Quint Smits
Tilburg University
Tilburg, The Netherlands  (51.5° N, 5.0° E)

featuring Jaena Kim, Classical Flutist, Winnipeg, Canada (49.8° N, 97.1° W)

Samantha Chao
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Todd Frazier, Director of the Center for Performing Arts Medicine, Houston Methodist Hospital, Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

The concept of understanding music as language has been around for centuries, but only until recent decades has this language of music been utilized for medical purposes by people such as Todd Frazier, director of the Center for Performing Arts Medicine (CPAM) at Houston Methodist Hospital. My own passions for medicine and music have also drawn me toward the field of medical humanities and arts medicine, and it was an honor to hear his discussion with Longitude.site contributor Anu Dwarumpudi, a biochemistry and molecular biology graduate from Rice University, about how he is working to professionalize the integration of music and other performing arts into the medical sphere with the intention of improving the overall experience of being a patient.

Professionally trained as a composer and musician at Juilliard School in New York City, Todd has long been familiar with the skills and benefits that music provides to those who practice or engage with it. Even as a student, he recognized the broad-ranging utility of these skills and wanted to share his knowledge to budding young musicians through a career in music education. It was not until he started watching his colleagues work with special needs children, however, that he quickly realized the benefits of music on neurological development and regeneration. This sparked his interest in the world of arts integration, the interdisciplinary field that integrates the arts into the healthcare community for therapeutic, educational, and expressive purposes.

I am always impressed whenever I hear stories about how people manage to move between and combine conventionally disparate fields, but Todd’s journey is particularly interesting to me because of how its intersectionality necessitates diverse teams who, together, can make a greater impact than any one discipline alone. Through such collaborations that Todd fosters at Methodist, the hospital has daily musical performances to reduce anxiety and modulate mood. They also have multidisciplinary care teams consisting of music therapists, neurologists, and artists who work with patients on anything from inpatient rehabilitation to psychiatric therapy.

Currently, Todd is working on a research project that monitors the distribution of oxygenated blood flow in the brain as patients listen to music. This information can be used to create customized listening lists that help to exercise the brain for better rehabilitation outcomes for stroke patients. His discussion about how patients respond positively to soothing music resonates with my own experiences serving as a music volunteer at Methodist, and it is very exciting to see the development of new technologies that allow for widespread distribution of such individualized care to patients.

I am very inspired to hear about how Todd has managed to combine both the medical and art worlds to create a dedicated space at Methodist to serve current patients and to research future music therapy options. The rising importance of art in medicine through programs such as CPAM has created many opportunities for growth and development in the intersection between conventionally disparate fields, which makes studying medical humanities in the classroom all the more rewarding and stimulating.

Highlights from the interview:

Everyone’s family, community, and life circumstances tend to create an initial role for them in society. What was expected of you growing up and throughout your career, and how did you adhere to or stray from that?

I grew up wanting to be involved with music. I’m a composer of music, and I think from 7th or 8th grade I was really drawn toward being in the world of music, but at the same time I wasn’t really sure what I would do professionally with it. I just knew it was something I was drawn to. I decided that I’d go to music school, so I went for composition because I was drawn to creating—or using music to illuminate ideas that I thought could communicate. It was just a language that I was passionate about.

My parents never really had any preconceived idea of who I would become or not become. I think they were just, in general, supportive of something that I might be interested in and passionate about. They would always encourage me to do my best, and I always tried to because I thought it was so great that they were being supportive of something like a music composition career, which I knew that they were concerned would have limited career opportunities.

I went to undergraduate school for music, and then I went to graduate school for music at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York and then the Juilliard School in New York City. It really wasn’t until I started my last year in graduate school [that I started] thinking about both what I was going to do career-wise when I graduated, but also the question of why there weren’t more opportunities, professional opportunities, for artists…limiting artists in the way we describe professional success. Meaning when you go through a traditional music school or conservatory, there’s a traditional trajectory of what would be considered professional success—say, you’re in instrumental music, violin player—and it would be joining a professional orchestra or having a solo career or also, maybe, teaching. Teaching is the common denominator amongst all of them. I always said if everyone just became a teacher, we would just be teaching the next generation of artists to continue to go into a field where there are very limited career opportunities.

I really remember thinking to myself that I can really be excited about how I might broaden the definition of professional success for artists, which for me would be stretching it well beyond what would be more of a traditional career path. Looking at what do artists do uniquely—are they creative? Do they look at problems in a unique way, and do they find solutions in unique ways? Do they work with teams in unique ways? Are they sensitive to differences?

So that set me out on a path where I first was in education, music education, and really trying to make sure I could do things to safeguard that opportunity for young people to just have music as part of their general education. Not having anything to do with training professional musicians, but just the idea of can we elevate the importance of art and music to an integral part of a well-rounded education? Then I started to look at how the arts were being used in schools, and they were being used [in] more than just your music class and your choir class. There were a lot of teachers that used the arts and creativity in teaching subjects. We call it sometimes arts integrated learning or experiential learning. And [I started to look at] how teachers were developing new applications to work in special needs education, where students may have learning challenges or developmental difficulties, and thinking that the medical center knows a lot about neurological challenges or different neurologic development phases. And I said, well, why don’t we start to bring some of the folks in the medical center [to work] more closely in collaboration with what’s happening in education and the arts in schools and look at how there could be synergies amongst these things that could improve. I knew there was a young field called music therapy that was being utilized in the hospital clinically with patients, so I started bringing music therapists over to schools, working with classroom teachers and looking at folks that were specialists in childhood development.

That was my first experience in thinking maybe we could have a much, much broader circle in which the arts could be a common denominator that would take us from education to what was happening in communities, community health, and what’s happening in hospitals and public health.

I started to do some research experiments on how the arts could uniquely be used to develop attention span and develop things that wouldn’t be considered musical skills, but of course they are. If anyone plays an instrument, they know it needs some focused attention, but things that any teacher in any classroom is trying to do is to help their children develop their attention span. The arts, if they’re presented in a well-thought-out way, can be a fantastic tool to do that. That got me really involved in this world that we’re calling arts in health, and even though it’s been around forever, it’s still really professionally emerging.

I’m thrilled that the Methodist Hospital here in Houston—at around that same time when I was reaching out to the hospital and looking at what’s happening in the arts community, in education, and how we might learn better from each other—they were wanting to have a stronger relationship with the arts community in Houston. They saw that I was already building these bridges, and they asked me to come here to think about different ways that the arts could have entry points in the traditional hospital environment and might also provide some solution to some of today’s and tomorrow’s challenges. That’s where I am now, running this center here at the Center for Performing Arts Medicine, which has arts integration. We have live music every day to improve the overall experience, to reduce anxiety, to rejuvenate. We have music therapy, so that music therapists who are now trained (it’s a healthcare board certified degree) work with patients in clinical teams, anywhere from inpatient rehabilitation to psychiatric clinic, using some of the unique stimulating elements of rhythm and melody for neurologic rehabilitation, like in gait training and balance and melody with speech therapy. All the way to the psychiatric clinic, [they are using] the motivational elements of music to help alter mood, to help modulate mood. And then we have a research division which is using some modern tools like the fMRI, which is just a brain scan, to learn more about why the arts have this unique response in humans and how we can maybe better harness that to help therapeutically. And then we have a clinic that helps take care of injuries related to artists, just as sports medicine has for athletes.

When did you envision yourself doing the work that you’re doing now?

Early on, I really had much more of a focus on trying to safeguard the arts’ role in education, feeling like if we can’t even provide some basic level of exposure to the arts for our children, then it’s going to be hard to build on that or evolve the importance of that in communities when people are grown up.

So it really wasn’t so much about training, or wanting to train, or have more people become professional artists. It was more about the arts and how the arts could be a really integral balance in somebody’s development in education. In the K-12 school system, especially in the public system, you come up against the standardized tests. Most of the time, people might think a lot of the things the arts are doing makes sense, and they see it works, but because they weren’t actually tested in the standardized tests that evaluate and rank schools, there weren’t any specific questions about the arts. A lot of the principals and decision makers wouldn’t put resources towards those; they’d put all their resources toward what was on the test. That’s where the phrase “teaching to the test” came from.

