Musicology and Repair with William Cheng

It's hard, I think, to wrap our minds around because so much of our American society is focused on individual merit and certainly your own professional trajectory depends so overwhelmingly on what you yourself produce. single author peer-reviewed books and articles for example that we sometimes forget that we're still all in it together and when someone you know produces a beautiful and amazing and surprising piece of scholarship that it's kind of a win for all of us.

Welcome back to Sound Expertise. I'm your host, Will Robin, and this is the final episode of a podcast where I talk to my fellow music scholars about their research and why it matters.

Yes, this is the season finale of our final season. I'm sad to be saying goodbye, but I'm proud of all our podcast has accomplished. If you'd like to hear some more reflections on the end of sound expertise, I encourage you to check out last week's episode where I speak with my producer, Eddie, about the show and its legacy.

I've long known who I wanted to have as a guest for our final episode, someone who has been thinking deeply and profoundly about what music scholarship can do in our current moment. William Cheng, who is professor of music at Dartmouth College. Dr. Cheng's 2016 book Just Vibrations represented a landmark moment in the field. The book offers fundamental reconsiderations of what musicology can be by laying out a vision of philosophy.

of care and repair shaped by chang's own struggles with chronic illness but professor chang's scholarship extends beyond rumination on the discipline to include foundational work on music and video games public-oriented social justice advocacy and scrutinizing ethical questions around musical taste in his recent book, Loving Music Till It Hurts. This is the kind of conversation I started sound expertise to have, and an ideal one for our finale.

So I'd love to talk today broadly and also starting off with really what the state of musicology is in terms of how you see it. You're someone who's really been thinking a lot about the direction of what we might call music studies.

for a long time and and i think someone whose work has really profoundly grappled with this question and so just thinking about where we are right now in november 2024 like how what do you think about what musicology is obviously that's an extremely broad question and i'll we'll happily have you take it in whatever direction you like sure i think it as you say is a almost an impossible question but it's an aspirational

invitation because as with you know political leaders who give state of the union type of addresses whenever we're trying to address the state of something I think there's a performance involved we necessarily need to act like we know more than we possibly can. I suppose one thing I could take away from any large conference that we had in musicology, regardless of how much I...

would have been able to participate in talks or social events is that they're impossibly large. The whole point of concurrent panels suggests that we've already reached a point in our discipline where there is

a surplus of knowledge production, knowledge dissemination, and we have to pick and choose what kind of paper we want to go to at any given time. And that sense of abundance, I think... is really exciting just this you know going to a place knowing that people are giving talks at the same time and there's all this new information and there's curiosity from the audience that's really

It's also really overwhelming because it makes me realize how little I've been able to keep up with all the new things going on in our field and all the exciting work that people are doing. As a matter of course, I don't find myself with enough time, I think, to read the latest musicology literature, even journals from our flagship societies.

And at Dartmouth College, where I teach, I don't have graduate students in musicology, so it's not like I'm actively, currently advising students in that capacity and keeping up with... the new methodologies that people are engaging. So, yeah, it really is a difficult question. Are there any specific things about the quote-unquote

musicology that you think would be helpful to chat about in particular yeah i mean i've got a long list but one one way maybe to tackle this related to this question of conferences is i have experienced It's hard not to have a personal bias when we think about this, but

I don't know. I've gone to AMS for whatever, 10 or 15 years or something. And I have certainly experienced that conference changing a lot. Of course, I've changed, right? And you've changed through the course of your annual visits to this American Musicological Society conference. If you think back to maybe some of your earlier experiences at that conference, have you been able to notice a change, a significant change in what that represents, if that does represent the field in that sense?

