Panel #1: Collaborations
Panel #2: Musical Tourism
Panel #3: Going Public: Some Tough Questions of Public Musicology
Panel #4: Museums
10:00am: Panel #1: Collaborations
Felicia Sandler (New England Conservatory): “Research and Concert Programming that Involves the Wider Community: An Example from the New England Conservatory of Music and Tufts University”
In the Spring of 2014, the New England Conservatory of Music and Tufts University collaborated on an international festival celebrating the music of Dr. Ephraim Amu, father of classical music in Ghana. (http://amufestival.weebly.com). It was a three-day event comprised of paper presentations, concert, and workshops in drumming/dancing, and choral music. There were three Ghanaian speakers, two speakers from Nigeria, and two American scholars whose research is in the area of African music. The workshops were run by highly skilled Ghanaian master musicians, and all was free to the public. Four choirs participated from our two institutions – college and youth choirs, and drummers and dancers from the Agbekor Society in Medford joined the students. Registrants came from all over the U.S., Canada, the UK, and Ghana. Most impressive, however, was the participation of those from the Boston Metro Area who fit into three demographics that we rarely see in our buildings: 1) a very large contingent of Africans from the Ghana Association of Greater Boston (GAGB), 2) young people and their teachers whose units on Africa’s geography and culture brought them out, 3) educators, program directors for community humanities organizations, and directors of urban community youth programs. Satellite events were set up in the community before and after the Festival at the Museum of African American History, a local church, the Independence Day Celebration of the GAGB, some academic concerts, lectures, and presentations, and collaborations with choral directors. The preparations for the festival and its attending activities were extensive, and well worth every effort. It was anticipated that the events would be enriching for the wider community. What was not apparent until after was how incredibly enriching it would be for our institutions, as well. This paper is a chronicle of the festival from inception through post-mortem with media of programming.
About Felicia: Composer, theorist Felicia Sandler joined the faculty at NEC in 2002. She composes in all genres, with particular love for choral music. Her studies in Ghanaian traditional music include programs with C.K. Ladzekpo, Nani Agbeli, and the Obi Nyim Nda and Emashie Cultural groups in Ghana. She directs the traditional chorus, Mile Norvisi Boston, and is spearheading the development of a two-volume set with a team of scholars in the U.S and Ghana: the Collected Works of Dr. Ephraim Amu. Her compositions are published by E.C. Schirmer Publishing, and Shawnee Press, and are recorded on Mark Master and Naxos Labels.
Jennifer Kelly (Lafayette College): “The GLF Project: A Successful Model for Interdisciplinary Study and Public Engagement through the Commission and Performance of a Major Work”
Musicology is an active, living study. With multi-discipline support and a College initiative to bring the arts into a wider curriculum, Lafayette College commissioned American composer Gabriela Lena Frank to write a major work for choir, Songs of Cifar and the Sweet Sea. The commission included a yearlong residency (2013-2014) exploring creative thought and process as a large interdisciplinary subject. Introducing a new major work into the repertoire is an opportunity to engage the public throughout the process of creation. Beginning with intention, and exploring design, method, performance practice, and practicalities of bringing a new commission to life invites the public into a thoughtful sense of ownership of the eventual listening experience. As educators, we had an additional opportunity with this commission to engage our students through the entire creative process and build an interdisciplinary experience for them. Multiple communities were engaged including students from such disciplines as Music, Engineering, WGS, Art, Latin American Studies, English, and Psych/Neuroscience, and wider communities of Lafayette College and Lehigh Valley.
The “GLF Project” developed into a successful model to commission new works at the college level while emphasizing necessary accompanying studies: cultural, poetic, composer intention, musical, design, pedagogical, collaborative, and practical. Through the collaboration of composer, professional soloists and instrumentalists, students/professors/administrators from around the College and local high school, we explored these studies through brown bags, panel discussions, master classes, student projects, additional concerts, and ultimate reviewed premiere. This paper discusses the GLF Project from original idea to final performance and how it helped define a model for large artistic projects at Lafayette. I will explore what worked, what we learned, lasting effects, and how I will approach new projects based on this experience. The GLF Project resulted in a yearlong public process engaging multiple communities while emphasizing intellectual inquiry of musical art.