I’ve always been someone who never just accepted what was status quo. I asked the question, why do we have to have that standard test as the parameter for everything that’s important for our kids to know, when we know that there are things that aren’t on it that are important? So I started to look for other ways. I explored other ways to evaluate the role of the arts in our lives and [what] ways would be dynamic, in presenting a strong case. That’s when I started to look towards not so much at K-12 test assessments, but how learning these things in history and math and science is a neurological developmental process and this is the type of thing that the medical field really knows a lot about. They can tell you what looks like a good activity for your brain when the different hubs are connecting to each other, and when your brain is not stimulated. They also know that neurological activity is important during brain development.

That’s when I first started to wonder if there’s some different tests or a different approach we can look at that compares the arts to other types of situations or activities that might show some unique benefits it might have. That’s when I got really excited about some of the modern tools we have. For example, we have the fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging. It’s just a magnet. But when you’re in the magnet, it can show electrical connectivity in the brain, sort of a roadmap of how the brain is working. It can also show different chemical releases. It can also show where the oxygenated blood is going to, which tells you what part of the brain is being used. Neurologists can look at these scans and tell you what a robust healthy oxygen flow looks like, or a normal positive connectivity pattern looks like. They can also tell you that these are developing; that these connectivity patterns grow over time through stimulation, and they call that plasticity. They can tell you—for example, if you look at a brain of an autistic child, there will still be a lot of hubs, points of activity, but there won’t be as much connectivity between the different hubs. Which might make sense because some of these children are having trouble developmentally connecting different parts to their emotions, to their actions, different things. So I thought this could be—this was a whole new way of giving some strengths to the arts as a medium that should not be discounted within education, especially at critical times when children are developing.

I started to do some research that didn’t look at standardized tests. Things like focused attention and comparing it against other teaching styles. Reading with a textbook, different things. And we got some really compelling brain scan activity, which showed some very intricate kind of connectivity and stimulation. That started to gain some new kinds of attention from some of the principals and people at school, especially for schools that have special needs divisions, because it just happened that those were areas where I found a lot of schools were struggling with and they were really looking for more ways to try to help those children in their development. That probably happened for me about eight years ago, and I made that switch, this switch from the education world being my playing field to actually within a health community or a hospital being the playing field. That might be the direction of least resistance that had the most opportunity. Plus, you didn’t have standardized tests, and you didn’t have some of these other potential boundaries; you really just needed to show some basic fundamentals and people seemed pretty open and accepting to see this as a viable tool.

Did you have someone who acted as a mentor who helped cultivate your interests and guide you along?

When I was in high school, learning more and more about my connection to music, I definitely had some music teachers who were mentors and inspiration to me. And then in music schools, there were people that definitely inspired me. In this particular field, I was looking for people involved with it. There wasn’t anything going on like there is now. Now, at the Texas Medical Center, most of the hospitals have some arts and medicine program. At the time I was inspired by the opportunity. I definitely sought out people. For example, I’m not a music therapist, so I sought out music therapists to better understand what they were doing, how they were doing it. I did realize that just as an artist, performing artist, there really wasn’t a lot of specific education going into how you would prepare a program, what kind of pieces you might prepare if you were going to perform for an audience in a hospital. I guess because I was already in the music world, being a composer and knowing something about music, I got excited about that. That’s the first thing I did here at Methodist. I proposed that we be the first hospital here to create a really coordinated professional entry point or doorway for the arts community, arts and culture community, to be able to share these unique audiences.

I really had thought a lot about how thinking for preparing music for these audiences needed to be different, and we needed to create some new guidelines to orient artists, and that would contribute to the further professionalization of this as a field as well. So, for example, a group played here today, and we talked about the idea that no one that’s actually here in the community areas came and bought a ticket to hear them play. They’re here because they were going to be there anyway. Music is giving a space and an opportunity to share, and the hope is that it can support, enrich, and enhance their journey of either caregiving for a family member or friend, or employees, if they’re visiting. Anyone and everyone here, we talk about using music to lower anxiety, and everyone probably has a little anxiety about what they’re going to do, who they’re going to see, what they’re waiting for. And also provide that real distraction and turning that into a positive, rejuvenating experience. Maybe the arts can help them take a step back and look at their lives in a different way, or a fresh way, and renew strength.

We do now have a very robust—about 150 performances here a year in our different lobbies, in addition to pianists. We have five staff pianists that play every day in our lobbies, seven days a week. And so the combination of all that is music has a very visible role in just the basic environment here. The founder of this center is a doctor named Richard Stasney; he’s an ENT physician and he takes care of singers. I suppose I could say he was one of my mentors within this field. He really encouraged me because he knew he wanted someone to connect the hospital to the arts, and he actually reached out to me and asked if I would come in and work here and see how that could be done.

Wow, that’s very interesting. I didn’t realize your staff was that extensive.

Well, we started with just one employee just six years ago, and now we have about 21.

What do you think are the misconceptions people have about your job and your field?

I think there is still a feeling that the arts are something special that can be included if you either just have a little extra money or you have some volunteers. Or as entertainment.

I don’t want to discount that the arts certainly can entertain, but I think that there’s been enough information and research that shows that the arts in these environments, in these very vulnerable environments, can also be a very productive tool to alter the mood, and to motivate, and to build resilience. I think that people are surprised at how professionally it’s evolved to a point where, not all hospitals, but at this hospital, it’s something that they justify putting money behind and supporting. People justify making contributions and giving grants to have this as part of the experience, and I think that’s something that takes a little bit of a shift in some people’s minds to recognize that it’s evolved.

What skills do you find yourself utilizing the most in your position, and how do you think your college years informed that?

Of course in music conservatory, we learned a lot about music history and theory and the craft. I guess I use that because we review the different artists who want to come share music here. We review the programming. We’re tasked to look at things that will connect to our community, so we look at where our employees and patients come from. Interestingly enough, employees will be a mix of from the US but also some from India and there’s also a good number from different Asian countries. How do we use the arts to make people feel at home and welcome and celebrate different times of year? Just having a good, broad education in music history has helped that, but as far as administratively running the center here, I have to say I did a lot of that learning on the job. I’m happy to say that I try to always learn from my mistakes. I mean I think I’ve always been well-intentioned. One of the things I’ve learned is to try not to move something through too soon or too fast, you know, the importance of really thoroughly and prudently taking one step at a time and how that increases your chance of success and long-term success. Some of these efforts across America, in arts and health, you’ll find someone gives you a grant, or all of a sudden, they’ll have some extra budget money, and they’ll have some projects, and they’ll hire some people and do some things. And then all of a sudden, you hear the center is closing, or they lost their grant, or the administration changed and they had to let people go. I’ve really tried to not ever be in a situation where we haven’t either developed or established something to a point to where I think it would be considered critical or so important that I would hope that it wouldn’t be something that would be easily thrown out.

One of the skills in working in any kind of arts or any kind of nonprofit, including hospital administration, especially if you’re working at a nonprofit hospital, is fundraising. In general, good financial planning, budgeting strategy, and also, in my case, fundraising, which is usually working with individuals who might make contributions—your private foundations and also public funds that might be used. I learned pretty early on, even when I was working more in the education world, that if you can learn how to do this and you can be successful, it gives you a lot of strength as far as being able to safeguard your programs, sustain your programs. Also build a reputation of stability, if it could be something that can be continued year after year. Interestingly enough in our case here, the better we have done with fundraising, I think the more attention we’ve been receiving, and ultimately sometimes the more operational hospital support [we] would get, which would be funds from the hospital supporting us as well. So, coming up with a nice balance of operational funds, earned income funds, supporting what we do, as well as philanthropic funds. I’m trying to keep a healthy balance with those, too, so we can safeguard our activities.

Is there a particular project that is your favorite? Or that you think was the most impactful on the position you’re in now?

Well, professionally, I’m excited that we did raise a large sum of money. We raised a little over a million dollars that we’ve put in an endowment account, a restricted endowment account, where we’re just using the interest. That’s dedicated to what we call arts integration. It’s how we can work with the arts and culture community so they can contribute to the experience here in the hospital. I’m excited about that, because in raising that endowment, it means that that program will have a permanent funding source in perpetuity so that this hospital will always be known as having that available to them. As an artist myself, and as an administrator, I’m proud that there is something that will have a life of its own.