I don't think I can say with any certainty that I've perceived large scale changes in conference vibe or etiquette. I think sometimes what I think what's funny is.

uh very anecdotally after going to you know certain annual amses um just talking to colleagues or friends some will say you know i think this was a chiller ams or people seemed a little nicer at the same as but but their sample um you know their evidence is very limited because again we're going to all sorts of different papers um But once again, I find that kind of expression very aspirational when people seem optimistic that perhaps something is shifting very slowly but surely.

almost imperceptibly like when they talk about just the vibe being slightly better slightly kinder people asking nicer questions um or people not asking mean questions um So I've engaged in those kinds of conversations, but if I think about my first AMS, which I believe was 2006 in Los Angeles, I was a senior in college, I was going to... AMS for my first time to scope out grad programs. I remember just being super alone and intimidated as a senior in college with no other

peers with me, undergrad peers. I only knew a couple of professors from my university there and wandering into receptions just scared out of my mind and walking up to to professors whose names I knew based on articles or books by theirs that I've read, and trying to just strike up a normal conversation and thinking that what...

meant normal at the time was you know introducing yourself and your research interests which as a senior in college they were not very well developed right so um so i remember that sense of pervasive anxiety as a first-time attendee, and yet even today in 2024, having gone to, I guess, around 15 such conferences, I still get nervous walking up to strangers who I want to talk to or being nervous when asking a question or chairing the session.

where all I really have to do is read the panelists' biographies. I just tell myself, you know, this is a moment for the panelists. I don't want to mess anything up. And then speaking on a panel, it's very... I don't want to say nerve wracking. It's very humbling because oftentimes people who come to your panel on whatever subject are already experts in that subject or very curious about it. So there is this.

for me, an intractable anxiety around going to these conferences where the stakes of professional kind of camaraderie feel very high.

I mean, can I mention one memory I have from my first time? I wanted to dig into your early musicology years, so yes, please. Yeah, the one memory I have from, or the one... Good memory I have from my first AMS conference in LA in 2006 was going to Suzanne Cusick's Music as Torture paper. I remember it was standing room only. It was very hot and muddy in the room.

The doors were open. I think there were two sets of doors into that presentation room. And just sensing that there was... an event happening and that people were learning about sound as violence and really coming together to think deeply about it. It almost felt meditative rather than performative. It felt like there was a mutual reckoning. And that was the memory I took away from that conference. And that's partly or largely.

what drove me to want to apply to graduate programs to kind of one day perhaps re-experience similar presentations where people are coming together. and trying to debate and critically engage without necessarily seeking to tear down or refute or add on to immediately. Yeah. I mean, that seems like...

I would love to talk a little bit more about how you found yourself at the AMS in college, which there are people who go to the AMS in college and there are people who wait until graduate school. But what got you into musicology such that this moment at... Q6 panel was such a transformational one for you. If I recall correctly, I think it was my one of my college professors at Stanford, Heather Hadlock, who encouraged me to apply for the Eileen Southern.

grant, which I luckily received and therefore was able to have my travel to Amos funded. And yeah, that's honestly how I... Yeah, that's how I got into musicology. I don't know how far back you want to go, but... In college, in my junior and senior years, I started to sit in on some graduate seminars in musicology, met some grad students. I remember the first time...

One of my friends who was a grad student, Erin Knight, she now teaches at UMass Amherst. I thought musicology was a made-up word the first time she said it to me. She said, I'm a graduate student in musicology. and i laughed i remember laughing and then she said what's so funny and i said oh you're oh what's musicology and she explained it's the study of music she explained that she's in a phd program and it's funded and she tas uh in in some years for for her stipend and at that time

you know, late junior year, I was either going to want to go to law school or go to graduate school of some sort. And I got a bunch of secondhand LSAT. practice books, some of which already had answers wrong or right circled within them. And I remember just failing all of my practice LSATs and realizing law school was probably not in the cards.

So I then had the thought perhaps I would continue in piano and performance, but having concentrated in piano performance in college, I could not imagine myself. working as a performer because the stage fright, the anxiety, the long hours of practice, the self-doubt, the physical strain and repetitive motion injuries. They all added up to this kind of inevitable reckoning within my body, like this kind of the body nose, where I realized I could not have a sustainable career.

as a performer. And so with law school and performance kind of removed from consideration, I thought, well, I love music and I love thinking about music. I like to write, so why not, you know, pursue kind of a grad degree and see where it goes.

