Let us TEACH!

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I’ve been off the blog bandwagon for a bit.   In part because after spending last summer blogging about being an Earth Mother in remote rural China it seemed like most of what I’d write would be boring.  But I’m going to try again. This entry is inspired by a conversation with my kids in the flame van on Friday night while I was on the verge of a bad infection and so not my usual perky self.

Eli: mommy are you in college?

Me: no

Eli: mommy you DO go to UVa.

Me: no I don’t

Rebecca: Eli she doesn’t go to UVa she works there but she’s pissed off all the time.

Eli: what’s pissed off?

Jonathan: yea what’s pissed off. 

Eli: pissing is peeing.

Manuel: Pissed off is a not nice way to say you are mad. Peeved seems to be more polite, but I don’t understand why.

And it went down hill from there.   But here’s the thing.  My daughter is right. I am pissed off all the time; in fact every time I open my email I develop a new string of curses.  Certain minions of the deans can set me off just when I see their name in my inbox.  These are people who apparently have been hired since the summer and every few days summon all of us to some sort of town hall meeting or issue a command that ends in more results. And if one more person writes back to a request telling me they are too busy I might just start bringing a water gun to grounds—WE ARE ALL BUSY. I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that this fall has pretty much bit the big one at UVa.  To be perfectly crass, we had a great moment of solidarity and saved the President’s ass on a national stage, and it seemed like it might even set us up as a model for protecting public education.  But, instead, it may even be worse than before.  About every two weeks a new command is issued from on high, some portion of the faculty becomes agitated and before, action is taken, another command comes down.  Meanwhile the gender climate is worse then ever as far as I can tell.  I’m pretty sure my female grad students will enter more difficult world than I did; at least when I came out of grad school music departments felt that they had to hire qualified women.  I’ve taken to bringing undergrads and grad students to meetings just so I don’t have to be the only woman in the room. Oh, and despite the fact that I’ve long understood that I don’t command the respect of my male colleagues, I wasn’t actually groped until this year.

Part of the problem is that since the summer we’ve all been talking about what is wrong with higher education, what is wrong with UVa, what we need to do to enter the 21^st century, and what we need to do to fix and save public education.  We are reforming the curriculum, the administrative structure, the library, development, etc… We are restructuring and restrategizing, but:  Some stuff we do WORKS JUST FINE and has been working JUST FINE for a couple of hundred years. In fact, it works REALLY WELL. Our students still get a great education for a comparatively low cost.  And for the record, Darden, the Med School, the Law School, etc. all depend on students’ learning the basics in college.  Even online learning assumes student can read, absorb information, and synthesize information.  I’m not saying we don’t need to fix lots of things; I protested for living wage last spring, we do need to figure out what to do with digital media, we need to continue to push hard on diversity, and we continue to make the education we offer more accessible.  And I am all for new innovations; I’ve spent the better part of the last two years banging my head against a wall about arts and community engagement at UVa and in Charlottesville.  There is plenty of work to do. But I repeat we do some stuff well. 

This sense of we do some stuff well and it’s really cool that we get to do it smacked me in the face last week.  Wednesday afternoon I went to the Woodson Institute for African African American Studies to attend their Meet the Fellows afternoon.  That’s where the Woodson Fellows introduce themselves and their projects.  For about 90 minutes I listened to a group of pre-doc and post doc fellows talk about a stunning array of projects from the religious practices of a religion I’d never heard of to an ethnography of gay black communities in neighborhoods I grew up hanging out in.  All of these people are, in theory, young enough to be my children, all of them gave fabulous presentations, and all of them even in these lean times get the privilege of two years to simply do their academic work.  And if some of these projects are half as good as they sound they may well change the way many of us think in profound ways.  In other words, we still have moments where it’s all about ideas and it’s all about giving young people the space to develop the ideas that may just make a difference. 

Thursday I walked to school and watched a group of students very carefully and deliberately laying out hundreds of empty backpacks on the lawn. It was a striking sight, and I later learned that it was a piece of public art geared towards suicide prevention and awareness.  It stopped me in my tracks.  I don’t think there’s a single person in higher education who hasn’t been touched by student suicide. And if you haven’t, then you haven’t probably paid enough attention to your friends and students.  It happens every year at every college. And here in the midst of everything else on a gorgeous Friday before fall break our students asked us to think about that for a moment.  I watched all day from my office windows as students walked by, read personal stories, and stopped to take it in. Way to go kids!  I listened as they talked about those stories. And BOV, you need to hear this:  the way they took all in had nothing to do with strategic dynamism.  It had everything to do with being in a place that gave them the luxury to think and to practice empathy.

