While I was able to capture something real yesterday, I was having a lot of trouble getting into a headspace where I was having new ideas, making new connections, or actually making new decisions about what I want to focus on in this program. Part of the reason is that my interests are do broad, not only within music but across many domains. I love the “powerful ideas” in fields I’ve never studied or even mucked around in. I love doing and making things. I live arguing and designing and making music. That said, I know the boundary conditions for my life, as it stands now and as I expect it to develop over the next couple years, and those constraints helped to point me toward music. In the same way, I’m hoping that thinking about the types of things I actually want to *do *with *young people *around *music *will help me to ground my thinking and commit—even if it is just for this iteration or until I try some things out and refocus and refine this vision—to a particular line of inquiry. I know, in an instinctual way, what I will get excited about designing and then actually doing with kids, and I want to trust those instincts. Be critical of them, sure, but to trust the wisdom of the gut to know something that resonates and then use the mind to try and understand where the resonance comes from.

What do I actually want to do with young people?

  • Jam sessions, instrumentation doesn’t matter too much

  • Musical instrument design, instrumentation doesn’t matter too much

  • Loop workshops, this is the nub of an idea that I’ve had floating around for a couple years and I’d like to work with someone more interested in CS and/or another more ‘technical’ field that uses looping deeply to design an interdisciplinary seminar

  • Music analysis, knowing what you like is important, but being able to talk about *why *is powerful, similar to discovering genre when I didn’t know how to find books I would like in any kind of consistent way, the language of analysis has allowed me to see songs in new ways but pulling out different tonal and timbral pieces‚ as well as guessing an artist’s intent when they made a certain decision

    • Which song is “better?” And what constitutes “better?”

    • What characteristics do like songs share (a la echonest)?

    • Did Adele sing the chorus to Rolling in the Deep just once? Or is she perfect?

    • Corny song composition competition !!! What makes it corny?

  • Role of music in politics and activism, related to analysis

    • Looking at releases that “changed” things/artists who are considered political

    • “Effective” roles of music in activism, how do you measure efficacy?

    • Roles of music in live demonstrations and political actions

    • The political nature of some musical/cultural events (e.g. Carnaval, etc.)

  • Soundscape stories, writing stories/poems/essays and recording them, like podcasts, with sound effects, music, and other audio elements included

  • Collaborative concept albums, in which people conceptualize and record different tracks, composing pieces based on the constraints laid out by the album’s “concept” e.g. found sounds, kitchen implements, body sounds, etc.

  • Music maps/memoirs, creating graphical layouts of music that was important to you at different times in your life, laying it out chronologically, with connections between songs you feel are related, possibly including nodes for friends who introduced you to things, etc. This could also be extended to creating maps for others (your mom, your grandma) to illustrate their own musical biographies.

So, what kind of themes and questions point me in that direction?

What ties all these things together? I think there are two levels I need to think about and organize. The first is just straight-up music and spectacle. This is what I want to create with people. At School of HONK, for example, while I have an interest in how people learn, listen, and collaborate to make and *perform *music and how, as an organization but also personally as a facilitator, I can support that process, that’s not what *School of HONK *is about. SoH is about having fun. We come together to do something we all love. And, for this reason, the whats and hows of our success, the machinations of the organization, especially around facilitation, are often invisible. It’s something that I, and other leaders and mentors, as organizers of SoH are engaged in, but not something we require SoH members to think about explicitly. Analogously, I am interested in working with young people to directly engage in music- and spectacle-making.

Why music and spectacle? Well, this gets at my interest in “simple” songs. While technique and theoretical background can be helpful, can allow you to express and organize musical thoughts and ideas, it’s not necessary to create music that speaks—both to express yourself and touch listeners. I am interested in music, but not in theory. I want to create music that speaks to people, that impacts them, gets them moving, makes them respond, regardless of their musical background, and that’s what I want to do with young people at PHS as well.