About Jennifer: Dr. Jennifer Kelly is a professional conductor, Associate Professor of Music/Director of Choral Activities at Lafayette College, and Artistic Director of Concord Chamber Singers. She obtained her doctoral degree from UCLA under Donald Neuen and Robert Winter. Dr. Kelly’s scholarly interests include American music, particularly that of women composers. She has presented her research in the U.S., Europe, and China. Publications include her recent book In Her Own Words: Conversations with Composers in the United States (UIP 2013). She currently serves on the Board of the International Alliance for Women in Music.
11:15am: Panel #2: Musical Tourism
Kate Galloway (Memorial University of Newfoundland): “Soundscapes and Civic Engagement: Public Ecomusicology through Soundwalking and Locative Soundscape Media”
This presentation addresses two case studies that use technology and the local soundscape to engage civic engagement with place: Hildegard Westerkamp’s Soundwalking Vancouver Co-Op Radio program and Battery Radio’s Inside/Outside Battery mobile media application that geographically positions listeners through GIS software, triggering a narrative soundscape. Through narration, poetry, storytelling, music, and field recordings, Soundwalking and Inside/Outside Battery sonically excavate the relationships amongst personal narrative, place and sonic experience. Both sound initiatives employ the radio arts to broadcast site-specific ecomusicological research to a general audience, explore sonic-spatial collaborations, and position the built and natural spaces of the city (Vancouver and St. John’s) as sites of play, exploration, and heritage. Soundwalking and Inside/Outside Battery are forms of arts- and technology-driven environmental engagement that sense place (Feld and Basso 1996), perform nature (Szerszynski, Heim, and Waterton 2003), and stimulate multi-sensory activity as listeners explore their surroundings. Though, the activities of these communities exhibit “ecological irony” (Stoddart 2011), a detachment between abstract values and embodied behavior as participants celebrate the heritage landscapes of Vancouver and St. John’s, which are experiencing ongoing urban growth and gentrification.
Engaging the local community through soundscape activities and the relationships among music, sound, and place is central to my current ecomusicological research program as I think through existing projects where technology is used to mediate between listener and environment. In this presentation I consider the following: How do the sonic intersections of landscapes and cityscapes produce multifarious listener responses? How can researchers digitally mobilize ecomusicological research and soundscape experience? How are histories of place recorded and remembered through sensory experience? How are audio technologies and environments used to encourage the public to act and sound in environmentally ethical ways? Employing practice-based ethnography I examine how site-specific soundscape documentary technologies engage socio-environmental knowledge and foster a sense of sounding citizenship.
About Kate: Kate Galloway is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Memorial University of Newfoundland’s Research Centre for Music, Media, and Place (MMaP) funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellowship and Insight Development Grant. She received a PhD from the University of Toronto (2010) where she completed a dissertation on the ethnographic study of participatory performance, alternative performance space, ritual performance, and acoustic ecology in R. Murray Schafer’s Patria (1966- ). She specializes in the North American avant-garde, soundscape studies and acoustic ecology, music and place, sound art, digital humanities, music and technology, and the ethnography of experimental music practices.
Christian Thorau (University of Potsdam): “What Ought to be Heard: Touristic Listening and the Proliferation of Musicological Knowledge”
While music and musical performance are connected to the human activity of traveling in many ways, the intersection between music listening and tourism does not appear so obvious especially if one thinks of audiences in concert halls. Yet since the emergence of program notes and concert guides in the second half of the 19th century in Europe and Northern America we can speak of a culture of listening that shows many structural similarities between concert-goers and tourists and that lives on today in the digital proliferation of knowledge through websites and apps. I have recently suggested the term “touristic listening” as a tool to describe the manifold parallels between a listening that is framed by musical knowledge and the tourist’s mode of world-disclosure, directed by travelguides toward “what ought to be seen” (Der Kanon der Musik, Munich 2013). Typical for touristic listening are strategies of canonization that apply chunks of popular knowledge and work with metonymical part-whole-reductions. For academic musicology it still seems difficult to address such popular listening practices in a non-pejorative way. In my paper I will show that categories from research on tourism offer an analytical model through which popular and elaborate modes of perception can be described as a continuous spectrum of coexisting listening modes. I will discuss what demands are put on a popularized musicological knowledge that serves the need for orientation but leaves room for individual listening options and for a guided listening that is not patronizing. The examples will include recently published apps for classical music and the ohrphon@orchester project initiated by the concert hall at Potsdam, Germany.
