This is an almost-verbatim transcript of my inaugural lecture as Stevens-Bristow Endowed Professor at Plymouth State University, "What Do I Teach Them NOW?," delivered on November 8, 2024. I've embedded links to referenced audio examples in the body of the text below.  Video of the lecture is available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKnCQoedGfs

Good afternoon, everybody! I should say at the beginning that what I’d really like to do now is put on a 45-minute mixtape of my music and just sit down and let you listen to that, because that speaks the best for me. I’ll only play short excerpts from my works today that are illustrative of things I’m going to be talking about, except for one piece which I will play in its entirety, and it’s an unexpected choice for a lecture like this (there’s a nice teaser for you). For more information about my stuff, including links to audio files of just about all of it, if you visit www.jonathansantore.com, you can get access to all of that.

​Today, I’ll be talking about

• how I used to compose and teach,
• how an encounter with a student using a new tool in an unexpected way led me on a creative journey with that new tool (helped massively along that path by collaborative creative experiences cooked up with my colleagues here at Plymouth State), and
• how using and thinking about that new tool has affected my pedagogy, both in the classroom and in a much larger sense.

I should also say before I start that I’m going to be using a term that struck me as weird when it came to mind, and that term is “made manifest,” or “making manifest,” which has a real Biblical, oracular sound to it. But I mean by that very simply the idea of taking imagined sounds – imagined music –and getting them out in the world, where other people can hear them. So that’s what I mean by that.

I don’t play a lot of instruments. I was a very serious trumpet player once upon a time, I know just enough piano to be dangerous, and I studied voice to some extent in college. But early on, knew I wanted to be a composer, and that I wanted to write for “classical,” “orchestral,” pick an adjective here – acoustic media that relied on music notation. Once upon a time, if you heard a sound in your head for one of these instruments, there was a huge information barrier you had to cross to get from what you heard in your head to having it played out in the world for others to hear. Here’s an example from a piece I wrote in 2006 called Later. It was a piece for narrator and orchestra, and the little excerpt I’m going to play is a viola solo that you’ll hear being played by our emeritus colleague Rodger Ellsworth. I might have picked it because I love viola – viola’s probably my favorite string instrument because it encompasses both the thrilling highs of the violin and the deep, resonant lows of the cello. I might have picked it because the text was written by our beloved colleague Liz Ahl, who’s been an inspiration to me throughout my time here. So, here’s an excerpt from Later.

https://soundcloud.com/jonathansantore/1-sb-later-viola-solo

So it turns out there’s a whole bunch of things I had to know to get from the imagined sound of that solo in my head to actually hearing it. One of the things I needed to know is that viola reads in alto clef – it’s the only orchestral instrument that reads in that particular clef. I knew that to get the distinctive sound that I wanted out of the viola, I wanted to be in as low a register as possible on the instrument, so I needed to know that the lowest note on the viola is the C below middle C on the piano, and it turns out that the solo you just heard started on the C below middle C. I needed to know enough about how bowing works on the instrument to tell the performer when, where, and how to switch the direction of the bow. Specifically, I don’t know if you heard it, but the next to last note in that solo has a very strong accent, and in order to get that strong accent, I had to lay out the entire bowing for the passage to make sure that the bow ended up at the “hand end,” the frog of the bow, so I could get a downstroke on that note.

Now, multiply that by all the individual orchestral string instruments, and all the woodwind and brass and percussion instruments, and all the different choral voice parts, and all the different characteristics of those voices when they’re heard in solo –  if I heard the sound of those acoustic media in my head and wanted to make those sounds manifest to others , I needed to learn and know a lot of arcane information about what each of them is capable of, and also how to communicate what I wanted them to play through the medium of musical notation – not just the notation that I used in my performance practice as a trumpet player and pianist and singer, but in the notation practice that they use in theirs.

As I was writing this speech, I remembered a term from the training of London cab drivers. I don’t know if you knew about this, but if you’re getting your cabbie license in London, you have to pass a massive test where you are able to prove you know every arcane shortcut and byway and route and path through the greater London area. London cabbies refer to this as “The Knowledge.” And that’s how I started to think about this big blob of stuff I needed to know in order to write all this music I was hearing in my head. If you wanted to have these sounds made in the world, you either needed to have The Knowledge, or you needed to find someone who had The Knowledge to help you out.

The best known case of this is George Martin with the Beatles. Now Martin was their producer, yes, but Martin was also a “classically” trained composer and arranger, so he was able to bring his mastery of The Knowledge to serve their musical needs. I just did a lesson with a class about the song “Yesterday.” “Yesterday” is Paul McCartney’s song, soup to nuts – except for the string quartet part that sends it into the empyrean. The way that happened is that Paul McCartney came over to George Martin’s house, and they sat together at George Martin’s piano and George Martin orchestrated it for string quartet.