I’d say at this point a shockingly small portion of my day goes to teaching and scholarship. If I could publish my emails the second book would be long done by now. Indeed, the only thing causing teaching to take a front seat again this semester is that for some dumb reason I assumed I’d taught an early music survey at some point in my career and assumed I could teach it in my sleep.  I did zippo to prepare. As it turns out, I’m teaching tunes I haven’t thought about since grad school.  And sometimes it’s pretty intoxicating.  In a week where I, like my colleagues, have been asked to come up with revenue generating masters programs, rethink the undergraduate distribution requirements, justify why we need a music librarian, and come up with new technological initiatives it’s a pleasure to just teach the old fashioned way.  For example, go into class with a copy of a letter that the 16^th century courtesan Veronica Franco wrote to a mother who wanted to make her daughter a courtesan and ask the undergrads why she’d so vehemently oppose her own profession. And watch the students become completely enthralled with the details of a document.  And, turn off the ipod, itunes, power point,  and put an Archadelt Madrigal in front of a group of  17 music majors and figure out they can make music out of it and they can love it.  And they can from that experience start wonder about what it was like to learn music in the 16^th century.  So I guess what I’m saying is, “Dammit BOV, President Sullivan, and Dean Everyone; leave us alone and let us do our jobs!”

Day 16

It’s become cliché at UVa to say “I’ve never been prouder of UVa then I am now.” But I’ll say it. And I’ll say I’ve never had more fun on the lawn then playing Twisted Sister with my colleagues, friends, children and students.  I mean, seriously, Twisted Sister and Thomas Jefferson in the same epistemological space.  Ok Dragon lady you may need to handle your so called “philosophical differences” by firing someone and summarily going around any process of civility and governance.  But here’s to a few grad students namely Emily Gale (melodica) and Chris Peck (piccolo) who managed to take philosophical divide, historical difference, and everything else and make music with a message. “We’re not gonna take it….”  The group featured everything from a kick ass trumpet section (thanks John and Emily) and a quite literally puny melody section of ten and under on violin and flute.  It’s true that the puny melody instruments were essentially inaudible, but it’s all about the effect.  And yes, the Good Old Song was lovely too… (Well it was lovely except for the part where the five year old was hanging on me “whews’s MY INSTWAMENT!!!!!  BECCA TOOK my INSTWAMENT. I’m in THIS BAND) I’m pretty sure that I heard Mr. Thomas Jefferson himself, Peter Onuf, call TJ the philosopher of LOVE which means that “stop in the name of love” was also fabulously appropriate.

I’ll take Twisted Sister and Donna Summers over TJ any day—can we please put that genie back in the box?  TJ said and did some great things.  I personally love the fact that he said books are capital. Take that Board of Visitors…. He made his University largely to educate citizens for the business of citizenship a privilege many of us who were on the lawn yesterday would not have had.  Remember that to him African Americans didn’t even qualify as people much less citizens.  Even with this TJ cycnicism, one of my favorite moments at yesterday’s rally on the lawn was my colleague and friend, the above mentioned  Peter Onuf, saying that as far as he knows he’s the only one around here authorized to speak for Thomas Jefferson and that what TJ would be saying is “This is what I envisioned for my academical villiage.” And who knew that Professor Onuf was such a rabble rouser?

I was really glad to see Susan Fraiman speaking, not just because what she said was to my mind characteristically spot on and brilliantly articulated.  But because we need to hear from women, and we need to see women on the front lines.  Gender is by no means the central issue at play here, but it’s a part of it. Sure the BOV could have fired a man and sure Dragon Lady is a woman.  But it would have been a hell of a lot harder to do this to a man.  Here’s a teachable moment young women, women can be sexist and misogynist too.  It’s escaped no one’s noticed that the so called issues with Preisdent Sullivan’s leadership come in part from the idea that she moves by consensus building and by consulting.  These are supposedly feminine leadership qualities. And in my personal experience of being in two meetings with President Sullivan she really did seem to listen, take things in, and think about it.  Remember she’s a scholar and a thinker.

 But the gender issues are also far more visceral than leadership traits. I’m not alone in saying that at some level Terri Sullivan may not look like a University of Virginia President to the BOV.  At a roundtable with Tim Kaine a few women not affiliated with UVa said “she looks like a mother….”  And like so much about this whole ousting, this visceral issue is fully in keeping with UVa’s culture.  I’ve never been at an institution with less respect for women.   It is extremely hard to be taken seriously here.  I have some friends and colleagues whom I think of as patriarchal arm candy. That means I need their tall white man selves to get stuff done around here.  I am regularly completely disregarded and ignored.  I was rejected from a University committee because I was supposedly not senior enough but the replacement was male and junior to me; that means seniority implies certain anatomical structures.   If Terry Sullivan doesn’t look like a University of Virginia President. I don’t look like a University of Virginia Professor.  And we look super different, which makes me wonder what kind of woman looks like they belong in power here.  I’m hoping for better by the time my kids get to college.

