CMR-Pod: Scholarly Music Podcasts: A Conversation with Megan Lyons, William Robin, and Jennifer Weaver

Anna Rose Nelson, Host:

Hello everyone, and welcome to this very special podcast episode through the online publication space, Currents in Music Research. I’m your host, Anna Rose Nelson. I use she/her pronouns. I’m on the editorial board of CMR, I recently finished my PhD through the University of Michigan, and I teach music theory at the University of Maryland in College Park. In today’s episode, we’ll hear from some folks who are doing some exciting research, but they’re also doing the important work of making their ideas accessible to the public, people outside the academy, all in the form of podcasts. We’ll hear about the pros and cons of an audio only format, we’ll talk about the tricky question of rigor as it applies to public facing scholarship, and we’ll learn about each of our panelists’ visions for their work. Let’s get into it.  

Nelson:

All right, welcome everyone to this podcast episode, potentially an inaugural podcast episode through the Currents in Music Research publication space. As you already know, I’m Anna Rose, I’m your host, and I’m here with three super exciting guests who are going to talk to us about their own podcasts so that you, the listener, can get a sense of who they are, and of course, get to know their voice so you can follow the conversation we’re about to have.

I’ll have them each introduce themselves. Guests, remember to please say your name, your pronouns, if you feel comfortable sharing them, your institutional affiliation, and potentially anything that you do outside of your podcast, assuming that that delineation can be drawn. And then tell me a little bit about your podcast. What’s it called? Where can we listen more, for example? I’ll just start, for no particular reason with Megan. Megan, how’s it going? 

Megan Lyons:

Hey, good. What’s up guys? My name is Megan Lyons. My pronouns are she/her. I’m currently going into my third year as an assistant professor of music theory at Furman University, down in Greenville, South Carolina, Go Dins. Some fun facts about me, I am an escape room fiend, so feel free, anybody listening, let me know where I should go to do an escape room next. I think I’ve done three this summer already. And the podcast that I guess I’m representing today is SMT-pod. SMT-pod is the premier audio publication of the Society for Music Theory, and I am the founder and editor of it.  

Nelson:

Fabulous. Awesome. And you can go to smt-pod.org to learn more [laugh]. Fabulous. Let’s jump to Will.  

William Robin: 

Hi, I’m Will Robin. Very happy to be joining this conversation today. I’m an associate professor of Musicology at the University of Maryland School of Music, and my podcast is called Sound Expertise. We’ve been around for a few years. We’re going to launch, hopefully, a fourth season this fall. That’s a preview for those who don’t know, and you can find it at soundexpertise.org. It’s a show where I interview other music scholars about their research and why it matters, and it’s also available on all of your main podcasting platforms. 

Nelson: 

Fabulous. Awesome. Thanks, Will. Jen, we’ll move over to you.  

Jennifer Weaver:  

Sure. I’m Jen Weaver and I am Professor of Music Theory at Dallas Baptist University. I’m starting my 12th year, which is crazy to think about. My pronouns are she/her and I am one of three hosts on Note Doctors podcasts, which is mostly about music theory pedagogy, but we hit on all sorts of things along the way. We are starting our fifth season––you start to lose track at some point––our fifth season this fall, but we’re currently doing summer shorts right now. And we are at notedoctorspodcast.com.  

Nelson: 

Awesome. What a great overview of music scholarship podcasts. Not that these three are the only, but these three are, in my opinion, some of the best. Awesome. Let’s jump into this conversation. I’ve got a set of prepared questions, so I’ll just jump in. So, think about this, guests. Why did you choose an audio only public facing format for this project, this initiative, your ideas, whatever you’d like to say. In other words, why a podcast?  

Weaver:

So, for us on Note Doctors, it started during the pandemic. We were jumping into each other’s music theory pedagogy classes and doing Zoom sessions. That’s where it was born originally, was from those kinds of conversations. That transferred very directly to podcast format. We literally just one day said, “we should have a podcast where we talk about this”, and then we were like, well, let’s make one and maybe our moms will listen. And then [laugh], it turned out differently. Lots of people listened, so we kept going. But ours started out in that format, and so it made sense to continue that way.  

Nelson:

Yeah, I imagine that so many podcasts happened after 2020. I imagine that there was just a big ballooning of that, and that’s great. Awesome. Megan or Will, you have any thoughts?  