As a creative artist, I saw my work as taking the musical sounds I heard in my head, and using The Knowledge to convert them into printed materials, informed by the hundreds of facts that I had to keep in mind about each of the instruments and voices involved, rendered in the forms of musical notation that would accurately communicate my intentions so that other musicians could actually make them manifest as sound. As a teacher, my work was to deepen my students’ grasp of The Knowledge – to teach them about musical structure through the lens of notation, and to help them deepen their ability to translate from notated music to internally imagined music to sounding music, and vice versa.

For my students who were training to be K-12 music educators, they would in turn impart these skills to their students. They too need The Knowledge, with a slightly different spin – they need to be able to guide a young student with an interest in any one of these instruments or voice parts to successful initial experiences using them. Think about that for a second – that’s what we train our music education students to be able to do in the field. They come out, and if a young person wants to play trombone, or viola, or flute, or wants to sing mezzo-soprano, our music education students guide them there through their mastery of The Knowledge. At this point in our field, students studying music at the college/university level were absolutely expected to read musical notation with some degree of fluency – how can they acquire The Knowledge if they don’t speak the language that The Knowledge is written in?

Now at the same time, the world of electronic music, music technology was going on in parallel, both in the wider field of music and here at Plymouth State. My colleague Rik Pfenninger, who started his career as a music educator and jazz performer and composer, was deeply involved in this world and led our successful program in Music Tech. At that time, from my view, I wasn’t particularly interested in that world. It occupied a slightly different aesthetic space, I was not particularly interested in the sound palettes that were available, and frankly I was pretty darn happy doing what I was doing -- creating the music that I wanted to create, and getting the sounds that I wanted to make manifest in the world.

I should also say here that I was deeply engaged in one little corner of music technology directly related to my work, music notation software. Its use immensely sped up the process of getting from the imagined music to the notated music – miles and miles and miles faster than, by the time I was doing it, pencil and paper and photocopy machines, but for the generation just before me, India ink and paper. Very difficult process.  By the way, I just got some interesting news, which is I found out that the software I’ve been using to do this since 1987, which is called Finale, is going off the market. The program is too old – it can’t be updated anymore, and frankly it’s not very commercially competitive with other things that are going on. This created a furor in my world, which I didn’t think was going to cross over, but, as it turns out, the story about it shutting down turned up as a featured article on Slate.com. That happened primarily because it turns out that the vast majority of the most successful composers on Broadway also use the notation software that I use. At any rate, the fact that all those composers are missing out on it hasn’t shifted the opinion of the company, so I have learning a new notation software in front of me soon. And that’s okay.

So there I am – I’m getting nice recognition for my work. As with all artists, I’m hoping for more. There was the famous quote when Gertrude Stein was asked “What do writers want?” She laughed and responded “Praise, praise, praise!” Even people working in the “classical” world want to have their work picked up by certain record labels, get mentioned in certain magazines or media outlets, etc. So I was hoping for that. But, I was getting to work with really talented students, and it’s especially joyful when I get to work with them as collaborators. Here’s an excerpt from a piece I wrote in 2011 for two people who were at that time students, and who have gone on to success in their fields. Jennifer Fijal (now Jennifer Fijal Brevik), mezzo-soprano, and Molly Finkel, bassoonist, came to me and asked me to write them a piece, and it was great. This is settings of two letters by the Roman poet Sulpicia, described in Wikipedia as “one of the few female Roman poets whose work survives.” So here’s just a little excerpt from that.

https://soundcloud.com/jonathansantore/2-sb-two-letters-of-sulpicia-acoustic-excerpt

It occurs to me as I’m talking that that performance happened right about here (where I was standing on stage).

So I’m bopping along, doing my thing, working with students, loving everything that’s going on, and then in the Fall of 2012, a student came into my office for a private lesson in composition and played me an orchestral work they’d created. It knocked my socks off. It was nuanced, subtle, beautifully orchestrated, demonstrating to my ear all the command of The Knowledge necessary to create a substantial work of music. But, I knew the student. I had them in my Musicianship classes. I knew that their command of the notational and structural knowledge was … kinda shaky. I know they didn’t know what the lowest note on the viola was! But there was the piece. They’d created it using a Digital Audio Workstation computer program, or DAW, driving digital samples of acoustic instruments. They’d created a work that was right in my aesthetic wheelhouse, without needing much of The Knowledge at all. And that’s when I thought, “Buddy, you better really learn something about all of this.”

My first step was choosing a DAW – I had to choose which program to purchase to drive the digital sounds, and which sounds to purchase to be driven by the program. I spent a long time – about a year or so – asking people in the field which way to go with this. I should add as a side note here that this is still a difficult decision, and thinking about ways to make that decision easier for entry-level students is a major part of my upcoming research. So, by the Fall of 2014, I’d completed that research, acquired the necessary tools to begin exploring the DAW, and … it sat around for a while! I had my teaching duties to attend to, and I had a full list of commissions for acoustic works in the style and the way of writing that I was accustomed to doing.

