Dr Christopher J Smith (associate professor & Chair of Musicology and director of the Vernacular Music Center at Texas Tech University); keynote address Jan 27 2011 at Texas Association of Music Schools Annual Convention

1. Access, Advocacy, Inclusivity: Campus Roles in Building Community<br />[c20:00]<br />Chairs, directors, esteemed colleagues, and friends:<br />I’ve been asked to speak to you here this evening about a set of both philosophical visions and practical tools for enhancing exchange of energy, ideas, people, and positive creative values between communities and campuses, between music programs and other divisions, and between what we do in our individual studios, classrooms, and rehearsal halls, and the rest of the world. <br />It’s been a heck of a year…and it’s only January!, But the only antidote to despair is to remember the old, old Confucian insight, that “periods of crisis present moments of opportunity.” Yes, the mere thought of having to cut 100,000 jobs from education across the State is enough to make one howl—or weep. But these are the realities we are dealing with. <br />In such circumstances, our job is to continue providing quality education to deserving students. But our quest is to improve that quality of education, to enhance the range of students served, and to deepen the commitments and the positive energy that flows between us and the communities in which we move. I want to talk about three issues which, in my own observation and experience, are crucial components in this quest; they are inclusivity, access, and advocacy. <br />Access is about maximizing the opportunity for our communities to benefit from what we do;<br />Inclusivity is about drawing wider and more diverse communities toward what we do;<br />And I’d like to clarify something here: although I recognize the essential role to be played by diversity issues, in my book “inclusivity” yields a compatible, but different connotation: Inclusivity means ‘drawing in all who wish to be involved’. We don’t want to enhance quotas—more profoundly, we want to enhance the desire by all members of the population to be involved. To take part. To participate. <br />Finally, Advocacy is about being responsive to all our diverse communities, and creating and reaching out with those communities’ needs, wants, experiences, and possibilities in mind, serving as advocates on behalf of both the musics we wish to share and the communities with which we wish to share them (and here I’ll take just a moment to recommend a remarkable book by James Bau Graves called Cultural Democracy—wonderfully practical yet inspiring study of how to make community music work). <br />Tomorrow we will be giving a presentation which we hope will demonstrate at least some of the practical possibilities for this kind of campus/community outreach & advocacy, but this evening I’d like to speak more philosophically, and more historically; I hope both presentations provide comparable value<br />Every person in this room provides remarkably high, remarkably well-guaranteed value for dollar. Every musician knows that an hour in the practice room will always yield results; there is, in music, no such thing as a “low- or under-performing investment”. We need to be articulate, passionate, and pro-active advocates for what this value represents. We need, as expert public educators, to be able to speak with expertise to a wide diversity of publics. We speak with such eloquence, through our music; we need to be able to speak using diverse media with equivalent eloquence<br />I’m a foreigner, as you can tell—but what I have learned, over two extended periods of émigré life here, is that Texans are profoundly responsive to the arts, and especially to the performing arts. In our diverse demographics and constituencies, one thing is constant—a hunger for economic, social, and most of all intellectual expansion. Of all the art forms that I know, I think the argument can be made that, in music, we have the widest possible opportunities to reach the most diverse populations in the most expansive and participatory ways with the widest range of artistic expression, and to do it all together, as a community, in real time. Almost nothing except possibly dancing—nothing!—is so fundamental and immediate, so intimately experiential, an expression of the ancient and eternal human thirst for beauty as the drawing of a breath and the singing of a note of music.