Robin:

So, funnily enough, the podcast launched in the pandemic, but it was actually conceived much, much earlier. I’d been thinking about wanting to do something since like 2016 or 2017 or so, just because I listened to podcasts a lot––comedy podcasts, interview podcasts, you know, newsy podcasts. And it just seemed at that time when I was thinking about this, that there was a clear kind of void to be filled.

There are all of these spaces where musicologists write about their work and talk about their work, but those spaces are often cloistered, they’re often designed for a specific audience, a journal article or a monograph. It has a specific way it’s meant to be read, and you learn in graduate school how to read that. And yet, when you talk to any of the folks in the Zoom or any other musicologists, ethnomusicologists, music theorists or otherwise, they can have really interesting and vivid and detailed conversations about their work that are not just only accessible to people who went to grad school.

That was kind of the original idea. I have all of these things I’m interested in. There’s all of this knowledge within our discipline, broadly conceived, that could be really compelling to folks both within and outside the discipline. But the general idea was to try to create something that was accessible to non-academic audiences, or at least non-musicology audiences in that sense. So, the interview format seemed like an ideal way to do that, to get people to speak informally about their work, to engage with it, to teach it through the conversation format.

As far as why audio only, I don’t really like watching YouTube, and I definitely don’t want to be on it [laugh]. I think that there is something specific to the podcasting medium when you have a conversation happening in your ears that actually really helps you focus on ideas that can be really engaging deep, and you can have an hour-long conversation that someone can follow as a narrative in a way that you can’t necessarily in other formats. That was what really compelled me to explore the media. 

Nelson:

Yeah. Absolutely. And I’ve loved listening to a lot of your interviews, and they seem to be so easygoing back and forth. And you’re right, they’re so easy to follow. I really love it. Thank you. Megan, any thoughts about audio only?  

Lyons:

So, I guess our podcast is a little different because we are technically a publication, and that was kind of my vision in founding SMT-pod. The Society for Music Theory has so many great journals, you know, ––Spectrum, JMT, SMTV––but a lot of them are traditional formats. So, they have 40/50-page articles that, personally, a lot of us love reading. But sometimes we don’t have the time to read through those 40/50-page articles, or maybe our undergrad students can’t absorb them as well, as Will was saying.

After seeing SMTV launch, which is the video format publication of the Society, I thought, “hey, why not have a podcast format for the publication too?” So, I proposed it, and we are going into our fourth season. I think it’s a really good way to bridge the gap between those really heavy duty 40/50-page articles and something seen as a little more informal, like a podcast. Our goal, which I hope we will achieve at some point, is to show that podcasting overall is a very, very vigorous form of academic writing, essentially. It’s just in a new format and presented in a way that’s a little more digestible. So that’s the long goal, but I think we’re all kind of in the same camp in this.  

Nelson:

Yeah, absolutely. And digestible, I think is a good word to use. Especially because some music theory specifically, publications can be, as you say Will, very complex and only accessible to a certain person with a certain type of training. But also specifically with music theory, we often rely so heavily upon graphics or scores or charts or Roman numerals or Schenker graphs or whatever it might be. And so, I think it’s a really interesting question to ask music theorists to forego those. But I saw that as a potential pitfall, and I haven’t seen any issues with it so far. I mean, Megan, have you seen any issues with that?  

Lyons:

No, but you’re right. It presents a really unique challenge, at least for us, where some of these authors are taking what was the highlight conference presentation of the regional conference that they presented at, and now they can’t put a score on the screen to show their sonata form analysis. So, for me, I like to compare it to when I’m teaching my oral skills classes, when I have to say, “okay, I’m not going to write anything down. We’re only going to use our ears. We’re going to use words to describe what we’re hearing; we’re going to create our own terms to get through this together.” So, in a way, it’s actually a little more challenging than writing a traditional journal article. Which I know, I’ve done that, where I have 40 examples for my 40-page article. You can’t do that here, and I think that’s pretty awesome.  

Nelson:

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. It helps us focus on listening to the music, which is something that so often gets lost, especially in the music theory classroom. Other than not having a score or potentially written examples or charts, or whatever, have you faced any other challenges working only with audio?

