December 12, 2021
Presented by Sara Gross Ceballos, Sonja Downing, Julie McQuinn, Erica Scheinberg, Lawrence University.
Unlike most CMS workshops, which typically feature colleagues from a cross section of our organization's disciplines and institutions, this interactive event will focus on a single institution's process of changing a single discipline. The four-member musicology faculty of the Lawrence University Conservatory of Music (Appleton, WI) will share a case study of the redesign, approval, and implementation of its core musicology coursework. In early 2017, the Lawrence faculty decided it was no longer comfortable sending a message that a history of Western classical music is core to an undergraduate music education—what should be “learned” before anything else and thus more important than anything else. Colleagues discussed how they might, to use the words of Alejandro Madrid in his 2017 article “Diversity, Tokenism, Non-Canonical Musics, and the Crisis of the Humanities in U.S. Academia,” confront the discipline as “an arm of colonialist and imperialist projects” (125). The Lawrence musicology faculty decided to work for deep structural change, to start from scratch, and ask, what should be core musicology for an undergraduate music major in the conservatory?
Lawrence's new two-term core, called “Introduction to Musicologies,” exposes students to the multiplicities and complexities of doing musicology. Case studies from across the globe and throughout history provide opportunities for students to grapple with issues such as how
someone might determine musical meaning; how musickings participate in constructions and expressions of identity; how musickings and discourses about music can marginalize, empower, and perpetuate or resist ideologies; and how performance and scholarship might inform one another. The new curriculum emphasizes scholars and the ways that they make arguments, use writing, choose topics to study, and present history. The diverse musics, concepts, theories, methodologies, and disciplinary viewpoints students encounter in the course come to serve as lenses through which they can learn to think again, in a new way, about other musickings in the courses and in their lives. The point isn’t to introduce students to a “canon” of important scholars or issues in the field, nor a canonical repertoire, but rather to emphasize the ways that scholarship is made by people and to emphasize that students have the power and responsibility to make scholarship too. Each full-time member of the Lawrence musicology faculty teaches their own sections from a shared, frequently-revised, syllabus.
The Committee on Cultural Inclusion is excited to present this curriculum to workshop attendees and to share the genesis, guiding principles, and methods used to design these new core courses at the Lawrence Conservatory. At the center of the workshop will be an experiential component, followed by an open discussion with workshop participants.
Presenters
Sara Gross Ceballos is Associate Professor of Music at Lawrence University. Her research focuses on 18-century keyboard music in performance. She has published and presented on musical portraiture in keyboard works by Domenico Scarlatti and François Couperin, and on sympathetic collaborative accompaniment in C. P. E. Bach. She has also contributed to the Journal of Music History Pedagogy and is a member of the editorial board of Open Access Musicology.
Sonja Downing is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at Lawrence University, and the author of Gamelan Girls: Gender, Childhood, and Politics in Balinese Music Ensembles. Other writings of hers have been published in the journal Ethnomusicology and in edited volumes on music and childhood, and on Balinese performing arts. Her research on girls’ gamelans has been supported by grants from the Fulbright Hays Program and the Pacific Rim Research Program, and she received the Marcia Herndon and the Wong Tolbert prizes within the Society for Ethnomusicology. She has performed with Gamelan Sekar Jaya across the US and in Bali, and has performed as a guest musician with Gamelan Çudamani. She is currently a member of the Lawrence Community Music School’s Gamelan Sekar Kemuda.
Julie McQuinn is Associate Professor of Music at Lawrence University. She received an AMS 50 Fellowship from the American Musicological Society for her dissertation exploring issues of gender and sexuality in Parisian opera at the turn of the 20th century. She has published and presented on the music of Debussy, film music, and opera. Her current research and teaching interests include music’s intersections with gender, fairy tale, memory, disability, and conceptions of humanness, in multiple mediums.
Erica Scheinberg is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Lawrence University Conservatory of Music. In the Department of Musicology she has taught seminars on the history of recorded sound, music in the United States, the history of the public concert, and on various popular music topics. She has given many public talks about music at Lawrence and elsewhere, and since 2013 has presented onstage comments and artist interviews for several concerts on the New Music at Lawrence series.