Words of the Dead

One year ago today, musicologist Charles Hiroshi Garrett passed away unexpectedly at his home in Ann Arbor, MI. He was 58 years old.

Chuck, as I knew him, was an esteemed and beloved professor at the University of Michigan and celebrated contributor to his academic discipline. For those of you interested in learning about his accomplishments, I recommend this memorial statement issued by the university's regents last September, as well as Will Robin's July 30, 2024 obituary for musicologist Rich Crawford in The New York Times, which mentions Chuck's passing. The Society for American Music, one of the scholarly organizations Chuck participated in, also established a fellowship in his memory, which further indicates his enormous standing within the field of American music scholarship.

With that said, this post is not about Chuck's work as a musicologist, as that is not how we knew each other. Indeed, one of the most challenging things I faced after his death was situating my relationship with him alongside those of his mourning students and colleagues who worked with him for many years, if not decades. Although I heard the name 'Charles Garrett' throughout my five years of graduate studies at the University of Michigan (2010-2015), I never took one of his classes. We did not directly communicate until November 2023, when I reached out to him about a workshop on AI & music pedagogy he planned to lead for faculty at the School of Music, Theatre, and Dance. A few months earlier, I had published a feature in The New York Times on the burgeoning intersection of classical music and generative AI tools, and, only a few weeks before Chuck's workshop, I had given a presentation on this same topic at the Ann Arbor District Library. I contacted him because I detected our mutual interest in this subject, and could never have expected where that early communication would lead.

Within a month of my email, Chuck and I were hired by the University of Michigan's Center for Academic Innovation (CAI) to develop a new 'short course' for their online education suite entitled, "AI for Creative Work". Coincidentally, he and I had both submitted individual proposals to CAI's Fall 2023 call for AI-related online courses, and a staff member there encouraged us to unite as a collaborative team. In a matter of weeks, Chuck and I went from not knowing each other at all to meeting twice a week to conceive and design a three course series with a variety of lectures, assessments, guest contributions, and other content. We maintained this schedule from December 2023 to the following April when we began working closely with a design team at CAI who helped us reconcile our planning with the realities of the online instruction platform. This work included the further refinement of our content ideas, determining design elements for the online interface, managing guests located both locally and across the country, as well as recording our own video contributions, which we did together and individually.

I could write thousands of words and still not capture how closely we worked together. We planned every topic and piece of course content, reviewed each other's scripts for our individual and joint videos, and coordinated on every other detail of the course, digital and conceptual, outside of what we accomplished in our meetings with the design team. The defining characteristics of our collaboration were mutual respect and attention to the integrity of our academic and instructional presentation. We fell into immediate alignment about the course's point of view, which aims to inform creative professionals about AI technology so they interact with it from an empowered position, even if that means not using it in their work. And, we pursued this aim with rigor so our arguments were strong and durable. Chuck was an unfailingly respectful collaborator with me, the many CAI staff members we worked with, and his graduate students, Emma Beachy and Kelly Hoppenjans, whom he recruited to assist us with this project. He cared deeply that his and my roles were designed and executed equitably, despite the enormous differences between our respective jobs at the university. Similarly, he was very concerned that Emma and Kelly would be paid fairly and, otherwise, not exploited in their work.

When Chuck died and the countless people whose lives he touched began accounting for his impact on them, I focused on this humanism. In terms of our online course, he was committed to honoring the people with whom he worked, and that stands out among my experiences interacting with senior faculty. There are many grotesqueries that contingent instructors, such as myself, must endure as we navigate the institutions of higher education that employ us. We can be invisible to our colleagues on the tenure track, and our concerns about unpaid labor and job security can be dismissed as immaterial. Chuck, despite his accomplishments and status, did not feel this way, and realized his belief through his treatment of others. To me, the rarity of Chuck's character makes the loss incurred by his passing greater than his achievements as a researcher.