I applied to grad school with an interest in 19th century program music and piano music. And once I entered grad school, I quickly... turn to one of my long-standing loves in life that I never thought would be a viable academic subject, which was video games. And that's how I ended up writing a dissertation about games. Yeah. What was the moment in graduate school where, I mean, I think it's a moment some of us.

are lucky enough to have and others don't, where you realized video games are feasible to write about as an academic through music, where obviously at some point you thought, this is not something worth considering but that switch must have happened at some point right yeah i think it was reading kiri miller's video game scholarship

Keri Miller is an ethnic musicologist, American studies scholar, media studies scholar. She teaches at Brown, and I was introduced to her, I think... in my first or second year in grad school and then i read some of her work on grand theft auto and such and i was just really taken by seeing a very concrete example of scholarship that I aspired to do and seeing that scholarship basically opened all these doors or windows in my mind.

where before they had just been arbitrarily closed. It's not as if any advisor in grad school told me right off the bat, oh, no, you can't ever work on that subject. It's not serious enough. But they didn't need to because I had internalized all that doubt. And video games, as I teach my students, are so interesting precisely because and despite they are...

often popularly recognized as merely recreational or frivolous or diversionary or escapist. But that's also what makes them fascinating and worthy as objects of cultural study. I didn't have that... sense of both and as a grad student i thought you could love video games on the side and then you have to write about list or chopin sure sure um and i know

speaking now in 2024, where Ludo Musicology, you know, the study of video game music is very much present. You know, there are journals, there are book series, there are conferences. just amazing multimodal inventive projects. I even find it strange to think back to a point, to a time when there was so much doubt about... the viability of the subject. It wasn't helped by the fact that I did encounter very explicit resistance to the topic, not from my advisors in grad school, but from...

external interlocutors. So when I went to a regional AMS conference, I think my second or third year, I presented on Kornbold, not video game music, but then during the...

One of the breaks, I remember talking to a professor who asked me what I'm going to write my dissertation on, and I said video game music, and I remember very clearly him saying, oh, I don't think that's a real... topic like why would you be doing that and you know as a grad student you're not going to talk back to a professor or lead your case so I just you know sulked away

told my advisor what had happened and he said you know don't pay attention to them but that's gone yeah that's just one example um of explicit uh skepticism um There's also been, and I think I've written about this, just expressions of concern when I've presented on soundscapes in violent online video games, for example.

I had one professor come up to me afterwards, very well-intentioned. He said, I fear that all of your fieldwork and your immersion in these violent... online video games with voice chat that's full of, you know, sexist and racist and misogynist rhetoric, like, it'll actually affect you spiritually or... latently in ways that you can't even imagine. So he was kind of worried for my spirit and for my person, which was very kind and compassionate.

But we don't often tell... Yeah, I'm trying to think of what other mediums or topics elicit such moral panic. probably hip-hop but even that started to change right um yeah you know you mentioned in that talk you heard by suzanne cusick that you were galvanized by the response to it being this kind of meditative engagement and reflection rather than this kind of critical, you know, response debate.

which maybe is the paranoid mode of thinking. I'm trying to push a little bit towards that. And I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about, you know, your book, Just Vibrations is almost 10 years old now. I think it's...

Probably one of the things that in the kinds of introductory to musicology courses gets taught a lot. I've certainly talked about it with our students. And, you know, I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about how you came to this idea in that book of reparative work.

what you saw in the field prior to beginning work on this project that you didn't feel was reparative and what you think kind of needed to change coming out of that? I think I perceived in institutions, whether it's graduate programs or the American Musicological Society, a wishfulness that...

the things we study and the things we produce and the writing we produce can somehow be separable or separated from... the people and the very real lived conditions that produce them, almost as if intellectual labor could be autonomous or autonomized.

