CMR-Pod: Public Music Scholarship and Alternative Academia: A Conversation with Clay Conley and Eric Whitmer

Kelly Hoppenjans, co-host:

Hi everyone, and welcome to this panel as part of the special issue of Currents in Music Research focused on public music scholarship. Today we are joined by two people pursuing public work alongside their academic endeavors. We’re going to learn from them about the benefits and challenges of balancing academic and public work and expand our definitions of music scholarship. Let’s get started.

Hoppenjans:

As we get started here, let’s introduce ourselves. My name’s Kelly Hoppenjans, I use she/her pronouns. I am a fourth-year PhD student in musicology at University of Michigan. 

Eric Whitmer:

She’s a candidate, everyone [laugh]. And since I guess I spoke, that means I have to go next. My name’s Eric Whitmer. I’m a second-year PhD student, not yet a candidate for those keeping track, at the University of Michigan. And I use they/he pronouns. 

Emma Beachy, co-host:

I’m Emma Beachy. I am a third-year PhD student at the University of Michigan in historical musicology, and I use she/they pronouns. 

Clay Conley:    

Cool. Best for last [laugh]. I’m Clay Conley. Um, they/them pronouns and I’m a fourth-year ethnomusicologist. Take that y’all [laugh]. 

Hoppenjans:

So Eric and Clay, can we start by having you tell us about your alternative academic experience? How did you get into your particular opportunities outside of academia, and why did you choose to get into that? 

Conley:

So I have, like, two things I do outside of academia. Both I got into because of academia—I want to make that very clear that they are not parallel paths. They’re very much conjoined. The first is my podcast When I Go Heavy, which was grown out of a paper that did pretty bad. [laugh] Sorry. And I thought the research was really important and the reason it was bad is because my conclusion was like, “Everyone’s different.”

Whitmer:

Oh!

Conley:

And that is academically not good research. But I thought that what I was pursuing was important. So I started that podcast to create a variety of views and not just hedge my argument to just prove one thing or another. And then my other thing is that I’m an audio engineer here in Ann Arbor. And at first it was for research and then it became a side hustle. So I now work at three different venues and am kind of a known engineer here in Ann Arbor. Nice. That’s it. 

Hoppenjans:

Yeah. Can you explain a little bit more about what When I Go Heavy is about?

Conley:

When I Go Heavy is about music and exercise, and it is about––what’s the word I’m looking for––it’s about how people approach exercise and their listening habits while they’re exercising. So actually a few people in this room were interviewed for the paper itself and the questions that I asked were like, “when you are doing cardio, what do you listen to?” “When you are lifting really heavy, what do you listen to?” “If you’re going for a walk, what do you listen to?” And I found a variety of different people. It was, like, I knew someone in college who, when she was on the treadmill, had to listen to Brahms Fourth, right? Like, that was like how she pushed through cardio. And for me, I talked to other people, they’re like, “no, I listen to trap music to get me through.” And so I found that people had different perspectives on pain and endurance and getting through and finding enjoyment in exercise that was often accompanied with or often without music.

Hoppenjans:

Hmm. Very cool.

Conley:

Yeah.

Hoppenjans:

So how does the podcast take a different kind of approach than your paper did? 

Conley:

The paper was looking for reasons why people were listening to music and you know, analyzing data. And the podcast is just about some chaps, you know, having a chat.

Hoppenjans:

Nice.

Conley:

That’s all it is. [laugh] Yeah. And we were talking––this is a podcast talking about editing a podcast. I interviewed AJ, one of our fellow PhD students and we talked about mac and cheese for like 10 minutes. And I was like, “I don’t think this is relevant.” [laugh] But that was the podcast. We just talked about whatever mattered, so.

Hoppenjans:   

Yeah, so I definitely have taken a very circuitous route into academia, for whatever that means. Both my parents are college professors. There’s a ton of doctorates in my immediate family that none of them are like MDs and have do anything meaningful with their PhDs, EDDs, et cetera, et cetera. They’re great people, love them, you know, wonderful family. But they aren’t doing a ton of academic, rigorous presenting at conferences. So I always kind of knew that there was this higher education that I could go into. And it wasn’t until really after I got into my undergraduate and started taking musicology classes that I even really considered even being an academic. I was determined not to do a PhD.

But one of the things that I just found is that for me, where I grew up in the community, musicians that really got me started on being a musician—it was always about this community perspective, that interface between things like nonprofits, grants, regional funding, all of these kinds of things. So my first job ever was working for my local symphony orchestra, and that job was one of the engagement coordinators for my hometown. Now it’s a little bit crazy that a 16-year-old could have that job because it feels like there should be more qualifications than being 16 years old and willing to work at a [laugh] negligible rate above the minimum wage.