The final thoughts I had about the rally is that this is much bigger than UVa and liberal arts education.  I’d fight tooth and nail for both of those things; I’m after all in a department that’s so obscure it doesn’t even rate as obscure.  But I care even more about the philosophical belief in the right to public education for every kid. And that’s under attack. I spend a lot of time working in the community to expose underserved kids to UVa so that they think of college as a place where they belong.  That means we cannot lose sight of the fact that Access UVa may matter more than any of the rest of it.  If a few rich and powerful people can torpedo an institution like UVa, think of what they can to do less prestigious public universities or public schools serving predominantly children living in poverty.  No matter what happens on Tuesday, we the UVa community have an opportunity to be heard on a local and national level.  Let’s make sure that we remember we’re not just fighting for our own institution now.  I’m pretty sure that no matter what happens tomorrow I’ll still have a job and my privileged children will still get a good college education. I’m much more depressed about what may happen to the kids I take on Arts field trips.

Day 13

Like everyone at UVa, I’ve spent the last thirteen days completely immersed in the debacle here, glued to email, the web, my iPhone etc…   At least three of my colleagues across the University have confessed to sleeping with their smart phones and checking their email when they get up in the night to go to the bathroom.  Countless others have learned to follow Twitter and some have even Tweeted themselves.  One of my students said on facebook that it’s getting to be like Law and Order around here; every five minutes something important happens.   It’s a miraculous moment; a revolution of the kind I never would have predicted and I’m proud of my colleagues who have done the hard organizing and thinking work.  I’ve been cynical about this place since I was a high schools student and found it too full of republicans and floral dresses.

Let’s be clear that it’s a revolution in part because the tenured faculty among us have job security.  I assume that I am not alone in thinking that despite the governor’s veiled threat about everyone stopping the frenzy that no one is going to start firing tenured faculty any time soon. That means we can yell and scream. And we don’t have any where we have to be at 3 p on a Tuesday, i.e., we have the flexibility to get shit done at the last minute. I’m not by any means saying that we sit on our duffs over the summer; in fact the BOV has now cost me about two good weeks of work; that’s a conference paper to be sure, a chunk of a book that was to get done this week, and a grant proposal for an arts outreach project. In lawyer terms that’s a lot of billable hours.  But I still have tenure.  And I’m well aware that if tenured faculty have felt that the University often treats us as if we ought to feel privileged to work here general faculty, staff, and wage earners have this even worse and do not have the same freedom to speak out.

 Dragon lady may have thought that by waiting until after graduation and raising forty million dollars at reunions that she would avoid student outcry and that the faculty might not notice. She failed to account for the fact that the students are fabulously mobile and that even the faculty all have smart phones (except my husband and best friend who call me regularly for updates when they are staking out the Rotunda at ungodly hours of the night); I followed it from a cafe in Berlin and, unlike the governor, managed to weigh in from abroad when necessary.

I’ve spent enough time in the community this year to be, at some level, mistrustful of what may at face value seem like such an overeducated revolution.  And at root I’m mad about what this says about public education, liberal arts education, the value of ideas and creativity.  But I’m also thinking that in all of this Access UVa, (financial aid) has a giant target on its back.  I’ve spent a good deal of time this year working to expose underserved kids to UVa; to help them think of the Lawn as accessible to them.  It won’t be without financial aid.  And community engagement of any kind likely doesn’t seem especially revenue generating to the powers at be.  They are, of course, short sighted in this; it’s good business to partner with the community.  And if the corporatization of education can mess with Mr. Jefferson’s elitist institution think of what it can do to underserved kids.

So Governor, I am extremely anxious to get back to work here; to spend less time on twitter and face book and more time writing my book,  planning a field trip to The Magic Flute for a group of underserved kids, and focusing on my children without worrying about whether they will have the kind of education I want them to have.  And I want to use some of that supposed time flexibility to hang out with them. But I’m afraid that no matter what happens on Tuesday we’ve not looking at business as usual.  It’s not just healing; it’s that even if Terri is reinstated the revolution such as it is will have lots more work to do.  We are on the cusp of a new UVa, one where the faculty actually buy into the idea that this is our university and that’s a big change.

Day after the fall

I’ve been off blogging for the last few months.  But at this point since the only useful thing I’ve done in days is follow news about the UVa presidential debacle on various social media and media sites, I thought I might as well bring it back.  We’re living in a bubble here—the kind where you have to remind yourself to feed your children and to check the news for other things. Note to UVa peeps, Egypt and Pakastan are following apart and you can’t say vagina in Michigan anymore.  I am too tired to be coherent.  But here’s a sense of how my day went.  

1.I woke up and sleepily grabbed the phone and to see that university as we know it had indeed gone down. When I finally went to bed around 1 and had heard from friends at the rotunda that various BOV members and administrators were yelling at each other I held out some hope that something might change.