The project that I have the most interest in, excitement, and hope for—we’re right in the middle. We’re about halfway through a research project, which is based on some of our publications using the fMRI looking at individuals’ relationships to music and how we can take some individual preferences, and we’ve been very consistent in being able to create these customized listening lists, which are based both on music that someone has a strong positive emotional connection to but also based on music that is completely unfamiliar to that person. Using those in a unique mix to create what we see as a healthy distribution of oxygenated blood flow throughout different parts of the brain, the emotion and memory and the focused attention areas. And so what we’re doing in our stroke center now, patients who are volunteering, they’re doing these individualized lists three times a day for 90 days, and about 15 minutes each time. And the idea is that it’s an exercise for the brain. It’s a good example of what we call music medicine. In a way it’s almost like taking a pill, but instead of taking a pill, you’re listening to the music. We know that the music also has some chemical releases and changes certain blood flow patterns and connectivity patterns, so there is some neurologic change happening, and the thought is that this consistent profusion of blood, [this] exercise may help during that rehabilitation process. The different areas of the brain that might be compromised, [this] might help them recover. At some point, there are parts of the brain after a stroke that won’t recover, but there does seem to be some question as to how much and which parts of those might be, so giving it as much oxygen as you can might be an aid in recovery. Early signs and some other studies show that it does seem to make some difference. But this is a very thorough study; they have an fMRI scanner at the beginning, the middle, and the end, and they also have different neuropsychological and motor exams at the beginning and the end. So when we finish, all of our patients will have a very high quality clinical study, which will give us some evidence [as] to whether this type of intervention has value or not. Of course, I have high hopes that it might, but either way, it will be important. It will add important information to the field, and we will learn from it.

Earlier I was saying I was trying to find new ways to show value in what the arts can do, and so the neurologist in the stroke center, how I approached him was that I showed these fMRI scans. They can see for themselves what was happening, and they thought that that looked like a very healthy pattern. So that was a successful way of finding a new language that has value. Otherwise, I would have just said, I have this idea. People like music. If you play this music for people, it might help them recover better, and just based on that, it made them happy or something like that. And I suspect that wouldn’t have been enough to have them create a formal clinical study. The idea of thinking creatively about how to communicate value, that’s also a good example of that. I really have high hopes for it.

This fMRI technology has only been around for 10 or 15 years, which, relatively speaking, is not that long. That’s been a new way to look into the brain to understand what’s happening, but let’s say that this stroke study does work and these individualized listening lists do seem to be a tool that someone can use for themselves as a healthy listening technique that could help them have even better results. Technology could then help us create an app that could be something that could be shared around the world. That would be embedded with all the decisions and the database of unfamiliar pieces and music history, all the information that we’ve garnered from this work. And immediately, through technology, you’d potentially be helping people all around the world. Of course, that’s thinking a little ahead.

We’ve talked about how you’ve collaborated with neurologists and musical therapists. How does working on a project with a team full of diverse people work in terms of structure or organization?

One of the things I try to do all the time is put together diverse teams and teams of people that aren’t all within the same discipline. I guess it’s natural because I’m already an artist in the medical community. For me, if we’re looking at music medicine or music therapy application, I think, well, let’s get the imaging person involved, so probably a physicist in the imaging department. Let’s get a neurologist who knows about brain development, let’s get an artist who can really be an expert, a musicology expert, a music history expert—you know, and let’s get, of course, the music therapist themselves.

I think part of the nature of what we do is look at bridges and common denominators amongst different disciplines, so the arts also are something that reaches almost every aspect of the hospital. The arts at Methodist have a supportive collaboration here with our spiritual care chaplains. They also have a connection to neurosurgeons in helping detect brain stimulation in ways that music can only do, and sort of everything in between. So music lends itself well to bringing people of a variety of disciplines together, and you naturally get people from different cultures and different backgrounds, especially being at a place like the Texas Medical Center that has such a large international presence. We have been congratulated at conferences, at neurologic conferences and things—and I’d have to say we were excited that we didn’t even think of it—but we were congratulated on how diverse our teams were. I guess [when] you look at some research coming out of a university, or out of only a neurologic institute, you might just have all those kinds of people, and so that is something I realized: when you interject the arts, it also seems like a nice way to open up the stage for a lot more diversity. We just do it because it makes sense naturally. We don’t have any kind of mandate to do it, but it has been very helpful.

How do you think that science and technology will impact your specific area of interest?

Telemedicine is a big deal because for us; that’s one of the disconnects with medicine. When you have a patient in a very controlled environment, you can get a lot done because you are controlling all the different variables. But of course, when they’re discharged, you don’t see them again. You lose track of them. The telemedicine has allowed us to maintain that supportive connection to that person, so if they’re having trouble reintegrating to their community, they have that lifeline. And also for us, for the patients in the psychiatric clinic, we’re able to ask them are they using their listening lists, have they been helpful. Before, we wouldn’t even know at all. We thought they could just lose their listening devices, or they didn’t know how to recharge them, or they just threw them away or something. Luckily, so far they have all said that they are still using their lists, and it’s been a very helpful thing.

Is there a methodology that you have in terms of figuring out what music to give to a specific individual? Is there a way that you personalize it? How do you do that?

We’ve developed with our music therapy department what’s called a music biography, a music history. Because at the same time, you want to make sure that you don’t choose a negative piece—just as music can bring about positive memories, sometimes it can also be associated with a negative event—so you want to safeguard your choices against those types of choices that might be counter to what you’re trying to do. So the music history will have something about their preferred genres, how often they listen to music, even writing down specific songs or pieces that would be their favorite. We ask a lot of questions, such as are they religious, have they served in the military, are they married, a lot of different things. Let’s say if they were in the military, there may be certain pieces that would be inspiring to them, but it also may be a sensitive area. There may be certain pieces around a period of time that may have a negative trigger for them. If we created an app out of the stroke study, they would go down and answer all these questions in the app before they actually set up their music listening. We would call that music therapy informed so that music therapists, their experiences as therapists themselves, will help.

We focused a lot on music and its impact on medicine. What is your opinion on using other forms of art like painting, dance, so on and so forth, in terms of health and healing?

I think there’s room for all of it. We happen to have 10 music therapists here, but each one of the art forms have their own therapy degree—visual arts, movement and dance, poetry and creative writing. I think as far as the discipline, music therapy seems to have maybe…a little bit more research behind it. It’s had a little bit more time in the field and has evolved to a pretty comprehensive point. It may or may not be 100 percent true on that, but the other thing [is] here in Texas, we have a good number of universities that offer a music therapy degree, so we have a lot more music therapists wanting to work and wanting to shadow, wanting to do an internship. We have very few, if any, universities that offer visual art therapy or dance therapy. It changes in the region. I understand there’s a lot more visual art therapists up in the northeast, and it probably has something to do with that there’s courses that they cultivate and offer, and there’s more of an awareness, and there’s more research and more pilot programs going in that way. We’re very open to other art forms, and we do have creative writing classes for employees. We have photography classes for employees, and we have visual arts classes for employees. And those are a lot of things we do for employees, using the arts to build resiliency and also a creative outlet to help them think about what they do and help them balance their life between work and home and their hobbies. Those aren’t taught by therapists; they are taught usually by professional artists. And we do a lot of visual art programming exhibits in the hospital and things like that, but as far as specific patient therapy, right now we only have music therapy here. We’re also an adult hospital. Texas Children’s right next door does have a visual art therapist, and there’s some thought that when you’re working with children, creating and making stuff becomes a little bit more natural. But it can also be very effective with adults too, and I’m sure we’ll have a visual art therapist at some point. 

What advice would you give to a student that was interested in getting into your field?

There’s starting to emerge some certificates, some of them online, some degrees that will introduce you to the field. There’s one out of the University of Florida, there’s an online certificate in arts. There are also workshops. There’s a two-day workshop that means you get some certificate or some acknowledgement. I think that anything one can do to gain more information and knowledge from people who are active practitioners is always going to be helpful whether you go into that field or not. We didn’t used to have much of that, but fortunately today there are some opportunities like that, across America, to gain some hands-on experiences.

