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FIVE SUGGESTIONS FOR AN ASPIRING COMPOSITION TEACHER: TOWARDS AN INCLUSIVE COMPOSITIONAL PEDAGOGY
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 September 2022
Abstract
This article takes a recent interview with Chaya Czernowin, ‘5 Things Harvard's Chaya Czernowin Suggests You Do as an Aspiring Composer’, as a point of departure for a series of reflections on compositional pedagogy focusing specifically on inclusion. It proposes a less restrictive definition of a ‘composer’ and a decentring of career expectations in favour of embracing a range of creative sound-making practices. It goes on to underline the importance of transnational and transcultural perspectives, of experimentation and the risk of failure, and of listening skills that transcend style and culture. In these latter two sections, specific classroom techniques are cited: Maria Chavez's creative workshop on failure, and Thea Musgrave's ‘critique’ sessions, in which students listen critically to compositions without prior knowledge of their title or author. The final section addresses the question of evaluation, positing that lowering the stakes of individual assessments encourages students to branch out and take risks. It also calls into question the weight given to forms of evaluation, such as recommendation letters, that may pose particular problems of bias. In the conclusion, it looks to recent decolonisation movements in music for models of structural changes that could help to enact the essay's propositions.
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- RESEARCH ARTICLE
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 Anouk Dyussembayeva and Chaya Czernowin, ‘5 Things Harvard's Chaya Czernowin Suggests You Do as an Aspiring Composer’, Composium, 15 July 2021, https://mycomposium.com/chaya-czernowin-five-things-composer (accessed 1 March 2021).
2 Juliana Hodkinson and Georgina Born, ‘Gender and Social Relations in New Music: Tackling the Octopus’, Seismograf, 27 September 2017, https://seismograf.org/node/9588 (accessed 1 March 2021).
3 Dyussembayeva and Czernowin, ‘5 Things’.
4 See, for instance, Carlana, Michela, ‘Implicit Stereotypes: Evidence from Teachers’ Gender Bias’, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134, no. 3 (2019), pp. 1163–224CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 This article uses the acronym BAME for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic, commonly used in the UK, and the US-specific term BIPOC (that is, Black, Indigenous and people of colour) when referring to the US context. I recognise the shortcomings of both terms; as Alex Mistlin writes in the Guardian, ‘The truth is, there'll never be a handy acronym that can capture the complex histories and cultures of Britain's ethnic minorities… So the term BAME has had its day. But what should replace it?’, Guardian, 8 April 2021, www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/08/bame-britain-ethnic-minorities-acronym (accessed 1 March 2022).
6 Examples of the unequal impacts of the pandemic include a lack of vaccine access in low-income countries as a direct result of the refusal of wealthy nations to share vaccine intellectual property and/or share vaccine supplies, higher death rates from COVID among BIPOC in the US (as of October 2021), declining numbers of women in the US workforce, especially women with less education, and disproportionate health and social harm to disabled people.
7 In terms of production, see Tinel, Bruno, ‘Why and How Do Capitalists Divide Labor? From Marglin and Back Again through Babbage and Marx’, Review of Political Economy, 25, no. 2 (2013), pp. 254–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 The University of Cambridge, for example, conferred degrees in Music in part for activities that included composition as early as 1464. However, composition was considered to be a part of the larger category of musical practice, rather than a category in and of itself, and degrees in composition were not offered until the twentieth century. In his history of the early origins of Music studies at Cambridge, Martin Cullingford quotes David Skinner on the ‘two types of musician that circulated at universities’: ‘One was the practical musician, those that sang and perhaps composed. Then there were those who were somewhat more intellectual’. Martin Cullingford, ‘A Degree of Harmony’, www.mus.cam.ac.uk/system/files/documents/CambridgePast.pdf (accessed 1 March 2022).
9 Dyussembayeva and Czernowin, ‘5 Things’.
10 Arnett, Jeffrey J., ‘The Neglected 95%: Why American Psychology Needs to Become Less American’, American Psychologist, 63, no. 7 (2008), pp. 602–14CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
11 For a debunking of the ‘lack of qualified candidates’ argument, see Patricia Alessandrini, ‘Not All Ideas Are the Same: Challenging Dominant Discourses and Re-imaging Computer Music Research’, Array: The Journal of the ICMA (2017–18), pp. 7–14, www.computermusic.org/media/documents/array/Array-2018-special.pdf (accessed 1 March 2022).
