Teaching Philosophy

 As an educator, I am committed to creating a lively, active-learning environment that emphasizes the importance of critical thinking and creative engagement with the subject matter. As a musicologist, I want to provide students with a lens through which they can explore broader issues related to historical narrative, cultural context, and musical meaning. Above all, I believe in the following learning objectives for students of all ranges and abilities: to explore the ways in which music and culture intersect; to develop and articulate independent, personal interpretations of music; and to use music as a creative tool to express a larger argument. Most importantly, I want students to consider how and why music (history) matters.

To think of music as a product of culture is to acknowledge that the arts can reveal crucial details about our past and present conditions. This line of inquiry allows students to see how music intersects with larger social issues and frameworks—an issue with which my own research is especially concerned. In 19th-century Music, one assignment that I find successful to this end explores contemporary stagings of Bizet’s Carmen. This task reflects on the merit of a controversial 2018 Florentine performance that revised the ending. In this version, Carmen no longer dies at the hands of her rejected lover, Don José, but pulls a gun on him, instead. This revision hoped to bring awareness to domestic violence and emphasize the social responsibility of art. Through written reflection and in-class debate, students have to both re-think our earlier analyses of the opera and its gender politics, while also considering the role (and relevance) of art music in today’s society. Along these lines, students also consider this interpretation as related to modern day issues.

Emphasizing cultural context also asks students to expand their understanding of music’s significance in society, which becomes especially important when teaching non-majors. To this end, students in Music Appreciation write an Album Review at the end of the semester. This assignment asks them to connect our course material to “their” music. In so doing, students see the relevance of the historical to the current, while also thinking on the social and cultural import of their musical preferences. Emphasizing the power of the “personal” connects to my own research’s focus on challenging the hegemonic, often masculine objectivity of authorial content. The results of the album review are generally successful and wide-ranging, including considerations of the political power of Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly to explorations of Ariana Grande’s Dangerous Woman as both empowering and problematical for women in today’s popular culture world. This assignment also gives me incredible insight into the musical preferences of my students, which is so important when teaching non-majors.

Just as I ask students to connect their own music to our classroom content, I am especially committed to asking students to engage creatively with the musical subject matter. In an era where most of the American population considers themselves musical “consumers,” as opposed to “creators,” I ask students to interact with the musical subject more actively. In Music as Communication students explore the various ways music communicates all kinds of social, political, cultural, and historical moments. Towards the end of the semester, student-groups brainstorm and decide on a social issue with which they are concerned. They research the issue, collate a collection of audible samples that address this issue, and then make a short remix via Soundtrap—an online, collaborative remixing tool. A short essay outlining their creative choices and album artwork accompanies their final composition. Students in 20th-Century Music also work on a semester-long creative project wherein they plan, compose, and perform a piece of “concept” music (as crafted and ideologically defined within their group). An in-class performance and short essay comprise the final components. In 19th-century Music, students complete a Reclamation Project, wherein they research and revise a blackface minstrel tune, submitting a short, researched paper and lyrics. In Sounds and Cinema the semester culminates with a student rescoring a silent film housed in the Library of Congress. Indeed these artistic projects, alongside more traditional pedagogical exercises, excite students, create new methods to engage with the material at hand, democratize creative expression, and arm students with different ways to interact with the world around them.

As my research considers the powerful constructs that have shaped our current interactions with music—from the serious music aesthetic, to gendered aspects of reception, and to early American musical markets—so too does my teaching emphasize the importance of coming to terms with music’s often powerful role in cultural history. In creating a range of assignments that emphasize diverse, interdisciplinary, and sometimes even contradictory perspectives, we gain an even more profound and complete picture of the musical subject. These approaches are crucial to my vitality as a musicologist and to the dynamism of the field as a whole.