Music Theory, Professional Conferences, and Community Engagement

Anna Gawboy, Danny Jenkins, Rachel Short, and Larry Zbikowski

In the time of COVID-19, meetings of professional organizations and other conferences are being cancelled or moved online. Although discussions about the environmental impacts of meeting face to face have become more urgent in recent years, alternatives to our past conference-going habits are now emerging more quickly than they would have otherwise. The efficacy of these virtual meetings provides us all with the opportunity to consider how necessary conference travel really is.

While it is probably premature to declare an end to all future conference travel—particularly the ritualized, pseudo-pilgrimages that many take to their annual disciplinary meetings—it is important to think critically about the purposes and goals of such gatherings. In regards to the meetings of our own professional organization, the Society for Music Theory (SMT), we look forward to hearing presentations of the latest scholarship, meeting in small groups with those who share similar interests, browsing the newest publications, and renewing old—and building new—relationships with other scholars in our field. As important as these activities are, a number of questions about our typical behavioral patterns emerge. How much of our experience occurs within the walls of the conference hotel, and in immediately surrounding restaurants and bars? How can we better interface with and learn from the larger communities in which our professional conferences take place? Rather than simply academic music theorists, how do we use these opportunities to become public music theorists? 

The most recent meeting of the SMT was held November 7–10, 2019, in Columbus, Ohio. The official program offered many papers, posters, interest group meetings, and other activities intended to facilitate the exchange of ideas among SMT members, but on the evenings of November 7 and 8, Rachel Short and Larry Zbikowski left the conference to share their research with members of the Columbus community. These public events reflect a growing interest in public music theory within the SMT. This essay will trace this recent history and discuss why Columbus was an ideal city for hosting public scholarship. Rachel and Larry will reflect on their experience and share their approaches to presenting their work to a general audience. The goal of this report is to encourage further public engagement adjacent to national meetings, or in the innumerable locations around the world where SMT members live.

In comparison to many academic societies, SMT was ahead of the curve in its support for open access scholarship, with the inaugural volume of Music Theory Online (MTO) appearing in February 1993. This e-journal was incredibly effective at presenting the highest quality scholarship to its readers at no cost, well before JSTOR or other online forums emerged. While fully and freely available, the peer-reviewed articles published in MTO do often present accessibility challenges to non-specialist audiences in terms of tone, terminology, and other constraints. In February 2015, SMT created another venue for open access scholarship with the release of the first volume of SMT-V: The Society for Music Theory Videocast Journal. SMT-V requires scholars to present their ideas in 10-minute video segments. Though the content is peer-reviewed, the format encourages scholars to make their ideas easily digestible in order to broaden “the potential to engage both specialists within the field as well as interested viewers outside the music theory community.” SMT-V has become the most visible evidence of the Society’s commitment to public music theory.

In 2018, the SMT program for its joint meeting with the American Musicological Society (AMS) in San Antonio included a special session on the topic of public music theory. Chaired by Anna Gawboy, the session included papers by music theorists Alyssa Barna, Danny Jenkins, Miriam Piilonen, Alex Rehding, Daniel B. Stevens, and Christian Thorau. These scholars addressed a variety of topics, including Leonard Bernstein’s famous Norton Lectures, analytical visualizations, twenty-first-century alternatives to program notes, digital journalism, Twitter as a space for people to discuss their anxieties about music theory, and community-engaged pedagogy. The presentations reflected the fact that although the term “public music theory” was relatively new, activities and modes of inquiry we might include under that rubric were already varied and manifold.

As preparations for the 2019 meeting were underway, Anna Gawboy, a faculty member at The Ohio State University (OSU) and local arrangements chair for the meeting, contacted Danny Jenkins to discuss the possibility of organizing some public music theory events in the city of Columbus to coincide with the annual meeting. Columbus proved an ideal location to organize community engagement events to coincide with the annual meeting. The city has a unique culture of public scholarship shaped largely by OSU’s land-grant mission. There are hundreds of partnerships, programs, broadcasts, publications, performances, and events that connect OSU researchers with the public.