About Christian: Christian Thorau is Professor for Musicology at the University of Potsdam, Germany. His research priorities include the popularisation of musicological knowledge in different media since 1800 and the history of music listening. (Semantisierte Sinnlichkeit – Studien zu Rezeption und Zeichenstruktur der Leitmotivtechnik Richard Wagners, 2003; Musik – Bürger – Stadt. Konzertleben und musikalisches Hören im historischen Wandel, 2011) In the academic year 2008/2009 he was a fellow at the National Humanities Center, North Carolina and at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna. His recent book is a contribution to the theory, methodology and practice of music analysis (Vom Klang zur Metapher. Perspektiven der musikalischen Analyse, 2012).
1:15pm: Panel #3: Going Public: Some Tough Questions of Public Musicology
About the panel: This panel addresses some of the practical considerations of a career in public musicology. The panelists represent several dimensions of public musicology. Amanda Sewell transitioned directly from the Ph.D. program to public musicology, and Felicia Miyakawa left a tenured position and pursued public musicology. James Zychowicz has spent his career in music publishing, both digital and traditional. Christine Kyprianides is an established performer of Baroque cello and viol. Each panelist will focus on issues related to living and working as independent scholars. The panelists will answer tough questions that they were asked and that they have asked themselves, including, “How do you do research without an institutional affiliation or institutional support?” “How do you find employment outside the academy?” and “How does musicology support and complement my existing skills?” The goal of this panel is to initiate a conversation about how we as public musicologists relate to other musicologists, how we relate to the field, how we relate to the academy, and how we relate to the “real world.”
Felicia Miyakawa (Independent scholar, freelance editor and academic consultant): “Going ‘Rogue’: On Leaving the Academy and Taking Risks”
After nearly twenty years in the Academy (nine years in graduate school and ten in a full-time permanent position at a public university), I reached a crossroad. Behind me lay years of milestones: completed Ph.D.; first book; first child; tenure; promotion; administrative appointments; and “gifts” of heavy committee work that “rewarded” me for my proven organizational skills. Directly in front of me lay the near certitude of a full professorship, the nirvana to which all academics surely aspire. Down that path I saw even more committee and administrative work; less time to plan new and innovative courses; and most importantly, dwindling opportunities to grow as a thinker and human being. I saw complacency, not security, and I did not like this path. So I did the unthinkable: I resigned.
Resigning from my academic position (but not leaving Musicology) meant creating a new path. In this presentation I will offer my experiences of resigning from a “permanent” position; detaching myself professionally from said institution while still contributing to the health of the department and setting up a new career path; and getting over the “guilt” of leaving the one career path we are all expected to choose.
About Felicia: Felicia M. Miyakawa (Ph.D., Indiana University) taught for ten years at Middle Tennessee State University, achieving both tenure and promotion, and also took on increasing administrative roles, culminating in a several-year stint as Director of Graduate Studies. Since June 2014, Miyakawa has worked as an independent scholar, freelance editor, and academic consultant. She is co-editor of The Avid Listener, an interactive blog site hosted by W. W. Norton and is also co-editor of Indiana University Press’s book series Profiles in Popular Music. Known primarily for her work on hip-hop, Miyakawa also writes about Spirituals, Black Nationalism, and Popular Music Pedagogy.
Amanda Sewell (In the Write): “’But You’ve Still Looking for Jobs, Right? On Going Directly from the Dissertation Defense to Public Musicology”
In the spring of 2013, I had no academic job prospects on the horizon. Despite a promising CV, an imminent dissertation defense, and several Skype interviews, it became clear that I would not be working for a university the next academic year. I had to find a Plan B. My talk will address my transition directly from the Ph.D. program into public musicology, focusing on how I adapted my academic skills into the world of public musicology.