2.While walking kids to school I got stopped by a cop and scolded because "my boy" was too far ahead of me on third street and you never know what can happen in the big city.  Thankfully the cville police had two forensic police cars tracking Eli on third street.

3.  I continued my  vigil in front of email, facebook etc...   I did this last night for my husband and BFF who had taken their tenured selves back to the rotunda to bear witness to last nights event.  Both have “stupid phones” meaning they had no access to information. Mostly I was able to report on the weather (boring) and on the US field Hockey scrimmage at UVa.  

4. I walked to cville coffe to meet Tim Kaine. Ever since we have given $25 contributions to Obama, the Democratic party has been calling multiple times a day.  They invited me five times to meet the former governor at a round table today for area women. Finally on Friday I decided I actually had some questions for the man. I arrived early because it's actually only a five minute walk.  The Kaine staffers were all aflutter because they heard rumors that UVa faculty were going to flood the joint. It’s clear to me now that the visually impaired musician is an underutilized genre of spy.  The staff closed the shades, called field officers, and then called the governor with phrases like, "stay the course", 'stay on issue", "uva faculty are angry".  “There’s really nothing we can do about this.  The governor marched in and introduces himself sweetly to the twenty or so women seated prepared to dialogue on education and economy He addressed the "situation" at uva by reading remarks directed to the press.  He then took questions but studiously avoids calling on me; an actual UVa faculty member. He called on everyone around me. I had to leave after an hour to pick up the kids.

5. Despite being cited as an unfit mother this morning, I picked up FIVE kids from camp and almost left with an extra two.

6. At the pool instead of reading twitter or cooling off, I spent most of the time convincing one child or another to go to swim lessons with phrases like "this is not a democracy, it's the BoV, go...." I was glad that there were no press at the pool who would have seen at least a few faculty members in bathing suits obsessively checking phones and shooing kids back into the water. The vice rector’s resignation flew through the pool like no one's business.

7. I got a phone call from husband who said he’d be  Board of Architectural Review for the entire night because, before they discuss drainage on our driveway, they have to discuss the hotel on Main St. I wasn’t able to receive his message at first because my nine year old daughter was weeping over the fact that her brother bought her a strawberry ring pop and not a watermelon one. The Architectural Board meeting was a particular scheduling problem because I had promised some kids I’d take them out for ice cream. Their family does not have a phone, and I do not have car, so to get the message to them that ice cream would be postponed until tomorrow I had to take seven people with me.

8. When I got home I accidentally dumped an entire bag of delicious trail mix on floor of the kitchen and refused to clean it up in protest.  Like all protests this week, it got me nothing, but my kids did give me a no confidence vote.  To earn back their confidence I actually ordered take out from two different restaurants.

9. Now I’m reading Cav Daily tweets….

Coach

I wish I’d had a camera when Rebecca met Joanne Boyle, the UVa Women’s Basketball Coach.  The coach stands over six feet tall and sports spiked heels and stunning designer clothing; for this game it was a floor length skit.  Rebecca’s reaction was complete open-mouthed shock and awe and silence. She has since spent a fair bit of time wearing high heels and proclaiming herself Basketball Coach. This reaction, of course, did not fit so well my fantasies of the guest coach experience showing her tall, athletic, and powerful women…

At the end of last semester a very tall woman in my music 101 class handed me a piece of paper which I tossed in my backpack and lost track of.  I read it a few weeks later and realized it was an invitation to be Basketball Coach for the Day. It seemed clear that every Division One basketball team needs a legally blind coach on the bench.  This seemed like it would be the closest to a ball sport I’ll ever come, and I’d never been to a basketball game. My hoop glory days were brief and consisted of, college Sunday morning feminist basketball which, after many months of patient coaching, yielded one successful (and uncontested) lay-up.   Let’s just say that one of the main reasons I run is that when I showed up for field hockey, Coach Noel took one look at me with a ball and a stick and sent me over to Coach Adkins and the cross country team.

My instructions were to show up for the afternoon shoot-around and evening game with a guest.  I had no clue what a shoot-around was but, because my actual date would be in school for said shoot-around.  Manuel was jealous that I picked Rebecca and not him as guest so I said Manuel could attend the pregame festivities. He loved it…  In typical UVa fashion the invite came with a dress code for the event; Cavalier clothing for the shoot-around and a suit for the game. I owned neither, but thanks to a few donations and after trying on suits from some very generous lawyer friends, I was appropriately outfitted. (And for the record I have plenty of fine-looking professional clothes but no business clothes!)  A shoot-around turns out to be a very easy practice and, not surprisingly, they do not let the shrimpy Guest Coach anywhere near the athletes.