During the Columbus meeting, music theorists presented at Columbus Science Pub (founded 2010) and the STEAM Factory (founded 2012), two OSU-affiliated organizations that regularly host live, interactive scholarly lectures for general audiences. Columbus Science Pub is an hour-long event featuring a single speaker that takes place monthly at Upfront@Shadowbox Live, a theater and bar in Columbus’s brewery district. Its format and aims are inspired by the Science Café movement, which facilitates conversations between researchers and the public in a casual setting in order to “welcome people who may or may not typically get involved with scientific discussions.” The Science Café website affirms that “these are not long lectures with a passive audience listening to an expert. Rather, they are dynamic, two-way interactions…. In this way, the public feels empowered to learn, and the scientist speaker gains valuable perspective on [their] own work.”

Rachel Short at the STEAM Factory (photo credit: Gabriel Cuddy)

A similar spirit motivates the OSU STEAM Factory, which hosts research salons during Franklinton Fridays, a monthly art crawl held at a former factory building that is now home to artists’ studios, a bar-restaurant, a live music venue, and offices. While Columbus Science Pub features speakers who adopt a wide range of empirical or computational approaches to research, OSU STEAM factory is a faculty collective representing a wide range of disciplines, including the arts, sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The STEAM Factory Franklinton Friday program involves several scholars from different fields who give “lightning talks” related to a general theme. Both Columbus Science Pub and the STEAM Factory have dedicated audiences who gather to hear about new ideas in comfortable spaces away from campus. Both venues are adjacent to centers of artistic activity, which helps shape audiences’ expectations for intellectually- or aesthetically-stimulating entertainment.

Larry delivered his talk, “From Feeling to Understanding,” at Columbus Science Pub, while Rachel spoke about “Moving Through Musical Time and Space” at the STEAM Factory’s Franklinton Friday. Larry’s talk explored what we know about the emotions and how music shapes our emotional responses, and Rachel’s presentation analyzed how musical meter and choreographic step patterns interact in musical theatre tap dance breaks. The two events were structured quite differently. At Columbus Science Pub, Larry was on stage by himself for an hour. The audience members were seated at tables—this was literally a pub. Rachel, on the other hand, was one of five speakers who talked with a group of interested community members in 20-minute slots. There was time in between the presentations for the audience to ask questions of the speakers.

Larry Zbikowski at the Columbus Science Pub (photo credit: Gabriel Cuddy)

Anna and Danny interviewed Larry and Rachel about their experiences. Their answers reveal their individual perspectives and provide helpful information to scholars who are interested in engaging with the public in their own communities. The following interview has been lightly edited.

A & D: Did you have any expectations regarding presenting your work in a public forum? Did the experience match your expectations, or were there any surprises?

Larry: I had an hour-long video conference with the organizers about three weeks before the event, so I had a pretty good idea about what to expect. During this conference we not only discussed the basic format—a public lecture to a general audience that should include an interactive element—but were also abpe to share information about the overall purpose of the events and how I could best fit into that.

Rachel: My main expectation was that I didn’t know what to expect. That was daunting—because not knowing the background of the audience meant that I didn’t know the knowledge base they began from. When teaching a class, I usually build on my students’ prior knowledge on a subject, but the Franklinton Friday audience’s familiarity with music was a big uncertainty. Getting information about the venue from the organizer beforehand did help, as well as hearing from those who had been there before. At the event, I was able to chat with people while waiting to present. I met people in my booth area and at the refreshment table, asked about what brought them there, and listened to their stories. This confirmed my assumption that many audience members had little to no formal musical background. However, they were intellectually curious and excited to learn new things. I was pleased by their engagement during the question and answer periods of other speakers—they had honest, thoughtful questions. This helped give me confidence in speaking and responding to them.

A & D: How did you moderate your language, content selection, or presentation style to fit your audience? What materials did you need to help communicate with them?

Rachel: I avoided more technical music theory jargon. It was a challenge to figure out exactly what basic terms I needed them to have as background in order to understand my research, especially with a time limit. I did about six minutes of “music theory 101” at the beginning of the presentation to define essential and more scholarly terms like “meter,” “hemiola,” and “metrical dissonance,” drawing on my teaching skills to adapt to the audience.