Academia taught me to ask tough questions about what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it, which helped me think about what my skills were and how I wanted to apply them. I realized that my love of writing and editing would be served in a career as a professional academic editor, and the diversity of subjects would fuel my inquisitive nature. My ability to research efficiently and look for ideas in unexpected places helped me seek out clients and employment opportunities, and my meticulous nature lent itself to the fastidious organization required of a freelancer. Ultimately, the creativity, critical thinking, and writing skills that helped me succeed in the academy have also benefited me as a public musicologist.
About Amanda: Amanda Sewell works as a freelance academic editor under the dreadfully clever name In the Write. She has published peer-reviewed articles in the Journal of the Society for American Music and the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and she contributed a chapter to the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Hip Hop (2015). Amanda has presented talks at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, U.S. Branch and the national meeting of the American Musicological Society. She holds a Ph.D. in musicology from Indiana University.
James L. Zychowicz (A-R Editions), “Careers in Musicology: Challenges for the Non-Teaching Scholar”
In pursuing the Ph.D. in musicology I planned for an academic career, and even after receiving a Fulbright Scholarship for study in Vienna and another year in Paris, I faced a difficult job market. The temporary position with a music publishing firm became full time, but some tradeoffs occurred. The publishing job lacked the rhythms of the academic year, which caused me to pursue research on my own time. Even so, not everything easily fits into personal time, since libraries and archives often follow the academic calendar. I used time creatively by spending vacation time on research and other projects. While my position often involves attending conferences, it is important to balance the responsibilities of my job with my participation in professional meetings. Throughout this non-teaching career, though, one continual challenge is the lack of access to libraries that academic scholars enjoy. Even with publications and awards, I did not have the access accorded to my teaching colleagues. In building my own case for access, I am a champion of access for all, regardless of the place of employment, and this is a further role that allows me to share my experience with others facing a similar career choice.
About James: James L. Zychowicz received the Ph.D. in musicology from the University of Cincinnati, and during his studies, he received a Fulbright Scholarship for research in Vienna. His publications include the monograph Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, the entry on Mahler and Strauss in The Cambridge Companion to the Lied, and articles in various periodicals. His assessment of Mahler studies in “Gustav Mahler’s Second Century” won MLA’s Hill Award. A scholar-in-residence at the Newberry Library, Zychowicz also serves on the editorial board of Oxford Bibliographies: Music. He also reviews opera and orchestra performances for several online journals.
Christine Kyprianides (Baroque cellist and viol performer): “Another Iron in the Fire: Public Musicology and the Freelance Musician”
During a long European career in early music, I had the good fortune to play a wide variety of repertoires and work with many outstanding musicians. I was often intrigued by the music I was performing, but like most busy freelancer musicians, I had little time to study it in depth. Furthermore, I was intimidated by the academy and was convinced that I could never be a writer or scholar. In this talk, I will focus on my evolution as a performer/public musicologist.
Returning to graduate school in the US for a Doctor of Music degree, I chose historical musicology as a minor field. I learned to use the internet critically and overcame my fear of libraries. As my writing skills developed, I began attending conferences and presenting papers. After graduation, I realized that it was probably too late to embark on an academic career, and the United States offered far fewer opportunities to concertize than Europe. I therefore took on activities that incorporated my musicological training with performance, such as researching programs and writing program notes and grant proposals for my ensembles. Additionally, as an independent scholar, I am free from the burden of achieving tenure and can follow my own path.
About Christine: Christine Kyprianides performs internationally on Baroque cello and viol. She received a DM from Indiana University (2009), where she was a visiting scholar in musicology (2010-12). Christine has served on several nonprofit boards, run a music festival, and founded the American Friends of Finchcocks, supporting an English collection of historical keyboard instruments. She has contributed to a book on performance practice and written reviews and translations for performance journals. Her recent research has focused on the social history of nineteenth-century music in Britain; an article on music in the Charles Dickens journals is forthcoming in Victorian Periodicals Review.