Whitmer:

But what I found was that, you know, I was doing these educational initiatives that I remember, the symphony orchestra coming to my school, and all of a sudden I was doing that maybe eight years later with, shall we say, no qualifications. [laugh] And so I really felt like there was this unstudied, unacknowledged kind of way that academia and musicology spend so much time thinking and really talking about some of the ethical problems about music and really trying to engage with it in meaningful ways. But at the same time, it doesn’t interface with how that discourse is then going into communities. And so what I really found, and a lot of the reasons that I focus on institutional research is because I’m really interested in, how do we mediate between this academic discourse and then what communities are actually doing? Because we can talk about, for all we want, about the canon and all these kinds of questions about living memory, yada yada yada. But at the same time, if symphony orchestras are not changing how they’re programming, if cartoons aren’t changing what, you know, classical music they’re using as reference points, how is that really changing the discourse for anyone other than musicologists? So that’s my soap box and I’m going to stick to it. [laugh] 

Hoppenjans:

Nice.

Beachy:

And so, for both of you, how do you see the work that you’re doing as connected to the academic stuff that you’re involved with? Like, have these things changed your academic work or your persona at all? Clay, maybe let’s start with you. I’m especially curious about your sound engineering work and how that like connects to your academic research. 

Conley:

Yeah. So it first started as field research as an ethnomusicologist. I got into audio engineering because I wanted to shadow engineers and learn what was up. My advisor, Christi-Anne Castro, was like, “if you’re going to criticize these people and critique and gather data on them, you need to know what they’re doing.” So it was both this simultaneous field research and gathering of skills, right. And unfortunately, that advice led to me gathering so many skills [laugh] that I became able to do this without having to shadow. And that the field research kind of launched off. Then it now becomes more of like an autoethnography, right? Because I’m doing it myself.

Now how does it relate back to the academia? Oh boy. [laugh] So it allows me to like gather research for my dissertation and, you know, allow me to get a doctorate. But it also allows me to have one foot out the door, right? Like, it allows us to realize that we as academics aren’t just academics. That we have a variety of skills and tons of interests, right? I think when we teach classes, a lot of our students, especially the majors, are like, [silly voice] “why are you a musicologist? All I wanna do is play.” And I think I always remind myself that we are also musicians first, and we love supporting and being part of music. And so not just reading books about music and listening to music, like we also are creators as well. So I think that’s kind of my relationship. It may have actually weakened my relationship with academia and that’s okay. I think that’s actually a strong point. 

Beachy:

Yeah, for sure. Eric, what about you? 

Whitmer:

I think I would second that, you know, with the kind of the foot out the door thing, not in a bad way.

Conley:

Yeah.

Whitmer:

But like I think about like when I had to write my undergraduate college admission essay, it was like one of those stupid like—

Conley:

“What have you failed?” [laugh]

Whitmer:

Yeah! No, what have you failed. Or I think the one was like, when did you know you were gonna be a music major or something like that.

Conley:

Right.

Whitmer:

And I wrote at the time, because once upon a time in high school I had written a grant to basically let my friend and I go play a few concerts, go to do some community engagement work, performing in front of school children, et cetera, et cetera, from a regional community foundation. Which was successful. We got the grant. It was, like, we didn’t pay ourselves because we were dumb and young. And so we just barely covered our expenses. We commissioned a piece, we did three concerts. We went to 12 different schools throughout very rural California where, you know, most children would not be exposed to that kind of music making. Looking back on it now, I think there’s a lot of problems with like how we approached that. But what I will say is that experience really taught me the value of creativity as a musician should not just be extended to how are you interpreting Bach or how are you listening to Brahms four or whatever, right? [laugh] Like, I think there’s so many ways that––especially with my historical research looking at donors and patronage––there’s so much room for negotiation and weaving and bobbing in between this realm of people who have money and you as a musician or a creative that wants to create something that’s going to exist. But you need money in order to get that. And under our current system of philanthropy and charity and all these kinds of things, you have to navigate these kinds of things. And so bringing this back to academia, I think this is so critical because academia is one of the few places I think where you can write criticism, you can do a lot of thinking and get paid to do it. 

And then the challenge is then how do you convince people to listen to you? So recently I had the great fortune of going out to lunch with a friend of mine and we were talking, because they work as a recruiter for nonprofits. And so I was sharing my grand plan for world domination and how my dissertation’s going to eventually be talking about charity work and nonprofit and the history and like doing some criticism work. And she goes to me and she’s like, “you’re not expecting this to get you a job, are you?” I was like, “uh, yeah, I was actually.” [laugh] 

Conley:

[laugh] That’s so fair. 

Whitmer:

But she was right. She was like, “well you know, you need experience then because I don’t care that you wrote a book. I care that you did a thing.” And that’s freaking harsh. And I did cry a little bit about it if I’m being completely honest [laugh]. But it also I think is really true, and speaks to the point where, as academics, we can do a lot of thinking and that’s great. But at what point do people start to listen to us? And unfortunately, in the system that we have, we have to kind of make people that have a lot of money listen to us, or we have to get enough people on board that we can raise the financial capital in order to create the change and the programs that we want to see and exist in.

Hoppenjans:

That’s so interesting because that’s almost like a redefinition of what is an expert. From the perspective of academia, an expert is somebody who wrote the book on it, right? But yeah, thinking about expertise as being many different types of knowledge.