I am lucky that Chuck was the first person close to me whom I was forced to grieve since 2017. The world of the last eight years has been so full of death. Chuck's passing served me as a reminder that each victim of disease, bombs, bullets, and starvation represents a trusted voice extinguished, a beloved family and/or community member taken. But, losing Chuck has also shown me how life extends beyond the body and can reverberate through the absence that remains. It is appropriate that, in death, Chuck, a consummate educator, has taught me new lessons.

Obviously, our online course plays an important role animating his memory, namely through the videos Chuck recorded in the final weeks of his life. The day before he died, the last time I saw and spoke with him, we completed all the necessary filming for "AI for Creative Work". That was also the last day before he was set to begin an extended sabbatical to travel Europe with his wife, the art historian Saleema Waraich, as she conducted research at various museums. He was ready for a break and excited for the chance to support her. All of that adds to the shocking tragedy of his death and made my experience in its wake more uncomfortable. The fact that Chuck had completed all of this filmed content for our course meant there was no practical reason the project could not proceed. I hated this. I was distraught. That convenience felt smarmy and dispassionately industrial in the way it overlooked the personal and generic human loss at the heart of the situation.  

At first, I did not want to continue working on this project because I knew it would be incredibly painful to finish it without Chuck. We had arrived at every detail together, and the prospect of completing it alone felt, at best, excruciating. If I could have made the choice regarding the future of "AI and Creative Work" simply based on my own feelings, I would have never returned to the CAI offices. But, I could not ignore everything Chuck produced that would be lost in that outcome. He was passionate about what we were doing, and held the determination — even though we could sense the political trajectory of generative AI technology — that our university's online educational offerings must include at least one skeptical perspective and at least one course dedicated to the arts. 

Also, I consulted Emma and Kelly, who knew Chuck's relationship to his work in a different, broader way than I did. They were adamant that he would want the course to be completed, and generously offered to increase their participation in the course's remaining work so my burden would be lessened. Finally, CAI's leadership contacted Chuck's widow, Saleema, to confirm that she was comfortable with our choice to finish the course without him. Indeed, she hoped we would do so and was present at the course's launch event in Ann Arbor last November.

To the credit of the staff and managers at CAI, no one placed any pressure on me as I contemplated what to do. In particular, the design team, which was led by an incredible project manager named Clare Brown, handled these unprecedented circumstances humanely, sensitively, and professionally. Clare made sure the project's budget would cover Emma and Kelly's increased workload, and was patient with me in the moments I became overwhelmed by the emotional truth of the situation.

In October of last year, the University of Michigan's Musicology Department held a celebration of life event for Chuck and a couple other emeritus faculty members who had recently passed away. Kelly invited me to speak, and I wrote the following, which I was unable to deliver in full because I started crying after a couple paragraphs:

To begin, I would like to thank Kelly Hoppenjans for inviting me to speak tonight and to everyone at SMTD, in the musicology department, and in Chuck’s family who made this event possible.

Although I was a graduate student here at the University of Michigan from 2010-2015, I did not meet Chuck until last November. I knew from friends that he had a wonderful reputation as a teacher and mentor, but I got to know him in a different way: as his collaborator. From December of last year until July, Chuck and I met at least once a week, if not more frequently, to work on a new online course about AI and creative work we developed in conjunction with the Center for Academic Innovation.

I’m sure none of you will be surprised to hear that Chuck was an extraordinarily generous, kind, and affirming person to work with in this setting. I have been a lecturer with the College of Literature, Sciences, and the Arts since January of 2021, and I only ever felt the difference in Chuck’s and my status at the university in the times when he used his connections and greater access to resources to benefit our work. This includes persuading Dean Gier to support guest contributions to our course. And, most importantly, his recruitment of musicology doctoral students Emma Beachy and Kelly Hoppenjans to work with us and the CAI design team as Course Development Assistants.

Chuck and I developed a strong connection through our deep caring for the course topic and the opportunity this project represented at a moment when institutions, including this university, invested in AI tools with little or no hesitation. We worked in a serious and determined manner, but also made room to have fun and make the experience as pleasant as possible. Chuck brought a lot of humor to our interactions and he was also effortlessly personable with the many staff members at CAI with whom we collaborated as a pair — Clare Brown, the project manager, repeatedly referred to us as, ‘star faculty’, and we quickly learned that, internally, CAI staff affectionately dubbed us ‘The Garretts’. 

