thinkfetti

In a previous post, I wrote about a few of the most significant challenges facing me as a music professor and conductor at a small science and engineering university located in a remote area. But I don’t think the issues are specific to my location. Instead, looking at the folding of major orchestras in this country and many other factors such as educational trends and funding models, I believe this is a widespread, multifaceted cultural phenomenon. Now, given these challenges, what can/should be done?

In product design, it’s common to talk about a product’s life cycle. There are plenty of empirical and model-based theories about life cycles, most of which talk about growth, maturity, and decline phases. What would happen if we were to talk about the orchestra as a product, a designed system that has a relatively well-defined functionality? Into which phase of the product life cycle would you put the orchestra?

Going further…. If you were the product manager of this particular product, the orchestra, how would you evaluate the market situation, and what would you suggest?

In evaluating the music program at my (science and engineering-focus) university and thinking about possible future directions, I have drafted a “re-envisioning” of myself, which I will describe in later entries. Here is a sketch of the constellation of problems I am trying to address:

• There is a paucity of students and community participants who read conventional music notation fluently. This impacts both what material can be covered in music courses and how (and if) ensembles learn their music.
• The university, with no degree offerings in the arts and located in a small, rural, underserved community, is not well-positioned to facilitate conventional instrumental ensembles such as an orchestra or big band jazz ensemble. Conventional instrumental ensembles such as these are harder to sustain than choral ensembles, because 1) beginning adult singers can advance more rapidly than beginning adult instrumentalists, particularly in the absence of private instrumental instruction, and 2) most choral music has only a handful of independent parts, making it easier to perform with limited numbers of performers.
• Community members enjoy performing on stage in large, musical theatre performances, but productions of this type use time, money, and personnel resources without facilitating sustainable growth of music program ensembles in terms of numbers of participants or performance ability.

I am the university’s sole performing arts professor. To justify my salary, the university is most interested in the quantity of people enrolled in music ensembles and courses (the more, the better), but as for my own vitality as an artist, I am sustained by quality (the better, the better). My job is to teach, but I would have more personal resources to bring to the classroom and the rehearsal hall if my work were set up to reliably provide me with some experiences of high quality artistic interaction and creation.

Part of my job is teaching music to undergraduate science and engineering majors – both teaching about music and teaching music. Yesterday’s music appreciation class did not work. Now, there are many ways a class can fail to work. The class crashed on a technological problem that resulted from my efforts to make the class work better…

The problem I’m trying to solve:

One of the chief difficulties in teaching music appreciation is that music comes at you linearly in time ([not always->http://infosthetics.com/archives/2006/09/giant_steps_music_animation.html]); after hearing a piece through, there’s no way to physically point at part of it (music notation is a topic for another day). The listener has to rely on memory to analyze, compare, describe. (Similar to Edward Tufte’s rants about PowerPoint [here->http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html] or [here->http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint] – layering of information in time, instead of space.) And for a piece of music that is unfamiliar — and one that is word-free, no text to hold on to — this is extremely difficult. Most untrained listeners can only manage comments such as “I liked it,” or “that one sounded happier than the other one.” That’s not deep enough. So, how to get around the memory issue? Sure, memory can develop, especially when it is given a framework of concepts to work with, to enable some realtime analysis/processing. But in the meantime, before the listener’s ability to use memory has evolved — can we discuss music in some substantial way?

What I tried:

For yesterday’s class, I spent an extra couple of hours ahead of time chopping up the pieces we were going to discuss into small soundbites. Just got started in class, and the iPod froze, at the end of the first clip. A student helped me reset it, and we went on. But then the iPod froze again. And again. I was trying to stop the clip near the end, so it wouldn’t go on precipitously to the next clip, but the iPod did not like it, and threw in the towel.

Meta:

The soundbite approach is worth me spending more time to figure out, but I was very frustrated. I know the class will be better for this, and I’m all for experimentation. But to add some self-observation — I just wanted it to work, and it didn’t, and I got very unhappy. Welcome to innovation – fail as rapidly as possible – I wonder if I can re-tune myself to enjoy that part.

P.S.:

I was able to get something to work by converting the music into audiobook format and adding chapters, using a [tool->http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050628120738853&query=chapters] from Apple and a [GUI add-on->http://www.oldjewelsoftware.com/products/podcastav/]. Thanks to student Jim Slutz for showing me chapters.