I presented “Reflexively and Improvisation: Ethnomusicology at a Liberal Arts College” as a contributor to the panel entitled, “Ethnomusicology as a Liberal Art: Pedagogy, Disciplinarity, and Institutionalization at the Educational Crossroads” at the 2020 annual (virtual) meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology.

ABSTRACT:

New ethnomusicology students at Bard College consider ethnographic fieldwork in terms much less accepted of their graduate student counterparts at research universities: It is as much a chance to experiment with their own being and becoming, as it is also a time to explore how people theorize their lifeworlds in the social contexts of music. Bard’s participation in the liberal arts model encourages interdisciplinary course readings that students ethnographically test. However, their analytical juxtapositions of such scholarship with theory from the field frame their ethnographic writing that becomes not only a bildungsroman for themselves but also one about the experience of their fellow students. Beyond this final project for the introductory course, students pursue special topics courses in ethnomusicology that often emphasize critical improvisation studies, jazz and American musics. The ways in which musical and extramusical improvisation suggest a social science of comparable potentials for social agents and structures, as well as how the confluence of oppression, cultural generosities (McMullen 2016) and tactics of resistance (O’Meally 2004) associated with becoming and being free in the United States equally inform new frameworks through which students encounter the field again. This paper presents how improvisation and ethnographic reflexivity construct a specific liberal arts pedagogy among college students. In addition, this presentation also considers the similarly improvisatory autodidactic practices of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (Lewis 2009) in relation to a Bard graduate seminar.