estate developer-Party machine coalition currently in charge might consider governing on the basis of merit rather than “can we punish progressives.”
Mayor Parker proposes cutting funding to Prevention Point by nearly $1 million via
@phillyinquirer
"And members of her own administration said they expect rates of infectious diseases like HIV to rise because of the funding withdrawal"
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My short piece for the Inquirer on the Philadelphia Orchestra and its discontents.
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Can’t ever get rejected from AMS if you constantly miss the submission deadline every year, is my helpful life advice.
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A reminder that it wasn’t actually left-wing students who turned university campuses into a battleground in the US, but rather the pro-Israeli right who, way before last October, wanted to stamp out one of the few spaces in this country where public dissent was possible.
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I just don’t understand how there are no public polls of the Philly mayoral race.
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If you were wondering, that final footnote takes you to an extended quotation from a wikipedia entry on "misogyny in rap music." Real top-notch scholarship here.
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@willmasonmusic
There use to be a dept website group photo of the UCLA musicology faculty (back in the Susan McClary era) in which every single member was dressed like Bill Murray.
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@joannakempner
My three initials are very frequently autocorrected so that I often sign off as if an intruder has suddenly entered the room.
-omg
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I realize it’s not the main reason Helen lost, but saying that a Republican billionaire and several prominent Rhynhart supporters teamed up together to run close to $1m worth of anonymous attack ads against Helen is not a conspiracy theory, it’s a real thing that happened. 🤷🏼♂️
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I don’t mean to brag, and one doesn’t want to make real names unemployable, but a relative of mine was amongst the crew protesting Nielsen at dinner, and we are very proud. 🤗
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We said goodbye to our beloved Mabel today. She was fifteen years old, and a very good girl.
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Ugh, tornado season in academia, when people are getting jobs, getting into grad school, defending dissertations, getting tenure; meanwhile others are getting rejected from schools, watching jobs slip away, making contingency plans. It’s too much.
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(One of the nuanced things about John Cage was that he became basically apolitical; activists in the 60s often sought his support and he always turned them down in favor of a kind of glib anarchism.)
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Let’s not be confused about this complaint, this is a group of racist white parents trying to get black teachers and staff fired, for fear that their children will learn the truth. (that their parents are racist.)
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I mean, just to be clear Seinfeld “supported Israel” by raising money for violent mobs to attack student protestors in the middle of the night. 🤷🏼♂️
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So much energy out there canvassing for
@HelenGymPHL
this afternoon in the heart of west philly. Sweaty, damp energy, but amazing to see so many people who are totally new to politics out there for Helen, and so many neighbors grateful to have a new kind of mayor to vote for.
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@ariellecohen
@JohnFetterman
honestly one should be ashamed of what is inside one’s cheesesteak; nobody should have to see it.
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@mindyisser
Even the reporter could barely find enough examples of things approaching antisemitism in the complaint; one of them honestly sounds more Islamophobic than anything
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I have been waiting over a decade for this moment: my fall teaching and childcare schedules miraculously align with the paltry SEPTA regional rail offerings to Delaware and...I think I might be able to commute to work on the train instead of driving. Truly the dream.
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So...this genre tweet is such a cliché...but if you are one of the ~800 people who followed me in the last 24 hours, I regret to say I mostly tweet about musicology and philadelphia. (Rarely together. But sometimes.)
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If you’re curious what it’s like to have a 10yo, mine just somehow managed to somehow suck his lips into a Gatorade bottle and create a vacuum so intense that several blood vessels burst and now he has kardashian lips.
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I'll try not to be too snarky about this, but if you were wondering how Rebecca Rhynhart, who kicked off her campaign for mayor with a slick video ad bemoaning the facilities crisis in schools, plans to to fund improvements, I will quote that plan in its entirety for you:
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