Rebecca and I acquired fancy “all access badges” which gave us the run of John Paul Jones Arena for game day.  She especially loved hers and informed someone who asked her if she was a ball girl that “I’m not a ball girl; I’m a guest coach.” She also enjoyed visiting her father, brother and friends in the nose bleed seats and announcing, “oh I have to get back to my seat.” We had a visiting scholar in the music department who graciously spent much of the game discussing and reading the heinous transformer book with Eli.  Our passes got us into the locker room for the pre game ritual.  And I use the word ritual purposefully to describe the whole experience. I found myself thinking the whole night about an article I read in a grad school ethnomusicology class about the ritual of football game and about Bruno Nettl’s Ethnomusicologist from Mars who visits a music department and provides an ethnographic analysis.   Like all competitive sports, women’s basketball games at UVa are complex social dramas complete with rituals and performances.

 When the abovementioned goddess coach enters the locker room the players applaud. Then, at various intervals during her pre game talk, they clap rhythmically.  With a few more participant observations one could make a pretty solid argument about the ritual of clapping as both enacting the coach as an almost deity and as pushing the players into moving as a collective body. It ends with an inspirational quote and a group prayer circle, which somehow we ended up in—holding hands and looking solemn. They do, in fact, pray for victory, which perplexed Rebecca. “that was kind of weird Mommy, do you think God really has time for UVa basketball…”  The ritual, in other words, involves divine presence, and Geertz would no doubt read it as a religious experience.  I’m with Rebecca on this one…

The most striking thing about a Division One big sports school is that revenue-generating sports exist on a different planet from most of the rest of the University. For one thing, everyone wears orange.  “they are all wearing cavaliers” my five year old told me.   My daughter’s stunned reaction to a 6’3 coach pretty much matched mine to my first music 101 class at UVa back in 2007.  When a block of eight football players walked in, my TA, Matt, and I were stunned—Medussa turned into stone style.  I’d never seen people that big in real life—their legs were the size of my waist and they barely fit in the chairs.   The JPJ experience is utterly removed from Central Grounds where the university works hard to reconstruct a Jeffersonian academic village.   In contrast to UVA brochures and websites, JPJ has no columns, no green space, and no diverse groups of students sitting under trees. Instead it’s all bright lights, expensive hotdogs, and noise…  The current construction project not withstanding, Central Grounds is constructed to block out external noise.  JPJ resounds not just with talking but with cheering and the marching band.  The band tells the audience when to pay attention, when something good has happened, and when to avert their eyes.

I assume the coach for the day project is meant to help engender warm feelings from faculty for the athletes.  It’s no secret on grounds that the business of student athletes is a complicated one.  Players generate millions of dollars but get very little for themselves.  Coaches make more money then the rest of us will see in a life-time. 

Many (of course, not all) athletes from revenue generating sports come to UVa far less prepared than their classmates.  Some of our teams have at least a few players who do not meet the NCAA standards—this is very low.  As a football coach once told me when I asked point blank if football players were less academically skilled than the average UVa student. “Well, they want us to beat Miami, and you don’t beat Miami with nice kids…”  The athletes get tutors, they get study halls, they get their own dining room (complete with their own nutritionist), and they get help picking classes that will meet their needs. And often, despite all of this, their grades are below the mean.  Music 101 regularly gets groups from teams, so I track it.

But here’s the thing.  The basketball staff member who ushered me around my various duties as guest coach made it clear that these women spend SIX HOURS a day on their training.  That’s six hours of physical activity.  Football players in Music 101 regularly came to class with arms in slings looking like they’d come home from battle.  They often had.  The bottom line is that we set them up to fail.  If they come to UVa underprepared, and they have a physically demanding nearly full time job, they are set up for academic trouble. 

All of that not withstanding, I loved the game!  I’m a sucker for ritual.  I love the marching band, I love watching the way everyone cheers.  I don’t enjoy sports on TV, I can never find the damn ball. Football games are usually cold, and the field is big so no matter where I sit I can’t see what’s going on.  The basketball court is small and intimate by stadium standards, and if you get to sit on the bench you are right in the thick of it.  I was totally sucked into the drama and into the pleasure of not knowing what would happen.  The kids loved the game and got to back on Saturday with courtside front row tickets given to us by another friend.  On the one hand the evening brought home the contrast between JPJ and central grounds.  While the kids and Manuel were in cavalier finery eating popcorn and watching hoops I was on the so called music-balcony of the newly restored Garret Hall playing a Scottish lament on my viola for a dead wife that TJ may or may not have listened to.   I was pretty jealous of the kids!

The Layout Room

At some point soon I’ll write a nuanced description of the Sound in Early America exhibit that my grad students are curating. The team includes the two first year grad students Amy Coddington and Gretchen Michelson.  We also have Courtney Kleftis, Stephanie Doktor, Emily Gale and Winston Barham helping out.  Winston is the resident expert on old books.  My official description will explain the ways in which we have tried to remind everyone that Early America was a noisy place and that we want to animate the archive by turning its usually silent stacks into sonorous echoes of the past.  After all it’s only we moderns who think of Reading as a solitary and silent practice.  For now I’ll just say that I hope the chaos of today will be delightfully invisible to the millions of visitors who will troop into the UVa Special Collections Library when our exhibit opens.