Whitmer:

And I’ll put the first of many citations I’m sure for Ask the Experts by Michael Uy, which is a great book about the history of the NEA, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations, and how different types of philanthropy and different parts of grant funding and who the people that were deciding the grants really changed the landscape of America. 

Hoppenjans:

This really connects well to our next question. How have your musicology knowledge and skills contributed to your work outside of academia? 

Conley:

At the end of a show in mid-May, I was mixing for a local Ann Arbor musician, and at the end of the show she was like, “Clay, you did such a great job. Thank you so much. Are you studying engineering? I heard you’re a student at University of Michigan.” I go, “No, [laugh], I’m an ethnomusicologist.” She goes, “Whoa.” And I go, “Yeah, I don’t study mixing. I studied the social relations of engineering and live music.” She goes, “Oh my God, that’s why you were nice.” [laugh] So I think that is exactly how musicology is helping me in my alternate academia or my non-academic endeavors, is that it allows me to see social relations and people and thinkers rather than most audio engineers just think of electrical pathways, right? So [laugh], I mean that’s––okay, maybe that’s reducing some audio engineers. But I’ve met a few.

But yeah, she was even talking about that, it’s not just The Ark—this was at The Ark. She’s like, “I’ve even had some not so great experiences at the Ark because there’s some dudes that just don’t listen to me.” And I go, “Well, when you talk about your music, all I can think about is doing a good job.” Right? Because as a musicologist, I want to uplift music. That’s like, the primary thing that I want to do is talk and uplift music. So I think that’s how musicology, [laugh] has helped me out a little bit. Just like thinking about how people make music together, intellectually, and then being able to just do that on the day to day. 

Beachy:

Which I think really speaks to, like, the value of the humanities sort of writ large––

Conley:

Yes! Yes!

Beachy:

—in general. Which, I think gets lost a lot because you want to like be able to find a job and show that you have skills that can be useful to someone. This is actually really important to being a person in the world. So, yeah. I appreciate that. 

Conley:

Yeah. [laugh]

Whitmer:

I mean, I think the other thing that I would say is that most people really do have good intentions. Like, I really do believe that most people think they’re doing the best like they can in the world and are really just trying to make their own garden grow. I’m going to pull a little Candide right there. But a lot of times people just don’t realize what some of these larger histories are or what the larger impact may be.

And that’s not a detriment to them. I mean, we literally went to grad school to study this stuff. We should have a responsibility to have more knowledge or however we want to quantify that. Obviously we got a PhD, I would hope that I learned something in the x amount of time that I’m going to spend in grad school. 

But then you also have to understand that there’s different types of knowledge. So I think for me, when I’m in conversations with people about how are we applying for this grant, or how are we trying to equitably fund this, or what these kinds of decisions look like, I’m oftentimes bringing in a perspective that they maybe haven’t considered. And I don’t necessarily want to completely yuck their yum. There might be lived experience where Brahms 4 is really the best thing, and they’ve found a system where playing Brahms 4 for second graders in this one community makes a marked impact on x factor in these kinds of ways. And I can bring in and talk about the reasons why Brahms is popular and European supremacy and all these kinds of things. And what if we played like gamelan music and what would that do? 

But at a certain point, I also have to acknowledge that there’s a way that I can get pigeonholed into trying to find this perfect knowledge. And then really what they’re wanting is just a solution that does some amount of impact and some amount of better. So I think I’m waffling back and forth on this because I really have a hard time separating my like quote unquote “academic and musicological practice” from my work in nonprofit, work in creative circles, and trying to get people to give me money to do things that I want to do. [laugh] Like, it’s because I think they’re so interrelated and they’re so connected because it’s always this—you learn something on one hand and then you learn something on the other hand. It’s always you’re going back and forth and crossing the boundaries. 

Conley:

Yeah. I wanted to add one thing, because I work for a nonprofit, the Neutral Zone here in Ann Arbor. I’m their audio engineer. The Neutral Zone is a teen center. It’s open every day that the Ann Arbor public school system is open. And we are a place for creative freedom for young teens. So we have art programs, music programming, one of our longest standing programs is Riot Youth, which is an LGBTQ+ affinity group. We also have different relationships with kids who have graduated, so we have an 18 to 24 group. It allows people to grow into adulthood after being a Neutral Zone teen, as well as having some affiliations with youth and young adults who have interactions with the law. So they do a lot of stuff and it’s like, you know, nonprofits that are trying to save the world kind of thing.And we had this volunteer who was to help me out with engineering because I’m hired to do one too many things for too few hours—

Whitmer:

As is every nonprofit worker. [laugh]

Conley:

[laugh] Yes. And we were noticing that he wasn’t really doing a good job of working with the young teens. He wasn’t really good at communicating to them and uplifting them, right. My job is to record, but primarily to encourage youth to be creative people. And my––actually [laugh] not my supervisor––the director, it’s a very small nonprofit so if I want to go high up, I go to the person who runs the whole thing. And she was like, “Remind him of your research. Remind him of what you do and that you are not about the engineering, you’re about those social relations.” But also like this nonprofit thing of like: it’s a volunteer. We want to keep them around, you know, [laugh]. Yeah. So, it is not just like money, but it’s also nonprofits also like to use people’s time, right, in a very similar way.