Weaver:

Occasionally copyright related things are concerning, because you are playing oral clips of things and stuff like that. So that occasionally is a question mark, although we’ve never actually had an issue with it. We do post our podcast episodes on YouTube just as audio files with our like logo as the picture. Occasionally they have flagged us if whatever we played was more than 15 seconds or something like that, they’ll flag us as copyright. But that’s the only other thing I can think of. And I agree. I love that we have to lean into, if we’re going to try to demonstrate an analysis thing, it has to be something that the audience can easily hear when you play it immediately. So, you have to kind of lean hard into that element of analysis. And I think that’s fun. I think it’s interesting.  

Nelson:

Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I’ve had conversations with a friend Dana DeVlieger about; she has a PhD in theory from the University of Minnesota and then a JD I think it is from Northwestern, and she studies these issues of copyright. And that’s something that I’m always afraid of [laugh], and there’s really no way to know. That’s definitely a huge challenge. [laugh] Will, have you faced any issues working only with audio?  

Robin:

No, I mean, with the copyright thing, we don’t really play music clips typically in the show. I’ve occasionally dropped in like a 15 second thing, but we did an episode a couple years ago that was about the pandemic, and I had folks call in with audio messages about their experiences of the pandemic as scholars and we strung them together. It’s a really––you go back and listen, it’s really intense now. Towards the end of the episode, Marian Wilson Kimber––who’s a great scholar of 19th century and early 20th century music and gender, ––the episode ends with this kind of incredible anecdote or story that she tells about mourning in the 19th century. She talks about a song––a parlor song whose name I’m actually forgetting right now––which is the Indiana State song. I had wanted to end the episode with a recording of the song that she talks about by William Bolcom and Joan Morris, and I reached out to none and such ’cause I wanted to play the full thing. It took a while to get an answer, and then it was probably going to be fine. In the meantime, my producer, Eddie Davis, ––composer D Edward Davis, who’s a wonderful composer and producer––decided he just wanted to have a crack at the song. So, he recorded his own version, and we ended. It made it much better and more personal. So yeah, that was the only real situation where I was like, “oh, there might be a copyright issue to come up.”

Audio is a challenge because I hate the sound of my own voice. I hate recording these stupid introductions and outros. It drives me crazy. I sit in my basement, I do it five or six times over and over, and I eventually just say it’s as good as it’s going to get. I never wanted to be a radio host or anything like that, and I certainly didn’t want to have to keep listening over and over and over to my voice. I’m seeing some nods here, which makes me feel that I’m not the only person in the room who feels this way. So that is the downside. But I kind of measured that against the fact that I really wanted the show to exist. And I also knew that I don’t necessarily think of the challenges of the medium so much as the strengths of the medium.

One of them is that you are being, in most good podcasts, you’re being taken on an audio journey by a host who you have some kind of empathetic, familiar relationship with. It’s like you’re listening to your friend, and I imagine any of you who listen to podcasts feel this way about the ones you listen to the most. So, I knew that if I wanted these conversations to be interpreted in a way that the most popular topics and the least popular topics would get equal, hopefully equal attention, then it would have to be through the way I open each episode with an introduction where I explain why I think this topic matters and why it should matter to you. I’m making my own case for that. And that’s part of, I think, what’s great about this medium is that you have that ability to carve out a space to have this personal connection to a listener, despite the fact that they don’t know me, and I don’t know them. Right. Yeah.

Nelson:

Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s really, really great. And yes, I mean, we’ve had a couple of episodes through SMT-pod where somebody records their own version of something or records music in the background, and we’re always so happy because it’s like now, oh, there’s no chance that anybody’s going to try and sue us. Not that anybody here would get sued [laugh], you know? Yeah, that’s absolutely true. And I also agree, I haven’t really thought about it that way. I also love thinking about hosts as people that I was just talking to at a cocktail party or invited over for dinner. It’s a very intimate experience, I think, audio only.

Okay. Let’s take a little bit of a turn into potentially controversial waters. So despite the fact that our academic societies, AMS, SMT, SEM, so on and so on, seem to be terribly or rather recently interested in “public scholarship”, quote unquote, as evidenced by the last plenary session at SMT in New Orleans I think it was, some folks within our disciplines and in other certain disciplines are hesitant to call what we do scholarship, or at least scholarship that’s rigorous enough that could warrant a line on a CV or potentially in a tenure dossier, et cetera. Have any of you experienced any of that pushback? And even if not, what would your answer be to somebody who holds that opinion?  