Yesterday’s class project was layout.  That means apparently that you turn layout the goods on a mock display to make sure they all fit. It gets pretty punchy when you’re in a windowless room with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of precious documents including a civil war era valentine, some printing tools that look like toy soldier weapons, and a picture of the lovely Jenny Lindt. Most rare books rooms only let you look at a few things at once, and they have very strict rules about not talking, not sharing, etc.  We had a good 36 items floating around.  Old paper gets dusty fast and we learned that all of us scratch our throats in unladylike ways that gross out our boyfriends/husbands.  And yes, other than Winston who is holding down the man fort, we are all women—a formidable bunch of women I might add. The  whole process works like corralling kids. I think I said “use your inside voice” at least five times.  (the room is not soundproof and other people were actually doing SCHOLARSHIP)  I’m also pretty sure there was throwing. I’m not mentioning names, but those cute little bean bag things that hold pages open definitely flew.

The first of six cases took us a good forty minutes to deal with, which I’m pretty sure left the library wishing they’d never asked us to do this.  Petrina and Anne (the excellent librarians who have been working with us) have been remarkably patient and helpful. I, for example, have not had time to get my e-services password to work, so any time I need a book I go old fashioned and write it on a paper slip. I feel totally 1990’s.  In terms of the Music Department crew, I am thankful that Amy took over and acted as drill sergeant and book gatherer. I think she was really hungry and thought if we got it done she could get food faster…  But it worked. I realized about ten minutes into the process that I’m a terrible person for this sort of thing; archival exhibits are completely inaccessible to the visually impaired since they prevent my usual stick-my-nose-quite-literally-in-the-book pose.  In addition, my lack of fine motor skills makes writing labels and quickly moving around fragile things treacherous.  Before Amy took over I heard phrases like “uh oh, I think we just made something up.” And, again I’m not naming names, but someone put a song from 1824 in the civil war section. We plan to upset (we hope) some visitors by deliberately placing the Civil War in the Patriotism section and presenting some of the more abhorrent Confederate materials as examples of what happens when Patriotism goes wrong.

My low point during the initial warm up was picking up Thomas Jefferson’s edition of Der Freishutz and watching the title page fly off—yes, fly off.  I’ve been drawn to this particular edition for a few years.  This piano reduction has a beautiful cover illustration.  It’s a really simple reduction; much easier to play than most.  And it doesn’t really fit in with anything else in TJ’s collection.   Jews believe that if you drop a Torah you have to fast for forty days, and I’m sure the retributions for dropping anything Mr. Jefferson put his hands on are harsher around here. I promise that part of my Decentering of TJ project does not involve consciously dropping his stuff.  (though in my opinion we could all stand to rough up a little more of his stuff…)

It got pretty brutal down there as we had to make choices about which documents would actually get to spend some time in the display cases instead of languishing in the bowels of the library. The most crushing omission was probably the tiny books.  We all fell in love with these little miniature books that measure about three inches.  You could easily fit three of them in your jeans pocket.  After oohing and awwwing every time, we were finally informed by the librarians that “they are cute but...”  As in, “Get over it ladies.  These things are too small even for people who can see.”  We also ran into space problems and had to evict Jenny Lind. The sweetish nightingale became famous in the States after an extremely successful concert tour organized by PT Barnum in 1850.  It felt a little like a cross between a sorority and a job search as we had to eliminate her because she simply did not meet our needs and her delightful little program was falling apart and decrepit.  With her, unfortunately, went Willa Cather’s Song of The Lark.  As someone said “we gave her the boot even if she was the first woman to win the Pulitzer prize or something like that.”  We had to move all kinds of things around because the precious wax cylinder is considered a security risk. 

We’ve divided the exhibit into six major categories.  I’m not going to write them here because I want EVERYONE TO COME SEE IT, and I know that you are all dying to know exactly how we’ve organized the goods.  We’ve been most fascinated by, and had the most trouble with, the sections of the exhibit that deal with musical representations of Native Americans and African Americans. We first categorized this as “stuff white people like to transcribe”.  That seemed not quite right, so we moved onto a Guyatri Spivak style “can the subaltern sing?”  We settled on musical ethnographies. Wordplay aside, writing about Race is always hard, and it’s particularly vexed at UVa, which has its own ugly history of racism; a history that is with us today in countless ways.  That means that, in addition to Frederick Douglas’s speeches, we have a Steven Foster minstrel song.  Frederick Douglas was disgusted by the idea that the songs of enslaved people reflected their happiness and insisted that they told a “tale of woe in tones loud, long and deep.” And minstrel songs stand as an egregious example of a white celebration and appropriation of the Black Culture it attempts to oppress. And we also have the earliest printed collection of music of the enslaved people published in 1867.  We also have “Death Song of the Cherokee Indians” from 1786 that claims to be “An original air, brought from America by a Gentleman long conversant [sic] with the Indian Tribes, and particularly with the Nation of the Cherokees.”  The gentlemen that brought back those original airs also participated in a process of genocide.  These are very tricky issues for graduate students to navigate in two sentences of text.