Whitmer:

Yeah. And I think that’s so important to recognize, especially when we’re talking about knowledge production and these kinds of things, like volunteers and people that are working to do music, or to produce music, or to help music exist in the community in some way, are usually doing it because they love music. And so there’s so rarely bad intent, and that people really always just do think they’re trying to do the best thing. And then it always comes in where you’re having to have a conversation like, “hey, so my experience based off of my work, like, this is what I can share with you that might offer additional perspective, and I wonder if this will change the way that you think about it.”

So my story about this is that I was working for my temple as a music educator for their Saturday school program. We were having a conversation about disability and supporting our students. And I came into it with like, being the PhD. I didn’t check myself for a second, and I came into it swinging these things about the history of disability and why we really need to be careful about how we’re approaching this. And I will never forget that one of the like senior members of the community, who I really respect and is a wonderful educator, looked at me and was like, “what are you talking about?” And that was like a real oof moment where I definitely had to check that privilege of like, I spend my day thinking about the history and like social relations of this really complicated subject. And if I don’t change how I’m talking and meet them at their level, then I’m only going to be spinning my wheels and I’m never going to make any kind of real progress. Not in the sense that my way is the right way, but in the sense that I want to communicate the knowledge that I have so that other people can think about the larger implications of what we might be trying to do with our best intentions. 

Conley:

Yeah. I mean, I’m going to jump to one of our future topics that I don’t know anything about, because this is a completely candid interview, [laugh] is that you can’t just present musicology to the public—

Whitmer:

Oh yeah.

Conley:

—and expect it to go well. You have to present musicology in a way that is accessible and understandable to the public. So you using fancy words about disability and being like, “oh, have you heard of, you know, universal design, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” you know. And they’re like, “What the hell are you talking about?”

Whitmer:

Yeah. [laugh]

Conley:

I just want you to talk to me. With all of this knowledge that you have, you should be so smart that you should be able to explain this in whatever way is possible and palatable. Right? And that’s hard. 

Whitmer:

Which is not what we are trained in. Let’s also acknowledge that.

Conley:

No, we’re trained to sound like highfalutin, you know. [laugh]

Whitmer:

Yeah. [laugh] And I mean, that’s like one of the things that drives me a little bit nuts if I’m being completely honest, because I think there’s so much time and energy spent on trying to sound academic and principled neutral. I will probably change my opinion on this as I age, and who knows, in 20 years I may look back on this interview and think I’m a complete dum-dum. But what I will say is that, for the stuff that I want to talk about and that I want to engage in, I think there’s always an audience that is beyond academia. And I think it would be nice if more of the things that we produced didn’t have to be written one way for something and then written another way for another thing. Because I will say that I’ve, you know, read a few books in my time, and I have never been able to give an academic book to like a friend or something that is not in a PhD musicology program and said like, “Here’s this,” without any caveat or anything like that. 

But I’ve been able to recommend like trashy romance novels. And I’m not saying that academia should be trashy romance novels. But I am saying that it’d be nice if we didn’t have to completely change our language when we were switching between an op-ed or a conference paper. Like, I think there’s no reason that we as academics—we can reference things that are complicated, but we can talk about it in such a way that knowledge is easily transmitted. It’s difficult and it might not always work the same way for every single audience, but it is possible. 

Beachy:

I think teaching kind of offers a bit of a middle ground, like, a place to sort of workshop some of those things. And does anyone have thoughts on teaching in relation to public musicology? I’m throwing this at you. This was not a pre-prepared question, so [laugh].

Conley:

I think my students take me more seriously when I’m not just all-in academic, mostly because we either teach the majors here who are starkly and strongly musicians, right? They are performers. So when I talk about that, down the road I could be mic-ing them up, they take me more seriously, right? And then if I’m talking to non-majors who are like, “yeah, I’m a kinesiology person,” I’m like, “have you heard my podcast?” [laugh] You know, so like, they take me more seriously because I am not just this musicology teacher who’s just telling them to remember that Beethoven’s blah, blah, blah was in year blah, blah, blah, because don’t ask me the year on any of those. [laugh] But yeah, I think they take you more seriously and they listen to you more when you are not just hoity-toity academic. 

Whitmer:

I mean, I hate to offer, like, a mushy gushy like story right now. But I will get sentimental for like approximately 30 seconds. In my undergraduate, I was TA-ing in musicology class in my senior year. And at this point I had kind of already decided to apply to musicology PhD programs. At one point I was given the opportunity to do a little lecture, and I was talking to the students about, you know, “here’s why I do musicology and here’s why you should take this seriously.” And I did have a few students come up to me that was like, “that really changed my perspective on these things, and I really want to think about it more.” And, and that stuff really gets me going because I don’t think that I’m going to have the right answers. 