So getting familiar with the DAW waited until about the spring of 2016, when my colleagues Paul Mroczka, Amanda Whitworth, Matt Kizer, our former colleague Emily Jaworski, and a friend and collaborator of Amanda’s named Charmy Wells, all were getting together to start to create what for me felt like a very strange multimedia work. But I was all in, because those are great, fabulous, interesting people to work with, and I said yes, and I’m going to create the music for this using my DAW.  Now there’s a major commitment – about 25 minutes’ worth of music and soundscape, using a tool you don’t really know yet. That’s a good way to learn a tool.

This was a multimedia work called Brilliant Being, about a post-apocalyptic environment, basically. I got to play with a lot of fun stuff as I was starting to create that piece, including the manipulation of sounds found in nature – that’s known in the field as musique concrete. I acquired a digital recorder – you know, put in older terms, CD-quality recordings right in the palm of my hand with two AA batteries, which was amazing – and I started to run around and irritate my friends, asking them to make sounds into this recorder. Two of the people I ended up recording doing that were Amanda and Emily, and here’s a recording of them making some fun sounds (I described these sounds as “Amanda Whammmp,” “Buzzy NNNNN,” and “Emily Na”), followed by some of the sounds that I ended up creating using those original sounds.

https://soundcloud.com/jonathansantore/3-sb-brilliant-being-orig-sounds-effects-made

So those sounds were audio representations of otherworldly obstacles that the characters were encountering as they traversed this post-apocalyptic landscape. Because the thing that was doing the bulk of the work to create the sense of the physical space was projections, rather than handing out programs and stuff, we were able to create a closing credits sequence. Here’s an excerpt from the final scene of the work, giving you just a little taste of the soundscape that was going on in the rest of the piece, and the closing credit theme itself.

https://soundcloud.com/jonathansantore/4-sb-brilliant-being-closing-credits-remix

So in doing that, I was learning how to manipulate the digital instruments – both the ones that were drawn from natural sounds and the ones that were totally synthesized – in order to make their sounds and responses more natural. You can hear there that, even in my digital work, I’m drawn to acoustic sounds. Their specificity resonates with me. You can also hear that I really like the crunchy interaction of individual tone colors – what’s referred to in the “Classical” music world as chamber music sounds, rather than big sectional sounds.

Great! That premiered in September 2016. It went very well. All that work was put in, I was set up to continue mightily with the DAW, and then I didn’t do anything else with it until Summer 2017! The academic year intervened. At that time, I was just trying to increase my command of what the DAW could do, so I tried creating some things that were frankly more commercial in approach, that might prove useful as audio for various video contexts. This is an excerpt from a piece I called “Inspector Clavinet,” where I was inspecting a digital version of an actual electromechanical instrument, the clavinet. You know the clavinet if you’ve ever heard anything by Stevie Wonder, who put his hands on it and ascended into heaven the minute he touched it. One thing that’s interesting to me is that the clavinet is an electromechanical version of a very, very old musical instrument, the clavichord, in which a tiny metal wedge hits a string. They basically took a clavichord and put pickups on it, and that’s the clavinet. So here’s a little excerpt of me messing around with this in “Inspector Clavinet.”

https://soundcloud.com/jonathansantore/5-sb-inspector-clavinet-excerpt
​
Did you hear that? Did you hear that little “thwack” at the end? I LOVE those little particular sounds in acoustic music that are often like a byproduct or something that’s not the main meat of the sound, and using digital samples allows me to explore those little sounds very deeply without asking a live human being, who would eventually hit me with something, to make those noises over and over and over again. “That’s great – can you release those keys 150 more times, please? Thank you …”

So great. I made those, and then it went back on the shelf again, until another collaborative art piece came up. This time … The people I have gotten to work with at Plymouth State University have been fabulous – inspiring, spurring me on to do great, creative stuff. This second collaborative work came about in association with my colleagues Liz Ahl, Nick Sevigney, Amanda Whitworth, and we were later joined by a metalwork artist named Ray Ciemny that Amanda knew (because Amanda is the best-connected artist in northern New England). And we were kicking around ideas for an exhibition that was going to open in the Museum of the White Mountains in February, 2019. Now, we decided to make up a person named Lara Linowicz. In the universe we were creating, Lara had somehow been present in the greater New York City area from the sixties forward, and had interacted with all the important artists in the New York scene during that time. I decided to create digital work for this exhibition, and the best news was that I had a sabbatical coming up in Spring 2018.