3:45pm: Panel #4: Museums (Chair: Nicol Hammond, University of California at Santa Cruz)
Michael Alan Anderson (Eastman School of Music) and Nancy Norwood (Memorial Art Gallery): “Museum Soundscapes”
Outside of movie-like underscoring of sound to some exhibits, art museums are rather silent when it comes to infusing their permanent collection galleries with a sonic world. This presentation explores a special collaboration between two divisions of the University of Rochester-the Eastman School of Music (ESM) and the Memorial Art Gallery (MAG)-that have found that silence deafening. ESM has teamed up with MAG to bring sounds, instruments, and music scholarship into the highly visual environment of an art museum.
This presentation showcases three cooperative efforts between ESM and MAG, each integrating sound into the visual world to create an enhanced sensory experience for patrons of both art and music. (1) In 2013, an ensemble formed by Eastman students named Sound ExChange began a program with the MAG that creates an intimate experience for audiences. Musicians and art historians select individual works from both the sound and sight worlds, and the integration of musical performance and commentary into a single event fuses the two experiences into an exceptional offering for museum visitors. (2) In 2005, ESM’s Organ Department joined with MAG to commence the first phase of the Eastman Rochester Organ Initiative (EROI) with the installation of an antique Italian Baroque organ, the only full-size instrument of its kind in North America. Placed in the museum’s gallery ofltalian Baroque art, the instrument has allowed a true synthesis of Baroque musical and visual art, whether through jointly-sponsored symposia, a regular concert series, or scholarly study. (3) Most recently, the two institutions teamed up in conjunction with the reinstallation of MAG’s collection of medieval art. With a one-time grant from the University of Rochester, medieval music inspired by individual artworks was recorded for the gallery’s incorporation into its mobile app and other didactic materials. The collaboration was captured in an in-gallery video kiosk and archived online for study.
About Michael: Michael Alan Anderson is Associate Professor of Musicology at the Eastman School of Music. He is author of St. Anne in Renaissance Music: Devotion and Politics (Cambridge University Press, 20 14) and specializes in a wide range of issues related to sacred music from the fourteenth through the sixteenth century, with emphasis on lay devotion. He won the Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society for outstanding contributions to historical performance practice and the Deems Taylor Award (presented by the American Society for Composers, Authors and Publishers) for a 2011 article published in Early Music History.
About Nancy: Nancy Norwood is the curator of European art at the Memorial Art Gallery. Although her academic specialization is in medieval and northern Renaissance art and devotional practice, her responsibilities over the past 14 years have included the stewardship, installation, and interpretation of the museum’s collections of ancient, Asian, and European art. She has directed reinstallations and curated exhibitions on a variety of subjects, and regularly integrates performance and technological initiatives into the museum’s permanent collection galleries. Two of these initiatives, the 2005 reinstallation of the Baroque and the 2013 reinstallation of the medieval galleries, involved significant collaboration with ESM faculty.
Philip Gentry (University of Delaware): “Colonial Williamsburg’s Cold War Musicology”
Since its founding in the late 1920s, Colonial Williamsburg has been one of the most famous public history projects in the United States, educating millions of visitors not only in specific topics of the colonial era, but in the methodologies of historical research. As such, the particular historiographies of CW over the years have been the focus of a number of academic critiques, most especially Richard Handler and Eric Gable’s 1997 ethnographic study The New History in an Old Museum. Colonial Williamsburg has, however, always had an ambivalent relationship with music, and musicology. Although the iconic fife and drums performances have long played a central role in the visitor experience, other forms of colonial music making have often played a lesser role. Most notably, the organization specifically decided not to restore any of the eighteenth-century opera houses which had made the colonial-era version of the town a cosmopolitan cultural center.
As a case study in the intersection of public history and musicology, this paper looks at one particular historical era at Colonial Williamsburg: the early Cold War. In their study, Handler and Gabel describe how CW’s original quaint Colonial Revival aesthetic acquired a more muscular, patriotic sheen in the 1950s. In this Cold War era, CW produced two films of particular interest: a lavishly-produced orientation film Williamsburg: The Story of a Patriot (1957), with a score by well-known film composer Bernard Herrmann, and Music of Williamsburg (1960) featuring colonial music researched and reconstructed by Alan Lomax. This paper will use these films to explore the ideological work of CW’s musical historiography, especially the conflation of modernism and folklore illustrated by these two documents, and their effect on public performances of eighteenth-century music still today.