<br />I once had an undergraduate student, great big kid with a great big heart, who kept falling asleep in class—he was a trumpet player. So I found a tactful time to speak to him outside of class. And I said, “Tim, listen, man… You just can’t keep falling asleep in class like this; it’s just not going to let you make the grade you need. What’s the deal?” He told me that he would go home from class at 3 or 4 in the afternoon, get something to eat, and then practice his horn for 5 or 6 hours. And then he would go to the local Safeway supermarket, where he worked re-stocking shelves from 11pm until 7:00 in the morning. And then he would go to his 8:00 o’clock music theory class. <br />I was horrified by this—not even a 20-year-old can go week-in and week-out on zero sleep—but I was also inexpressibly moved. Here was a kid who, without complaining or whining or histrionics or self-dramatization (after all, we were before the Facebook Era), wanted a life as a working musician and teacher so badly that he would do whatever it took—up to and including trying to work, study, and practice on NO SLEEP WHATSOEVER—in order to make that dream come true.<br />And it ain’t for the money, folks, is it? There just isn’t a big-enough money-carrot in the world to dangle in front of a student who doesn’t want to do the work; as my wife’s Italian immigrant grandma would have said, “you can’t push spaghetti.” There was something deeper, purer, more ancient, and more powerful than money at work in this young man, and he was prepared to employ “any means necessary” to get the training that would take him, in music, where he wanted to go.<br />We’ve all known students like this—dozens and even hundreds of them over the years—students whose desire is so deep, so instinctive, so powerful, so ancient, so idealistic, that they will make incredible sacrifices in order to attain these deeper, longer-term, more valuable goals. Our task as educators is to expand the likelihood that such remarkable young people can succeed. That’s why we do what we do. Because, as I say, it ain’t for the money, is it?<br />It’s about something deeper. And more powerful.<br />What this anecdote illustrates is something that I think we all know, but upon which I think we draw too infrequently: that music teachers, music educators, music students, music consumers are passionately committed to the creation of community through participatory creative experience. Compared to all the other art forms we admire so much—painting, poetry, sculpture, prose, poetry, drama, and so on—it is in the performing arts, and I would argue most centrally in music, that we find a formula, a set of practical tools, for creating community through participation. For at least 40,000 years—since our early ancestors, for example, were painting performances of sacred dance and music in the caves of Lascaux and Namibia, Kakadu and Sierra da Capivara, Kalimantan and Padah-Lin—humans have understood at a deep, even molecular level, that making and sharing art serves a fundamental human need—as important as food and air and heat and water. Humans need to do this. Human communities need to do this together.<br />In 1997, I was living and working with my wife Angela in Bloomington IN, hacking away at the first drafts of a doctoral dissertation in Musicology. Around that time, some long-term residents came out of their homestead cabins and “townie” rental houses and began playing Irish traditional music in the pubs again: music that I’d grown up with around Boston and Chicago, but which I’d set aside as I learned to play bebop and the blues. It was a wonderful tonic for me to plow through books on Biber and Boulez during the day, and then go play Irish tunes at night, but I noticed a funny thing: the really advanced trad players sometimes found themselves held back by avocational guest-players who wanted to participate, but didn’t know “what they didn’t know.” <br />I looked at that situation, and thought perhaps there might be a niche where I could contribute. I thought that maybe I could offer a complement to the pub session—a “teaching” session in which the emphasis would be on stylistic fundamentals, in which beginners could begin to accept learning by ear rather than by notation, in which there was time to talk about values and ethics in the context of the music. And it worked: it took the pressure off the pub session, provided a jumpstart to beginners, and created an effective counterpoint and exchange. Now, 14 years later, that beginners’ session is still going strong, and its alumni are playing Irish music—some of them touring professionally—all over North America. I don’t think I would have lucked into that vision of shared community music-making without both the experience of playing in the pubs and that of sitting in the music classroom. I later wrote an article for a scholarly journal about the experience, entitled “Reclaiming the Commons One Tune at a Time”: reclaiming a shared participatory experience of making art together. One tune at a time.<br />Like everyone in this room, I believe very strongly that music is an essential part not only of human consciousness (just ask those painters in the caves beneath Lascaux) but also of human communities; and that just like clean air, clean water, healthy food, affordable medical care, and decent schools, communities need music to survive. They may not all have it, they may not all know it, but they need it. And we, as music educators working in those communities, are uniquely positioned to help them discover, and to discover it ourselves.