Weaver:

I don’t know that I’ve gotten a whole lot of pushback. I did use the podcast in my advancement materials when I went from associate to full, but I’m at a teaching university. They were incredibly responsive to that because it is so public facing, and because it’s teaching focused. So that actually worked in my favor, I think.

I was at the Pedagogy into Practice conference this summer, and someone there said, “I have wondered how you all carve out the time to do the amount of research you have to do in order to create your podcast.” No one had ever framed it to me like that before. I was so grateful for that sort of recognition of the fact that yes, we do just have conversations with people, but we have to read their book. We have to look at their research. We have to think through everything and come up with thoughtful questions. All of that is intellectual work. All of that is, in its own way, scholarship. We are still digesting materials from our field and then creating content related to them.

Clearly it has had its place because we’ve had some great responses sometimes from people. We had a woman who wrote us, who teaches in South Africa, who said something along the lines of like, “I don’t have colleagues here who do what I do, and now I feel like I have colleagues.” So, there’s certainly a space for sharing research in this unique way. I mean, people are just going to need to become more open to it, [laugh] I think, is the long and short of it, because we don’t have enough journals in our field to support the amount of research that there’s potential for, is what I would say. So, these sorts of outlets make space for those things. 

Nelson:

I love that. That’s great. And it’s so nice to hear that someone thinks that your podcast allows them to have colleagues. It’s so sweet. That’s heartwarming. Awesome. Megan, Will, any thoughts?  

Lyons:

I know us at SMT-pod kind of faced a conundrum at first because when we think of academic journals, especially in the music theory musicology space, we think of the anonymous peer review. I don’t know if you guys also have nightmares about ‘peer reviewer number two’, because I do. Oftentimes the idea of ‘rigorous’ has been associated with cruelty and a little bit of belittling and almost hazing. To get those ‘revise and resubmits’ where they basically say, “I’d love a brand-new article, just do it all over again.” [laugh] I think what we’re trying to do is rebrand the idea of ‘rigorous’, to be exactly what Jen and Will are saying. It’s well researched, it is founded in evidence and there’s support from it. We have people affirming that, yes, what we’re talking about is legitimate, all that sort of stuff.

So, for us at SMT-pod, we created an open collaborative peer review process, which I mean, we’re not the first to do that. Let me just clarify that. That’s just simply what we call it, where our authors are able to choose a peer reviewer––who of course doesn’t have a conflict of interest––but then they get to know each other’s name, they get to jump on Zoom, they get to throw ideas back and forth. It’s still rigorous because we’re still doing research and we’re still putting out new theories and discovering new things, but we’re not beating somebody down and making them feel really bad before we publish their article three years later.

Which is another thing, I think, that’s great about the podcast format. We’re not waiting three years to see someone’s research. I always hated that, when I’d see the best conference presentation ever and then the article came out five years later. I mean, it was great because I really loved it and I was excited to see it again, but I really wanted to read it earlier. So, I think the idea of podcasts not being rigorous is––we need to rethink the term ‘rigorous’ because they are, they absolutely are. It’s just the way we’ve thought of it in the past doesn’t line up with the present.  

Nelson:

Yeah, absolutely. And as you say, the double anonymous peer review system, there’s so much research that says that it doesn’t necessarily lead to better research products. It’s, as you say, it’s kind of just hazing. So yeah, if that’s what rigor is, let’s be done with that [laugh] and change the definition. I love that. Will, any thoughts?  

Robin:

Yeah, I’ve been in a privileged position of being at an institution where I can generally– I’ve been doing public scholarship for, I don’t know, 10 or 15 years now of different forms, writing, speaking, this thing, now the podcast. I’ve always pursued the thing I’m interested in before I figured out if it “counts”. I’ve been able to get things to count. This podcast did not replace anything I needed for tenure, for example. I still had a book and the articles and all that stuff. For example, the most recent season, I had a sabbatical after I got tenure, and I proposed the podcast season as the sabbatical, and that was approved. That obviously counted in that sense, which was nice.