There’s also each of the therapies, what we call creative arts therapies music, drama, dance, visual art. Each of those has a national organization that has an annual conference, and anyone can go to any of these conferences to just immerse and learn more about it, learn education opportunities. I happen to be president of what’s called the National Organization for Arts in Health, NOAH, and that organization aims to be a broad representation of all the different related fields and professional fields that are working in arts in health. That organization has a national conference, and this year it’s in September in Boston. Folks register and there are scholarships for students and all sorts of things. It will have a very broad introduction to what’s happening in the field across America. So I think, for example, a young person coming out of school, let’s say they apply here for an artist-in-residency. If I see that they’ve done a weekend, hands-on arts in health seminar, they’ve gone to a national conference, they’ve maybe shadowed somebody, that’s going to really make that person stand out. Because right now, there aren’t many full degrees, full undergrad or full master’s, specifically in arts in health. There are a few, but a lot of them will be blended. [They] are sort of those extra certificate kind of credits. Also those things will help a young person confirm if it’s really the field they want to go into or not.

Did anything I ask or didn’t ask spark anything else that you think would be important to mention? 

There’s a report called “Arts, Health, and Well-being in America.” It was published by the National Organization of Arts in Health, NOAH, and it’s a free download from their website. It’s essentially a state of the field in arts in health in America today, and it’s very easy to read. It’s really interesting. It has program models, and it goes over a lot of the different realms in which the arts are used in health, including with veterans, including with the elderly, including all sorts, including clinically in the therapies. If someone…wants to know what would be the next thing to dive into this, I’d say that would definitely be the next thing. It’s a great way to get a really good introduction to what’s happening in the field. It’s not 100 pages; it’s maybe 25 pages. It’s got pictures and lots of links and a glossary. It’s a really great foundation for learning more about the field. And it’s downloadable on that site. The site is thenoah.net.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.

Joint article by:
Molly Turner, orchestral conducting master’s student at Juilliard, New York City (40.7° N, 74.0° W)   
Douglas Graham, computer science sophomore at Rice University, Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

The caricature for a composer may go something like this: they’re sitting at a cluttered desk, staring at a blank piece of music in front of them. At the moment of inspiration, they furiously jot down notes as if dictating the sounds of the heavens. If only it were that easy! And perhaps our overdone stereotype of the computer scientist is a nerdy and antisocial individual who is smashing keys at a coffee shop, coding the next big thing. What computer scientist would go to a music party? And what composer would delight in C++ or JavaScript? We wouldn’t consider much overlap between either of these specialties. In fact, though, there are a multitude of areas where computer science intersects with our composition, production, and consumption of music—too many, even, for this article to cover in full. 

To start, a great deal of music composition actually involves a logic-based thinking that also underlies computer science. Sound waves passing through the air and into our ears are like information passing between systems. Logic-based thinking and music composition overlap in the work of Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), a composer who chose to organize sounds in a very systematic way with his development of the twelve-tone method. The twelve-tone method assigns each of the twelve chromatic notes in the octave a number instead of the traditional letter name. Then those numbers are put into a matrix with various conditions developed by Schoenberg. This matrix is the reference for which pitch is assigned in music. Essentially, traditional western harmony was abandoned for numerical outputs from a matrix. Milton Babbitt, who took inspiration from Schoenberg, was both a mathematician and composer and used these ostensibly diverse specialties to create music that furthered the efforts of Schoenberg and serialization of music. Babbitt and others would go on to serialize not only pitch, but also dynamics, articulation, rhythm, and other musical parameters. Babbitt and Schoenberg’s music haven’t drawn wide audiences, and some of their music is considered unlistenable. Their efforts, however, showed us the outer limits of logic-based thinking as a way to outsource one’s compositional agency.

Beyond the logic-based thinking that can be involved in composition, another intersection between music and computer science happens at the level of production. If we look broadly at the history of music, we start with the human voice and basic acoustic instruments. During the Renaissance, advances in physical models helped develop more powerful instruments that were louder and more versatile. Most recently, with the invention of recording and synthesizing technology, the spectrum of sound possibilities are now endless. Digital audio workstations (called DAWs), made possible by computer scientists, now provide anyone who wants to create music the platform to do so. Mozart used highly esoteric notation to represent his musical compositions. He also needed live and paid musicians to bring his music to life. But today, anyone with a laptop can seek out their creative potential, thus creating a much-needed mechanism for diverse music creators to produce their music. 

While logic-based thinking and technology certainly aid in the composition and production of music by humans, the emergence of music created by artificial intelligence (AI) brings the connection to a new level. This was brought to the public’s attention with a recent Google Doodle, which allowed users to compose a small melody and have it harmonized in the style of J. S. Bach. The algorithm works using machine learning, a type of AI where a computer is fed a large amount of example data (in this case, over 300 of Bach’s famous chorales) and uses those examples to generate its own example or prediction. The Google Doodle, along with similar attempts to write music through computer programs, has polarized the music community. Some, such as those working on the Magenta research project, a research collaborative where programmers publish AI models to augment musicians’ toolbox, saw the Doodle as a creative opportunity to extend musicians’ existing skills. Others, like Bach scholar Christopher Brody, expressed disappointment at the Doodle for failing to capture any important elements of Bach’s style and instead attempting to emulate Bach by finding compromises in his music. Similar disagreements are visible in the music community surrounding new AI algorithms that emulate certain composers or produce original music. Regardless of any argument, one fact remains concrete: no one has been able to generate music entirely automatically. That is, every piece of music “created” by AI so far has been based directly off of pieces written by a real, human composer. 

Although much of the conversation about technology in music centers around whether AI should play a role in composition, AI already has a prominent function in our consumption of music. It is heavily present in video-sharing platforms like YouTube and streaming services like Spotify, learning what listeners enjoy best and recommending them new music based on their preferences. This can be beneficial to listeners, who are given accurate recommendations by the AI algorithms, and it can benefit artists by promoting their work to listeners who may not have discovered them otherwise. On the other hand, as much as streaming companies tout their ability to unearth hidden music, their profit is ultimately determined by their quantity of listens. Their AI algorithms sometimes reflect this by recommending music they know viewers will listen to rather than suggesting the music they would enjoy most. Though this drawback may limit AI’s potential to give listeners exciting new recommendations consistently, it doesn’t cancel out the improvement in music accessibility that AI creates. 

Computer science majors and music majors may rarely interact on a college campus. In fact, on the Rice University campus, the Shepherd School of Music is about as far as you can get from most computer science classes. As we have explored, however, the interaction between these specialties has yielded many innovations that are transforming the way we create and listen to music. With these advances, accessibility to the composition, production, and consumption of music continues to increase but so do the questions about how much human agency is a necessary component to art.  Exploring this intersection has taught us that the push and pull between creativity and logic is the motor for progress, perhaps in any field. Out-of-the-box musicians and coders will be the initiators for breakthroughs in the future of technology and music. 

Further Reading:

Topics covered: 

Milton Babbitt and System Based Composition (see page 7):
https://getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/sullivan_erin_l_200508_ma.pdf 

Music Composition, Schoenberg, and Matrices:
https://sites.math.washington.edu/~morrow/336_15/papers/rasika.pdf

Deep Learning and Music Composition:
https://cs224d.stanford.edu/reports/allenh.pdf

Bach Google Doodle:
https://www.google.com/doodles/celebrating-johann-sebastian-bach 

Debate on the Bach Doodle:
https://slate.com/technology/2019/03/google-doodle-bach-ai-music-generator.html

YouTube Algorithm:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8 

Spotify Algorithm:
https://medium.com/s/story/spotifys-discover-weekly-how-machine-learning-finds-your-new-music-19a41ab76efe

Other topics not explicitly discussed:

MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) as Computer Instruments:
https://blog.landr.com/what-is-midi/

The Virtual Orchestra and MIDI sound banks that work within with DAWs:
http://motu.com/products/software/bmf-encore-soundbank

Virtual Reality and the Orchestra:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/sep/29/virtual-reality-london-philharmonia-orchestra-esa-pekka-salonen-interview

A Brief History of Sampling, Music Production, and Technology:
https://www.musicradar.com/tuition/tech/a-brief-history-of-sampling-604868

Binaural Audio: Music, Physics, Stereo Sound, and “3D Sound” (has applications in gaming as well):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yd5i7TlpzCk 

Technology and Music Education:
http://solfeg.io/music-education-technology/

Longitude.site welcomes applications from students who are interested to explore other topics related to music and technology. Apply here.