I did notice that we’ve all sort of fallen in love with old books.  I’ve always been disparaging of the kind of opera or literature scholarship that acts like the author is about to have lunch with the character.  But I’d say we’ve all crossed a line with these books.  We worried about finding them a home, giving them room to breathe, finding them a safe space to be, etc…  I’m not sure what the students actually think about the process.  When I promised them all A’s in the class they seemed to relax a bit... But I am pretty sure that I’m not the only one in  that room who gets a kind of visceral pleasure out of touching old books.

Arts Engagement

I was asked a few weeks ago to write a brief update on my Mead endowment project.  This is a small grant I have from the University that I am using to pair UVa students with third and fourth graders for a series of Arts events over the course of the year.   In the Charlottesville public schools, kids can start a musical instrument in fifth grade. They can also begin to take extra art and drama.  Kids who experience the arts are more likely to want to make art. There’s a lot of talk about the achievement gap in academics but there also exists a very real artistic gap, which to me feels just as tragic.  Like every parent in the Charlottesville schools, I’ve seen the achievement gap happen. Some kids who started kindergarten coming out of Head Start reading better than either of my children now read below grade level.  This is not because my kids are smarter.  Likewise, my kids consider the UVA Lawn their playground and have been going to concerts since they were literally a week old; they assumed they would play musical instruments, and they do. My daughter thinks she might be an artist because she knows some.  The kids in the Arts program go to the elementary school that Rebecca and Jonathan go to but they come from different worlds. They live predominantly in two underserved communities in Charlottesville, both of which are bussed to the school.  Many of the kids have never been on UVa’s campus, even though it’s a fifteen-minute walk from their home.  Many have never been to a live concert or an art museum, even though Charlottesville offers plenty of both for free. They do not play instruments and they do not have a cabinet of art supplies in their homes. Things change slowly, and the Arts and UVa remain inaccessible and alienating to much of the city’s population, especially to people of color living in poverty. 

I’d been asked to do this progress report a few weeks ago and, although this project has consumed more mental space than Music 101, the task stumped me.  For a few days I considered just sending them some really great pictures that a history faculty member and documentary photographer took of the group at the Bill T Jones open rehearsal.  Eventually I sat down and wrote a few bland sentences; the kind that can go on brochures.

A brief update about my Mead project. I had a tremendous amount of interest from the undergraduates and, in fact, had to turn many students away.  We've had two events so far.  The first was a photography show and jazz concert at the Bridge. The second was a bit more ambitious and involved taking everyone to see a Bill T Jones open rehearsal.  Below are a series of pictures.  John Mason from the history department took the second set. It's been a blast to get to know these undergraduates. About half of them are from my music 101 class or other things I've been involved with on grounds and about half are brand new to me. The best part is probably exploring the project of arts engagement with these bright and enthusiastic students. The University as a whole seems to be struggling with community engagement and it turns out that if we ask our students they have some pretty good hunches. The undergrads and little kids are keeping journals together and a few pairs have been on WTJU. This gives them a sense to experience live radio and give me a chance to hang out with them more. There have of course been some mishaps.  For example just because you can have a group of 200 music 101 students completely under control and enthralled doesn't mean you can effectively control 12 third and fourth graders on a bus. That University Transit driver may have quit. It's a learning experience for all of us.  On Saturday we're headed to a step contest at the Paramount. The UVa students came up with this plan. I haven't been to a step event in a good twenty years and it's out of my comfort zone but I'm sure it'll be an experience for all of us!

While all of the above is true, beneath that surface lies a much more complicated truth, most of which I think wouldn’t be appropriate for the kind of upbeat positive spin that donors want to read.  It turns out that taking a small group of UVa students and a small group of little kids to some events is not as cute as it sounds. And I’ve spent a lot more energy on logistics and crowd control than on thinking deep thoughts about Arts engagement. For starters, I can’t even control my own kids, so I’m not sure what made me think I could control ten extras.  When putting together the proposal for this project, I thought of those moments when my own children sat angelically moved by some performance, not the ones where they kicked the person in front of them, threw up on me, or cracked up at a moment that an artist thought was sublimely moving. (and those ARE things my kids have done). Also, it turns out that while on good days I can soemtimes make an assignment clear to a graduate seminar, I can’t do it for third and fourth graders. My student Lauren, who has been a real school teacher, and without whom this whole thing would fall apart, informs me that when talking to groups of children I need to limit the information to three things.  And she suggests I get the most important safety and logistical information out there before opening up the floor for questions.  So that, for example, everyone knows what time they will be picked up before discussing what happens if you bring money for ice cream but you don’t quite have enough money for ice cream and if one person has to go to the bathroom will the other person wait before buying the mythological ice cream that I never said we’d buy.  Next time we speak to the group of kids, she talks. 