And why wouldn't we have that illusion, right? Like, think about just how many, as we were saying, how many papers are being given at AMS and you walking in as an individual to a conference and seeing this, like... cornucopia of knowledge dissemination and feeling so small within that universe where you would very logically have The assumption that everyone's doing fine and everyone's doing so much work and everyone's presenting their best selves and anything that is unpleasant or...

oppressive or difficult or personally challenging must live below the surface and support that knowledge display, right? And I started to think, well, you know, we all have so many challenges, whether it's funding or it's illness or disability or overwork. We don't really talk about it in our own work. If anything, it's something we reserve for a podcast episode, for example, or for a memoir down the line, or for a blog post, or for your social media post.

And that division or that separation between the self and the transparent modes through which that self is able to write and to research and to teach. Why there must be, like, yeah, it just didn't seem like a natural separation. It seemed very artificial, and I think that artifice serves to buttress this idea that the... The research production is king and everything else is subservient. And that's certainly the way that our job market seems to work. It's the way that...

the alleged meritocracy of program selection tends to appear to work. And I just wanted to dig deeper into the conditions that allow us or prevent us, allow us to or prevent us from, you know, produce what we want to produce. And I think the intro to Just Vibrations, I have this anecdote.

from Lydia Hemsley, who talks about one of the AMS conferences where there were a lot of sessions about women in music and how this male... attendee stood up and said that it wasn't his problem if his female grad students couldn't walk couldn't work late in the library because they were afraid to walk home in the dark and he said that wasn't his problem and then

Lydia recalled that Rosemary Killam stood up and said, yes, it is. It is your problem. And that was a really interesting quote for me to dwell on for a long time. I wondered to myself, what could lead any scholar to think that the safety of their students is not their problem? And what does that indicate?

if someone can have that sense of non-responsibility in their mind. And that got me... asking whether or not this kind of collective care and interdependence within any academic community that considers itself a community, whether the care of all of its... constituents is actually core to the mission of that discipline rather than an adjunct or um yeah rather than an adjunct to it so to define

To define or redefine musicology as encompassing this attentiveness to student safety, for example, in a sense. Yeah, and even more broadly, to... our community as a collective and that the research we're all doing is all part of this effort. It's hard, I think, to wrap our minds around because so much of our At least, you know, the American society is focused on individual merit and certainly your own professional trajectory depends so overwhelmingly on what you yourself produce.

single author peer-reviewed books and articles for example that we sometimes forget that we're still all in it together and when someone you know produces a beautiful and amazing and surprising piece of scholarship that it's kind of a win for all of us because that person required presumably the collective laborers past and present.

of prior researchers you know in order to to to make that knowledge happen um and that's how i you know i've talked about um in different contexts how that's how chairing a department feels sometimes where you take a step back you pause your research and then you let your colleagues fly and it's beautiful to

to watch and then when it's their turn um you feel really grateful that they are then taking on certain administrative labors that releases you from having to engage deeply in those labors and if we think of the department or you know, an academic society as a collective with that form of interdependence, perhaps it could be a more caring model. Yeah, yeah.

An important part of Just Vibrations is your own personal experiences with regards to long-term illness and chronic pain. Can you talk a little bit about... that trajectory for you and how it kind of led you to come to some of the conclusions you came to in the book towards the end of uh grad school And shortly before I started the job I'm currently in, I experienced idiopathic abdominal pain that was misdiagnosed repeatedly.

And the procedures that I was recommended to undergo by physicians, the first couple ended up, they turned out to be the wrong procedures. So I had a gallbladder removed. for apparently no good reason. And it turned out after years of misdiagnosis and seeking more opinions that... It was neuropathic pain in the abdominal wall rather than anything in the GI tract. So it was really a, the abdominal pain was a red herring in many ways.

What I learned, one thing I learned from the experience was how my inclination to do research didn't help my condition. Because doctors weren't providing me with the correct diagnoses or procedure recommendations, I did research on my own condition and was just trying to gather.

well-peer-reviewed scientific articles, medical journal articles, to diagnose myself or try to figure out how to help myself. And I remember maybe the... first or second year of this pain, walking into, and I think it was a pain clinic, and I believe the doctor was an anesthesiologist, and she told me...