Molly Turner
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Thomas Forrest Kelly, Morton B. Knafel Research Professor of Music, Harvard University, Boston (42.3° N, 71.0° W)

Thomas Forrest Kelly is Morton B. Knafel Research Professor of Music at Harvard University, where he served as Chair of the Music Department from 1999 to 2004. In 2005 he was named a Harvard College Professor in recognition of his teaching of undergraduates. Before coming to Harvard he taught at Oberlin Conservatory (where he was the founding director of the program in Historical Performance and served as acting Dean of the Conservatory); he taught at the Five Colleges in Massachusetts (Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Hampshire Colleges and the University of Massachusetts), where he was the founding director of the Five College Early Music Program. Previously he taught at Wellesley College. He was a Visiting Scholar at King’s College, Cambridge (1976-77) and a Professeur invité at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris (1998).

-from Thomas Forrest Kelly

Dr. Kelly is an accomplished teacher of music. But he doesn’t teach students how to play an instrument. Rather, he teaches the history and appreciation of music. I had the pleasure of interviewing him over Skype while he was in the comfort of his office in Massachusetts. He sat in front of his own harpsichord and was engulfed in bookshelves. Now, professors of academia across many fields tend to be private, well-read, and perhaps not the most social beings, but after conversing with Dr. Kelly, I got to know both a true academic author of books and also a musician who has had a varied career in music directing, keyboard playing, and historical performance. It was a pleasure to get a glimpse into his work that equally involves historical research as well as live performances. His work and teaching beautifully combines the “then” and the “now.”

Academia and music schools are sometimes at odds with each other. Students attend music conservatories to get really good at their instrument, not to learn how to write a bibliography. But Dr. Kelly’s multi-faceted career bridges the gap between these areas. He currently teaches a graduate course at Juilliard where he works with performance majors. The course covers the premieres of five famous pieces of the past. It involves research at the New York Philharmonic Library, the New York Public Library, and even some time at Carnegie Hall. It also includes reflection on a modern premiere by a living composer. Engaging the great performers of today with research methods and historical awareness is one of the most interesting parts of Dr. Kelly’s work.

Dr. Kelly also continues to make a lot of music, whether at the harpsichord or at the helm as a music director. It’s perhaps akin to a Shakespeare professor actively performing Shakespeare live on stage. He has led choirs and directed historical performing groups, as well as curated a substantial summer music festival. His historical knowledge informs his live performance, and this is at the heart of why many people still perform medieval and Renaissance music. As a composer and conductor, I am interested in the interaction between academic and performing pursuits. Dr. Kelly’s career serves as a model for doing both.

I really appreciated Dr. Kelly’s unpretentious attitude and genuine passion for historical performance. There’s a bad stereotype of the stuffy pretentious professor, and he demolishes this stereotype. He joked he doesn’t even particularly like the word “musicologist.” He said it sounds like an unpleasant medical specialty, and most people don’t know what it is. When asked what he does, he responds, “I teach music, but I teach the history of music not the scales.” His attitude reminds me that there’s more to music than knowing all the notes.

Highlights from the Interview

Everyone’s family, community and life circumstances create an initial role for them in society. What was expected of you? And did you adhere to or stray from that?

I was raised by a single mother who was divorced from my father when I was eight. My mother and my two younger brothers lived in a university town in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I think I continued in the path that was set for me—in the sense that I lived in a university town, I went to the university there, and I’ve never been out of college ever since. I’m sort of in the seventieth grade or something like that. And the music thing, I think it came from being dragged to church. Nobody asked me if I wanted to go to church, nobody asked me if I wanted to sing in their junior choir. In those days, some of us did what we were told most of the time. As a result, these are things that became familiar with me. I wouldn’t say I’m much of a rebel. I think I followed in the path that was set for me.

What was your primary instrumental exposure to music?

I was sent off to prep school in the north. I went to Groton School in Massachusetts at the age of twelve. There was a big, still is, a big stone gothic chapel with a great big organ in it. The organ console looked like a cross between the machinery behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz and an airplane cockpit. It had a thing called a crescendo pedal that looked like a gas pedal, and when you pressed it down, a whole row of red lights went on and it played really loud. So, you name me a twelve-year-old boy who’s not going to say, “I want to control that thing.” It was really more a matter of power and technology than it was of music, maybe. But I started taking organ lessons, and while I was in that prep school I sang soprano, alto, tenor, and bass in the chapel choir. Not all at once; one after another. 

The result is that the music you’re exposed to becomes the music you’re familiar with, so I ended up knowing a lot of earlier music. Because organ music tends to be—not all, but a lot of organ music is eighteenth century music, and before, and a lot of church choral music is also relatively early music. So I got a lot of that under my belt without any particular effort, so that was a lot of my original music background.

Did you have someone who acted as a mentor, either starting in your undergraduate studies or after, that led you more into the historical, academic side of music? 

I can think of two people. One is my very nice piano teacher, Mrs. Gay. She saw me picking out tunes on a piano at a church supper and said to my mother, “This boy has talent. He must come to me.” I didn’t have any talent. I’m sure I was playing “See the Birdy in the Tree” or “Chopsticks” or something. But anyway, I went over to Mrs. Gay’s house every day because we didn’t have a piano. I practiced and took lessons from her. She was a wonderful, wonderful lovely lady. And then when I went into college, one other thing happened. I took a music appreciation course when I was in college because I knew, as all sensible people do, that it made no sense to be a music major. It was impractical. You’ll never get a job. So, I wasn’t a music major. I did something really practical and majored in French. I took a music appreciation course, where I knew the professor. His name was William S. Newman. He was a pianist but also a very distinguished musicologist. He said to me, “Tommy, I want you to stay after class. I want to talk to you.” So I did and what he said was, “You shouldn’t be taking this music appreciation course; you should be a music major. You know more stuff than you need to know to take this course. Why don’t you be a music major?” I said, “Well, thank you, Dr. Newman,” and went away. But within a couple of days, I was back in his office, and said, “Well, suppose I did want to be a music major?” He cobbled together a sort of emergency, last-minute music major for me, and I ended up majoring in French and music. It’s probably that combination of those two that got me a Fulbright to go study music in France. But if he hadn’t said that to me, if he hadn’t sort of said, “You know it would be okay. You could do this.” I think if he hadn’t done that, I don’t know what would have happened, but I don’t think I ever would have turned to music as a profession.

What led you to your current position, and what does your position entail? 

My whole professional career has been teaching as a faculty member in colleges. But at the beginning of it, I was mostly associated with and identified with and teaching what they called early music or historical performance—the performance of older music using historical principles. I started doing teaching like that when I came back from France and went to graduate school at Harvard. I got involved in being a church organist, and from there I got involved in being the conductor of a large community choir north of Boston. And then I got involved running a summer music festival for ten or twelve years, a sort of big music festival with a fairly big budget. I could do whatever I wanted to, so I did all sorts of cool early music things. We did baroque operas, we did medieval liturgical dramas, we did Viennese ballroom…

Where in the country?

It was in a place called Castle Hill in Ipswich, Massachusetts—a great big palace overlooking the sea built by Mr. Crane the millionaire from Chicago. The property is now owned by a land conservancy called the Trustees of Reservations. On that property, which had beautiful outdoor spaces, we built a little theater in what used to be the barn. We used various outdoor spaces and indoor spaces to recreate entertainments of various kinds from times past, and I engaged people from the United States and Europe to come and be a resident orchestra. So, I got some experience being sort of an impresario, and conductor, and harpsichord continuo player, and all that sort of thing. Partly as a result of that, some of my university teaching moved over in that direction.

When I had my first academic job teaching at Wellesley College, it was a series of sabbatical fill-ins. I did three successive one-year jobs, and then it got converted into a real assistant professor track. I ran their early music ensemble for quite a long time. From there, I moved to a job running what was called the Five College Early Music program. There are five associated colleges in Western Massachusetts: Smith, Amherst, Mount Holyoke, the University of Massachusetts, and Hampshire College. It was a sort of consortium. They decided that if they pooled their resources, they could have an early music program that served all five of the colleges, even though none of them had the resources to do it individually. So I was hired to create and run the Five College Early Music program. My next job was to be the first director of the historical performance program in the Oberlin Conservatory. 

That’s quite strong though, isn’t it? I didn’t know its inception.