As far as this conversation about rigor and peer review, I don’t think my podcast is rigorous. I think it’s actually important that it’s not rigorous in the sense that––that doesn’t mean I don’t do a lot of work for it––but there is great work to be created through academic institutions and traditional or non-traditional modes of academic review and criticism, arbitration, whatever. But I also think that if we want our work to speak beyond the academy, we can’t necessarily conceive it through the societies themselves as these more kind of collaborative projects, which again, I think are very important. But this is a personal project. I would never want to, for example, have a call for presenters on my podcast because the people I choose to speak to are the people that I’m interested in speaking to.

The reason people generally want to listen to the podcast is because I have made curatorial decisions that would not withstand P[eer] review, because I’ve been interested in this topic and this topic, and this person and this person. If you look at that list, it’s probably not the list that should be the people who are in jams over the course of two years or something, if that makes sense. They’re all amazing scholars, but it comes first from that personal drive. I don’t think of my podcast as scholarship itself, and also because it’s an interview. I’m essentially showcasing the work of others. That’s the foremost thing I’m doing. But I put a lot of scholarly insight into it and work into it. Ultimately each episode represents a piece of scholarship for the person who is featured in it.

And there are now multiple scholars, like Sumanth Gopinath, who’s a scholar of Reich and Reach––that’s still our most popular episode. That is the thing that people get to his work through now, is that they know him from that episode and they come to his work later. That episode represents his perspective really well in a way that’s fundamentally different from how it’s represented in his publications.

David Hunter is another one who did our episode on Handel in the Slave Trade, where it’s like, there are some really good peer-reviewed David Hunter articles out there where you can read about Handel’s involvement in the slave trade, or you can listen to the 45-minute episode and get a lot of those details. And also, his more personal insights that are the things that get stripped out of the “rigorous” scholarship. Because a lot of what I love about the podcast is I get to hear from people why they care about something, what brought them to an issue. Even further, for example, in that episode, when I read Hunter’s work on Handel in the Slave Trade where he is uncovering these things, he draws conclusions about it as historical evidence, and he raises questions. But then I ask him, ‘well, what do we actually do with this information?’ Which is the question that you often don’t answer in your journal article, because it’s kind of beyond the scope of what you’re really supposed to be doing in that format.

By removing these ideas of “rigor” that come from what we traditionally expect out of the academic publication, it allows, at least me, to have the conversations that I think are going to be more captivating to a wider audience, if that makes sense, but also ideally captivating to musicologists, which remain our core audience as well.

Nelson:

I might even just push back and say at one point you said that the episodes are a piece of scholarship for the person you’re interviewing. I might also say that it’s a piece of scholarship, cultivated anyway, by you. Because despite the fact that you’re asking these questions that tend to be left out of publications, journals, etc., you’re also––I’ve seen, especially in that two-month episode, which I’ve listened to by the way––you come up with a new way of thinking about things through the conversation that you’re having. It’s not just Sumanth has one idea, and you have another, but rather, the two of you are bouncing off one another and coming up with something that wouldn’t have been created, an idea that wouldn’t have been spoken if it wasn’t for your podcast.  

Robin:

Thank you. That’s definitely the goal is for––sometimes the work doesn’t actually click for me until I have these conversations. Dylan Robinson’s work is fantastic. It’s hard. His book is hard to read, it’s a dense book, and it’s hard to read because it has provocative and important ideas that require you to ruminate on them. And I ruminated on them, and I felt like I was like 60% of the way there. Then talking to him helped me understand them, and then hopefully that can also work for other people too. So yeah, thank you for pointing that out.

Nelson:

Absolutely. That actually leads––one of the last points you mentioned––leads into my last question, which is, who is the audience for this podcast as you see it? And have you had to adapt the way that you present ideas, materials, thoughts in order to reach that intended audience? So, I’ll just go around the room, who’s got thoughts?  

Lyons:

I’ll start, why not? I think overall at SMT-pod we want to reach everybody. But selfishly, I’ll just say I want to reach high school students and undergrad music students who are thinking of going into musicology, going into music theory. Because I know for me as an undergrad, I was thinking of going into music theory but seeing a 50-page article on geometric transformations, Neo Riemannian stuff, it was cool, but I had no idea what was going on and I couldn’t picture myself doing that. So, some of the episodes we have are a little more jargon heavy. Obviously, we don’t have geometric transformations going on.

