Philosophies of Teaching

I see the academic environment as the place where commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion can be safely discussed, debated, and molded to include more voices and perspectives across all aspects of diversity, from race and ethnicity, to gender, to ability, to socioeconomic status, and many others. The students in our classrooms are different; they are more diverse not only in identity, but also in terms of the music they listen to, and in how they engage with their exterior worlds in their professional lives. Diversity, equity, and inclusion must celebrate our students, and it must prepare them to live completely in our contemporary world once they leave school. Diversity, equity, and inclusion must also prepare us—as faculty—to confront and reflect on our own biases and how we can address those deeply rooted in our disciplines. Every semester, my students teach me how to do this, and I listen.

Over the past six years, I have developed my courses to include more diverse topics and music by underrepresented composers. As an early music historian, incorporating underrepresented composers is especially hard, and so I have learned to branch outside of music composition in order to accommodate for other voices that have been lost to history. My approach to music history—both in the classroom and in my research—is that composers are only one branch of musical creation, performance, and reception. Broadening our knowledge of music through the perspective of the performer, or the audience member, or the patron, or the institution, or the geographic area is essential for understanding a more diverse history.

I am also very sensitive to tokenization of underrepresented voices. It is easy to teach one day on the Chevalier de Saint-Georges and then ignore the Black perspective for the rest of the semester. Instead, I try to incorporate these topics into my classes in a holistic way, making important connections with previous issues and contextualizing diversity within larger social and cultural forces of the time. In this way, these diverse perspectives become threads in the fabric of a larger history, rather than being relegated to a “separate and not equal” status in the class.

My commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion extends beyond the classroom and into my research and scholarly activities. I am fascinated by women’s history and have become a specialist in the lives and experiences of professional female composers and performers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Recently, I have published on Elisabetta de Gambarini, a female composer and harpsichordist who also experienced physical and emotional trauma at the hands of her abusive husband—yet she and the lawsuit she brought against him were both lost to history because of the continual privileging of male perspectives in music history. I have also incorporated her music into my performances by giving lecture recitals relating her story (and those of other eighteenth-century female composers).

What excites me most about teaching is that even though I stand in front of students every day, each class is still a learning experience for me. Every student brings their own perspectives, skills, and knowledge to bear on the course material, and this diversity of knowledge enhances my own understanding of music history. The students I have taught over the past 8 years have all contributed to my teaching techniques and the content I cover in the classroom. I always try to tailor my classes to student interest and experience. I often try to give open-ended research and creative assignments so that students choose topics in which they are invested. I also assign discussion posts and discussion leading in nearly every one of my classes; this means that students get to talk about what they find most interesting, and I am there to help guide the discussion if needed.

As an early music historian and performer, one of my main teaching goals is to make sure that the material I cover is both relevant to and intersects with the experiences of my students as twenty-first century musicians and listeners. This relevance comes in a variety of forms: it informs how I structure my courses, and it influences the types of assignments that I give my students. I try to teach specialized seminars and topics in areas that allow for direct connections between historical periods and today (see my Music and Gender Before 1800 syllabus for examples). Even in my survey courses, I make time to teach how music intersected with social history, and I encourage my students to think about how understanding these topics historically (such as music and colonization, for example) still influence contemporary thought and trends. Finally, I incorporate performance into nearly all of my classes. As a harpsichordist myself, I find that performing this music allows for a deeper connection to this repertoire. My students have echoed this in my teaching evaluations—playing the music has helped them understand it more intimately.

My approach to undergraduate teaching emphasizes both collaboration and performance. Music history can be exciting, but students are often concerned with applicability, which can be difficult to convey, especially in a survey setting. In my undergraduate survey courses (Music from the Ancient Greeks to 1750; Music from 1750 to the Present), I focus my assignments and classroom time on student involvement. I ask my students to complete a performance project in the first half of the survey; they choose one work each from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Baroque, and they must arrange and record themselves performing these works. They must write program notes for each piece, giving background to the work itself and discussing some of the performance practice issues that arose in arranging the music for their modern instruments. This kind of assignment lets students dig into the music and feel what it is like to perform outside of their comfort zones. It also reveals important questions about performance practice that students must ask when tackling any new piece of music.

Undergraduate courses provide the perfect time to introduce students to new ways of thinking about how they interact with music in their worlds. In my course “Muse” (for first-semester freshmen music majors), we explore the intersections of music, culture, and identity. Each unit address topics relevant to students today, such as issues of music and gender, class, politics, race and ethnicity, disability, and socioeconomic status. The class also includes a semester-long assignment in which students must organize and perform a pop-up concert somewhere on campus with a theme that ties into one of the units we spend time on in class. At the end of the semester, they write a reflection about their experiences putting together the concert, including finding a venue, choosing appropriate repertoire, advertising, and hosting the event. This assignment allows students the chance to practice collaboration, organization, and self-promotion skills while still allowing them to reflect on the course themes about music in society.

In my graduate courses, I strive to unite a deep understanding of cultural history with the more practical aspects of aurally recognizing styles and genres. In these courses, I assign readings and listening examples that illuminate the whys of musical practice and stylistic history during the early modern era. I almost never use textbooks in my classes, because I find that the more interesting musicological stories are found in scholarly articles. These sources also provide better models regarding writing style and structure. I structure my courses with attention to both stylistic history and cultural history (I’ve adapted this approach for undergraduates, and you can see an example of this in my Music of the Baroque syllabus). Music history is not simply a parade of styles and genres; it is also a cultural medium influenced by real people, and it is their stories that I want my students to remember.

In my graduate courses, my assignments are usually writing-based, but I try to use these opportunities for students to branch out of their comfort zones. In Music of the Renaissance, I assign a final paper topic relating to art and music patronage, in which students must visit the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (or a local art museum) and write about an artist represented there whose patron also supported a Renaissance musician. I have also taught courses in Research & Bibliography in music, which breaks down the writing process into manageable chunks. The students work on a research paper throughout the semester, but they also engage in other kinds of writing, such as grant writing, program notes, and public musicology.

In graduate classes, my mission is to explore early music genres, composers, or themes from new perspectives. For example, in my History of the Oratorio seminar, we explored a new oratorio and conducted thorough analyses of the libretto and music. While we considered some of the most important oratorios in Western music, we also spent time on works from diverse and underrepresented composers, such as William Grant Still’s And they lynched him on the tree, Craig Hella Johnson’s Considering Matthew Shepard, and a Turkish oratorio by Ahmed Adnan Saygun called Yunus Emre. Instead of writing a research paper, I instead assigned my students a creative assignment in which they “wrote” their own oratorio: they had to include a short libretto, an explanation of how they might orchestrate it, and considerations of who their audience would be and where it might be performed. In these ways, I made a fairly inaccessible genre more accessible to my students, all practicing musicians in the twenty-first century.

Over the past eight years as a full-time instructor of record, my teaching philosophy has coalesced around three main ideas: collaboration, relevancy, and performance. While I know my philosophy will continue to shift and change the longer I teach, I will always value these core elements and will continue to design courses based around them.