Well, they had been doing early music at Oberlin for a long, long time. It’s a very famous summer program called the Baroque Performance Institute that’s been going on for twenty-five years or so. What they hadn’t had was an official named degree program in historical performance during the year in the conservatory. So the idea was to bring in one more person, that was me, who would coordinate the efforts of all of the people who were already there, and we would create a master’s degree in historical performance, have undergraduate courses, and all that kind of thing. Which is what I did, all while doing musicology. I had been teaching music history courses in all of these places and researching and publishing articles and books on my musicological field, especially, which is really early medieval music. I remember when Harvard posted an ad for a position looking for a musicologist in medieval music. I remember looking at that while I was at Oberlin and thinking…gee, if I played my cards differently, maybe I would be in line for that job, but I won’t apply because everybody thinks of me as being the early music guy. So I didn’t apply for it. But the head of the search committee at Harvard called me up. By that time, I was serving as the dean of the Oberlin Conservatory in addition to running the early music program. He said, “Tom, we’re trying to cast the widest possible net, and we noticed that you’d done some medieval music. Would you mind just sending in your CV, and I’ll throw your hat in the ring, you never know.” So I did. I would not have applied for the job if they hadn’t asked me to, and I got the job! I don’t know how that happened because I wasn’t there when they decided who to hire, but they did offer me a job, and I took it. I was there for many years, and I enjoyed it a lot. It was interesting though, when I went to Harvard. I swapped a job in which I did my scholarship on nights and weekends, and my day job was a music job, for a job in which the music was nights and weekends, and my day job was doing musicology. I missed the active engagement with music and musicians that I had in my previous jobs while I was at Harvard. Now I’ve retired, and for the moment, at least, I go down to New York and teach at the Juilliard School in their early music program. 

Wonderful.

It’s fun to teach. It feels like a homecoming, going back to teaching musicians in a music school, which I enjoy. Because there’s a challenge for teachers in that, it seems to me, in a music school, it’s not at all clear why you have to have classroom courses…They’d rather be playing bassoon scales. So the question is, “Why do I need to take these theory classes? Why do I need to take these music history classes?” And if you’re the classroom teacher, you’ve got to convince yourself that you can look ’em in the eye and say, “You will be a better musician if you take this course.” And if you can’t say that, and if you don’t believe that, then they shouldn’t be taking the course. They should be practicing their bassoon scales. It’s a challenge that you have in a music school that you don’t have in a university. 

What kind of misconceptions are there about your job? Do you prefer to be called a music history professor or a musicologist?

Well, musicologist always sounds like some kind of unpleasant medical specialty. It sounds rather pretentious, and I think a lot of people don’t know what it means, so when people next to me on the airplane say, “What do you do?” I say, “I teach music, but I teach the history of music, not the scales.” Because usually when you say you teach music, people assume you are a piano teacher or something like that. But I don’t mind the word musicologist as long as no one’s being pretentious about it.

I belong to the American Musicological Society, and I publish in the journal of the American Musicological Society and stuff like that. I have no objections to it. But art historians don’t call themselves “artologists” and literary historians don’t call themselves “literologists,” so I don’t know where we get off calling ourselves musicologists. 

On the other hand, you could argue that there’s far more to it than music history. There’s all sorts of aspects of the study of music as a scholarly discipline that are not historical in nature. But it used to be mostly history and mostly older music. The field has changed a lot in recent years, and it seems to be more about the cultures of the world and about the role of music in various social and cultural movements.

Going back to the “Why should I take music history?” question—maybe especially working with the musicians at Juilliard who…they want to win a job, they want to play the violin the best they can, they want to play the Brahms Violin Concerto perfectly, and they’re happy just playing that piece every day…What gets them to play Telemann? What gets them to play these older pieces?

At the moment I teach two sets of people. One is the graduate students in Juilliard’s historical performance program. So they’re already convinced that they want to play early music. They already have a baroque violin, whatever it is. They already have a classical bow and a baroque bow, and all those things. So I don’t need to convince them of any of that. They want to be able to play baroque music better than anybody else. But there’s a lot that they don’t know. They know their baroque music; they know their Corelli trio sonatas, whatever it is. But there’s a lot of stuff they don’t know. They’re having a good time. They got interested in reading old notation. They said, “We don’t know anything about medieval music, we don’t know anything about renaissance music,” so I’m putting them through a crash course in musical notation, and we sight read stuff out of Renaissance and medieval manuscripts sometimes.

That’s great because sometimes when I learn about that, it’s sort of spoon-fed, and it’s just the modern transcription there. But reading from the original source and seeing the squiggles and deciding what that means…

It can be hard to do that. You understand that that’s stuff that musicians made for themselves and it works great. Then there’s another group. I’m teaching another group at Juilliard who are—it’s called a graduate seminar. And some of them are DMA students and some are master’s students, but they are actually all instrumentalists, so they’re doing advanced degrees but on instruments. They’re not musicologists. It’s the first time I’ve done that, so I don’t know how that’s going to work. The course is about studying premieres of five famous pieces in the past. We’re studying five premieres in the past. How do you find the primary sources that let you know what it was like to be there at the first performance of Beethoven’s ninth symphony or Handel’s Messiah or whatever it is. And then each of them is going do a research paper on a twentieth-century premiere in New York City. 

Oh, I love this. I want to take this class.

So what I hope is that we’ll have a kind of history of music in New York in the twentieth century, done just on the basis of specific events. What it was like to go to a Boulez 2002 premiere? What was it like to go to the premiere of Rachmaninoff’s third piano concerto in New York? What was it like to go to the premiere of Porgy and Bess, things like that? And students are going to have to write about the music and how the music works but also what was the venue? What else could you have done that week in New York? What was the place of music in New York in the 1920s? What was the place of New York in the musical world of the United States and the world? Stuff like that, trying to place these things in context. And they’re supposed to come up with this series of primary documents—reviews, letters—that they can find, any original conductor, performance materials if they can find them. So we’re actually going around to various places. I took a class last week to the Performing Arts division of New York Public Library, which is at Lincoln Center, and they have a very cool archive of all sorts of really neat things. They brought out all sorts of really neat things to show them how to do research in the New York public library, and next week we’re going to the archive on the New York Philharmonic to find out what kind of stuff they have…

What are some of the most exciting projects that you’ve ever worked on in your career, both as a musicologist and as a conductor ad hoc ensemble person?

Too many things to remember. One of my favorite pieces is a piece that I’ve had things to do with for many years. It bridges the performance and study—Monteverdi’s opera Orfeo. I don’t know if you know it. It premiered in 1607 in Italy. And I wrote a book called First Nights about premieres, and it’s the first chapter in that book. And I’ve been to Mantua and looked in the palace of the dukes where it was first performed, and it’s one of the pieces that I’ve performed in lots of different places. I did it in Oberlin, with students; I did it in my music festival. The first time I ever performed it was at Wellesley College where I didn’t know anything at all. But I learned a lot from doing that, and then I did it at Oberlin with the early music students, a lot of good kids. I did it at my music festival at Castle Hill with professional singers, and so on. So I’ve done it over the years in a bunch of different places.

I had a really interesting experience last year of touring with a group called Apollo’s Fire—they just won a Grammy just last year—who are a baroque orchestra based in Cleveland, and their director is a conductor named Jeannette Sorrell, who is a really good conductor. She does a lot of guest conducting with modern orchestras, but she wanted to do Orfeo. She asked me if I would give the preconcert lectures and come and perform and tour with them—they were touring around the country—and play second harpsichord and organ and regale and all that sort of stuff assisting her, and I said I would love to, and I did. And the thing is, the first time she ever played harpsichord continuo was when she assisted me at Oberlin twenty-five years ago in Monteverdi’s Orfeo. She said the first time she ever played, she remembered I said, “You just sit at that other harpsichord over there and play.” And she said, “What do you mean play?” I said, “Well, play the bass line, and if you think of anything else to play, play that.” She said, “The first time I’d ever played continuo, I had no idea what I was doing. I learned a lot by being thrown into the deep end,” so it was fun to join her twenty-five years later as her assistant. I got to play a lot of really cool instruments and had a wonderful time, and so I celebrated my seventy-fifth birthday on the road playing a piece that I started with thirty years earlier. So it’s a piece that’s followed me for many years, and I never get tired of. It’s one of the greatest pieces of music ever written.

And is it one of your favorite things when some punk rocker shows up to music appreciation and then you start out with Orfeo, and they’re like, “Who is this? What is this?”