If you’re not in academia and you wonder what the deal is with a sabbatical – this is what it’s for. I threw myself into digital music creation completely for that semester, hours and hours and hours a day spent in the studio with the door closed, working with the DAW, creating and refining the product, totally immersed. It was great. One big work I created for that exhibition was called Imagined Artifacts and Surprise Reveal. It was works inspired by or in the style of four very important musicians in the 60s/70s, all of whom were early pioneers in electric/electronic/digital music, and all of whom had had interactions with Lara Linowicz in this universe we were creating. So I’m going to play a little excerpt of that now, and you’re about to hear me inhabit the compositional skin of Bob Dylan, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and, with the help of Marcia Santore, Laurie Anderson.

https://soundcloud.com/jonathansantore/6-sb-imagined-artifacts-excerpts

(WARNING: the next paragraph contains spoilers! Skip ahead to the following paragraph if you want to hear all of Imagined Artifacts and Surprise Reveal and experience the reveal for yourself.)

So those four excerpts were from the “Imagined Artifacts” of the title – my favorite part of the work is the “Surprise Reveal” in the last movement, where the listener finds out that the entire piece is an elaborate, extended RickRoll! Every movement contains lyrics and/or musical content adapted from “Never Gonna Give You Up.” I don’t know if you noticed me as Bob Dylan was singing the title of that song, which was “I Will Not Surrender You” – the movement Marcia was doing was called “Easter Eggs,” because of all the stuff that’s hidden in there, etc. etc. Working on this for me was very much like the traditional pedagogical technique of style composition – write a piece in the style of X, which helps you both deepen your understanding of X’s technique and develop your own. I learned how to record voices, how to alter them to sound like they were in a recording of a lo-fi radio broadcast or coming through a megaphone, I had complex mixing tasks to do in that, etc. etc.

At the same time in the middle of this, and working with Amanda as one of the collaborators on this, I was reminded of a story Amanda told me about a piece that she had created early in her career as a choreographer. It involved the dancers on stage all throwing spoons back and forth – spoons were all over the stage – and I started to think, what would happen if I recorded a bunch of spoons dropping and messed around with those sounds (which goes back to this idea of musique concrete that I was talking about earlier)? I came up with a piece that was called Schiller’s Spoons (that was Amanda’s name when she created the original piece that this story reminded me of). Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of the piece where you hear one of the original, untransformed spoon recordings, and then you get to hear a bit of what I transformed them into.

https://soundcloud.com/jonathansantore/7-sb-schillers-spoons-excerpt

So just a reminder – all the sounds in that were derived from those initial recordings of spoons dropping – the big, resonant tamtam sound you heard, the smaller things that sounded like Indonesian Gamelan gongs, even that little “boom” that sounded like a percussion hit on a tabla or a conga drum. All of that came from the spoon sounds. The other thing I did, in a nod to my traditional composer roots, was that the passage you just heard was spelling out Amanda’s name in musical notation using the letters. That’s a very old trick that people have been using for many, many years.

Okay. I’m about to play the only piece of mine that I will play in its entirety, which I also created during this Spring 2018 sabbatical. I’m blessed to belong to the first generation of American composers that grew up after the great tonal vs. atonal wars of the 60s and 70s. I’ve always felt that I can make whatever music I want to, whenever I want to (unlike, say, the American serialist composer Milton Babbit, who was well-known to have a trunk full of Broadway show tunes in his apartment that he did not allow to be released to the wider world because he didn’t think he was “supposed to be” writing music like that). I grew up in east Tennessee, and was always attracted to the popular humorous country songwriters of my childhood – Roger Miller, Jim Stafford, Jerry Reed. Later on (I think from his early appearances on Saturday Night Live), I heard and fell in love with the music of Leon Redbone. With those influences in mind, let me introduce you to Uncle Geezum Tugly (his middle name is Bud). You might find the humor in this a little sophomoric, and that’s very relevant. So give me a second here to get my tech straightened out for this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0KvuDvRvPg

So how is this song relevant to this entire lecture? At the time I made this song manifest, I had actually created it 35 years earlier, during my sophomore year of college. I heard it in my head, in its entirety, sounding exactly like that. But I didn’t play guitar, or tuba, or clarinet, or drums, and it never seemed worth my while to write it out, to gather that particular group of performers together, and to get them to make it manifest. But now I could. Just as my student in the Fall of 2012 could create that orchestral piece, could make that sound manifest in the world, without The Knowledge, so too could I make this song manifest in the world, without access to a Leon Redbone-style quartet willing to learn and perform my piece. Just as my student did, I could imagine a very specific musical sound and make it manifest in the world, without the intervention of third parties, and with a much flatter learning curve than ever before. What I learned here, finally, after 4 years of serious work with it, is that the Digital Audio Workstation has truly democratized access to the means of musical production.

