Douglas Boyce (George Washington University) | “Teaching Post-Period and the Polysemy of Genre”
As musicians we take stances. Each piece, each performance, each opinion presents, and re-presents a view and commitment to a way-of-being-musical. And these views and stances overlap: all at once we are classicalists, modernists, populists, and elitists. For me, there is no role in which that is truer than as educator. This presentation draws from two decades developing radical curricular strategies ('applied hermeneutics') in which the multiple valences of genre and period are repurposed as tools to induce historical and cultural criticality. Students examine their roles in their community of practice and seek the site of potential for agency that justifies the labor and cost of individual music instruction.
The pedagogy to be discussed emerges from the coupling of classroom intellectual work and the
technical focus of the private lesson into a hybrid seminar/practicum for freshman and sophomore in the general university population. Mixing of scholarship, storytelling, performance and self-criticality, the approach supplants typical frames of genre and historical period with the subjectivity of the student themselves – the subject of the course is not music, nor performing but the work of the students themselves, and the technical, personal, and socio-culture limits of meaning-making. Here, criticality baked in as students are asked to emplace and emplot their musicality in a historical/cultural context and to respond to the emplotments of their peers, a classroom of students of jazz, classical, musical-theater, and popular music.
Rather than rejecting genre and period distinctions, the pedagogy utilizes them as the terrain of the
dialectic, through the thought of Gadamer, Taylor, Webster, and Stiegler. Students interview and
analyze peers', friends' and professional musicians' use of genre and other engrained designations; in
unpacking these polysemes students develop a critical perspective on their own concepts of identity, authenticity, and the contextual contingency of individuated expression.
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Garrett Schumann (Appalachian State University) | “The ÆPEX Anthology: Crossing Lines between the Concert Stage, Scholarship, and Pedagogy"
ÆPEX Contemporary Performances is a Michigan-based concert presenting organization founded in 2015 by composer Garrett Schumann and conductor Kevin Fitzgerald with the mission of, “sharing the music of rarely performed and underrepresented twentieth and twenty-first century composers from around the world with audiences across Michigan.”
This summer, ÆPEX will launch a three-year project that expands the pursuit of social justice critical to our organizational mission and directly confronts the irrefutable exclusion of women composers, composers of color, and composers with other marginalized identities from university music theory curricula and concert stages across the country.
The project will center around the production of an anthology of musical examples created exclusively by minority identity musicians to serve as a substitute for any of the leading music theory textbooks, all which currently feature the music of white male composers at least 95% of the time. In conjunction with this effort, we will program concerts, organize community engagement events, and design artists residencies that illuminate and educate our audiences on music created by members of many different identity groups from the sixteenth century to the present.
We propose to present a paper describing our process of conceiving and implementing an initiative that blurs the lines between concert presentation, scholarship, and pedagogy. In addition to addressing the challenges inherent to teaching music theory with the work of individuals who create in different genres and have varying identities, our presentation will share the practices our leadership team has employed to better understand their own privilege, as well our relevant collaborations with a diverse group of musicians and academics in multiple disciplines. We believe all of these activities are essential to our success as we seek greater social justice in the contemporary field of music.
David Carter (Northwestern University) | “It’s Just Too Much”: Hypervirtuosity and Genre in the Music of Conlon Nancarrow, Art Tatum, and Black MIDI
Art Tatum is frequently mentioned as an inspiration to the reclusive American-Mexican composer Conlon Nancarrow. Tatum’s combination of swinging, stride-style jazz with hypervirtuosity that traversed the piano with machine-like precision has distinct echoes in the player piano studies of Nancarrow. Both artists can be viewed as heirs to the genre of virtuosic piano music that originated in the 19th century with Chopin and Liszt and continued in the 20th with Ravel and Godowsky. The intense concentration of material present in the music of both Nancarrow and Tatum complicates their relationship to conventional genres, such that both are commonly referred to as sui generis renegades. Tatum was viewed during his career as straddling the genres of jazz and classical concert music, while Nancarrow’s music combined popular forms like jazz, the blues, and boogie-woogie with a reliance on automatic performance that foreshadowed electroacoustic music, the synthesizer, and MIDI sequencing. The concentration and complexity of material in the music of both overwhelms and potentially exhausts the listener, threatening to defeat attempts at classification. In more recent times, the music of Black MIDI arrangers has picked up where Nancarrow left off, pushing the limits of processors while quaintly relying on MIDI piano sequencing that as a technology dates back nearly 40 years. As with Nancarrow, the use of technology in an almost frightening way by Black MIDI composers is combined with nostalgic elements, such as decades-old video game tunes, that humanize the listener’s experience but complicate genre classifications.