Like, I am a creative, I am a musician, I have thoughts and I do a lot of research and I read a lot of things, but that doesn’t always mean that I’m going to know the exact right way of doing things. I can offer a suggestion, but it’s only when I’m going to be countered or, you know, criticized or agreed with by other people that I think we arrive at something that can be beneficial to the larger public. And so I want more musicians, I want more people to be thinking about the stuff that I think about, because I think that’s how we get better ideas and better discourse and better music, is by when we really encourage people to think about these with our teaching. I’m super excited that I’m teaching non-majors for the first time, because I haven’t had the opportunity to work with them. But I’m so much more excited about the opportunity to hear about their experiences and hear about how they experience music, because it’s going to be so different from how I experience it. And so I think that’s one of my favorite bits about teaching is learning from my students. It sounds so cliche, but I’m going to stick to it. 

Conley:

Yeah. You can’t teach sonata form and be like, “can you hear the theme,” because non-majors mostly cannot hear the theme, right? So you have to find different ways to teach these like—we took many, many years of music theory to be able to be musicologists, but they can still understand the art of sonata form without knowing, “oh look, the B theme’s arrived. Oh, we have a bridge.” Like, no, it’s okay. “Did you remember that music came back? It came back! [laugh] Isn’t that cool?” You know, that’s like you have to—and it’s not a reduction, it’s a different way of explaining the same high-level thinking, right? It’s a really important understanding that accessibility is not watering down. It is just meeting that person where they’re at. 

Beachy:

Amen. [laugh]

Whitmer:

And I think so much of like––sorry to like get on my historical hat for like 30 seconds, I swear––but like so much of the history of music education and like public music scholarship, look back at the Lenny [Bernstein], like young people’s concerts, like what is he doing? He’s explaining music theory and musicology, he’s explaining music history and all these kinds of concepts to children that’s then being broadcasted nationally. Like there are ways that we can make these things very accessible.

But then there’s also ways that like—I don’t want to name names, so I’m going to very deliberately not name names right now—but people have suggested, “oh well if we just take, you know, some music and then pair it with this description, then everyone will be able to understand Florence Price or Benjamin Britton, or any other historical composer.” And I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. I think there are like––I love those attempts––but I think that there are definite ways where we need to be more open to larger histories and more accessibility and always remembering that like more accessibility does not equal watering down. Like there’s so much room for expansion instead of just saying, “oh, well if you look at this one painting and then compare it to this specific symphony, then all of a sudden everything makes sense and you can appreciate the great American masters—”

Conley:

Yeah, and, you know, impressionism. [laugh]

Whitmer:

Yeah. Right? Like it’s just, there’s so many things that I think are just so––like, we’re so bold and potentially a little pretentious. But we’re saying that this is the way to understand music. I mean, if any one of us understood music, I don’t think we would be doing a PhD in it.

Conley:

Right.

Whitmer:

I think because we don’t understand it, like, we want to get closer to that knowledge or whatever. That’s at least what drives me. 

Hoppenjans:

Actually, that was one of our questions. Why is doing public musicology or public facing work important to you? 

Whitmer:

I mean, like, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I don’t see a difference between the two. I mean, I see a difference in the way that academia provides me money in order to do certain things, then doesn’t provide me money to do other stuff. But I mean, I think—the honest answer, the reason that I really love being a PhD musicologist so much is because I get to spend my time thinking about these things that I would’ve been thinking about otherwise. And all of the sudden, I have the funding and monetary support that I need to be a human in America [laugh] in the 21st century. And I can think about these things and then bring this out to the public in whatever ways that I’m able to. 

Conley:

Yeah. I think it’s unrelated to my actual like positions in public musicology. I think about my secondary field of, like, hyper pop where I can tell gay people why they like hyper pop. Like, I can answer that question for them [laugh]. And that’s—

Beachy:

Clay, why is it a brat Summer? [laugh]

Conley:

It’s a brat summer because Charli XCX, a straight person, is speaking directly to queer people and queer culture.

Right? And for a gay person, like, “Why do I like this music? I don’t get it. She’s not talking about gay people, you know, doing stuff, right?” [laugh] She’s talking about a greater culture that is going on––a soundscape that speaks to queers and clubs. Right? And I think when I can talk to a gay person and be like, “you like that Chappell Roan song because you’re a lesbian.” [laugh] Right? And I feel that, like, power that we have, that I have to read so many frigging books about queerness and music that I can just be like, “Yeah, you gay.” [laugh] And I think that’s a pretty powerful thing to do in your day-to-day life: be able to be that resource of knowledge about music. You know, being in the car and someone’s like, “Ah, where’s what’s this song from?” I’m like, “Oh, 1965.” You know! You just know those things and you can be the encyclopedia of knowledge for people that are asking for it. 

