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• W4384817311 abstract "As the original journal for the Sonneck Society, American Music helped solidify that organization's presence and shape its scholarly profile: on a more personal scale, it also launched a professional career when it published my first article in fall 1996. In “A Sense of Place: Charles Ives and ‘Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut,’” I proposed that place provided one perspective from which to understand music, music culture, and personal and national history and identity, and this was especially so in the case of Ives.1 Although place was recognized by numerous disciplines as an essential locus of knowledge and traditional ways of knowing, it was not widely employed as a starting point for “high-art” musicological scholarship. This was made clear when Wiley Hitchcock, who chaired the panel at a Sonneck Conference where I was presenting a paper, introduced me as “the place musicologist”: it seemed my focus on place deserved a comment. American Music's editor Josephine Wright and her advisory board accepted my argument regarding Ives's susceptibility to place, his sensitivity to his environment, and its importance for his lifelong musical project and in so doing set me on a scholarly course that continues to this day. I'm still exploring the many intersections of place and history and identity, sometimes as the center of a study, but often as a starting point for investigations that go further afield into topics more typically treated by gender, environmental, and institutional scholars. In a current project, my collaborator, a cultural geographer, and I start with place to get at difficult questions that involve music, selective historiographical practices, fraught borrowed materials, and race.It would be revisionist history of the most fanciful kind to suggest that “A Sense of Place” led intentionally or inevitably to the work that consumes me now, or that it contained some kind of intellectual blueprint pointing where I would be twenty-six years later. It did not; I wasn't strategic; I simply studied what I was most curious about. It did, in retrospect, however, situate me in such a way that I could move seamlessly from an Ives-focused pursuit of place to a book project that considered other composers of “place pieces” and what their works said about U.S. American identity. From there, it was no big stretch to inquire where women fit within a heroic national narrative that regularly trumpeted the unique physical environment and the men who conquered it, but that ignored women's experiences of it; or how Ives's regard for place opened out into concerns for the natural world and the environment, his and others’; and then to ecocritical methodologies applied to music and the sounding arts and sciences more broadly.A second article in American Music that appeared in Fall 2001, “Charles Ives, Cowboys, and Indians: Aspects of the ‘Other Side of Pioneering,’” allowed me to interrogate the (flawed) idea of progress as it had been envisioned at the turn of the century, quotidian realities confronting America's indigenous peoples as they were moved steadily westward or eliminated, stereotypical musical markers of whiteness and Indianness in Ives's and others’ music, and assumptions about the universality of Americans’ relationships to the “West” as a place and as a concept.2 I read this article now and appreciate how limited my understanding was of the issues I was tackling and how many people and positions were excluded from my perspective. But I've learned a lot in twenty years, and again the journal, this time under the editorship of Rob Walser, provided a launchpad for an examination of a set of concerns that have stuck with me.A fortieth anniversary issue of American Music encourages reflection on how the nation's music was represented in 1983 when, thanks to the Bicentennial seven years earlier, “American” music studies had finally achieved a position of respect in the scholarly community. With articles on Art Tatum, Scott Joplin, and early commercial gospel music, and reviews of books on Marian Anderson, P.T. Barnum, Rogers and Hammerstein, Jazz, Hawaiian, and Revolutionary Era music, Volume 1, Number 1 announced a new order and orientation in scholarly musicological work. All musics were fair game. One could now write a dissertation on a U.S. American topic without risking their professional career! The attention paid to Charles Ives in Bicentennial celebrations made him a logical focus of musical studies in the decades that followed; I and many others were shaped by that era, and we became Ivesians. For forty years, American Music has introduced new perspectives, practitioners, and projects to the larger musicological community, and this is part of its legacy.Thinking back also challenges us to imagine the future of a field that now assumes an enlarged sense of what constitutes “American”—the United States as one part of “the Americas”—and a greater awareness of whose and which histories must be brought out of the shadows in our scholarship, our performances, and our classrooms. What are the cultural forces that will shape the next decades of musical thought? Who could have predicted a pandemic, or the rise of a former KGB foreign intelligence officer with an imperialist agenda, or a globe warming at a rate faster than any meteorologist's model suggested, or the collective gasp that resulted from a White policeman's knee on a Black man's neck? Who could have imagined their impact? We can't know those answers, but we can position ourselves on a metaphorical observation deck and acknowledge trends that are already part of our shared experience.The near-complete seizure of university administrative thinking by the STEM fields and the corporatization of the academy with its attendant shrinking of full-time positions in music and the arts have implications for who will be creating music scholarship and what we will write and speak about. It also has implications for how that work will be created, who will support it, where it will appear, and in what forms. With more arts practitioners holding multiple positions and working simultaneously inside and outside the classroom—in cultural affairs offices, community arts organizations, museums, libraries, various entrepreneurial endeavors, administrative positions, in government agencies, and across technology-heavy fields—it is logical that we will continue to see more outward-turning educational work: work that engages with non-specialists where they are. And this is not a bad thing. The impact or usefulness of scholarship that speaks exclusively to a small group of initiates will shrink and be questioned. This is not to suggest that highly specialized work