I brought in a couple of printouts of medical journal articles that I thought described my conditions. And she said, you should stop reading so much and stop researching all this because it's only going to make it worse. And I thought to myself, well, no one else is helping me and I can only help myself. And so...

Eventually, so I didn't stop. I kept researching and researching until I tracked down and was able to contact through email an author of one of these articles who was also practicing the surgical procedure.

and reached out to him eventually. But so much of the moments of illness made me realize that as quickly as I seemed to enter the field of musicology, you know, how I was describing earlier, it was just through chance, it seemed, you know, talking to one person and going to a conference, and I felt like I could... be extricated, whether willingly or against my will, from that field. Because during those moments of those years of chronic pain, I found myself unable to write.

to even really go out of the house or to enjoy life um and musicology felt beside the point i had you know bigger fish to fry which is in a way why Perhaps just vibrations doesn't read necessarily like a musicological text. Yeah, I mean, that's that's just the I'm happy to answer more questions about the health.

stuff yeah yeah i mean in just in terms of to how and whether this trajectory this this or horrible years of pain for you led you to think differently about what musicology is in a sense um yeah i think it led me ultimately to think about musicology as

as a community of people who call themselves musicologists and the full encompassment, if that's a word, of what everyone who calls themselves musicologists. chooses to do with their time and their life. That seems to me a better definition than trying to say what musicology should be or what topics or methods should be practiced because I have this hunch that if you care for a community of people and enable them to flourish and be creative and weird, amazing.

uh results follow um whereas if you try to tell this entire community that these are the topics that are either acceptable or in vogue or will net you social and intellectual capital and these are the methods that you should follow because they're the newest and most approved by consensus types of methods then you're already limiting

that landscape of potential knowledge production before people are even free to run wild in it. So why not open it up and say everyone's welcome and everyone show us your coolest.

work which by the way is what i feel like uh ams program selection could and perhaps should be which is instead of having anonymous review procedures of abstracts where, if I'm recalling correctly, perhaps 25% of papers get accepted each year, perhaps just have all AMS members, you know, people who are paying dues to this professional society.

Maybe everyone gets to present the paper every three years. And that's just how it works. And that way we get to see everyone's cool work rather than having a small committee select. from very short abstracts, you know, the kinds of topics they think are meritorious enough to make it to the national program. Yeah, that's really interesting.

A lot of people have read Just Vibrations. Just wonderful. A lot of people have taught it. And you've presumably given lots of talks about that book. And I'm wondering if... what you learned from the response to just vibrations, what you feel like the effect of that work might have had. And we'll talk about.

loving music till it hurts as well because i'm sure that many of the things you learned are part of that uh book too i think the book has reached people who most needed to hear some of the things in it or to see some of the things in it in print reached people who would otherwise say similar things if they were in greater positions of privilege and institutional.

authority i also think perhaps it resonated with people who were looking for alternate ways of writing and of thinking and also because the book reflects pretty explicitly on the challenges of writing itself and the purpose of writing in ways that conform to expectations of rhetorical excellence, that reflexivity. allows people to cut themselves some slack such that they realize there are lots of different ways to sound one way or the other and we all speak and write.

differently because we have different models and we grow up differently. There have also been negative reactions, critical reactions from uh people who say this isn't musicology which is not necessarily what i was trying to do with i wasn't trying to write a musicological book um or that there's no music in it or that it's kind of playing into woke culture. This was perhaps before woke became so politically charged, but I can totally see people accusing the book of...

perpetuating a certain like what we would today call wokeness. I just want to make it clear that when I first started writing what would become the book Just Vibrations, it started out as a 10,000 word article that I presented a couple places and then tried submitting to various journals. And I submitted it to three different journals, you know, one after the other. And you would be familiar. I'm not going to say what the journals are, but you're familiar with all of the journals.

And it was roundly rejected. And the critique was precisely that it was too much of a state of the field type of piece rather than an actual research. project and um after the three rejections oh and a press rejected the book when i or the manuscript when i tried to to submit it um So it went through, you know, four rejections and it was hard not to stop. I just thought, you know, this writing is not meant for the world and put it away for a bit.

editor at Michigan read it and actually kind of believed in it. And that's when it broadened into a short book. But I guess I just want to say that because I can only imagine, I don't know, younger scholars these days facing rejection for the first time, whether it's an article or a book manuscript or proposal. really not having much clarity as to why it was rejected and whether or not they're in the minority and what they're doing wrong.