It is quite common for academics to stand in front of audiences and read their paper aloud. I knew I didn’t want to do that for this public audience, so I prepared a detailed outline with chunks of prose, large section breaks, and important words bolded. Much of it was semi-memorized, and I had practiced my major points well. PowerPoint slides helped to structure the presentation and to provide graphical demonstrations. One visual analogy I used is a picture of the top of a six-pack of soda cans to show how six things can be viewed: viewers can immediately see the perspectives of two groups of three, or three groups of two. This prepared them understand how music and dance elements can be grouped differently, yet fill the same space. I limited my use of musical scores, and many of my analytical examples were on graph paper with grids to make them more accessible to the audience. My video examples were annotated, with numbers and titles showing up over the dancers and selected video clips shown in slow motion as well as real time. Animated slides with colored boxes, arrows, and circles helped communicate my points. I also shared a poster that showed the graphs and overviewed the research.

Larry: One of the main challenges was simply the venue (about which the organizers had warned me) —a somewhat oddly shaped bar space with tables sprinkled around. Their suggestion—which was a good one—was to keep the PowerPoint slides simple (one main point per slide). I’m pretty used to making presentations with slides (with and without a script) so this all went pretty smoothly: I had a few slides ready from other presentations, but pretty much everything needed to be adapted for this specific occasion (since technical jargon and music notation needed to be kept to a minimum). Early on I decided to illustrate my presentation by playing pieces on the guitar (relatively simple jazz arrangements of popular songs). This provided a nice counterpoint to the talking, and also a frame for the presentation: I would encourage the audience to attend to more or less specific features of the music, and then after I was done playing the piece I would ask for their responses.

A & D: Larry, the audience seemed to respond well to your guitar playing. And Rachel, I think not only having video clips of tap dances but actually performing the steps live was quite a thrill for the audience.

Rachel: Yes, I had tap shoes, a tap board, and my own feet. This allowed a particularly engaging presentation where I could demonstrate exactly what I spoke about. Presenting similar research earlier that week for SMT, I had created “mic-ography” in my notes, to plan out exactly where I would switch from the microphone on the podium I was standing behind, to the Q&A microphone so my feet could be seen (all while holding the PowerPoint clicker and my paper to read from). The paperless and podium-less public setting with a hand-held microphone proved easier to smoothly integrate my tap demonstrations into my speaking. Needing to carry a large tap-board, poster, and other accoutrements proved an additional challenge, not to mention the limited parking and intricate building in which it was easy to get lost!

A & D: Yes, those realities can make for quite an adventure. I’m curious, did you have a chance to meet the audience ahead of time, and what did you learn that helped you present your work?

Larry: Although the organizers gave me a good idea of who would be there—basically, folks who were interested in science, and who would come to a general lecture on a science topic—my first chance to meet them was in the few moments before I began the presentation. I had, of course, had that valuable video conference earlier, and so I knew what the goals of my presentation should be (i.e., give the members of the audience something they might talk about with friends over the next couple of days) and tried to make sure I accomplished them through establishing an interactive environment.

Rachel: While waiting to present, I also listened to the other speakers and considered how to place my research alongside theirs. I was somewhat daunted at first by how I might fit music theory research into a STEAM event—we in the arts aren’t curing cancer or working to curb world hunger (and other speakers spoke literally on those topics). One speaker that went before me was most inspirational both in presentational style and content. They spoke on tangible physical and relational matters that affect all people, and an audience member thanked them for providing hope for the future. That helped me find my way in to the event: I could speak to hope and joy as important things that the arts can help provide. As music theory helps us understand how music works and how the arts affect us, I was able to explain how the “A” fits into “STEAM.”

Photo credit: Gabriel Cuddy

A & D: How did you incorporate moments for the audience members to be active participants?