Yes. I love it. I try to make it clear at the beginning that the world is full of lots of cool music that you can study, just not in this course. That this is a course in which I’m going to show you my favorite pieces—I’m the professor, and I get to pick. But I’m not trying to privilege this music over any other kind of music, and I fully respect that there are a lot of musicians in this course who probably know their music a lot better than I know my music. But this is what this course is going to have, and here are some other courses you could take if you don’t like this. But I really love this, and if you’ll stick with me, I think you will too. I think you’ve got to do it that way rather than say, “This is the good music, and your music is the bad music.” Nobody’s going to respect you. 

(Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.)

Molly Turner
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Ross Williams, Assistant Professor, School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (1.3° N, 103.8° E)

Before coming to Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), Ross Williams was the senior lead instructor in audio production and post-production in the Digital Film and Interactive Media Departments at the Art Institute of New York City. He completed his master’s degree and doctorate in musical arts at Rice University in Houston, Texas. An Australian-born sound designer and composer, Ross has composed music and designed sound for theatre, museum installations, and award-winning independent feature and short films, as well as numerous concert works. His work can be found at fluidsound.com and Vimeo @rossawilliams.

I called Ross while he was in Singapore and I was back home in Seattle. Turns out, we both privately studied with the same professor, Dr. Gottschalk. But besides that, I didn’t know what to expect because he is a professor at a technology institute, not a music conservatory—that is, he is following a nontraditional path for a composer. We first talked about his background in Australia and his introductions to music, then we covered more professional topics like his graduate training at Rice, finding his first jobs, and the projects he’s working on now. We also bonded over bigger picture questions that ask what it means to be a composer or artist and how one finds meaning and work in a field that doesn’t have a set path.

Ross’s time after Rice shows an evolution from the traditional path as a concert composer. Ross was lucky enough to attend Rice to acquire traditional training and great connections, but he stated multiple times he didn’t want to be an “academic composer” or a traditional composer who finds their residency through a university. So, after graduation, he found other outlets for his creativity. He didn’t want to pay an orchestra a whole year’s paycheck to play his piece, so he learned how to mock up orchestras through sound libraries and MIDI playback. Long gone are the monarchy funded orchestras that sponsored many of Mozart’s and Haydn’s works; Ross had to teach himself technological skills and new ways to apply his musical training. He knew he wanted to collaborate with other artists, especially videographers, because he wanted his music to be combined with other types of art. This led him to independent short movies, museums, and audio production.

After he realized he wanted to collaborate, he transitioned into some sound design, which has many connections to music composition. And through his time at the Art Institute and lots of freelancing, Ross acquired a multifaceted career as a sound designer, teacher, composer, and artistic collaborator. Now, at his job in Singapore at Nanyang Technological University, he’s doing even more multidisciplinary projects. With his sound design background, he has been working on a volcano infrasound project well outside his designated role as just a sound designer.

Ross’s career path goes to show the tremendous changes the art world has made over the past century, even the past decades. Fifty years ago, before computers and the internet age, composers would go to school to learn to how to write concert orchestra music with pencil and paper, which was very much in the tradition of Beethoven and Mozart. Both Ross’s and my education reflect this tradition. We both learned orchestration techniques, traditional counterpoint and harmony, and how to write for the concert hall. But the concert hall is changing. Only a small demographic listens to classical music, and an even smaller crowd listens to contemporary classical music. It was really inspiring to hear that even though our careers as composers are rooted in the tradition of slow-moving trends, it’s possible in the twenty-first century to break from these trends by working in newly created fields related to our work such as sound design, multidisciplinary collaboration, and museum installations. Composers don’t compose by themselves at a desk and wait for their pieces to be performed; nowadays, they connect with other artists, use their background with sound to cross disciplines, and create music that is relevant to today’s audiences.

Highlights from the Interview

You grew up in Australia. What is the music education like and how did you get introduced to all of that?

Although my parents weren’t musical per se, they very much encouraged us to play instruments. I remember distinctly when I was five or six, my mom said, “Do you want to learn the piano?” and I was like, “Yeah, all right, whatever.” So I started piano lessons when I was pretty young. When I was ten, I was tested for musical facility, and I was recommended to learn another instrument, so I started learning trumpet. The instrument and the lessons were all provided part of the school curriculum. In Australia, certainly when I was growing up, we had sort of specific schools that were public schools that were target schools for music, where they had big programs. The high school I went into wasn’t a target school at that stage. Apparently it is now, but it wasn’t then. So we had no strings, so there wasn’t any possibility of doing strings; it was just basically concert band stuff, woodwinds and things. I played in concert bands all the way through high school. Australia’s generally like that. I mean if you go to private school, of course, then you get all the bells and whistles and orchestras and whatever you want. But in the public schools, specific ones might have string programs but many of them will not because they’re expensive.

Was your undergraduate degree in composition and trumpet?

I never had any intention of studying music at a high level. I originally started in biotechnology doing genetics, but when I realized biotech wasn’t for me, I took a one-year course in music at the conservatory of music as a trumpet major. I thought, “All right, this is cool. I like it. Let’s see where it goes.” I enrolled in the music education program and found out that they were starting a composition program, so I switched immediately to composition. So I never actually did trumpet as part of my bachelor’s; I was only a composer from then on.

How did you hear about Rice?

The teacher I started studying with asked, “What are you going to do when you graduate?” And I’m like, “I dunno,” like everybody does who does composing. So he said, “Have you thought about studying for your next degree in the US?” And I was like, “Eh not really, but why not? Let’s think about it.” So I applied to a number of places on his recommendations, and Rice was one that I got accepted into. When I got to Rice, I was like, “Wow! That’s an amazing building.” And it took me only a little while to realize how lucky I’d gotten getting into Rice as opposed to maybe some of the other places I may have gone to.

I looked at some of your work, and I was just wondering if you were doing all of those video collaborations and multi-media work at your time at Rice?

No, not really. When I was at Rice, I was just composing. I came from a background of a lot of electronic—not electronic music in terms of pop compositions stuff but as in I had bands in high school, and I was the keyboard player—and I grew up with computers. My dad built a computer in 1978 so I always had sort of tech side of things going on, but I never liked to use any of that in my music while I was in Rice. I have a bit of an aversion to any sort of electronic music, really, in certain contexts. If I’m going to a concert, I want to see people moving; I don’t want to hear buttons.

When I got out of Rice and I got my first teaching job, it was in a multimedia program. I was teaching sound. And, actually, going back one step, when I was at Rice doing my doctorate, Professor Gottschalk was teaching at a place called the Art Institute of Houston. He was teaching a sound course. He stopped doing it and asked, “Would you like to take over this course for me?” And I’m like, “All right, whatever.” So I taught about a year and a half there, and then I went to New York. They were starting that same program, so I just fell into that job there. I’ve only taught in media, and now I teach film.

When I left Rice, I only had a portfolio of just regular concert music. I built a whole other career that’s peripheral to what I studied, although related in a lot of ways. Because on some levels, sound is sound whether it’s music or anything else. When you’re organizing sound in space and time, then there are certain concepts that cross over all of them. While I was in New York, I met a lot of people who wanted music for things or sound design for things. So I just kept getting asked, “Can you do this?” Or I did some theater stuff, or I did some other things. So then when I met all these people, image people, were like, “Can we collaborate?” and I’m like, “Sure.” So I just end up doing these things based on relationships and then contacts and then people heard something and asked me to do it, and then I slipped more into film.

The problem I had as a composer for a long time, and I still have a little bit, is if I’m writing concert music, I always ask, “Why am I doing this? For who am I doing this?” I’ve got a little burned out. I didn’t want to be an academic composer. I didn’t want to write music for other composers. Why write something purely on it’s own anymore? Mind you, if someone said, “Hey Ross, write me an orchestra piece.” I’d be like, “Absolutely.” I would do it. But those things don’t happen. Least not—especially if you’ve chosen the path I’m on.

Sounds like you are “the” sound guy at the Nanyang University.

Anytime there’s a mention of the word “sound,” everyone looks at me. Which is cool in the sense that I just submitted a paper to a big journal on volcano infrasound that I did some work with some volcanologists on processing their infrasound so they can detect volcanoes more accurately, which is very peripheral. It started off with just a “Hey you’re a sound guy. I work with infrasound. Can you listen to this stuff and let’s chat.” And I’m listening to it, and I’m like, “This sounds horrible. Let me clean it up for you.” And they’re like, “Woah!” And that led to this whole research project. So that’s been fun, because if I was only writing music I think I’d get a little nuts, but if I was only doing non-music I’d get nuts. If I’m writing music, I’m always thinking, “I’m glad when this music’s done so I can do something else.” But then when I’m doing something else, I’m like, “I really feel like I should be writing music.” So I like that I have the freedom to do one or the other. The only problem is, of course, you get pigeonholed. You can’t be good at either of them because you’re doing two things.

