On Teaching

The most transformative moments of education for me have been face-to-face, in real time, in small groups of people motivated by a passionate love of truth. My favorite teachers were able to gently hold space for moments of aporia (ἀπορία, wonder, perplexity, "stung by the stingray") when faced with something unexpected. In this spirit, music can be a vehicle for wonder and a path toward wisdom.

This kind of exploration is ordinarily a Small Room practice. It thrives on sustained attention, small groups of students who know each others' names, mutual trust and vulnerability. It thrives in the midst of singing, dancing, listening, and particularly in attuned improvisation. It thrives in the silence that fills a space when nobody, including the teacher, knows the answer, when everyone is listening. This atmosphere, not any particular department or discipline, is the true home of the liberal arts.

Bringing this atmosphere into the Large Room of an undergraduate lecture hall is more challenging. Here, a student asking a question may feel as though they're admitting ignorance, or speaking into a vast, anonymous public space. Taking a seat among innumerable strangers may reinforce their sense that they are consumers in an anonymous market of knowledge, trying to get the best deal: maximizing grades, minimizing work, fulfilling requirements toward a degree, obtaining units of learning along the way. This may lead them to view their teacher as a service provider, and their classmates as competitors.

Of course, being a student, striving after knowledge, driven by a love of truth, is a richer and rarer calling than being a consumer. But it is also a much more fragile condition. The challenge of teaching the liberal arts at a large research university is to create conditions under which young people are allowed to go beyond the institutional clamor of credits, exams, and grades, and become students.

This means I spend a great deal of my teaching energy working against the grain. I ask "non-musicians" to sing and dance and perform event scores. I design my own materials for exactly the students I'm teaching. I present texts and images and videos that evoke laughter, delight, and confusion. I challenge students to design projects driven by their curiosity. I ask questions that I truly don't know the answer to. I make space for moments of genuine perplexity, startling contradictions, lived encounters with musical practices that resist easy comprehension into genre, period, or state. I make space for confusion and resist the pressure to resolve it prematurely.

It is important to acknowledge that this can produce a kind of discomfort, like muscle fatigue, a prelude to growth and transformation that feels altogether different from acing an exam. Some students find this liberating. Others find it disorienting. If I'm not skillful about it, they may even think I'm making fun of them, or pretending ignorance. But I am at my best as a teacher when I myself am genuinely in a state of aporia, at the edge of my own understanding. (Incidentally, this is the state that most useful research comes out of, as well.)

A few principles of teaching that I've learned from watching my teachers:

begin with particulars (a story, a rhythm, an image)

and practices (singing, dancing, constructing a geometric figure)

and only later move on to theoretical reflection

be clear about methods; be genuinely perplexed about questions

laughter may be an excellent sign of aporia

anyone can make some kind of music

let silence hang

slow down

it takes courage and patience for a student to transmute confusion into an explicit question

exams and grades are dangerous medicine;

apply sparingly, with caution and a sense of humor,

and then get past them as quickly as possible without attachment

a teacher must sometimes act foolish

a teacher qua teacher is not a friend, a boss, or an employee

a teacher qua teacher rejoices when a student comes to a different conclusion

a teacher qua teacher frees the student from becoming dependent on them

music (for lack of a better word) is bigger than any of us

I was inspired to be a teacher by my own generous teachers — Donna Lanza and Don Willson, who introduced me to the spirit of the liberal arts; Vasudha Dalmia, Richard Taruskin, Howard Bernstein, and Bonnie Wade, who guided me into the spirit of critical history; Alvin Lucier, Anthony Braxton, Ron Kuivila, Molly Sturges, and David Wessel, who taught, by example, the spirit of open-hearted musical experimentation; Vikas Kashalkar, Laxman Krishnarao Pandit, Veena Sahasrabuddhe, Chandrashekhar Mahajan, Johnny Way-sa-quo-nabe Smith, Issam Rafea, and Jon K. Barlow, who embody musical life as a vehicle of wisdom.