Rachel: I inserted various moments into my presentation to help the audience participate actively. In the beginning especially, I had them count aloud in duple and triple meter, and asked them to sing “Happy Birthday” to experience the meter. They clapped together—half the room in 2s, and half in 3s—to experience metrical layers. Demonstrating dance steps for them was engaging in a different manner, especially when I asked them to count an eight-count aloud as I performed changing step-patterns. Watching video clips of choreography from Broadway musicals helped them see and hear the elements I was analyzing.

Larry: As I mentioned earlier, I would frame a listening exercise—for instance, letting them know I was going to ask them what the piece I was going to play communicated to them—and then I’d play the piece and ask for responses. This worked pretty well, with a wide range of audience members responding. Over the course of about 40 minutes I interspersed three pieces (with a bit of noodling in between), each about two minutes long.

A & D: What was the space like that you presented in? Who was your audience? How many people? Ages? Gender balance? Racial makeup?

Larry: The place was functionally a bar, which also acted as a holding area for the main venue. It was set up with tables and chairs, and of course there was also the bar with chairs around. I think there might have been around 80 people there. As a whole, the audience tended to be a bit on the older side, with some kids and families mixed in, pretty much gender balanced. From what I gathered from the organizers, it was a pretty typical audience.

Rachel: The space I presented in was small and intimate. The warm lighting was a pleasant surprise, and especially soothing after spending the weekend in a conference center. There was a great mixture of ages in the audience. The venue made it family-friendly, with puzzles and hands-on games, as well as a side-room available for antsy toddlers. It was probably not quite as racially diverse as the surrounding city, but was a nice mixture of people. Some of the graduate students assisting and collecting research at the event were the most interested in chatting afterwards, and they were of various ages and backgrounds as well. 

Photo credit: Gabriel Cuddy

A & D: What would you say to those who are thinking about doing public scholarship in the future?

Rachel: Do it! Step out there! Your skills in pedagogy, presenting, and performance give you a background for public presentation that scholars in other areas may need special training to acquire. Know your audience as much as possible, and respond to them. Get inspiration in ways to engage your audience from other public-facing sources; these can be outside academia, or outside music and the arts. Watching television specials about space with my family helped me to see how skilled scientists can make detailed research more accessible.

I watch YouTube videos of online music analysts outside of academia (12tone, Adam Neely, and others), to learn from their excellent visual demonstrations, and ways to balance background knowledge with new content. Cory Arnold (12tone) alerts viewers to potentially unfamiliar terminology by using the stock phrase “something called.” This heightens their attention, readies them for a clear, straightforward definition, and disarms them in the process. Unlike the experience of watching a YouTube video, a live audience cannot pause and repeat things, so clarity of speech, active audience participation, and responding to your audience are critical. The most important advice is to have fun and let your passion for the subject shine through. My major surprise was how enjoyable it was—to conquer the uncertainty with a successful new experience, while representing my scholarly field of music theory to the broader public.

Larry: Get as much information as you can beforehand, especially about the background knowledge your audience might or might not have. Keep your presentation simple, with straightforward musical examples that illustrate your points, and through which you can guide your audience. Although one shouldn’t be afraid of using musical notation as part of the presentation, it’s well to keep in mind that even people who can read music may lack the facility to do so—and thus to grasp your points—at a rapid pace. Musical examples should be thus as clear as possible, and supported by arrows or highlighting that guide the eye and/or direct the audience to the salient features. Adopt a conversational style, inject the presentation with a bit of humor here and there, and listen carefully to the questions and comments your audience offers, because they’re almost certainly a lot smarter than you think they might be.

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In summary, here are a few key takeaways from Larry’s and Rachel’s experience that the interested reader might keep in mind as they are preparing to engage in public music theory:

·   Get as much information beforehand as possible, yet be ready to adapt to the unexpected.

·   Make a slide show—one point per slide, using multimedia when possible.

·   Clearly annotate your musical examples or include graphic alternatives to music notation.

·   Rehearse your major points until they can be expressed fluidly and naturally.

·   Adopt an energetic yet conversational style and inject humor.

·   Listen to, and respond to, your audience, they are a lot smarter than you might think.

·   Do it! Step out there and have fun!