What do we do with that? How does that manifest itself in the way we teach music in the 21st century? With all this in mind, what do I teach them now? The first question for music in higher education is, under this new paradigm (I have to interrupt to say that I owe Marcia Santore $5 for my use of the word “paradigm”) for musical creation, how necessary is fluency in music notation? This is a question Rik Pfenninger was thinking about deeply before his retirement in 2020 – he’d started work on a degree program that deemphasized work in traditional notation. Around this time, I started using the term “digital-first” musicians to describe the students and prospective students whose initial contact with music had come not through performing music on an instrument or voice, whether working with notation or by ear, but through a digital audio workstation. I see this trend happening nationwide, where traditional schools of music are seeing huge increases in interest in digital music creation and are doing nothing to embrace that shift of interest. They send digital musicians “over there” somewhere, often to an entirely different school or administrative unit within the university, or to another institution entirely. It’s a recipe for self-destruction.

After Rik’s retirement, I took over the development of the new degree program. I spent the summer of 2021 talking to alumni of our own Music Tech program, including Parish Dawe-Chadwick, now my colleague and our Recording Studio Manager here at PSU. I also talked to working digital musicians in the field about what they thought an undergraduate degree aimed at their future colleagues should entail. I spent the 22-23 academic year doing the extensive paperwork and justifications required on campus and in the University System before a new degree program can be created, and our BA in Digital Music Production and Entrepreneurship admitted its first majors in the Fall of 2023.

As we at the college/university level were seeing a shift in the musical interests of students during these years, our alumni and colleagues teaching in the public schools were seeing the same shift. The things that music educators were now being asked to do were radically different than the expectations of prior years. Music educators are now expected to introduce their students to digital creation, to help them learn instruments other than traditional band and orchestral instruments, and to help them sing and perform in the wide variety of musical styles that exist in the world today, all while continuing to provide students with the traditional performing and pedagogical experiences their field has always provided. Luckily, at the same time that the BA in Digital Music Production and Entrepreneurship was being finalized, two new colleagues joined our division who have helped us chart a course in these new directions.

Hannah Murray joined our faculty full-time as Coordinator of Vocal Studies in 2022; her encyclopedic knowledge of vocal technique and vocal health is matched by her openness to and interest in vocal performance in a wide range of styles and contexts. The same year, Harmony Markey joined our faculty full-time as Coordinator of Music Education. In addition to her extensive experience as a music teacher in the public schools, Harmony is an active singer-songwriter with an active interest in expanding the definition of “music” as taught in the public schools. In fact, Harmony was recently named a Higher Education Fellow by Music Will, an organization dedicated to bringing contemporary popular practice into the K-12 music classroom. Under Harmony’s leadership, we’ve radically revised our Music Education curriculum to ensure that the educators we graduate are fully equipped to say “Yes, And” to the wider world of popular music, including the digital music experience.
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So, what do I teach them now? What I think they need to know. I try to be open with myself and them about that, trying hard not to simply teach from my own autobiography. I can’t deny that my favorite moments are still when a student walks into my office with a notated score, but I also love the times when a student working on a new digital piece asks for advice, and I can bring my ear to their audio file with the same particularity and desire to help them achieve their aesthetic goals that I bring to a notated work.

And what about my continuing creative work? At this point, I’m moving back and forth comfortably, and in a way I find rich and interesting, between my work for traditional acoustic media and my digital work, still interested in that particularity of motion, the interaction between discrete tone colors – in the words of e.e. cummings, “abnormally fond of that precision which creates movement.” I’ve just had some notated stuff picked up by a publisher, including a new work that my colleague Jared Staub performed with the PSU Symphonic Band last November.

And remember the work I played earlier, Two Letters from Sulpicia? My former colleague Emily Jaworski approached me several years ago about a project we could work on together, and I suggested a digital reorchestration of Two Letters. She loved the idea, and included it in a larger project she was working on. Here’s a short excerpt from the digital reorchestration of that piece:

https://www.naxoslicensing.com/album/MjAwMTc4MC1kNDM0OTc/      (Track 7)

So, as it turns out, the project Emily was working on was an album of contemporary music for mezzo-soprano, and her album featuring my piece was released by Naxos Classical – a label that every contemporary composer wants to be represented on – and the album also got a “Critic’s Choice” review in Opera News, at that time the most important magazine in “classical” vocal music in the world. If you’d come up to me in the summer of 2012 and told me that my first music to get released on Naxos Classical and positively reviewed in Opera News would be digital, I might well have laughed in your face. But live and learn – I’d say that the most important things I want to teach my students now are, be open to new experiences – and don’t be afraid to learn new tricks when you’re a … late middle-aged dog. Thank you.

This is a metaphor/piece of advice that I’ve been giving to students, and discussing with colleagues and family members, and trying to take myself, for the past several years. A couple of people have mentioned it to me in recent weeks, so I thought I’d post it here.

When you’re working to complete a degree, you’re trying to fill three buckets:

1. the “degree requirements” bucket – What do I need to do to finish this bleeping degree?

2. the “life’s work” bucket – What do I feel passionate about doing with my life – what’s my calling, my vocation – and what do I need to do to pursue that?

3. the “making a living” bucket – What do I need to do to earn money after I’ve finished my degree and while I’m pursuing my life’s work?