12 Dyussembayeva and Czernowin, ‘5 Things’.
13 On consent in performer–composer collaborations, see Alex Temple, ‘Composers, Performers, and Consent’, NewMusicBox, 24 November 2015, https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/composers-performers-and-consent/ (accessed 1 March 2022).
14 Dyussembayeva and Czernowin, ‘5 Things’.
15 Ibid.
16 It is interesting to note that some composers strongly identify with the sonic world of a specific composition or a composer's oeuvre without necessarily wishing to engage with the compositional technique by which, according to the composer, it is achieved. Raphaël Cendo, for example, cites Xenakis as a major influence for his sonic world but rejects Xenakis' stochastic methods, going so far as to dismiss it as a ‘pretext’ for the music. Jean-Luc Menet and Raphaël Cendo, ‘Entretien de Raphaël Cendo avec Jean-Luc Menet’, BRAHMS, 1 January 2011, https://brahms.ircam.fr/documents/document/21511 (accessed 1 March 2022).
17 Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice (Lincoln: iUniverse, 2005) and Sonic Meditations (Baltimore: Smith, 1971).
18 Dyussembayeva and Czernowin, ‘5 Things’.
19 Ibid.
20 Liza Lim, ‘Luck, Grief, Hospitality – Re-routing Power Relationships in Music’, Women in the Creative Arts conference, Australian National University, 11 August 2017.
21 This occurred, for instance, in Chavez's 2015 workshop at Goldsmiths, University of London, ‘Revisiting Those Words: Failed Attempts as Material’, within her two-year residency there as a Research Fellow with the Sound Practice Research Unit.
22 ‘His Master's Vox’, 29 March 2018, www.canopycanopycanopy.com/contents/his-masters-vox (accessed 1 March 2022).
23 Ruth Zambrana, R. Burciaga Valdez, Chavella T. Pittman, Todd Bartko, Lynn Weber and Deborah Parra-Medina, ‘Workplace Stress and Discrimination Effects on the Physical and Depressive Symptoms of Underrepresented Minority Faculty’, Stress & Health: Journal of the International Society for the Investigation of Stress, 37, no. 1 (2021), pp. 175–85.
24 Alexandria N. Miller and Susan M. Orsillo, ‘Values, Acceptance, and Belongingess in Graduate School: Perspectives from Underrepresented Minority Students’, Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science, 15 (2020), pp. 197–206.
25 Stefania Giannini, ‘Prioritize Health and Well-being Now and When Schools Reopen’, UNESCO, 30 April 2020, https://en.unesco.org/news/prioritize-health-and-well-being-now-and-when-schools-reopen (accessed 1 March 2022).
26 Frank J. Oteri and Thea Musgrave, ‘Thea Musgrave: Where the Practicality Comes In’, NewMusicBox. 1 December 2017, https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/thea-musgrave-where-the-practicality-comes-in/ (accessed 1 March 2022).
27 Ibid.
28 Hodkinson and Born, ‘Gender and Social Relations in New Music’.
29 In ‘A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing’, Alia Al-Saji draws upon the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the temporal theories of Henri Bergson to propose a practice of conscious hesitation to counter affective, phenomenologically constructed forms of racial bias: ‘For to hesitate is to feel one's way tentatively and receptively; time is “tâtonnement”, says Bergson, that is, a search without time or teleology, an experimentation that does not dictate the future it will find.’ Al-Saji, Alia, ‘A Phenomenology of Hesitation: Interrupting Racializing Habits of Seeing’, in Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race, ed. Lee, Emily S. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), pp. 133–72Google Scholar.
30 ‘Oxford and Colonialism’, Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, n.d., https://oxfordandcolonialism.web.ox.ac.uk/music-faculty (accessed 1 March 2022).
31 Ibid.
32 Hodkinson and Born, ‘Gender and Social Relations in New Music’.