But other ones like, my personal favorite, I love the teardrop chord––which is, I think, episode three in season one, it’s about the minor four chord. Oh my gosh, if I heard that as a high school student, I would’ve immediately been sold. I’m going to get my music theory degree. Or Christopher Doll’s episode, “Is Key Real”, is just very out there––and a little bit controversial, but in the best way. Selfishly I want to appeal to those younger audiences who maybe can’t see themselves as a music academic, but by listening to our episodes, they say, ‘oh yeah, I’m really interested in that. I could do that.’

Nelson:

Oh yeah, absolutely. I might even argue, once you’ve reached the end of your undergrad and apply for music theory degrees, ––not that one should do that necessarily [laugh]––you don’t really know what music theory is or what it can be. I’m teaching this online class right now, it’s a pedagogy class, and people are saying, ‘yeah, I thought music theory was Roman numerals and transformations of the row.’ And it’s sort of like, well, that’s the start of it. But if you don’t even know what music theory can be at the end of an undergrad, then this tool could be absolutely helpful for you to start thinking beyond those boundaries.  

Lyons:

Absolutely. I think the panel I was on at SMT, somebody said, ‘who are music theorists?’ And I was like, you’re a music theorist. I’m a music theorist. We’re all music theorists. Do you talk about music? Okay, cool. You’re a music theorist. Like it or not. But you’re right. I think people need to be able to envision themselves in that role.  

Weaver:

So, we always envisioned, by the way, when I say we, my collaborators are Paul Thomas and Benjamin Graf. Paul Thomas is at Texas Woman’s University; Ben Graf is at UNT (University of North Texas).  We always envisioned our audience to be other people who are teaching music theory. And I think when you are someone who teaches music theory, you picture everyone else who does what you do as being like you; but the great thing about having Paul involved is that Paul is the composer. That’s how he came into teaching music theory. So, he also teaches composition, he does many other things. He also is the one who produces all of our audio and things like that for the podcast itself.

The great kind of flip side of all of this is that music theorists are not the only people, of course, who teach music theory. Lots of other kinds of specialists teach music theory at the college level. Lots of people teach music theory at the high school level or to their piano students or things like that. So, people have other kinds of people that teach what we do and have found us that way. It has kind of opened up the doors to talk to a lot of different kinds of people. I don’t know that we at any point have thought about changing how we talk about music in order to reach those audiences. It just naturally has happened that some of them have found us and have asked questions that are really helpful and things like that.

I like what you said, if you talk about music, you’re a music theorist. If you think about music, you’re a music theorist. You’re developing theories about music. That’s what we’re doing here. And lots of people teach that to other people as well. It’s a back to the audio format, it’s a broader space. And the fact that we can post it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or YouTube or whatever, also allows for a broader audience of people who might not encounter those ideas other ways.

Nelson:

Yeah. I was talking recently to a friend of mine, John Lawrence at U Chicago, who’s a theorist. And he was saying––he made a joke––he said, looking at the theory slash composition job wiki for the last seven years, he said that there’s been a position for bassoon slash music theory teacher. And it’s been [laugh] consistent for the last seven years. So, I think that that’s a really great way in because, somebody who has a high degree in bassoon may have some music theory, pedagogy, musicology pedagogy background. But they also may not, and it would be a real bummer if they had to teach through the textbook. It would be so much greater if they could make their classes richer with a podcast like Note Doctors [laugh]. Absolutely. Great. Awesome. Will, thoughts?  

Robin:

Yeah, you know, I think about this audience question a lot. I teach a public scholarship seminar where we talk about what is the public, there is no one public, there are many publics. And when you develop a project that is not a seminar paper or a dissertation or a lecture in a college classroom, you have to think about who your ideal audience is, and then also who your real audience is. If your ideal audience is everyone out there, but the real audience for the first two years of a project is going to be your immediate family, that’s worth thinking about. Knowing how to build from the real to the ideal. 

When I first started to think about this, my ideal audience was basically not anyone who’s interested in music, because this is not a music podcast. It’s not Song Exploder or Switched on Pop, where we’re going to tell you how music works or we’re going to break down something. It’s kind of like a music issues, explaining music scholarship podcast. In my head it’s basically for the person who probably studied music in college but then maybe became a musician or a composer or didn’t pursue music, but took maybe an upper-level music class, really liked it, and then hasn’t picked up a musicological monograph since graduating because what would they do with it, basically. That’s intimidating, expensive, et cetera. This would help them feel like they’re back in that classroom in a sense, catch them up on things that are interesting, alert them to issues that they might not think about, but also give them the one place where they can fully grasp ideally something that maybe that has been percolating on the corners of social media, but hasn’t actually been really explained.