If you’ve planned carefully and know yourself well, or if you’re extremely fortunate, the things that you’re doing to fill the first bucket will also spill over and help fill the second and third buckets. BUT, it’s a mistake to expect and assume that working to fill only one of the buckets will somehow fill the other two. The sooner and more actively you work on putting stuff into all three buckets, the fuller each bucket will be.

I could carry this metaphor in a number of directions – for example, I could go on at length about the pressure colleges and universities are under to pretend that the second bucket doesn’t exist, and to concentrate on filling the third bucket to the exclusion of everything else. However, I’ll close for now by pointing out that, once we’ve completed all the degrees we intend to complete (and that number might be zero!), we’re left with two buckets. My goal these days is to keep myself honest about putting stuff in both buckets, and not confusing one with the other.e to edit.

Comment from previous hosting site:
Victoria Cole, August 4, 2021 at 1:36 PM
Excellent teaching metaphor, Jonathan!

First of all, I see the publication date on my last blog entry and I'm ashamed! If you read the entry below, you'll see what I've been up to instead of blogging.

Earlier this month, I was honored to receive the 2018 Distinguished Teaching Award from my colleagues at Plymouth State University. Several of them have asked me to post the text of my acceptance speech somewhere -- my friend Scott Coykendall (recipient of this year's Distinguished Service Award from PSU) posted his remarks on his blog, so thanks for the idea, Scott! My only other prefatory remark -- I found out after I wrote this speech that the accomplishments of my friend Liz Ahl, who won this year's Distinguished Scholarship Award from PSU, would be read just before my speech, so I babbled out something else about her on the fly.

After some initial comments,what's contained below are many, many thanks for pedagogical and personal inspiration -- I'm very happy to have the opportunity to repeat them here.

I’m having a wonderful sabbatical. It started slowly, until I gave myself unqualified permission to focus on my individual scholarly/creative work. Now, the days are flying by all too quickly – I’m barely managing to find time to eat, pay bills, interact with other humans, etc. I’m immersed all the way over my head in my silo, and I am LOVING IT.

However, while I’m swimming around in my silo, I’m discovering more and more things that I can’t wait to share with our students starting next semester, both in my discipline and across disciplines – things about digital media; enabling constraints, DISabling constraints, and the creative process; collaboration, individuality, and hierarchy; the structure of produced objects in and out of the arts; the exploration of how the things we make represent us in the world.  In other words, my individual scholarly/creative work is feeding the teaching I will do in the future – as it has ALWAYS done, and always will do, for ALL of us in academe.

I strongly believe that my deep, passionate engagement with my specific area of scholarship and creativity led me directly to the teaching work that you have honored with this award. Our scholarly/creative work is the taproot of everything we do as university professors, and everything that leads to the success of a college or university – meaningful service, a reputation for academic excellence that SELLS, that leads to successful recruitment and retention, a prosperous and supportive alumni base, strong community support, etc. etc. etc. And of course, first and foremost, great teaching. Rich teaching. Passionate, concerned teaching.

If we as faculty believe this – that our scholarly/creative work is central to our work as teachers – then we need to speak out for it. If we as professors don’t advocate for this central truth, no one else will. If we as scholars don’t advocate for depth and rigor, even while working toward interdisciplinary breadth in a new model for higher education, then a timeless and worthwhile value of our profession will be lost. And the primary sufferers of that loss will be our students, the people we most hope to serve.

I have so many people to thank! If you think I should have mentioned your name, and I forgot – you’re right, and I’m sorry! First of all, thanks to all the wonderful teachers I’ve had in my life who aren’t in this room, who inspired me to enter this field as my life’s work. Special thanks in this regard to the Greeneville City Schools in my hometown of Greeneville, TN, and the master teachers I encountered throughout my twelve years there. They gave me a GREAT education, and taught me a lifelong lesson on the inestimable value of public education to the American people.

Thanks to all the students I’ve taught at Plymouth State, all of whom have taught me in some way, and so many of whom are now my colleagues and friends.

Thanks to the administrators here who have helped me be a better teacher for my students. I particularly want to recognize those who have won this award, or its graduate counterpart, in the past – Virginia Barry, recipient of PSU’s first Distinguished Teaching Award in 1985; Julie Bernier, recipient of the 2003 Distinguished Graduate Teaching Award; David Zehr, 2004 recipient of this award; and Cynthia Vascak, 2009 recipient. By the way, if you’d like a smile sometime, go back and look at the list of recipients of these awards – so many valued friends, wonderful teachers, great spirits!

Thanks to my colleagues and friends in the Department of Music, Theatre, and Dance for their consistent example of dedication to teaching and student success above and beyond the call of duty. I was recently copied on an email from a colleague from another department, who wrote to tell us how much she enjoyed having majors from one of our disciplines in her class this semester. She wrote: “They are responsible, engaged, thoughtful, mature, and professional. They are strong writers and strong thinkers.” This is not the first time I’ve heard such words of praise about MTD students from colleagues in other departments, and I can think of no words that make me prouder.

