Making a Mess of Everything: Excursions Through Communities, Musics, Academics, Longing, and Belonging

This project—what we have termed a collaborative autoethnographic mapping project—grew out of conversations between two researchers who also work as choral conductors and teachers in community contexts. We found ourselves constantly struggling with the stubborn fact that we, as community musicians, engage in the very practices that we, as academics, critique. As we considered our roles as musicians and academics, we quickly realized that who we are is deeply entwined with where we are and who we are with. While we initially considered only the relationship between our professional roles as academics and musicians, we also began to realize that our other roles, such as mother, daughter, friend, citizen, were implicated in our professional identities, making a mess of the very idea that we could resolve the tensions between the many different aspects of our lives. Out of those initial conversations, we launched a very personal research project that explored these tensions in ourselves and in relation to each other, not so much to sort out the tensions as to understand how place and social relationships shape who we think we are in any given moment. This video, with its “do-it-yourself” aesthetic, is the final iteration of a project that has explored the irresolvable tensions inherent in the messy, situated lived experience of two community music educators, traced through the physical and imagined journeys we navigate every day, which we have here conceptualized as desire lines, or the unmarked routes traversed between planned pathways

Examining Equity in Tenure Processes at Higher Education Music Programs: An Institutional Ethnography

As part of a larger mixed-methods study, this article presents findings from research on processes of tenure in Canadian higher education music faculties. The Principle Investigator and three teams of two researchers analyzed the process of tenure at three Canadian institutions to gain insight into how tenure decisions are made in relation to gender and race/ethnicity. The researchers used institutional ethnography, developed by sociologist Dorothy Smith, to examine institutional documents that organize tenure, as well as how documents organize people’s actions, studied through interviews with key stakeholders, such as directors, tenure applicants, and union representatives. The findings from the three sites were analyzed and integrated into one composite institution, and the researchers created a written analysis as well as a conceptual map of the process. The researchers found that the existence of a collective agreement created greater transparency in the tenure process for all stakeholders, contributing to a somewhat smoother path to tenure. However, ambiguities remained that created anxiety and stress, such as the “moving bar” related to publications and quantity vs. quality concerns, and the uncertainty about how artistic or musical achievements might “count” in the tenure dossier. The mantra of ‘hire the best candidates’ appears to disadvantage women and people of colour, who continue to be hired into tenure-track positions at much lower rates than men and White candidates. Policies to encourage diversity in hiring appear to be weak and poorly monitored

There\u27s No Place like Home: Community Choir Shallaway and the Production of Cultural Identity

This paper considers the role of music in producing a cultural identity specific to Newfoundland (while recognizing that no culture is unitary). I focus on the community youth choir Shallaway and the ways their explicit commitment to fostering a collective cultural identity are implemented musically and socially. After the collapse of the cod industry, Susan Knight sought a way to help re-invent Newfoundland culture and society. Her solution was to form a community youth choir committed to preserving and disseminating Newfoundland culture and to facilitating the development of future leaders in the province. As she says, “The ethos and philosophy of the choir is about developing our young people to be strong, independent, confident and committed to this place with a very strong sense of cultural identity.” In this paper, I examine some of the musical and non-musical ways Newfoundland community youth choir Shallaway develops individual and communal cultural identity among its members. Content analysis of the choir’s website, mandate and promotional materials offer background for considering how the choir’s choice of repertoire (both traditional folk material and commissioned works) reflect and produce historical and social narratives, and interviews with choir members offer insight into how the choir’s young singers internalize these narratives. Part of music’s power (in terms of identity) is its ability to define a space without (geographical) boundaries. I argue that what makes music special for Newfoundlanders is its ability to define a place without boundaries –that is, ‘Newfoundland’ music denotes and invokes that culture wherever and whenever it is performed, remembered or otherwise present. As a Newfoundlander recently defected to the “mainland”, I think often of the responsibility our province’s young people bear in building the province’s economy and culture. I’m not alone - klatches of faithful Newfoundlanders tend to form in almost every province, a collectivity I playfully term ‘the Newfoundland diaspora’. The tension between staying at home, helping to revision the future of our place, and moving away to seek one’s individual fortune often plays out in the folk and popular music of our region. Through focus group sessions with former Shallaway members now living away from home, I investigate how the “home and away” dichotomy operates among choir members who have chosen to leave the province. I also look at music’s role in fetishizing the distant ‘home’, and its power to invoke and create collective memory in the ‘diasporic’ community

Sounding Spaces: exploring interactions among space, place, music and identity in a Canadian community choir