What I've realized is so much of peer review is idiosyncratic, and it's luck of the draw, and I think it's hard not to lose hope when you face multiple rejections, but, you know, to the... The grad students or the people listening, junior scholars listening, I just hope that they know not to take it personally or to think that it's something wrong with their own writing or the topic they've chosen.

that sometimes it's completely out of your hands and continuing to show your work to people, including people who think differently than you.

eventually you'll find your people and your sense of collectivity and um yeah keep going so the loving music tilts hurts one thing i want to talk about with that book which we kind of already touched on is the mode of writing where where you intertwine kind of the scholarly and the personal um and you talked a little bit

about what kind of brought you to that style of thinking. But the other thing that I wanted to talk about is one of the things that we are taught i was taught and many other musicologists are taught is you kind of and presumably you were at some point you become this kind of specialist in a specific thing and you're encouraged to a certain degree stay within that bubble or maybe develop a couple specialties but

That book and your work generally is incredibly wide ranging. You deal with kind of the mythology of classical music, blind auditions, Britney Spears. How do you kind of input in... placing together the case studies of that book, or even just thinking about what you want to work on, how do you kind of come to those topics and then try to begin to hold them together to make a larger point about music's mystiques or dangers?

Yeah, in loving music till it hurts, I think, you know, one of the main claims that I make is that, so loving music till it hurts. addresses uh a question that i think i've always had about music ever since perhaps early college years when i remember you know how it is in when you first get to college you meet new friends they share their musical tastes with you you share yours with them you have all these conversations around artists and which are best and which are cool um and realizing that

um people are judging you based on what you tell them you like in terms of you know composers and and singers and such um and that you too are perhaps consciously or not, judging people and trying to figure out, oh, what can I tell about someone based on the music they listen to or the music they perform?

That's just been a through line in my mind, even as I pursue different kinds of research topics. And when I came to write the book Loving Music Until It Hurts, I really wanted to just draw out that theme. and think more broadly about how we, for lack of a better word, use music as a proxy to judge others or to oppress them or to lift them up. or to welcome them into our circles or to push them away. And even though musicologists have been pretty explicit and verbose about...

the dangers of mythologizing music and musical aptitude and affinity as proxies for any kind of moral personhood, right? Like just loving Beethoven does not make you necessarily a good person. I think we know that or we... We know to say that. But I think there's a difference between knowing to say it and knowing it in our phones, like actually disabusing ourselves of that learned behavior.

You know, it's a survival, social survival mechanism to judge people based on anything, based on how they dress, how they look, what music they listen to. We're just trying to gather more information as these, you know, infinitely curious. species but it's so dangerous because you can make really wrong assumptions about people and And social media shows us just how frequently and aggressively people can attack others based on a bad national anthem performance.

you know a de-auto-tuned leaked footage of one of your tracks right um and why the stakes are not you know that high it's someone trying to perform music at their best um Why shame people publicly for a seeming lapse in musical taste or aptitude? Or, yeah, why assume the worst of someone based on... on the music they listen to or right um so that's been that was the through line yeah one thing that's

So your work offers a kind of intervention, I think, within musicology, but much of your work is also not necessarily, whether it's books or otherwise, aimed at exclusively academic audiences. We were on a public... I guess it was called a public musicology panel a couple years ago at AMS. And, you know, I was talking about like how to make a cool podcast. And you were talking about very profound work around questions of sexual abuse and violence in the El Sistema program in Venezuela.

Can you talk a little bit about some of the communities you've worked with outside of the academy, whether it's the El Sistema example or otherwise, and how that's kind of changed your view of what we can do within the academy? And first, I'd like to say that... I think podcasting is really important. I was very nervous, by the way, to come on a podcast because I don't think I've done a podcast or at least a full length one before. I kept telling my friends like.