The Handel and the Slave Trade thing being, I think, the emblematic example where, starting in 2019/2020 or so––I don’t exactly remember when Hunter started writing about this–– there was stuff on the internet about it. But you could Google it and basically get a very incomplete picture of the scholarship without reading the scholarship. Same with this controversy around Reich and Race that unfolded in 2020, which we did in the middle of season one, which I had all prerecorded, we did a very quick episode on. Other episodes more recently with Philip Ewell and stuff like that as well. That was kind of the imagined audience. And we’ve been successful in reaching a lot of those people, I hear from folks all the time. We have, I just looked, we have 62,000 total downloads for the podcast over the last three seasons. So, a lot of people, when a new episode drops, usually, there are like a thousand or so listeners in the first week or so, and it builds up like that.

Certainly, more episodes are still more popular than others. But there’s also the actual non imagined audience, which I knew when this thing launched that the people who would be listening were primarily going to be people in the world of musicology and ethnomusicology who had friends who were on the show, who knew me, who saw it pop up on their social media feeds and was like, “oh, here’s a Musicology podcast.”

It was also really important for me to––and this was actually something that came out of a conversation I had early on at the recommendation of Charlie Harding, who’s one of the hosts of Switched On Pop, and he had some really good advice of like––don’t alienate or isolate your core audience either, because whatever we’re doing, I don’t want to “dumb it down” so that musicologists aren’t going to care. In fact, I hear a lot from musicologists who are like, “I didn’t get a chance to read XYZ’s work” and finally I feel like I know it.” Or a lot of people are assigning these episodes in the classroom because it’s a lot more digestible than assigning other work by that scholar. Ideally, we’ve been kind of serving these two audiences, the non-academic and the academic audience. That’s been, I think, a success of the show.

I’ll also say like, there are a lot of limitations to what I’ve done in terms of audience. If I wanted to double or triple or quadruple the audience, I would need to explore posting things on YouTube, using TikTok, all of the social media platforms that I have decided not to use. I also largely have pulled myself off social media in the last couple years. Twitter died in a way that Twitter––Twitter never really got people to get into the podcast. It was mostly a word-of-mouth phenomenon. I’m at a point actually where there is no real way for me to grow the audience for the show without investing significant amounts of time and potentially money in other places for it to pop up. And I’m not willing to do that, which is also why––and this is an exclusive for your podcast––the season I’m launching this fall is going to be a truncated final season, because we’ve done a lot of work. I’m happy with it. I’ve had most of the conversations I want to have, and I’m ready to move on with my life. I am imagining a final season. I’ll also give one more short preview plug, which is, we are going to do a live episode at AMS, an interview with Jonathan Bailey Holland, a great composer, as well as the Dean of Northwestern School of Music. So, if you’re attending AMS in Chicago, keep an eye out for that. 

Nelson:

Oh dang, I didn’t know it’s the last––oh, tear [laugh].  

Robin:

Well, you’re among the first people I’ve told besides my wife and my producer. But yeah, I’m ready to wrap up. 

Nelson:

I get that podcasting is, as Jen said, it’s a lot of work. [laugh] It’s a lot of work. Well, congratulations. That’s super exciting. 

Robins:

Thanks. 

Nelson:

This conversation has been so wonderful. I’m getting a lot of themes of accessibility, digestibility, but also this platform where new ideas can be cultivated in a way that they couldn’t be in double anonymous, peer reviewed journal monograph sorts of spaces. So, this has been really great. I’ll give us a chance to do one last wrap up thing. The last question is, what do you hope your audience takes away from today’s conversation of your podcast? Just sort of generally. For example, what do you want them to know about the podcast, about your project, about the content in your podcast, or your thoughts on public scholarship more generally? Any other plugs for stuff that’s happening on your podcast?  

Weaver:

So, we are already lining up guests for next season. There’s hopefully going to be some fun faces that we’ve not seen before, to talk about their work or to talk about their classrooms, or both. So that’s coming. Last summer we did a book club approach and we’re planning to hopefully do that this summer. But we’ve all been traveling and doing all sorts of crazy things. So, we’ll see if we can get a whole book read [laugh] together this summer. That is the plan.