Whitmer:

And I think also I just want to flag the way that Clay just synthesized some pretty, like, highfalutin queer theory and then made it accessible and able to talk about. Because I too have been wondering if I’m a lesbian because I have been listening to Chapell Roan a lot recently, [laugh] and have definitely been arranging a few of her works for carillon. I’m also a carillonist because I don’t have enough side hustles. But like, have definitely been plotting about how I’m going to play Chappell Roan for the church that I work after services.

Conley:

Good luck, babe. [laugh]

Whitmer:

And serenade them with “Pink Pony Club”, so… [laugh]

Conley:

Well, to be fair—I’m not going to derail this conversation—”Pink Pony Club” is about drag. So that is like, you know, greater than a lesbian conversation.

Whitmer:

That’s true. Yes. Yes. Opening it up. But anyways, uh, yeah, I mean I just–– [laugh] 

Beachy:

I actually think you should do “Red Wine Supernova” for the church. 

Whitmer:

That would be good. I mean, the honest answer is they never have told me what I can’t do. They really did say I could do whatever I wanted to. I just am a little afraid to test the boundaries of how truly open they’re going to be about some of my––

Beachy:

That’s public musicology folks. [laugh]

Whitmer:

[laugh] Okay. Well, all right. Can I, like—I’m going to take this opportunity to just like define what a carillon is really quickly, and also speak a little bit about like, how I kind of think about—

Conley:

Sure.

Whitmer:

—like, this directly informs my practice as a working musician. So a carillon is a bell tower basically, and it’s attached by wires to a keyboard console that’s similar to an organ where you have all these levers that you’re pressing with your hands and your feet. I got introduced to this through the wonderful carillonist and musicologist Tiffany Ng, who’s on faculty at the University of Michigan. And I’m very fortunate that I get to work for a church near Detroit and perform for their services before and afterwards. And then I also get to perform music at the University of Michigan. And there’s a lot of things that I kind of love about playing carillon. 

First of all, it’s really fun to ring really loud bells, but also it really is such a practical synthesis of so much of my work as a historical musicologist when I’m thinking about programming and thinking about how do I make points or change mood, or I want to offer critique of something that’s going on. So theoretically over last summer when the University of Michigan was negotiating with the Graduate Student Union, there may have been a carillonist that decided to play labor organizing songs. And the carillon is directly across the Ingalls Mall from the Michigan League where the negotiations were happening. And hypothetically, that was really fun. [laugh]

But that’s like a direct way. And then like, you know, the other––a few weeks ago when the semester was ending, I was giving one of my last carillon concerts of the school year because we offer these every day of the university in the session, there’s an afternoon carillon concert and someone, anyone can come up to the belfry. And someone came up to the belfry and was very thankful because they had never met a carillonist before. And they were talking about how, you know, a few months back someone played “Here Comes the Sun” right as the seasons were starting to turn. And it really just like made his day and he like, started crying about it. And I find these interactions just so wholesome and so—like, this is all of the things that I want musicology to do. It’s really––like, there’s so much ability for connection and for sharing of experience around music. And so being a carillonist, I just, I find so much joy. 

Hopppenjans:

Lovely. It’s certainly music in everyday life. To think about, like, you know, the carillon––we hear it all the time walking around. It’s really cool.

Whitmer:

It is fun to watch everyone like put in their AirPods as soon as they notice that the carillon’s going [laugh]. 

Conley:

Damn. That’s so funny.

Whitmer:

[sigh] That’s a fun one.

Beachy:

There’s a metaphor buried in there somewhere.

Whitmer:

Yeah, no, seriously, I keep on trying to think about it. I’m like, I need to write something about this. But I’m—so if someone, if one of our listeners out there has any ideas, please feel free to write me. 

Beachy:

So what advice would either of you give to other musicologists who are interested in doing public work based on the experiences that you’ve had and the ways that it’s impacted your own practice? 

Conley:

That’s a terrible question. [laugh]

Beachy:

[laugh] Thank you.

Whitmer:

[laugh] I actually liked it, but okay Clay!

Conley:

Sorry. [laugh] I think because our public work is obviously outside of academia mostly, and makes life harder, right? We’re doing more commitments. It makes it more difficult. And also everyone in this room knows I’m notorious for not showing up to events. Why am I notorious for not showing up to events? Because I’m doing my public musicology work, right? [laugh] Granted, working out doesn’t really count unless you’re thinking—That is research for the podcast. I’ll be fair! [laugh] 

Whitmer:

Clay is just too busy getting gains to show up to, uh…

Conley:

But yeah, academia is structured in such a way that you kind of have to go all in for some forms of success. But I think you can find some lower levels of success. You know, you’re not going to get that journal submission, you’re not going to get into every conference. And that’s okay because you’ve found fulfillment in other things. Granted, your advisors will be upset [laugh], and you just have to double down and be like, “I’m having a good time. I don’t know about you.”

Whiter:

Yeah. [laugh]

Conley:

So that’s what I got.

