Returning

“My class, ‘Music and Meaning in Our Lives’, is not about argumentation, it is about self-actualization”

Welcome back! I am returning to writing in this format for the first time in years, just like I finally have an operational website again. Last month, I returned to teaching in a classroom for the first time since March, 2020 with another iteration of the course I designed for the College of Literature, Sciences & the Arts at the University of Michigan, “Music and Meaning In Our Lives: Identity, Place & Contemporary Issues”.

I’m not sure where I was teaching the last time I wrote a blog post. Since I finished my doctorate in 2015, I’ve held contingent positions at Western Michigan University, Madonna University, Appalachian State University, Washtenaw Community College, and the University of Michigan (twice!). Last semester, I returned to the maize & blue to debut ‘Music and Meaning in Our Lives’ in a virtual format, which worked very well thanks to my students’ passionate engagement with the course’s core concepts.

This class is a music class, but not in the way we teach music at conservatories because students don’t need to be able to read music, or have any experience performing music. ‘Music and Meaning in Our Lives’ also differs greatly from music school classes because it is not centered on repertoire. I do not expect my students to master discrete technical skills, analyze specific pieces, or memorize dates. Rather, the course aims to give them new tools and practices so they better understand and enhance their own experience with a musical activity that is already a big part of their lives: listening to music.

There are a few basic concepts that make up the foundation of what we do in this class, none of which requires specialized musical knowledge. The first is something I encountered when I started teaching at Western Michigan University in their theory curriculum designed by composers Christopher Biggs and Lisa Coons. This concept looks at the act of listening to music and proposes that we generate meaning through the reflexive interaction between the music’s content and the lived experiences and cultural contexts we bring to the piece, sort of a dialog between internal and external stimuli.

This model also connects to the only specific analytical language I impart to my students, which is also something I borrow from Chris and Lisa. This framework asks my class to consider and identify specific elements of the music they are listening to in terms of five musical parameters: timbre, rhythm, texture, melody, and harmony. I’ve ordered them this way to reflect their respective accessibility to my students last semester. Unlike analysis in a conventional undergraduate course at a music school, there was almost no discussion of harmony among my students in the winter term, but they still made consistently incisive analyses involving a wide range of musical examples.

The last of the concepts that form the backbone of my class’s point of view is something I arrived to on my own. This is the, “Triangle of Musical Meaning”, represented in the banner graphic to this post, and it is a model for envisioning the reality that a singular piece of music can result in different meanings depending of our varied relationships to, perspectives on, and experiences with the music. In fact, the same person can occupy more than one point on the ‘triangle’ and hold more than one meaning for a given musical example at different times, or even simultaneously. I have found this concept is particularly relevant to modes of listening to music in the present era wherein user-generated content abounds, remix is commonplace, and we often encounter music not as an isolated cultural object but as a symbol emerging from a complex web of implicit and explicit meanings. 

So far, the class has worked wonderfully, and I am very excited to see how my students continue to respond to these ideas over the course of the term. In the winter, I was privileged to teach a very diverse group of undergraduates who brought an incredible range of music into our class and drew wonderful conclusions about what these examples meant to them and how that music intersected with identity, place, and various contemporary issues. As I said before, this course is not centered around repertoire — I would venture to say around 75% of the music we discussed was selected by my students. I find this approach extremely successful because it empowers students to engage with these musical examples deeply because they are invested in what they and their classmates have chosen to bring to share.

By asking my students to focus on music that is already meaningful to them, or their responses to works that appear in assignments, the way we talked about music throughout the semester had lower stakes than what I experienced when I was an undergraduate and graduate student in a conservatory. A lot of this and similar discourse centers around arguing the correctness of one position related to a piece of music, and often involves acts of persuasion, or assertions of dominance, that effort to get others to agree with and/or submit to the given point of view. My class, ‘Music and Meaning In Our Lives’, is not about argumentation, it is about self-actualization. The techniques I teach are not aimed at persuading others; but, instead, these skills are meant to serve my students as means to learn more about themselves and the ways they find music meaningful.

The goal of having self-actualization as a learning outcome in my teaching has always been present in my pedagogy, but I did not recognize it until I read bell hooks’ landmark book Teaching to Transgress in 2018. One of the most exciting aspects of offering this course is an opportunity to explore and apply aspects of “engaged pedagogy”, as hooks presents it, more than ever before. I believe ideas like hooks’ are increasingly important as college music programs attempt to address issues of oppression, exclusion, and prejudice that cast shadows over their existing pedagogies. Perhaps, courses like ‘Music and Meaning in Our Lives’ will play a role in this change, too.