That's my worst nightmare to speak on the record. Well, you got to do like five more and then you'll develop much worse nightmares than this. I'd say this is a low stakes nightmare.

So I've enjoyed writing like op-eds and features on various subjects. And since you asked about the El Sistema example, uh the scholar uh jeff baker who wrote a book about all system and i we collaborated a few years ago um uh on an op-ed about There were participants, students of El Sistema, alums of El Sistema, the Venezuelan state-sponsored music education program, who had come forward to Jeff or me and or...

myself, and shared their stories of sexual grooming and abuse within that system. And Jeff and I decided to write an op-ed together. trying to share some of these stories in anonymized forms to draw attention to some of the failings of El Sistema. I don't know if I mentioned this during that panel we were on, but we pitched it to, I'd say, 25 places with the assistance of a lot of classical music critics.

and people who we were hoping could connect us to the right editors. We had a team trying to help us place this article. And I remember sending just pitch after pitch, just copy, paste, copy, paste. Had a calendar for follow-ups, like, you know, if you hadn't heard from this, you know, bump the pitch. and just we would get silence or outright rejections uh the rejections that gave any explanation as to why it was rejected basically said um

legal liabilities were not, um, were, you know, uh, could not be ignored and therefore they could not publish what they consider to be, you know, quote unquote unsubstantiated allegations. Um, Eventually, the Washington Post, I think we pitched them and then they said no. And then they reached back out and said, sure. And I don't know what happened, but they published our piece. They translated it into Spanish a couple of days.

later um and my understanding was that there were internal motions within el sistema The admins presumably had seen the op-ed to redress or to formalize certain policies that would serve the protection of students better. I remember, and I might be misremembering, Because that was Denver AMS, right? That was the AMS. Yep, that was Denver. Okay, I was like, horrible. I couldn't deal with the altitude. But I seem to remember you talking about...

The students who had suffered abuse and you were describing musicology as encompassing people who had thought about these experiences and not just the people in the room of the AMS. Is that accurate? And can you talk a little bit more about that? I don't quite recall that, but it sounds like something I would say. Maybe the question is, when you think about who practices musicology, how wide does that...

What does it mean? Is it those who simply write the op-eds or is it those who are the interlocutors and those who are the subjects of the writing in that sense? Yeah, I think absolutely. Any interlocutor, anyone who's living in... or through or despite musical institutions and practices and systems and communities, they're living musicological lives regardless of whether that experience is translated into

words on a page right or even a post on on a social media account um we so uh in our kind of scriptocentric world privilege the written word and the peer-reviewed published word that I think sometimes we forget or undervalue the ephemeral and the experiences that people have that then live in their bodies that then radiate outwards in ways that might not contain explicit musicological or musical traces. But that's all part of this ecosystem that allows us, the people who actually...

formally considers ourselves practicing musicologists, enables us to write things and to share knowledge, right? That pipeline is, well, I don't even want to use, say, pipeline because that makes it sound so linear. It is an ecosystem. And I think recognition is inequitably distributed. different forms of inhabiting knowledge and making knowledge available are quite undervalued as compared to articles and journals and books.

So absolutely, I'd want to expand that circle of who gets to be a musicologist or who gets to be musicological. Because what are the stakes anyway? Why are we policing the boundaries of a discipline when... it's constantly shifting and very amorphous to begin with. The question that you started this conversation with, you know, about the state of musicology, it's unanswerable.

anyone who you know tries to look into the crystal ball to figure out what it is now but it will be in 10 years um i think in a way we're doing the field a disservice, because any attempt to define becomes a potential fulfillment of a prophecy before the fact, right? Especially if you are...

like a recognized figure in the field. And if you're giving like a plenary talk or if you're giving a keynote or if you're just coming on a podcast about sound expertise, like those words carry weight and people. including younger scholars who are just entering the field, they might not take your words as opinion or as just a personal... presumption, they might think that it's more authoritative and more definitional and prescriptive than even you, the speaker, would intend it to be.

