—Gregory Young
—Douglas Bartholomew
[The Montana Professor 23.1, Fall 2012 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Gregory Young, PhD
Professor of Clarinet and Director, School of Music
Montana State University-Bozeman
Douglas Bartholomew, PhD
Professor of Music Theory and Education
Montana State University-Bozeman
Undergraduate research/creativity is one of the fastest growing pedagogies in the nation, as professors in all disciplines are using it to engage students interactively, to help further their own research programs, and to link student learning with a large part of their work as scholars.
Many of the same obstacles to successful undergraduate research/creativity are found in every discipline, including the ability to write in the subject area; having time to write and to keep up with current literature; self-motivation; and initiative. In addition, two common obstacles cited by humanities professors are: 1) it takes too much time to bring students up to speed so that they can help on a research project; and 2) papers with undergraduate co-authors tend to not be accepted in their disciplinary journals. In the fine arts, even though creativity is the raison d'être, undergraduate research is not a commonly used term, compared to the sciences. In fact, it took the Council on Undergraduate Research thirty years to adopt an arts and humanities division./1/ One reason faculty in the fine arts don't think of having an undergraduate research assistant, for example, is that they do not normally have grant supported labs with assistants, as science professors often do, from freshman through post-doctoral researchers. Still, there are some interesting examples of undergraduate research in the fine arts, and the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) has been a showcase for this kind of work in all disciplines since 1987./2/ This paper will suggest some examples of how fine arts faculty might integrate scholarly inquiry and undergraduate research/creativity into their teaching.
"Undergraduate research (UR) in the arts and humanities shares the same purposes as UR in any other field: enhanced educational experiences, critical and creative thinking, intellectual and innovative approaches to complex questions, and improved skills of analysis and communication."/3/ Faculty in the fine arts are seldom involved in the types of discussions about undergraduate research and creativity that science faculty participate in on a regular basis. They have their own pedagogical methods for mentoring their students, and these methods often reflect the way they were taught. Because the focus of fine arts faculty is so commonly on creative activity, as opposed to research and scholarly interests, students in these programs spend more time making art than thinking or writing about it.
We recently discussed this with several colleagues, and realized that we could all learn something from our peers in the fine arts and across the many university disciplines. For example, what if every student performing a recital had to write an artist's statement for the program? One might say that would be analogous to an artist statement in a gallery showing—but only if the students were performing a recital of their own compositions. If performing music composed by others is truly a creative activity, though, why not demonstrate what the creative process of performing entails, including an analysis of the music itself and an examination of decision-making about what aspects of the composition the performance is intended to express? A comprehensive musician's statement could demonstrate understanding, engage the audience in subtle details of the composition, and give context to the problems and patterns of expression. Such a statement, whether delivered orally or in the form of program notes, or projected simultaneously with the performance, goes far beyond the normal biographical and historical material that often has little to do with the music itself. By including this with the performance, the audience knows the student did not just learn to imitate a performance heard on a recording; is better informed; and is apt to have a more enjoyable experience. Such scholarly inquiry represents a significant step toward approaching fine arts disciplines more analytically, and sets the stage for further investigations and research.
Conversations in the sciences about undergraduate research often involve testing a hypothesis using a control group and an experimental group, making sure the sample size is large enough, taking accurate measurements, and doing quantitative and/or qualitative analyses. Can fine arts faculty and students learn something from this? There is a strong research tradition in music, and this work is common fodder for graduate coursework. The degree, however, to which this research, especially in terms of expecting students to be able to carry out research activity on their own, has percolated down to the undergraduate music major is embarrassingly small. In what lower level classes would this material be introduced? It makes sense to refer in theory classes, for example, to Huron's finding that a regression to the mean is a better explanation for the kind of melodic motion that follows a large intervallic leap./4/ But there is simply not sufficient time in these classes to explain the methodology in a way that would permit students to do much follow-up of this research. It is unlikely that studio instructors would see the relevance of this kind of scholarship to their teaching. Their goal is to get their students to perform beautifully. Time spent exposing young performers to this research, to say nothing of preparing them to do this research, is time taken away from the typical one-on-one modeling, observing, and mentoring that goes on in the studio.
In a capstone course in music at Montana State University, one student chose a research project dealing with the quantitative measurement of music performances. She wanted to investigate how small differences in the timings of several performances of Debussy's Syrinx for solo flute might be related to differences in listener responses. Although she made good progress in her methodology, she began the process with little prior knowledge of statistics or behavioral research. She had never read papers in music perception or cognition, so as she began her background research, she was immediately overwhelmed by the vocabulary and specificity of each individual study. She lacked the background to question the basic assumptions of the methods and did not know the competing questions. Because this was a one-semester course, she did not have time to absorb all that she needed in order to produce a well-informed study. What she accomplished was little more than an introduction to research in music, and although her paper would technically meet the basic guidelines for an MSU-authorized Research (R) course, her lack of background for this kind of research restricted her progress.
Capstone courses are an excellent forum for undergraduate research, and the capstone course at the MSU School of Music, when recently proposed, had to adhere to the following guidelines in order to count as an R course. These guidelines have been used since 2004 for all undergraduate research-intensive courses in the new general education curriculum, Core 2.0./5/
Through the Research and Creative Experience students will:
Not all of these guidelines and outcomes are as easily translated to the more creative enterprises in the fine arts as they are in other fields. The kind of lecture recital/in-depth program note approach referred to above is not likely to produce, and most likely would not entail, a scholarly product. Because the arts curriculum is structured more around making art than doing research, it is more problematic to suggest that students, by the time they are seniors, can do direct research while the faculty provides the framing concepts. It is easy for undergraduate musicians to direct their creative activity, but this results in a very different product than a scholarly paper.
