Brett Boutwell and Blake Howe are musicologists at Louisiana State University, where they developed a first-year course for music majors called The Musician in Society.
Curricular reform can be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it affords a rare opportunity for faculty to shape the education of an institution’s student body at the most elemental level, rewriting the “code” that guides each student from the start of their educational journey to graduation day. On the other hand, it carries a corresponding amount of responsibility, posing a daunting series of questions—none of which, naturally, have easy answers.
In our own School of Music at Louisiana State University, a large-scale reform of the undergraduate curriculum led us to ponder what, exactly, we hoped first-year music majors would learn from an introductory course taught by musicology faculty. We began our development process by asking fundamental questions. What’s missing from existing music courses, conventionally organized by chronology, genre, or region? What topics are left unstudied in these common formats, and whose stories are left untold? How do legacy courses in music history shape (and potentially limit) the expectations that students have for their future careers, in music and beyond? How can we engage overworked and overloaded students, inspire their creativity, and excite their intellectual curiosity?
In embarking on this project, we settled on several goals. First, we wanted to examine music making as a social activity dependent on human collaboration, whether among individuals working together in a single moment or among those in the broader circulation of musical ideas and practices across time. Second, we wanted to frame the notion of music making in far-reaching cultural terms, concerning ourselves not just with people who sing, play instruments, or compose (the usual protagonists of music history), but also with the wide array of individuals whose interaction brings music into the world. After all, many of our students seek careers in music that will differ from the careers of their studio teachers or ensemble directors. Finally, we wanted to establish a flexible, modular structure that would allow the course’s various instructors across different semesters to pivot among topics according to their own preferences and strengths.
To meet these goals, we developed an innovative pedagogical structure—a new kind of “code.” We chose to organize our introductory course according to the roles people play vis-à-vis one another in the context of music making, devoting a unit of the course to each such role and asking students to consider how these roles intersect. Our course, called The Musician in Society, is now the basis of a new textbook that will be published by W. W. Norton in 2027.
The course and the book guide students through eleven different social roles tied to music making. These roles include familiar ones, such as the performer, but also less commonly explored ones, such as the teacher, the instrument maker, the patron, and the facilitator (by which we mean people who organize, manage, or produce musical events). We address the composer, of course, but also the adapter (that is, people who arrange, orchestrate, translate, or otherwise adapt a musical work or practice for some new context). We also examine music’s circulation in society through roles such as the influencer (critics, promoters, tastemakers), the conservator (archivists, community elders, “song catchers”), and the disseminator (scribes, couriers, publishers, broadcasters). Our first role—covered at the beginning of the semester and in Chapter 1 of our book—examines the listener, a role familiar to all students and one that lies at the foundation of music making. We make no claim that our list is exhaustive, that our roles are mutually exclusive, or that their meanings transcend cultural boundaries. They are not and do not. Interrogating such matters is, in fact, intrinsic to our pedagogy.
By organizing our course and our book around these and other roles, we have created a modular framework that introduces students to an array of musical attitudes and practices spanning historical epochs and global regions. For example, when studying the role of the teacher, students may be introduced to Allauddin Khan, an esteemed guru of Hindustani classical music; Sarah Anna Glover, an influential schoolteacher from nineteenth-century England; or Monnetus Monneri, a fifteenth-century trumpeter who offered instruction to apprentices. We take great pains to stress the equal importance of all the roles that we study, just as we strive to present musical traditions in a nonhierarchical framework in which no single approach to music making registers as normative and another tokenistic.
Notably, our framework decenters the roles of the composer and the performer in our classroom, forcing them to share the stage with a larger cast of characters. Our students have proven receptive to this panoramic view of music making. By the end of the semester, most of them recognize that this perspective holds implications for their own lives. By incorporating instrument makers, teachers, patrons, facilitators, conservators, disseminators, and other such figures into our pedagogy, we encourage our students to think creatively about the different pathways that they themselves might choose to travel in the future. Who knows? Maybe a clarinet major will be inspired to become a “conservator” and study music librarianship, a composition student to become an “adapter” and build a portfolio of marching band arrangements, or a singer to become a “facilitator” and pursue a career in artist management. Each, in their own way, will be a musician in society.
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MEET THE AUTHORS
Brett Boutwell and Blake Howe are musicologists at Louisiana State University, where they developed a first-year course for music majors called The Musician in Society. They are the recipients of several instructional awards from LSU for their undergraduate teaching, which spans small honors seminars, surveys of music history, and large courses in LSU’s general education catalog.