There were many times when I felt a friendly bond emerging between us, and I think this is what I miss the most. We both loved the NBA, and had fun jabbing each other when my beloved Boston Celtics faced his beloved Cleveland Cavaliers in the playoffs last spring (Boston won). One of our last phone conversations took place when Chuck was in Cleveland doing mentorship work for the American Musicological Society at Case Western Reserve University. The Cavaliers had just hired a new head coach, Kenny Atkinson, and I joked that Chuck should use his free time to track Atkinson down so they could talk about the upcoming season.

I saw Chuck the day before he passed, at the CAI office on Maynard street. That afternoon, we finished all of his filming for the course, which made it possible — after serious consideration, communication with Chuck’s family, and counsel from Kelly and Emma — to continue and complete this project without him. Over the last three months, many people came together, from CAI’s staff and leadership to Kelly and Emma, to make this possible, which testifies to how much he meant to all of us, some of whom he only knew for a few months.

Chuck’s impact on me will not end when our course launches in the coming days. As I’m sure many of you also experienced in your own relationships with Chuck, he had an untiring interest in sharing opportunity when it came to him and forging connections among his colleagues. Even though Chuck and I knew each other for less than a year, I can trace several current and upcoming projects, as well as growing professional relationships, on UM campus and beyond back to seeds he planted. I think Chuck’s ability to leave so many enduring gifts to the people he knew and worked with is one of the many ways his life can be a positive model to us all.

I have thought of Chuck countless times in the months following the online course's launch, though my mourning has changed because I am no longer sifting through the materials we created together. As my remarks from his remembrance ceremony indicate, there was a burgeoning friendship and mentorship in our working dynamic and I regret, more than anything, that we were not able to enjoy that more. A couple weeks after he died, I found myself in the midst of a very challenging peer review process that I wished he could have helped me with. Last winter, I faced multiple professional rejections, and I'm sure he would have provided solace at that time. And, of course, he was a serious Cleveland Cavaliers fan, and he would have loved watching their historic performance in the 2024-25 NBA regular season.

Of course, Chuck's memory has resonated with me over the last year in more ways than simple absence. In late November 2024, I appeared on a panel about AI and Music that he had organized at the American Musicological Society's national convention (for what it is worth, I was the only non-tenure-track faculty member Chuck invited to participate). We were able to use videos from "AI for Creative Work" to bring his perspective on the panel's subject into the room. And, above all, he introduced me to my colleague Julie Zhu, now an Assistant Professor of Music in the University of Michigan's Performing Arts and Technology department, when she was a newly brand-new postdoctoral fellow at Michigan. Julie has become one of my closest friends and an unparalleled artistic partner in our collaborative project 'Resonant Soundscapes'. That creative endeavor has been one of the most joyful of my life, and Chuck unknowingly acted as its conduit.

The title of this post is "Words Of The Dead", which reflects the digital perpetuity of Chuck's voice in the dozens of videos he made for our online course, which has engaged over 4,500 learners around the world in the last eight months. But, that title is also a reference to the 2017 album Mirror Reaper by the Seattle-based doom metal duo Bell Witch. Mirror Reaper is a 73-minute-long, continuous composition created by bassist Jesse Schreibman and drummer Dylan Desmond in memory of Adrian Guerra, one of the band's founding members, who died suddenly in 2016. There is a passage in Mirror Reaper labeled 'Words of the Dead', which incorporates vocals Guerra recorded prior to his death. Guerra's voice is intentionally processed and abstracted so it is unintelligible, but I connect strongly with this album because it, like "AI for Creative Work", is something that has touched an audience of thousands by posthumously featuring media created by a beloved collaborator. I have listened to Mirror Reaper many, many times in the last year.

Rest in peace, Chuck. I miss you, and I am not alone in that.