For example, there are a lot of jazz tunes that have a very surprising chord progression underneath them. In this case, surprising refers to a deviation from what, in the now-obscure tradition of jazz, has come to be expected, what is precedented. While knowing the lineage of a genre is a real thing, and has a certain power, there some “surprising” chord progressions (e.g. a lot of Stevie Wonder’s stuff) that sounds *completely natural and right *to untrained listeners. They are unprecedented, but speak. I want to create music like that. I want to perform like that. And while that type of performance doesn’t require that you *don’t *have training, it requires that you don’t start from training, theory, or history. You start from the music, and the music’s relationship to the performers and participants.

OK, so I want to LISTEN TO AND CREATE MUSIC with young people at PHS. But, the things I am interested in as a researcher are—in the SoH analogy above—about how musicians and audience members relate to their own practice. This means that, while I want to make music with young people, I also want to be thinking about their processes in an observant and critical way, possibly using ethnographic techniques to capture their work and their relationships to their work. And, assuming I am able to become more fluent in this realm of meta-musical stuff, I’d also love to circle back and include young people in thinking about the role of music in culture, how people relate to the music they produce and consume, etc.

Some of the best conversations I’ve had about these topics are with SoH members who began as HONK! Festival super fans who loved to listen and dance but never imagined they would play music themselves. Now, as musicians, their perspective about what makes a great performance is still most deeply informed by their perspectives as dancers and listeners. Because of this lens, even if they play the trumpet, they understand the role of the drums and bass in establishing a groove. Even if they play the drums, they understand the almost vocal aspect of the melody and the one-on-one interactions that can happen between melody players in the front line of the band interfacing with the audience. They are truly ensemble players because they think about bands as live, spectacle-making machines. And spectacle isn’t about note-perfect accuracy. It’s about energy and groove and connection. It’s about listening as much as playing. It’s about interaction and movement.

OK, so… can I say this in a shorter utterance:

A first attempt at a manifesto about my research agenda?

Music is primal, participatory, and personal. Its power stretches across scales making indelible marks on the history of the human race, on our communities, and on the hearts, minds, and tapping feet of individuals. It cannot be understood simply through the relationship of a teenager to their headphones or a culture to its traditions, by the act of singing in the shower or the musical impact of the introduction of guitars to western Africa during colonization on musical traditions. It must be all these things at once, otherwise it is denatured. For this reason, my program of study will explore the role of music along three dimensions.

Primal:** **People have been making music, responding to rhythms through dance, and coming together in community around music since pre-history. While explicit knowledge about the history of music—whether on a human time-scale as well as with regards to the more specific lineages of genres and traditions—isn’t necessary to make great music, I am interested in learning more about it, specifically with regards to the professionalizing of music and the impact of this pattern on folk traditions, in order to situate my own research interests and music making styles and perspectives in what has come before me.

*Participatory: *The oldest musical traditions are closely related to dance and movement, public spectacle, ecstatic ritual, and collective celebration and resistance. It’s only in the last few hundred years this has begun to change. Even so, the act of “consuming” music, even in the stodgiest of concert halls, still elicits involuntary participation. Humming along, tapping your foot, rocking back and forth, we can’t help ourselves. I am interested in understanding, not just in the historical(/primal) context described above, but also on a more human(/personal) level, what it is about music—as opposed to just sound—that does this to us and why people choose so consistently to come together around this art form in times of joy, woe, and anger.

*Personal: *I believe music is fundamentally social and collaborative. Whether you are a singer-songwriter alone on the stage, part of a classic four man rock band, or one clarinetist in a fifty person orchestra, you are a part of a conversation and collaboration with your audience, your bandmates, and your musical community. Still, as is always that case, we are fundamentally alone in the universe, and the act of producing and consuming music functions as a deep expression and exploration of the self. This makes it powerful to share music with anyone, but I think that power is even more so with young people who are often actively engaged in defining and expressing themselves.

To try and sum all this up in a graspable nugget: People like music. But they don’t just like it, it’s been an organizing element in almost all cultures throughout human history. Why is that? And, given its prominent place for individuals, within communities, and across cultures, what can we learn about its role in bringing people together? To try and even further nuggetize these instincts, I propose this series of questions to drive my program of study:

  • Why do people like music?

  • Where does music derive its power to impact individuals, communities, and culture?

  • What is music’s role in self-determination and expression for individuals, their communities and cultures?