Because undergraduate research was not as common when most current fine arts faculty were undergraduates, we don't often think of the possibilities for advancing our own research program with the assistance of undergraduates. And if we do utilize undergraduates, we suspect that they will make us less efficient rather than more. If one asks fine arts faculty to define undergraduate research/creativity, a variety of answers are given, but one interesting way to pose the question is, "What undergraduate research/creativity would you like to display for our campus-wide celebration?" After this challenge was presented to our School of Music (to mixed results), a faculty member was asked to organize a composition contest for original string quartets; the winning quartet ended up being featured at the campus-wide research celebration. Although the result was very well received, it is certainly not the only form of undergraduate research/creativity in music. Composition is a creative activity that is featured in the curriculum, both in the "compose according to the rules" exercises in most music theory courses and in generally available composition classes and lessons. But not all music majors get enough training in original composition to take on such a task.
Students can be asked to begin to develop the skills of writing about music, a step towards asking questions about music, early in their curriculum. In courses taught by music professors actively doing research, students could begin exposure to and digestion of (1) research literatures (print and electronic), (2) methodologies, (3) types of music writing (reviews, criticism, program notes, discursive analyses, historical commentaries, research articles), and so on. By so doing they would begin to learn the basics of writing within the musical discipline.
Drawing on the idea of the artist statement and extending the skills developed in such a course, students can be required to write about the music they are performing. The normal requirements of individual instruction in music are strongly focused on shaping and perfecting performance. But students could continue their progress toward developing skills in writing and think about music by starting to write program notes in their first two years in college. As they progress through their performance studies, the writing can gradually shift to more in-depth studies. This more detailed work could include analytical observations that affect their interpretations—stylistic, historical, and comparative studies that provide context to the music they are studying and performing, for example. This could lead to writing a full artist statement for their senior recitals, in which they make explicit their musical decisions and the reasoning behind them. These decisions will normally be based on their understanding of the music but could easily include the perspectives of other authors, musicologists, analysts, and performers. Scaffolding the writing component of a music degree will give students important preparation for being important contributors to a research project, whether led by a faculty member, coordinated with other students, or pursued individually in a senior research course.
An example of such an artist's statement accompanying a senior recital comes from an MSU senior project class. A guitarist was preparing a performance of Benjamin Britten's Nocturnal Op. 70. As a part of his preparation he did an analytical study of the work, complete with a complementary analysis of John Dowland's "Come Heavy Sleep," and a review of Britten's musical influences, particularly the music of Dowland. Britten used the Dowland song as the basis for a set of variations, but instead of presenting this musical "theme" first, followed by successively more complex variations of the song, he reversed the process, starting with variations so far removed from the original theme as to be unrecognizable as derivations from the music. After an in-depth study of the Dowland song, identifying its structural, melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic features, the student examined each variation, looking for these features, to see how they were quoted, fragmented, expanded, and so on. His analysis brought thematic material to his attention that he recognized he would not have been aware of had he not done this study even though he was a thoughtful and meticulous performer. His guitar instructor also commented that this in-depth study informed his subsequent performance. Not long after this student graduated, a similar analysis/6/ was published in EGTA, a publication of the European Guitar Teachers Association, evidence of the value of such a study to an artistic and research community. Clearly this is an example of a capstone project that respected both the scholarly and creative requirements of the MSU Research Core designation.
Another student in a senior project class once remarked, when trying to grasp what was going to be required of her, "Oh, this is like science fair!" Incoming freshmen, even when they are fine arts majors, know about science fairs. They know about research methodology in the sciences. When they are about to graduate, seniors in music programs have often developed strong performing and creative skills, but they still know little about research in music.
A guided introduction to the literature that surrounds their practice will give students valuable experience of the contents, methodologies, and motivating questions in music, experience that they do not have when they begin their college programs. The writing component described above would not involve more credits and could provide exactly this kind of introduction to research, writing, and thinking about music.
"[C]reating curricular scaffolds of the pertinent content and skills students need in order to conduct research in a discipline"/7/ not only provides students a strong foundation but allows professors a more efficient way to prepare a larger group of students for research. A further benefit to scaffolding in the music curriculum is that students gain opportunities to think more about their art as opposed to simply practicing it. Without this kind of thinking, students don't ask the kinds of questions that research can help to clarify. It can stimulate their curiosity about their art. Lacking this curiosity, they are less likely to think of research as a tool that could help them develop musically. The thought that they could do research in music will not likely even occur to them.
An interdisciplinary seminar for music and architecture students taught by one professor from each discipline at MSU provides a successful example of undergraduate research in the fine arts in the classroom. After bringing the eight music and eight architecture students up to speed on common terminology and sources of inspiration, the students were asked to create a work in their own discipline inspired and by guided by a work from the other discipline. The compositions inspired by architecture and the building designs inspired by music were successful enough to be published in an M.I.T. journal./8/
Promoting curiosity about their fine arts disciplines is an important element in preparing students for being successful at undergraduate research projects. There are many causes for a kind of deafness to the spirit of curiosity in our students, not all of them attributable to classroom environments, and countering this deafness by inspiring them with exciting projects aligned with their passion will be important if we are to overcome obstacles to undergraduate research in the fine arts.
Notes
[The Montana Professor 23.1, Fall 2012 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]