This dissertation, situated in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, is a musical geography and ethnography of Lady Cove Women’s choir that explores interactions among music, identity, and place. In this study, I consider how choral musicians use music to negotiate individual and collective identities as they interact with material and conceptual spaces of music-making. Participant observation and interviews were used together with conceptual mapping and participant-led tours to explore the kinds of spaces musicians inhabit in the city; their subjective senses of space and place and differences of spatial knowledge and affective responses to space and place. The study enabled participants to connect musical experiences to their material environments and associated identities, memories, emotions and relationships. I use Lefèbvre (1974) and Massey (1992, 2005) to contextualize participant experiences in terms of urban change and in relation to theoretical approaches that highlight the relational nature of space. Like Massey (1994), I frame space and place in terms of social relations to consider questions of accessibility and spatial organization, discussing how spaces are marked by uneven patterns of ideology, power and wealth. Lefèbvre’s theory of space as socially produced and contingent informs my discussion of evolving senses of place in response to urban change, shifting demographics, new economic realities and natural resources. The study revealed several key findings. First, it mapped how musicians move through urban space, revealing how routes are carved into the city over time and demonstrating genre-influenced patterns of visiting and re-visiting material music-making spaces like church buildings and arts centres. Second, analyzing the locations in participant tours illuminated what matters to participants and why, what made certain places distinctive or important for them and how these places changed over time. Finally, the diverse perspectives presented in participant narratives helped to highlight the multiple and relational nature of social space and offered opportunities to explore the ways in which locations of community music are animated by competing, sometimes conflicting discourses and spatial practices.Ph.D

Kiera Galway, bassoon; Andrea Lane-Gardner, piano; Michelle Cheramy, flute

Hector should read Heito

Demographics of Tenure-Stream Music Faculty in Canadian Post-secondary Institutions

This study provides a snapshot of tenure at Canadian post-secondary music institutions, with a particular focus on gender and race/ethnicity. The data show tenure has been granted at high rates over a five-year period, and that women are no more or less likely to achieve tenure than men. However, more men than women hold both tenured and tenure-track positions, at a ratio of 2:1. The sample size of non-white faculty was not large enough to conduct statistical analyses about tenure rates in relation to race/ethnicity, although the extremely low rates of non-white tenure-track faculty suggest that diversity remains a concern in post-secondary music programs.Cette étude donne un aperçu de l’obtention de la permanence dans les institutions canadiennes universitaires d’enseignement de la musique, en se concentrant en particulier sur les facteurs de genre et de race/ethnicité. Les données montrent que la permanence a été octroyée à un taux élevé sur une période de cinq ans, et que les femmes n’ont pas plus ou moins de chances de l’obtenir que les hommes. Cependant, il a été observé que plus d’hommes que de femmes occupent les postes réunis avec permanence et menant à la permanence, et ce, dans une proportion de 2 à 1. L’échantillon des professeurs non-blanc n’était pas suffisamment important pour effectuer des analyses statistiques sur les taux de permanence en rapport avec la race et l’ethnicité, bien que les taux très bas de non-blancs à des postes menant à la permanence suggèrent que la diversité demeure une préoccupation dans les programmes postsecondaires d’enseignement de la musique

Examining Equity in Tenure Processes at Higher Education Music Programs: An Institutional Ethnography

As part of a larger mixed-methods study, this article presents findings from research on processes of tenure in Canadian higher education music faculties. The Principle Investigator and three teams of two researchers analyzed the process of tenure at three Canadian institutions to gain insight into how tenure decisions are made in relation to gender and race/ethnicity. The researchers used institutional ethnography, developed by sociologist Dorothy Smith, to examine institutional documents that organize tenure, as well as how documents organize people’s actions, studied through interviews with key stakeholders, such as directors, tenure applicants, and union representatives. The findings from the three sites were analyzed and integrated into one composite institution, and the researchers created a written analysis as well as a conceptual map of the process. The researchers found that the existence of a collective agreement created greater transparency in the tenure process for all stakeholders, contributing to a somewhat smoother path to tenure. However, ambiguities remained that created anxiety and stress, such as the “moving bar” related to publications and quantity vs. quality concerns, and the uncertainty about how artistic or musical achievements might “count” in the tenure dossier. The mantra of ‘hire the best candidates’ appears to disadvantage women and people of colour, who continue to be hired into tenure-track positions at much lower rates than men and White candidates. Policies to encourage diversity in hiring appear to be weak and poorly monitored