Today, in thinking specifically about teaching, I want to mention three MTD colleagues in particular – Dan Perkins, whom I have referred to elsewhere as “a bright light through 24 winters”; Carleen Graff, who’s given me the privilege of watching a master teacher inspire my own son to engage deeply with the field I love so much; and Beth Daily, recipient of this award in 2008, who quietly, passionately, loves her field and cares about and inspires her students.

Thanks to all of you for the wonderful teaching that goes on all over this campus, among staff as well as faculty, all of you imparting important life lessons to our students with love, concern, and professionalism. I want to single out some personal heroes of mine – colleagues who are well-known on this campus as GREAT, GREAT teachers, who do what they need to do in the midst of teaching and service loads that have administrators and faculty members at other institutions shaking their heads in disbelief in order to remain deeply, passionately engaged with the scholarly and creative work they love.

Robin DeRosa, a master teacher whose acknowledged expertise in the shifting paradigm of contemporary higher education has led to her being named one of higher education’s 50 “must-read” bloggers by EdTech Magazine.

Lourdes Aviles, a master teacher who has published one book, and has contracts for two books in hand, with the American Meteorological Society – the principal scholarly society in her field.

Ann McClellan, a master teacher, who, despite the time demands of having a finger in almost every administrative and faculty reorganizational pie on this campus, is completing a book under contract to the University of Iowa Press.

Becky Noel, a master teacher who is spending time engaged in outreach to communities throughout New Hampshire with historical lectures about our past, and is completing a book under contract to the Johns Hopkins University Press.

Liz Ahl, a master teacher and AMAZING poet, who not only writes and publishes chapbooks – she makes them, and teaches her students how to make them too. Her first full-length book of poetry, Beating the Bounds, was recently published. Go buy a copy if you haven’t yet -- it’s wonderful!

Finally and foremost, all thanks and love to the best artist, best person, and best teacher I know, Marcia Santore, and my fellow students in her small-n classes of one, two, and three, my sons Peter and Thomas. Getting to share my life with them, and learn from them, is a constant joy and blessing.

I find that a lot of new composers who are interested in writing for live performers get frustrated because they end up having to do a lot of what I call “back-composition” in order to get a piece to performance. In most cases, this happens because they use a digital medium – a DAW or notation software – to create a work intended for performance by live musicians, but don’t spend enough time at the beginning of the process thinking about the individuals and ensembles who will ultimately perform the piece.

In my process, I like to put the musicians who will perform what I’m writing on the stage of my imagination and hear and record what comes out of them. Most of the time, this is a generic set of performers – a “Grade 3 Concert Band,” a “chamber orchestra,” etc., and I’m working within the generally-known timbres/capabilities/limitations of that set of performers. If I’m lucky, it’s a group of specific individuals I know well, and I’m working from personal knowledge of them.

Either way, I need to have a lot of information about the people sitting on my internal stage before I begin imagining new music for them – or else I’m going to end up having to re-imagine a lot of material just when I think I’m finished! For that reason, I think that the first, most important question a composer needs to ask herself before beginning a new work is, “Who’s ultimately going to perform it?” As I see it, there are three general answers to this question.

If you’re creating new music that will be performed by no one – a digital sound file, in other words  – then you don’t have to worry about conforming your compositional imagination to the capabilities of human performers and their instruments/voices. This is one of the reasons that composers have been interested in the idea of “musical machines” for centuries – it’s the closest they can get to a pure expression of the musical ideas they have inside their own heads. You imagine the music, you perfect it in the DAW, you create the sound file – bingo.

If you’re creating new music that will be performed by you, and you alone, then you’re only concerned about your limitations as a performer, and the limitations of the thing(s) you’re going to perform your new music with, and you should know those pretty well already.  If you’re a singer/guitarist creating something for you and you alone to perform, then you can’t expect to perform a work with notes higher than you can sing, or faster than you can play on guitar, or a really prominent English horn line, etc.

If you’re creating new music that will be performed by someone else, then you do have to worry about the capabilities of those others as performers, and the capabilities of the things they’re going to perform with, and you should be thinking about and working within those capabilities from the beginning of your process, or else you’re going to be confronted with them irritatingly at what you think should be the end of your process!

If you’re going to create music for someone else to perform on instrument X, then you should have at least a basic understanding of instrument X’s limitations – how high/low can it go? How loud/ soft can it go? etc., preferably before you begin your process. If you’re going to create music for a whole bunch of people to perform on a whole bunch of instruments or voices (orchestra, band, chorus, etc.), then you need to have a basic understanding of the capabilities of ALL those instruments or voices, and a basic understanding of how they all relate to one another in that particular ensemble, preferably before you begin your process.