<br />When I was hired at TTU in the summer of 2000, I had what was actually a very pleasant, collegial, encouraging, and mutually-respectful experience. Afterwards, my reaction was—oh, my gosh; I really like these people, and they think I could do the job, but how am I going to tell my wife?!? How was I going to persuade her to move to the flattest, most griddle-like place either of us Yankees had ever been? In the event, we did take the job, and we found ourselves amongst a community of absolutely remarkable, infallibly friendly, endlessly inspiring artists and colleagues. As one of my colleagues, Susan Brumfield, says “aw, heck, darlin’…up here, we learn to make our own fun.” <br />And she’s right, and there’s a kernel of enormous wisdom in that South Louisiana phrase. In our part of the world, in the art-form we have chosen and the profession we follow, and especially in the stark economic times in which we now find ourselves, in which so many voices conspire to tell us that art isn’t essential, that “community” is an economic or geographic abstraction, not a set of shared life-giving values—it is now that we must, more than ever, understand that every gig, every class, every service presentation, every person we meet on the street, greet after a concert, or whose kid we teach…every one of those encounters is an opportunity for outreach, audience education, development, and yes—that sharing of values and emotions that strengthens communities. <br />There were times and places on this earth when universities were the centers of communities, when the knowledge contained in their hand-copied libraries and in the minds and hands of their members was what held the Dark Ages at bay. Now in the 21st century, in a stark present day, now more than ever we have a role to play. Can we see it? Can we rise to it? Can we celebrate it?<br />I think we can.<br />During my interview sequence, during that long, long hour-by-hour schedule of meeting after meeting after meeting, at one point the then-Director of our school asked me that stock question “what would you like to be doing in the profession in 5 years time?” It’s a good and fair question, and it’s a question that every candidate should be prepared to answer. And I had an answer (“develop my research profile, enhance use of technology in the classroom, create new course topics,” blah blah blah), but after I was done, the Director leaned forward and said, “OK, yes, that’s good—but for a moment, think big. What would you do if we gave you a free hand?” And I blurted out “I’d start a center for research, teaching, and advocacy in the realm of the world’s folk and traditional musics.” <br />Now, what’s remarkable here is not so much that the Director offered me that opening, or that I improvised an interesting and challenging response—anybody in this room could do the same. Rather, what is remarkable is that, having elicited this response, my school actually helped me do it. Eleven years later, the Vernacular Music Center, a center for, yes, “research, teaching, and advocacy in the world’s oral-tradition musics,” actually exists.<br />My boss Bill Ballenger isn’t a huge fan of the term ‘vernacular’ and I can’t say I blame him. As a musicologist, I have an obsessive preference for just the right word, or the right 100 words, and Bill and I have had conversations in which he, tactfully, explained why he thought the VMC’s title might have some problems, and I, pedantically, insisted that ‘vernacular’ was the right word. “But it’s the right word—it conveys, succinctly, what we’re about! And it makes a good acronym!” “But the acronym doesn’t make any difference if people don’t know what the words mean!” “But, but…” etc, etc. <br />A ‘vernacular’ language is a language that is used in everyday discourse; in medieval Europe, for example, the formal language of business, spirituality, and power was Latin, but the vernaculars were those languages which the people spoke in the streets, outside the Church and the University. A ‘vernacular’ music, then, is a music that is learned, taught, and passed-on by ear and in the memory; in other words, ‘vernacular’ musics represent most of the musics in the world. But I get what Bill means: the term isn’t part of day-to-day discourse; it’s cumbersome, if precise, and thus less than ideal.