About Philip: Philip Gentry teaches music history at the University of Delaware, with a research focus on mid-century modernism and mass culture. He is currently completing his first book, American Music and Cold War Identity.
Nola Knouse (Moravian Music Foundation): “Preserving, Sharing, and Celebrating: The Moravian Music Foundation’s Public Mission”
The Moravian Music Foundation (MMF) is a nonprofit organization, with offices in Winston-Salem, NC, and Bethlehem, PA, dedicated to the preservation, rediscovery, and continuation of the musical culture of the Moravians. MMF is custodian of some 10,000 music manuscripts and early imprints, an extensive collection of hymnals and other books and artifacts. MMF’s mission has three focal points: the preservation, sharing, and celebration of this musical culture. Beyond the preservation of the music through conservation and archival storage, MMF’s public outreach includes the following activities, described in the paper:
- cataloging the collections online, a multi-year project currently underway;
- producing music recordings, both recordings of church music performed by Moravian musicians and released by MMF, and recordings of vocal and instrumental music from the archival collections, performed professionally, some released by New World Records;
- publishing music from the archival collections and newly-composed music, both scholarly editions and practical performing editions;
- distributing free “Moravian Music Sampler” CD’s, with over 10,000 copies given away within the past 5 years;
- presenting workshops, training events, and music reading sessions;
- assisting students and researchers from secondary through post-doctoral levels, including internships, independent research projects, theses and dissertations;
- presenting lectures at scholarly conferences, and co-sponsoring the biennial Bethlehem Conferences on Moravian History and Music;
- producing and providing new worship materials free of charge to Moravian congregations;
- producing quadrennial Moravian Music Festival, a week-long festival featuring choral and concert band rehearsals and performances, chamber music and trombone choirs, and workshops and seminars designed to assist church musicians;
- producing Moravian Music Weekends in various locations each year; and
- engaging in special projects as appropriate.
About Nola: The Rev. Dr. Nola Reed Knouse is Director of the Moravian Music Foundation, with research interests in the areas of eighteenth-century music editing; and especially worship, liturgy, and music. She holds the B.A. in music and mathematics from Wake Forest University, the M.A. and Ph.D. in music theory from the Eastman School of Music, and the Certificate in Theological Studies from Moravian Theological Seminary. Her book, The Music of the Moravian Church in America, is published by Eastman Studies in Musicology of the University of Rochester Press.
Allison Portnow (Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill): “The Musicologist in the Art Museum”
Across the country numerous art museums engage their audiences by offering musical performances in the galleries. Though this type of programming serves partially as simple entertainment, I have found—in the past five years of working as a musicologist in an art museum—that the museum can also be an important site for public musicology. In this paper, I explore what it means to be a musicologist in an art museum, outlining at the current state of musical programming in art museums and offering my thoughts on the museum as an ideal venue for public musicology—and the public musicologist.
In the first part of my paper, I explore the aspects of art museum culture that make the museum a good venue for public musicology. From the existing art-loving audience to the built-in schedule of rotating exhibitions that provide inspiration, many factors contribute to the museum’s success as a site for public musicology. In the second part, I look at the role of the museum programmer as public musicologist—though few programmers begin their professional careers with musicological training. I turn a critical eye on my own work at an art museum, looking at the ways it differs from the work of an “academic” musicologist. In curating interactions with new (or “new-to-you”) music and providing visitors access to contemporary performers, my work is much more similar to that of the art historian in an art museum.
Throughout the paper I share examples of the musical programs at my museum and at other institutions, illustrating the ways that the work of the musicologist in the art museum can provide a functional model for teaching music history and culture—through curated musical experiences—to lifelong learners in numerous settings.
About Allison: Allison Portnow is the Public Programs Manager at the Ackland Art Museum, where she began working in 2009 while completing her PhD in Musicology at UNC-Chapel Hill (2011). At the Ackland, Allison designs and implements a wide variety of public programs for lifelong learners of all ages—from hands-on art programs to concerts, film screenings, talks, and tours. Outside of work, Allison continues with her musicological research (on the intersections of music and science, as well as film music) and she serves on the Society for American Music’s Committee on the Conference and on UNC-Chapel Hill’s Alt-Ac Working Group.
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