Yeah, that's why I really like the question, like, what is the state of the field? But I'm also so nervous. Yeah, of course. Well, you mentioned kind of alternative modes of production, and that might be a good way to talk about it. your ongoing project, Touching Pitch, which is a memoir and an album and a role-playing game and probably some other stuff that I'm not getting. Can you talk a little bit about the origins of this project and actually what it is?

Sure. I think I've decided as of rather recently to disaggregate the role-playing game from the album memoir. So I think I'm going to publish the album memoir. and that is an album of live improvisation, so recordings of live classical piano improvisations across various performances and events. and prose slash poetry in between as kind of interludes speaking to the subject of classical improvisation as everyday practice.

What I found interesting about improvising in the classical style is that it was very well-established and... auth performed practice in the 19th century. It's kind of died off. People have written about this and theorized extensively as to why classical improvisation has declined.

I'm in particular interested in the continued exceptionalism or exceptionalization of Western classical music precisely because today it largely rejects improvisation in favor of perfect executions of established repertoire, right? Scholars and performers like Vijay Ayer have warned that it's actually perhaps dangerous to think about Western classical music as one of the only traditions where improvisation is rejected.

quote-unquote relegating improvisation as the thing that jazz artists and Black creative artists do. What does that do to our sense of the... racialized politics of musicology and our traditional subjects of study. Yeah, the other memoirish parts will include just this idea of the everyday and how the mundanity of trying to improvise classically inevitably leads to improvements and in one's skills and sense of the instrument.

I also talk a bit about AI. We're in this age where people are very actively creating algorithmic and generative models that can... you know, perhaps imitate Bach or sound like Mozart or pass a Turian test that convinces you that this is Beethoven. And one of the things I'm thinking about is how... For some musicians, they've often or always been accused of having or possessing a musical aptitude or intelligence that is deemed less than real meaning.

kind of artificial, whether it's let's say stereotypes of Asian classical musicians who go to conservatories. And then the critics complain that they play like robots, right? Or they don't have any, you know, enlightenment soul in them. Or when they do play in ways that please.

you know white critics they say oh it's so surprising that and you know people have uh written about this grace wang others um and yeah i'm thinking about how um musicians uh Yeah, especially minoritized musicians have always had to prove that their musicality is not artificial and that it is in fact authentic, even if they don't look white or don't look the part.

um this goes to another point which is uh that you know one claim i make is that classical music um isn't white um even if the hashtag of classical music so white is pervasive and rightfully so as a critique because in my estimation classical music has long been sustained, perpetuated, enriched, spread. by people of all backgrounds, especially in today's globalized age. So it no longer makes sense to portray classical music as essentially white when it's simply not.

that the reality uh these days and for let's just say asian musicians to continue to have to deal with a perpetual foreigner stereotype uh or stereotype threat I think that's unacceptable. And I think improvisation is one of many modalities through which... we can start to dismantle these very old school perceptions of where this music came from and whom it's for and who gets to call it their own.

I think that's a great place to leave it. Thank you so much. Thanks, Will. You can read more about his work on our website soundexpertise.org. Even after the show ends, our inbox will remain open and we would love to hear from you about the show, your goodbyes, your thoughts. You can email us at soundexpertise00 at gmail or tag me on Twitter or Insta at seatedovation.

A final round of huge thanks. I'm eternally grateful to D. Edward Davis, our producer and creator of our amazing theme music, for engineering and producing every episode of Sound Expertise. I could not do this show without him. Thank you, Eddie. You can check out his music on SoundCot at Warm Silence. I'm also very grateful to Andrew Del Antonio for transcribing our episodes to continue to make them more accessible.

I'm grateful to my institutional home as well, the University of Maryland School of Music, for supporting the show, and to my wife Emily and my kids Ira and Goldie for simply being the best. There is no next week on Sound Expertise, so I'll just say one final goodbye and thanks. Thank you all so, so much for listening, subscribing, and being a part of our podcast community. I hope you continue to share our episodes and keep this corner of music scholarship a part of your lives. Thank you.