<br />I can therefore tell you…and my boss!...about a recent, very encouraging chance conversation I had in one of our local grocery stores. For a city of 220,000, it is certainly true that Lubbock still feels like a small town; you run into a lot of the same people and faces, for sure. <br />Nevertheless, I was really pleased when a young woman with a couple of kids in tow came up to me and said, “Aren’t you the professor, over at Tech, the music professor? The one who organizes all those ‘vernacular’ concerts? Yes, we love to come to those—it’s always so interesting, even if it’s a kind of music we’ve never heard before.” <br />To me, this felt like a real watershed, because here was a person who surely would not have heard those musics, and discovered her love for them, if the VMC had never existed. Because we are there, because of the vision and collegiality and administrative simpatico, she, and others like her, and her kids and extended family, lead lives just that little bit richer than they might otherwise. And the community is just that little bit richer as a result—one tune at a time.<br />Right from jump-street—right from that very first, off-the-cuff response in my entrance interview—the VMC articulated a vision that integrated both teaching and research with the absolutely crucial element of advocacy. ‘Crucial’ not only because we believe so strongly in the value and beauty of all these diverse musics, but ‘crucial’ also because we understood, particularly in a tough environment, we simply had to reach out every time and in every way we could. <br />We’re presenters, but also seminar authors, teachers, partners across campus and throughout our communities, providers of music and educational services to a huge wide range of organizations within and beyond our community. If someone calls and asks for help finding a musician, a recording, a presentation, an insight, or an administrative channel, we help them. At every opportunity, we seek to maximize access, inclusivity, and advocacy.<br />Now, I should say that my own days as a ‘70s punk-rocker probably shape our ethos as well; we are very, very big proponents of the “D.I.Y.” or “do it yourself” aesthetic. If we can’t do something ourselves, and especially if we have to come up with cash to pay someone else to do something for us, we cut that budget to the bone. From logo to website to guest artists to mailings to T-shirts to banners to fundraising, we operate from the most bare-bones budget you ever saw; whenever appropriate, we actually barter rather than pay cash!.<br />We don’t do this because we think “no- or low-cost” is better—we do it rather because such “skillful means” provide us greater opportunities. If we can keep the overhead at rock-bottom, we have more freedom to take on all those other no- or low-paying service or pro bono gigs—and still balance the books.<br />And we are by God aggressive! We use every kind of new or electronic media, every kind of social- and viral-marketing tool we can think of, in addition to the more traditional methods like printing calendars and mailing postcards. We produce programming for the local PBS and NPR affiliates, and when they ask us to fund-raise during their pledge drives, we do it! We get up and do live TV for the “Daybreak” shows! (nothing is scarier than—or for—a musician than a 7am live TV shot). When we encounter a new marketing tool—especially if it’s free—we say “OK, I guess we’ve got to suck it up and learn how to use this one to our purposes.” One of the axioms of marketing, traditional or electronic, is that every different medium—from newspaper, magazine, local TV, local radio, internet, myspace, facebook, twitter, foursquare, and on and on and on, has its own particular demographic. You can’t hit only one of those media—you’ve got to try to hit them all (fortunately, if you keep up with the tech blogs—or just find a savvy freshman computer major—you can find ways to streamline this outreach).<br />As a result of this, we have three annual anchor events—one in December, one in March, one in May—that raise money for our VMC scholarships; we have a concert series; we have six sponsored or partnered ensembles; we have an “Outreach Scholars” series sending our students to study around the world; partnerships with university colleagues and departments in the UK and Ireland and on the Continent; a run-out presentations schedule to rural and underserved populations. VMC-affiliated personnel present literally hundreds of service gigs a year; we write grants—we even win grants. And we do it all with one graduate assistant “VMC Administrative Coordinator” (the remarkable Abi Rhoades, who you’ll see dancing tomorrow noon) and whatever time I can spare over and above my own overload of classroom teaching. And the wisdom, imagination, support, and value that is provided to us by our community.<br />So yes, we do have to be marketers, designers, entrepreneurs and code-writers, and also eloquent speakers, articulate teachers, and passionate performers. Tall order, huh? But we musicians have been figuring out new media, new modes of expression, new tools to express individual creativity and community unity, for forty-thousand years. We can do it again.<br />Periods of crisis provide moments of opportunity. This is one.<br />Thank you very much.<br />© 2010 Christopher J Smith. All rights reserved.<br />