Whitmer:

I mean, I would kind of second that. I mean, I think the honest answer is that, like, I am a distracted musicologist and there are many ways that I would probably be a better quote unquote “scholar” if I would do less things, but then I wouldn’t be motivated to be a musicologist, is like the honest truth about it. Like, I have to keep on playing music because otherwise I wouldn’t want to sit and read about music all day. Like, there’s just, the way that at least I have tried to make sense of it, and hopefully this helps someone, is that you just have to think about being as creative as humanly possible, and what are the things that you really want to study, and how can they potentially overlap with the work that you’re doing in the community. And I mean, I think it can work in, from both ways. 

Like if you’re doing work as a volunteer or something like that, there are ways that you can advance your knowledge through public, accessible, educational resources. Like, there are ways that you can do that. And I think there––it’s potentially a little bit more humbling––but there are ways that any musicologist could take their work and really think long and hard about how they want to make it accessible. And they could find an audience and they could find a way of doing public musicology. It’s just that that’s going to take away from their next book project. Like, there’s only a certain amount of hours of the day. And I, for one, really like getting eight hours of sleep.

So I am not necessarily willing [laugh] to always carve into that in order to produce another thing. But like I say—I can’t believe I’m going to use my dad’s metaphor, because he always says this and I always hate it so much, but he calls it splitting the baloney. Which is, like, the grossest absolute metaphor, analogy, simile, whatever you want to call it. But, it’s kind of true. Like, if you can find ways of making scholarship that can be used as both a credit to your like scholarly profile, but also does work or talks about or looks at things that you were interested in and wanted to do anyways. Like that’s the best of all worlds. So, I mean, I think for me, I’m presenting at AMS this fall—plug, plug, plug, for anyone listening to come to my little AMS pedagogy and disability studies group—but it’s talking about neurodiverse classrooms. And that was something that I wanted to think about for my classroom anyways as a GSI. But you know, now all of the sudden, I am going to have the ability to list a conference presentation on my CV, and it also benefits my teaching and also benefits the things that I want to talk about on how we educate, and think about, you know, interacting with neurodivergent students. 

Hoppenjans:

I have one more question. This may be totally of base––

Conley:

Do it.

Whitmer:

Do it.

Hoppenjans:

[laugh]––because it’s not on the list. But I’m curious what you both envision for the future, for when you graduate.

Whitmer:

[groan]

Hoppenjans:

I know. [laugh] I know it’s hard to imagine.

Beachy:

Can I piggyback? Your future and the future of the field too.

Whitmer:

Oh! I think the honest answer is that part of me is being pragmatic about, like, thinking about jobs in the academic job market after this. Because I know that I would be just as happy working for a nonprofit as I would be working for an academic institution and teaching full-time. So there’s part of me that acknowledges that and recognizes that I would be happy doing both. So therefore, when I think about this public musicology work that I’m doing and thinking about the history of nonprofits and all these kinds of things, it’s like, okay, great, I can––there is a double landing pad of where I might be able to get jobs.

But I also think that there’s some part of me that really just can’t separate the two, and to pick one or the other would feel just like ignoring something that’s––it would be like ignoring your shadow. Like, it’s going to exist whether you like it or not, so you might as well acknowledge it and think about it. So, I don’t know. I mean, honestly, what I hope for my future is that I get health insurance. I will keep on saying that until I am blue in the face, from not having health insurance. So, [laugh], as far as the future of the field goes, what I hope to see and what I would like to encourage amongst future generations of scholars––if I can say that because I’m a freaking young scholar myself–– is that, I mean, I’m going to sound like a broken record and echo so many other people, but like musicology is so expansive and we’re afforded such a wonderful discipline by having this intersection of ethnographic research and historical research and thinking about sociology and anthropology and all these kinds of other related disciplines. 

And it’s always connected and stitched together by music. And there are a lot of ways that you can interpret that, whether you are researching and you’re thinking about things that are specifically related to sound itself and you are hearing something. Or it can be—I mean, I would like to see it be more accepted and more encouraged for really thinking, you know, like broadening those extensions. And obviously I’m biased, but I really think there’s so much important history to institutional support of music, and to think about how money encourages and allows music to exist. And so, I want to see what other people have on these broader connections to music and then always coming back to this passion, this love that we have for like the creative sound experience. 

Hoppenjans:

Lovely.

Whitmer:

How was that? Was that effusive enough, and optimistic? There we go

Conley:

My athlete, who is a freshman in college—so I’m a weightlifting coach in addition to the other crap that I do––and she goes, “what do you want to do?” And I go, “girl, do you have time?” [laugh] And I said, “I’m a teacher.” I’m a teacher by trade. So, if that means I get a job in academia, great. If that means I end up in high school, even better.” Right? I came into this program––my statement of purpose said that I wanted to teach preschool. I’m still happy to teach preschool. So, you wanted healthcare, I wanted to teach kids, yeah. [laugh]. And that remains to be the 9 to 5 goal, right, is teaching people. And then I will go and coach, and then I’ll go mix a show, and that will be every single day. And my athlete said, “when will you sleep?” And I go, “I’ll figure that out later.” [laugh] So, I think that’s my goal is to keep in stride exactly what I’m doing right now because it fulfills me. Sleep is a secondary health problem in my forties, I guess. [laugh] 

Whitmer:

Girl, how, how? I’m so impressed with you. If I don’t have eight hours, I can’t deal with anything, and I turn into the world’s worst person. [laugh] 

Conley:

And in regards to what’s the future of the field? I really hope that as we continue to expand how musicology looks, that people can learn that musicology is not going to change the world.