is without merit; sharing permanent, new knowledge is always meaningful, and there's lots to be learned from projects that reveal the inner workings of our objects of study, which only small numbers of scholars might appreciate. But it's likely that such work will occupy a different position in a rearranged hierarchy of value. Getting off campus is good. Vaulting the ivy-covered walls is wise. Whether we call this welcome turn “public musicology” or “engaged musicology,” or something else, is not what's important. What is important is that we do it. Charles Ives, businessman, church musician, and composer, understood the benefits of broad engagement when he explained to Henry Bellamann: “I have experienced a great fulness of life in business. The fabric of existence weaves itself whole. You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance. There can be nothing exclusive about a substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of experience of life and thinking about life and living life.”3Related to the new thrust of musicological work that breeches the campus perimeter is a complimentary movement to stretch beyond disciplinary silos that define the academy itself. In a humanities community that continues to award single-authored monographs higher value in tenure and promotion processes, there is a trend toward greater attention, encouragement, and credit given to multi-disciplinary collaborative projects. We have learned something from our STEM colleagues whose articles regularly list a half-dozen contributors. Although multiauthored articles and books might not yet automatically be accorded the same prestige among humanists as a solo scholarly volume, there is increasing recognition that involving experts and practitioners from a wide array of specialties from the start of a project is one way to identify, locate, and process the often-overwhelming quantity of information that faces researchers today. When the sheer volume of information that could inform a study is beyond the grasp or mastery of a single seasoned scholar, collaborative partnerships make broadly relevant projects possible. They also increase the potential reach of one's work. In a world where metrics—numbers of publications, citations, and reviews—are frequently considered evidence of impact, collaborative projects serve many purposes. They also have the potential to be remarkably satisfying and mind-expanding for all involved.The proliferation of essay collections and handbooks is another manifestation of a move away from the omniscient solitary author-scholar. With a careful editor in charge, someone who moves beyond a small circle of insiders for contributions and actively seeks out perspectives from a diverse pool of scholars, edited collections present an invaluable forum for disseminating the most recent thinking from a variety of minds working independently on a subject. A similar trend is afoot in classrooms: textbooks—which were for decades automatically adopted and became embedded in programs, thus making curricular change extraordinarily difficult—are being reconsidered, employed selectively as one of many sources, or discarded completely in favor of readers and modules that can be combined and adjusted to move and change with a discipline where flexibility, inclusivity, and responsiveness are the new norm.Technology has facilitated the move away from textbooks and presents once-unimaginable opportunities for creating and disseminating knowledge. No schedule of revised textbook editions, regardless of how ambitious, can keep pace with the instantaneousness of uploading materials and ideas that are crowd-sourced, expertly curated, and circulated. Technology has the potential to democratize access to information, to courses, and to entire degree programs, although equal access remains an elusive goal. If virtual classrooms enforced by the pandemic revealed anything about the deeply embedded disparities in our society, it exposed in sometimes painful ways the range of learning environments students contend with, which includes their access to adequate technology. Identifying and correcting inequalities across society is a challenge we need to address. Abuses of technology are also a reality we endure as daily reports of outrageous behavior on social media make clear. How to commandeer technology for the highest purposes of our shared endeavor will be another ongoing challenge. I'm nonetheless encouraged by the brilliant digital humanities work that emerges with increasing frequency in our field. Its deployment will only grow in the coming decades. University presses and proactive librarians have been in the vanguard of digital resource creation, facilitation, and education. As they respond to demands for materials in new formats, their creative responses are among the most encouraging signs that technology can be made to work for us more often than not.When I began doctoral work in the late 1980s, the larger field of musicology was still in thrall to sketch and compositional-process studies so popular in the previous decade, although topics and approaches were beginning to expand. Still, I was counseled away from pursuing my interest in place by a senior scholar who volunteered that what I was doing was “soft” musicology. I needed, he advised, to show my chops with something more rigorous, perhaps create a critical edition of an Ives work. In 2022 it is hard not to hear the gendered assumptions behind his language and advice and the myopia that plagued the discipline regarding what constituted serious work. A few years later I spoke with a different senior scholar; she advised me to write what I was passionate about. And still another scholar said simply, “write the book you have to write.” Today I find myself channeling and sharing the advice of the second and third scholars with students of my own who are concerned that their real interests might not align with current trends, or be marketable, or fit positions likely to be posted. But trends are just that, and crystal ball technology is still a long way off. It might be that the best any of us can do is engage our passion and our hard-earned expertise to pay attention to what is happening around us and employ both as springboards to do good. Using our art for activism is possible regardless of our official position within or outside the academy. It is one way forward that won't succumb to scholarly fashions or unimaginative assessments of what is valuable." @default.
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• W4384817311 date "2022-12-01" @default.
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• W4384817311 title "Launchpads, Observation Decks, and Springboards" @default.
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