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Release date: October 11, 2004

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

"All musics are created equal": GCC music department chair helps students learn music from the inside out

Students in Matthew Shippee's World Music and Cultures class at Greenfield Community College learn about music "from the inside out” by going out into the real world to research music and the people who make it. "This project teaches students how important it is to have open ears and open minds when it comes to experiencing other kinds of music,” says Professor Shippee, Chair of the Music Department.

"We start with the viewpoint that all musics are created equal,” says Shippee. "That's a new concept for a lot of students because we're sort of trained to think that Bach and Beethoven, or whoever, is at the top of a pyramid. What we do is flatten that pyramid out and put everything on a continuum. So if a student says, ‘Japanese music is just noise,' we try to figure out why the music is made the way it is, how people think about it, and what it means to those people. When we listen to music from the viewpoint of the people making the music, we see how meaningful it is.”

Every summer, Matthew Shippee, an ethnomusicologist specializing in American music, practices what he preaches by completing a field research project that serves as a model for students in his World Music and Cultures course. This past summer, he received grants through the Maine Arts Commission to research the music of the Passamaquoddy Indians of Washington County, ME. The result will be a CD of music and interviews that the tribal community will use as a tool for sharing their traditional culture and music.

Shippee describes Passamaquoddy music as sounding "very organic, very much ‘of the earth.' It's mostly vocal music accompanied by a single drum that is beat by a stick. It's not melodic in the Western music sense of being melodic, but it's really beautiful in its own shape, which tends to start high and fall lower. Some of the chants are a series of words, or single words, or special vocal sounds that are repeated. It has this sense of being very cyclical and rhythmic, without a clear definition of beginning, middle and end.”

Shippee went through a process that his students will soon replicate for their own field work project: interviewing people, recording music, taking photographs and, finally, editing the material into a format that can be shared with others. It's both a process and an approach, he explains. "First, there's the logistics: How to contact people and do the research, how to use a tape recorder, how to ask the right kinds of questions. The second thing that I hope students emulate is the sense of discovery that goes on. If we go into such a project with assumptions about what we'll find, we always end up wrong. You really have to stay open, and when you do stay open, you find you're discovering things that you didn't expect.”

On the Passamaquoddy Reservation, Shippee discovered a rich sense of community and tradition coupled with "a whole lot of poverty and social abuses such as drug addition. It's not an easy life up there. I was struck by the juxtaposition of people who didn't have a lot materially, but had a whole lot on the inside because of their connection to tradition and community.”

World Music and Cultures field projects will take students into the Pioneer Valley to explore and document the local music culture. "We are a music department that values all kinds of music,” says Shippee. "We're ahead of the curve, especially when it comes to two-year schools, because we validate students' interests in popular music, jazz, world music and classical music. So we're not telling students they have to come in here and fit a certain mold. They have to work hard at whatever they do, but they have a lot of flexibility in where they will direct their energy.”

It's a philosophy that resonates with students, as evidenced by a 30% increase in music enrollments this year, an enviable rate of growth for any school. More students means more teachers are teaching in the department than ever before, contributing to an environment of student and faculty rapport that generates its own momentum. "We have some of the best musicians in the Valley teaching right here,” Shippee says, "and it's exciting, because we're building a truly unique music program that is connected to the local community in meaningful ways.”