I still refer to orchestration books often to touch base with all this information. One of the two best pieces of compositional advice I ever got came from the band composer Robert Jager, who said “Buy an orchestration book, and don’t be afraid to look in it!” The other came from my composition teacher Eugene Kurtz, who told me “Own more than one orchestration book, and don’t be afraid to look in all of them!”

In closing, I’ll say that, while I’ve found this idea of “performed by no one/performed by me/ performed by others” helpful for thinking about what I need to know before my process begins, I find it really useful for thinking about how I need to communicate my compositional intentions to others when they’re the ones converting my ideas into sound waves – in other words, for digging into the entire issue of notation, notation software, etc. That’s coming!

Also, while I began this post by talking about composers who start acoustic works in digital media and end up frustrated, I should say here that I use notation software throughout my compositional process, starting at a relatively early stage of the process. HOWEVER, I don’t rely on the software to tell me what I need to know about the acoustic media I’m composing for, or how I should notate for them. I don’t let it dictate or control my process, and you shouldn’t either! That discussion is coming as well ...

Comment left at former hosting site:
Ashley H. KraftApril 2, 2017 at 7:55 AMAnother very useful post. Thanks!

I had an interesting group meeting with my composition students yesterday. The main theme of the meeting seemed to be frustration. Some students work primarily in digital media, but are interested in creating music to be performed by live musicians on traditional acoustic instruments – they’re frustrated by the limitations of those instruments, and the notation they read. Some are primarily acoustic instrumentalists who are interested in using notation software as a compositional tool – they’re frustrated by the steep learning curve of the software, and the notational mistakes that the software still allows them to make. Before this meeting, I’d spent a lot of time thinking about the issues that my composition students have brought to my attention in recent years in broad sweeping terms – what my work with what I call “digital-first” composers has meant to my internal definitions of what constitutes musical literacy, how I might help students from the digital world compose effectively for acoustic media and vice versa, etc. However, after this meeting, I came back to some hard truths about composition that I hadn’t pondered for a long time:

1) Imagining new music is easy (well, relatively easy).
2) Bringing it into the world is hard, and takes skills.
3) Mastering those skills takes work.

Lots of us have great ideas for new music in our minds – a little snippet of something, or a big extended something. Bringing the music out into the world is a different matter, and happens for different people in different ways. Whatever your way happens to be, if you want to bring the music into the world as you imagined it, you have to have a set of deep skills to make that happen. If you’re creating stuff for digital media, you have to have deep knowledge of your digital audio workstation in order to bring your imagined music into the world exactly as you imagined it. If you’re creating stuff for you to perform, you have to have deep knowledge of your performing medium. If you’re creating stuff for other people to perform, you have to have deep knowledge of both their performing media and the language in which they want your compositional intent communicated to them. If there’s something you want to use as a tool to help you in your compositional work, you need to have deep knowledge of how that tool works, too. Developing each set of deep skills takes time, dedication, and concentration, and the skills don’t necessarily cross over – in my case, for example, my experience as an acoustic composer is no substitute for DAW knowledge when I’m creating music for digital media.

It’s actually taken me several hours of thought and false starts to get to that simple statement, and I imagine that my future posts will follow up on some of those false starts, but I think this is a good place for me to start this whole blogging adventure. Whatever else I might think or say about composing music, it’s important to acknowledge that parts of it are flat-out difficult, and require skills, knowledge, and hard work.

Comments from original hosting site:
Jon Corelis, March 14, 2017 at 6:22 PM
Best wishes on starting a composition blog. I hope people will find it useful.

As a very amateur composer (no reason to listen to me,) I offer two quotes which I've taken as basic principles for music composition:

La musique doit humblement chercher à faire plaisir, l'extrême complication est le contraire de l'art.

-- Claude Debussy

and on song writing:

Musicologist Robert Spencer wrote of the songs of Thomas Campion that his priorities were of the order of priority "poem, melody, and lastly singer, " and Campion himself defended the deliberate simplicity of his technique thus: 'A naked Ayre without guide, or prop, or colour but his owne, is easily censured of everies eare, and requires so much the more invention to make it please.'

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Jonathan Santore March 24, 2017 at 8:36 AM
I agree with both of these statements, Jon. I've certainly found in my own work that the simplest-sounding sections/textures/etc. require the most compositional thought and planning. I'm also absolutely "text-first" in my works setting text. Thanks for reading!

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Ashley H. Kraft March 24, 2017 at 7:01 AM
Thank you for taking the time to state this so clearly. It's a great reminder for me. As a "young" composer (but older person), I have been writing for acoustic instruments, struggling with notation software always, and I'm now learning DAWs and digital music creation. What you present here is a perfect description of what my music life feels like. Always challenging for me. Thanks! The points above are going on my wall as a reminder that what I'm feeling is normal.

Keep blogging, please. I can't wait to read what you have to say next.

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Jonathan Santore March 24, 2017 at 8:36 AM
Thanks so much, Ashley -- more to come!