The most complicated part of this project is, not surprisingly, moving twenty people around.  Despite the fact that they have smart phones that they check every three seconds and that I think I’m crystal clear, the UVa students are always confused and some chunk of them go to the wrong place. The University doesn’t want us driving kids around—it’s a liability nightmare.  So they suggested we get a University Transit Service (UTS) bus.  We did this for our trip to the Bill T Jones rehearsal at UVa.  It seemed to make no sense to have the UVa kids on the bus because this would take about an extra hour of their time, cost more etc.  So this left me with twelve kids on giant bus.  The low point came on the bus ride home, during which I realized that the bus driver didn’t know where he was going and, because I don’t drive, I had no clue how to get there either.  Since I was sitting between three fighting ten and eleven year old boys, I dispatched an eleven-year-old girl to give directions. When I heard her say to the bus driver “Oops, we missed it. Can you just back this thing up a bit?” I knew we were in trouble.  In order to back the thing up, a bit he turned the lights of which enticed all of the kids to scream their heads off.  (Don’t worry everyone was safe and got home in one piece).  We’ll all be enrolling in Harry Potter magic school before this weekend’s event so that we can magically appear in our location without worrying about vehicles or directions.

Our events have thus far been rather heady—jazz, photography and the Bill T Jones rehearsal.  Bill T, though he gave the kids a great 10-minute audience, did not do a lot of dancing. This extravaganza turned into a classic case of things not going quite as I imagined. His residency here came as part of a project called Story Time in collaboration with Ted Coffey a composer and friend of mine in the Music Department.   The open rehearsal I saw with this group about a year ago still stands as one of the most arresting performances I’ve ever seen. I found Bill gorgeous to watch, and he captures an entire room even he is just sitting in a chair.  This experience immediately incited liberal music professor fantasies in me about bringing this particular group of predominantly African American kids to see an African American Artist. He’s one of the most innovative and powerful dancers of this era and has shown a profound commitment to experimental arts and to community engagement. With Arnie Zane his dance company has merged with New York Live Arts to become one of the most innovative arts engagement projects in the country. I’m not naive enough to think that a few arts events can bridge the achievement gap or provide role models.  But I do believe in exposure, and I believe in giving kids the opportunity to see grownups who look like them do great things. The UVa residency wasn’t really aimed at those sorts of goals.  Nonetheless, I’d been trying to bring at risk kids to see one of the Bill T events for about two years and got nowhere.  For last year’s events, I was told that kids couldn’t come. This year the events had more seating, and I decided with the UVa students to take the kids to see a rehearsal. They, like me, saw this as a unique opportunity to expose kids to UVa and to the Arts.  A rehearsal seemed like it would suit our needs as we could talk about the process of working hard to get good at something and see first hand the process of making art.

This particular rehearsal focused more on concept than action. The dancers spent a lot of time moving stage equipment and did a few dance like small movements.  The kids asked variations of  “so is modern dance where you stand still” and “why don’t they just move the couch if it’s in their way.” Some of the ten-year-old boys informed me that the dancers just weren’t any good and that they just kind of looked weird.  The boys, predictably, got restless after 45 minutes, so I took them out into the lobby told them they cold quietly show me what they thought dance should look like. They did a series of very quiet back flips and step dancing which got us all in trouble with the undergraduate hall monitor.  (they were in fact very quiet)  Back in the auditorium some of the kids found the moving of furniture complexly fascinating.  But about halfway through I wondered if I’d managed to kill dance for a group of kids that love to dance. However, when Bill T spoke with the kids, it was a pretty phenomenal moment.  They asked engaging questions, suggesting that while I was doing crowd control they had actually gotten quite a bit out of the experience. This was not easy art to experience. So the real progress report is a giant question mark. I know that all of us have seen a few very cool things that we hadn’t seen before.  Beyond that I don’t know if this is working.  I don’t know what the UVa students or the little kids are getting out of it. And it may well be that my impulse towards exposing at risk kids to the arts is misguided.  Maybe they need too many other things. Perhaps the UVa students need more training and more guidance than I can give them.  And on a personal note perhaps this takes too much time away from my regular job and my own kids.  But, hopefully, the twenty-five of us involved, and those twenty five include my husband and kids, will make some sense of it by the end of the year.