Conservatory Creates African American Music Minor

CONSERVATORY

February 25, 2022 Established 1874 Volume 151, Number 12

A Vision for the Conservatory Section

For the first time in the Review’s 148-year history, the paper is introducing a one-page section dedicated to covering Conservatory news. This section will serve not only as a venue for traditional news coverage of Conservatory events, curricular changes, faculty, and students, but also as a way for individual artists and groups to tell their stories — stories that capture pivotal moments in their artistic development. The ultimate goal for this new section is to serve as a dynamic bridge between the College and the Conservatory.

The content in the section will demystify the kind of work Conservatory musicians do. Since we spend so much time practicing, rehearsing, collaborating in ensembles, and learning from our professors, many of us have few opportunities to relate our experiences to the wider Oberlin community. Yet all students, regardless of their major, should be able to connect to the frustrations and discoveries we make during those hours.

The introduction of this section also comes at a critical moment in the Conservatory’s history as it modifies its curriculum to include the formal study of music that has been historically marginalized, a shift that creates a notable starting point for this section.

Chief Classical Music Critic of The New York Times Anthony Tommasini provides a guiding vision for this section. In a retrospective on his first byline for the Times, Tommasini writes, “I’ve always believed that people who love music, even if they lack any training, are more perceptive of the nuances and complexities of a piece than they realize.” As a universal language, music, in all its wonderful complexity and diversity, is more critical than ever in bridging the divides that separate us.

If you are interested in contributing, please email conservatory@oberlinreview.org.

Conservatory Creates African American Music Minor

Walter Thomas-Patterson

Conservatory Editor

The Conservatory has established an African American Music minor that will be available to students beginning in the 2022–23 academic year. The minor will be interdisciplinary in nature; courses will be offered within the Conservatory’s Jazz and Ethnomusicology departments and the College’s Africana Studies, Dance, and Theater departments, among numerous other cross-sectional courses available to students.

The introduction of the minor actualizes a broader curricular expansion toward historically marginalized musical fields, following the Conservatory’s Racial Equity and Diversity Action Plan released in September 2020. The Conservatory is restructuring the music theory curriculum to de-emphasize Western art-music as the sole theoretical canon and instead provide students with a greater array of forms to explore.

Along with this pedagogical shift, the Conservatory is hiring new faculty for positions in Jazz History, as well as in African American and African Diasporic Music, to help teach newly available courses in this minor.

Africana Studies Department Chair Charles Peterson, Conservatory Associate Dean Chris Jenkins, and a not-yet named professor in African American Music will collaborate as co-chairs of the minor. They will be responsible for approving students’ academic proposals.

Jenkins says that although new positions will be hired for the minor, the program will also draw on pre-existing academic infrastructure.

“The curricular elements of the minor have been around for a long time; we just needed to formalize them to articulate a single area of study,” Jenkins wrote in an email to the Review. “There is already a lot of interest at Oberlin in studying Black cultural topics, so expanding Conservatory offerings in this area seems like an obvious opportunity.”

The minor requires 20 credit hours for completion: 12 are obtained through required introductory courses, and eight are approved from a variety of courses, contingent on a student’s particular interests in fields ranging from theatrical performance to gospel singing.

For College third-year and Africana Studies major L. Joshua Jackson, the curricular expansion has mostly been a positive change. However, Jackson has concerns that the minor will plaster over pre-existing problems they see in Africana Studies, primarily concerns around professors who do not have tenure-track positions.

“My question would be: Are we taking care of these departments and what we have already that is so rich within Africana Studies — within the context of dance and Africana Studies or theater in Africana Studies?” Jackson said. “This is a huge step for music and Africana Studies, but how are we taking care of what we already have?”

Still, Dean of the Conservatory William Quillen said that being able to draw on both the College’s Africana Studies program, as well as the Conservatory’s resources, is exactly what will make the minor such a special opportunity.

“In many regards, this program formalizes and recognizes pathways of study long-pursued by students in these areas, and lines of scholarly and creative inquiry of interest to faculty and staff throughout campus,” Quillen said in a Campus Digest email. “We are delighted to create this program in partnership with our colleagues in the College, and we look forward to the intellectual and artistic explorations it helps inspire.”

Jenkins says that he has already

Alum Donates $1.6 Million to Jazz Department

Walter Thomas-Patterson

Conservatory Editor

The Conservatory received a monumental $1.6 million donation from James R. and Susan Neumann to establish a new postdoctoral fellowship position in Jazz History. The soon-to-be announced fellow will have the chance to teach a slate of newly-offered classes in the Jazz department, as well as pursue individual research projects in conjunction with Oberlin students. The endowed position will begin in fall 2022 and will cycle every two years.

The donation from the Neumanns builds upon their prior gifts to the Jazz department over the past few decades. In 2011, the Neumanns donated more than 100,000 artifacts documenting the history of jazz from its inception. Now, $100,000 of this most recent donation will go toward supporting the Nuemann Jazz Collection.

With the recent establishment of a minor in African American Music, as well as the hiring of a new professor in African American and African Diasporic Music, this donation helps cement the Conservatory’s push toward including marginalized music as part of a formal study in its curriculum.

“The Neumanns’ magnanimous gifts to Oberlin Conservatory reflect their ongoing, passionate dedication to preserve and propagate jazz as a true American art form, a notion that certainly resonates profoundly with the students and faculty of the Jazz department,” wrote Director and Associate Professor of Jazz Studies Jay Ashby.

According to Conservatory Library Head Deborah Campana, the donation will allow students to immerse themselves within the world of history, sound, and social movements that jazz encapsulates. As they navigate the terrain of this new subfield, students will have a Jazz History professor to serve as a guide, encouraging them to foster their own perspectives on key topics.

“Whether studying jazz, contemporary culture, or African-American history, students can experience a sort of material culture in sound and documents, and a newly-minted jazz historian will stimulate them to develop their own interpretations of the social and artistic developments evolving from the unique art form, jazz,” Campana said.

Campana extended her gratitude to the Neumanns and acknowledged how their support will extend long into the future.

“In the Neumann Collection, the Oberlin College and Conservatory were gifted the treasure trove of ardent collectors,” Campana said. “Now in providing the funds to take care of the collection and the endowment to support a postdoctoral fellowship, [James] and Susan have ensured that their passion lives on into the future.”

The work of historically marginalized composers will gain more attention in the curriculum for the new African American music minor. In clockwise order from top left: Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-George; Jessie Montgomery; Roque Cordero; J. H. Kwabena Nketia; Samuel Coleridge-Taylor; and Florence Price.

heard from students who are excited about the new program.

“I think that interest in the minor is likely to drive the creation of new courses to satisfy its requirements,” Jenkins wrote. “Many students have written to me already to express their interest, so I am hopeful that many students will take advantage of this pathway and that their interest will nudge faculty towards creating new courses.”

Jenkins is also hopeful that the mi-

Courtesy of Abe Frato, Photo Editor nor might be the start of creating more academic programs that more broadly represent historically Black music in the Conservatory curricula.

“There are many different directions this type of study can take,” he wrote. “Curricular change is very slow, but it’s not unreasonable to imagine that over the course of years, this might be expanded into a major or some other type of program, given sufficient student interest.”