I think that the thing that has come to mind as we’ve been having this conversation for me is how much this has grown a sort of community in my life that didn’t exist before. Not just Paul and Ben––who I was already good friends with––but also, it creates a means for us to connect all the time about what we’re teaching. Which has really enriched my teaching and my life in general. But there’s this broader community of people now that I talk to and know quite well because they were guests on the podcast or because we connected to them through the podcast. The community side of it is one really wonderful thing about doing this kind of work.  

Nelson:

Absolutely. That’s so important. A dear friend of mine, Lydia Bangura, she has a podcast. If you don’t know it, Her Music Academia, it’s a great podcast. She talks about that a lot. She has a similar model to yours, Will, where she interviews somebody about their work, and she says that it’s so great to just build community around these conversations. Not only just with the person who’s being interviewed, but also with the people who write in after the show saying, I never thought about that. Or things like that. Community is so important and it’s so great that podcasts can afford that. That’s wonderful.  

Lyons:

Just thinking about public facing scholarship, I think I’ve grown to love that more than our, I guess the reverse would be like private facing scholarship. To me it’s almost more important that we’re putting podcasts out there, there’s YouTube channels, things like that because the music theory, the musicology space is not all that big. And a lot of what we do is–– this is definitely not a real word––but like self-cyclical. We just rotate within ourselves. We create things for ourselves. What everybody’s doing with podcasts and YouTube is expanding that circle and making that circle more inclusive in different ways.

I mean, Anna brought up accessibility and I think that’s a huge part of it. Is our material accessible and welcoming to everybody? I guess that would be my takeaway; let’s make all of our music fields more accessible and more inclusive and more fun because doing music theory is really fun. I think so at least.

Nelson:

Some of my students might disagree with you. Though I might hope that they feel differently after my class. [laugh] Yeah. Fabulous. Absolutely. Will, thoughts?  

Robin:

Yeah. You know, if you are out there and thinking of starting your own thing, whatever that thing is, if it’s a podcast or a video or something else, the two bits of advice that I always give are, whatever you’re interested in doing should be an extension––if it’s outside of your typical academic pursuit, if you’re an academic––should be an extension of something you already like doing. So, if you like Instagram, use Instagram. If you like making videos, make videos. If you hate making videos, don’t start making videos ’cause you think it’s a good thing to do as a musicologist. It’s probably not [laugh] if you don’t like already doing it.

Then the other thing is, spend a lot of time thinking about what the models are that are out there and how you can best fit into an existing genre. I think it’s so hard for people to say, “I want to start a podcast.” And then it’s like, well, what do I do? Well, you probably listen to some podcasts. What do they do? That was what got me started, I listened to a couple interview podcasts that I love, and I was like, let’s just replicate this format but for another thing. Finding established mediums, established ways of thinking can help you actually unlock the thing that you want to do. Because there are essentially like seven different genres of podcast in a way. You’re probably doing one of them if you don’t already know it. And one of them is obviously SMT-pod. That’s a genre unto itself. Right. 

Nelson:

[laugh] Wow. That’s great. Awesome. I mean, this is fabulous. So, we’ll wrap it up here. The last thing I’ll say is listen to these podcasts. Go learn some pedagogy at note doctors, go listen to some analysis at SMT-pod, and listen to some of those really interesting conversations through sound expertise. They’re very entertaining. So that’s all I have for us. Thanks for having this conversation with me. 

Lyons: 

Thanks guys.

Robin:             

Thank you everyone. Have a good one. 

Weaver:

Thank you.  

Nelson:

Well, there you have it. Huge thanks to Will Robin, Jen Weaver and Megan Lyons for a fascinating discussion about pressing issues in the music podcast world. I hope you learned a lot. I know I did. If you want to learn more about these folks and their work, here are the details.

Information about Will Robins podcast, Sound Expertise, can be found at soundexpertise.org. Note Doctors, the podcast that Jen Weaver is a co-founder of, can be found at notedoctorspodcast.com. SMT-pod, which Megan Lyons helped found through the Society for Music Theory, can be found at smtpod.org. All three of these podcasts can be accessed wherever you get your podcasts.

Finally, if you have any questions, comments, or ideas for us at CMR or if you’d like to explore publishing with us, you can find us at sites.lsa.umich.educurrentsinmusicresearch. Thanks for listening.