You see this a lot in conferences where people think that their research is, like, as groundbreaking as mapping the human genome. I’m so—like, I think what you had to say about Madonna is so cool, but it’s not revolutionizing world hunger, right? [laugh] So I just want to make it clear that it is a great way to understand people and connect, and understand this beautiful thing that we have that is music. But we can’t think that it is the end-all-be-all of intellectual thought. And I hope more people expand themselves and understand that listening to music and understanding music and communicating about music is super great, but it can’t be your whole personality.

That’s all I got. [laugh]

Whitmer:

Well, I think I really love what you were talking about with the idea of this passion and finding the kind of holistic experience that you want, because I don’t think there are enough jobs in the academic job market for all the people that are getting PhDs, so—

Conley:

So true.

Whitmer:

—it’s a matter true of fact that we’re going to have to do other things, or we’re going to have to find lots of wealthy people in order to marry and to steal all of their wealth. So, if that’s you––if you listener, please know that you have my incredible congratulations and please ask if there are any eligible relatives of your wealthy spouse that I could steal as well. [laugh] But like, there has to be this kind of acknowledgement of like multiple passions, and if you don’t have something else be in your life besides musicology—A) Who are you? B) I’m a little concerned about you, and I think you might need to go to therapy.  I think there are some ways that the field, I think, would be so much better if we can acknowledge the fact that there are other things in our lives besides music, or maybe in addition to music or maybe complimentary of it in different ways. And that if we accept that and are willing to talk about it and to encourage that. 

Conley:

To be fair though, in musicology and academia, the second you step outside—I’m reiterating something I said—it makes you have a harder time becoming the best musicologist you can be.

So, it’s not just like, we need more people choosing to go outside. It’s also the structure of the degree itself that it makes it very difficult to pursue this degree and add things to the CV as you talked about if you are doing stuff on the outside.

Whitmer:

Yeah.

Conley:

And I think it is so cool—even though I’m like, it’s not going to change the world—I think it’s so cool when someone’s like, “musicology is my thing. I’m presenting at all these conferences. I’m getting this X award, I’m presenting in this journal.” That is so cool. And that’s you too. And I’m trying to say that like, that’s just not me.

Beachy:

Mhm. And we’ve got to be set up for both , right? Like the programs have to be set up for kinds of people. And I think it’s getting better. Like, it’s easier for you to do what you do here than it would have been like 10 years ago.

Whitmer:

Yeah.

Conley:

Absolutely.

Beachy:

But yeah, there’s a lot of stuff left to do.

Whitmer:

Well…I mean, one of the things that I like to think about a lot of times, especially with disability history, is thinking about all of the people and all of the experiences and all of the knowledge that was kind of just trampled over because people were just like, “no, that’s not the way we do things.” And that’s so true for, like, any number of critical historical studies to be very clear. But I mean, when I’m thinking about what you’re talking about with this idea of wanting both things to exist within the field, it comes back to freaking accessibility, right? It’s like this idea that there are so many ways of knowledge production and knowledge transmission and that, you know—yes, musicology most likely will not change the world. [laugh]

But like I—okay, I’m going to sound so freaking naive and optimistic for like five seconds and then I’ll be back to my pessimistic, critical academic self–– but like, I really do think that no one sets out usually to change the world. It’s through a bunch of small actions that things happen. And like, at least for me, within Jewish wisdom, there is this idea that if you change, if you affect one person’s life, you’ve affected an entire world. And that’s something that I really find very like comforting and hopeful when I’m trying to think about these things and trying to ask myself like, how much of a change do I want to see?

It’s like, well, maybe it’s enough for me to do the things that I feel like I can do at my best. And if I manage to impact one of my students and to get them to think of their life in a different way, then I have changed a world. Maybe it’s not the world that I will inhabit. Maybe it’s a different timeline, but at the very least it’s something. And that there is some amount of like incremental change that we are increasing by living fruitful lives that are holistic and are trying to impact larger than just our own field.

Conley:

Yeah. Just to be clear, I’m very tired.

Whitmer:

Okay. [laugh]

Conley:

Yeah.

Whitmer:

Great. [laugh]

Conley:

But yeah, that’s, like, assemblage theory.

Whitmer:

Yeah.

Hoppenjans:

Beautiful. Thank you both so much for chatting with us today.

Conley:

Thank you.

Hoppenjans:

We really appreciate it.

Whitmer:

Yeah. This was fun. Yay. Let’s do it again. [laugh] Maybe without the microphones though. And over a beer. And later in the day. [laugh]

Beachy:

Thank you for listening to this special panel on public music scholarship and alternative academia from Currents in Music Research.