It was really exciting to hear that you did a project where you had complete artistic freedom, because my impression is that rarely happens.

That’s the good thing about academia is I can just do. I take projects or leave them. I’m not required to do them. I don’t have to feed my family based on the outcome of them. Not all of them, of course. Some of them I have battles with directors—more purely narrative films will go into battle over certain pieces of music or the way that they’re written. The funny thing is, I’m almost always battling, telling them not to use music. I’m always like, “You don’t need music in this part of the film.” Because there’s a tendency for overuse of music in general; from my aesthetic, it’s used way too much. And the effectiveness of the music is diminished. The more you have, the less effective it is.

You learned all of these notation things in grad school, and how to write an orchestra piece, and what instruments are. But now when you do all of these multimedia things, how do you acquire the skills to learn Pro Tools or learn Logic? Is that you at the computer figuring it out?

It’s funny, I joke with all my students. I tell them I’ve never had a film sound class. I’ve never had any class on what I teach my students. I suffer like all of us do, me maybe more than some, with the imposter syndrome. You know, I’ve never taken a specific class in this subject that I’m now teaching you. But I’ve been, the last twelve years, working in it and reading papers and going to conferences and all those other things. But yeah, it’s all self-taught on some level. That’s sort of going back to composition. I’ve always loved orchestra and orchestration, and sound design for film is essentially an orchestration or activity on some levels. Am I adding wind here or something there. I’m trying to affect your emotional state or direct you in an emotional state or direct you in a certain way, which is very much what we do in an orchestra. So there’s a parallel there, at certain levels, of the skill set I think have brought across. When I say that no one taught me what I’m doing, that’s not 100 percent true. I took orchestration classes. Although they weren’t directed at that specific outcome, there’s an aesthetic or a sensitivity that you develop through that process that comes to bear on other things.

I think I’ve always been reasonably good at picking stuff up. Like we all do. You know if someone says—as a composer especially, as you probably know, you never say no to anything. If someone says, “Can you do this?” You always say, “Yeah.” And then you say, “How am I going do this?” and then you work it out or you get some help. So that was sort of how my entire life has gone, I think. I should have said no to a few more things, but—well, actually, that’s not true. Keep saying yes and then it forces you into places that you might not have wanted to go. And then sometimes you go, and you’re like, “Eh, that maybe wasn’t worth the while, but that’s all right.” And then you’ve done something else.

It does mean a lot of background research. Like I don’t have a background in volcanology, and I’m never going to acquire a background in volcanology. Though I need to know just enough of these certain things to be able to apply. But also, you can have ideas that you don’t have to execute—that’s another thing. You can have an idea and say, “Why don’t we try this?” And you don’t know how to do it, but that’s where you get somebody else to help you with it. And that’s something—as composers, we are very used to being very solitary. We do it, we write it, we notate it. 

The genius of you sitting at the desk and penciling it out…

It can be a little lonely. I still like to do that. I’m writing a string quartet right now, which is going to be actually one of my first concert pieces for ages. It’s going to be that, and it’s going to be mixed media in the sense that the sound from the quartet would control images behind the quartet, but there’s no processing of the quartet. It’s just a regular quartet. And this is the first one I’ve written for ages, and I’m lonely writing it. I’m still looking around—like pencil and paper and doing my stuff—and thinking there’s nobody to bounce this idea off of. That’s good on some levels because it forces you back into that world of writing music. I still like writing with pencil and paper…in this case a little keyboard. Even though I’ve got all the gear to realize it digitally, if I want to, I try to hold that off until it’s mostly written.

At the end of the day, nobody cares how you wrote the music if they like the piece. That’s the thing. I think, as the student especially, it’s valuable. But I don’t know if they’re doing it yet—maybe they are at Rice—but it’s a hugely important skill to be able to do really good mock-ups of any special orchestral pieces. To be able to realize them with modern sample libraries, which is pretty extraordinary. Being able to mock up your pieces is hugely useful. Because, let’s face it, we are heading down a path where more and more of the music you hear is going to be sample-based. I mean you go to an orchestra—all right, that’s going to be an orchestra.

Can you talk a little bit about how you ended up in Singapore? Because I think that’s crazy.

After I left Rice, I had one year left on my student visa so I went to New York with my friend Bram who was also at Rice. I was working as a waiter and trying to work out what I wanted to do. The art institute I had worked at in Houston started one in New York, so they needed somebody to teach. That got me into a teaching job. Eventually I became full-time and they got me visas. So I spent a lot of years there working and developing the film side and the multimedia side of my music and sound design and all that sort of things. Later, when they were closing that school, I went online and looked for jobs. There was a job at the Berklee College of Music of music in music production and composition, which I was shortlisted for and I almost got that one. Fortunately I didn’t because if I had gotten it, I probably would have taken it even though it didn’t pay very well. Then I saw the Singapore job online—and it was one of those rare ones where you look at everything they ask for and it was everything that I was doing. In New York I was a founding instructor in their film department, so I helped write the curriculum and all that, and they were looking for someone to revamp their curriculum here from the sound part. I just hit all the right things, and then obviously…also having a doctorate from Rice did not hurt at all…There’s a lot of people who work at sound for film who don’t have a PhD or DMA. I mean, there’s probably more now…but certainly, not many with as much practical experience as I’ve had as well. And my sister was living in Singapore. She had been for the last twenty-five years. So I knew it well, so I was like, “All right, I like Singapore.” It’s on the equator so it’s never winter. And it’s only five hours from my home in Perth. It was attractive on a lot of levels. Singapore is a young county and they’re really only recently developing their creative arts, so it was an interesting place. The film creative area is growing, establishing itself so it was sort of fun to be part of that process, and then the money is really much better too, as well. They pay quite well. The sad thing in the US is that most of the faculty type jobs, unless you’re in one of the big schools, do not pay well.

What advice would you give to yourself when you were college age?

I think the only advice I would give is try not to say no to anything. I’ve always had good friends and good colleagues so opportunities seem to pop up here and there. But opportunities also come through connections you make and just being easy to work with and also doing good work. So I would say to try to look at what you actually want to do, because you’ve got to be realistic. Like I had no intention—even when I was finishing my doctorate, I knew that I wasn’t going to be an academic composer. I knew that I wasn’t going to get a job in a university as a composer.

I think maybe I applied for one or two things as I left, but I knew that for various reasons…I think I wasn’t strong enough on the theory side of things. I had no problem with my actual music writing, but I wasn’t a natural theorist. I’m a pretty crap conductor. So I was like, “You know what, let me work on my strengths.” So I think having sort of a clear idea of where you might want to go is important. As we know with music…I often joke with this friend of mine…The thing about music is that if every composer in the world stopped writing music right now, nobody in the world would know. Nobody would know for…who knows how long, nobody would know. And that’s not to say that what we’re doing doesn’t have value, but it says in the pecking order of things, it’s a fairly rarified life that an academic composer gets to enjoy. And those positions, there aren’t very many of them, so if you want that then think about all the things you need to get there. You’ve got to be going to competition after competition after competition. You’ve got to be really, really great at all your theory and maybe conducting. You’ve got to know people. All of those things. It’s all right to do all of those things, but you’ve got to do those at the very beginning. That was something at Rice, I think, that was maybe lacking a little bit, that discussion. How are you going to get that first job, and what is that first job going to be? Because the first job is the big one, because that tends to be where you end up moving in terms of your first professional job in your field. Where I ended up working, well, sure enough, I ended up staying within that lane, or branched out,. Had I got the job, say, at Berklee instead of here, then I would have probably shelved all the sound design stuff and had to go purely into music again. I don’t know if I would have been happy doing that. But that’s sort of a complicated answer now. We’re all different, and it’s a super glib and easy thing to say to do what makes you happy. But happiness is not guaranteed by anybody. I’ve always been lucky in the sense that my happiness is not derived from what I do. It’s derived from just being alive and having a family and that kind of stuff, so I could have been happy probably doing a bunch of other things too. I’m lucky I wrangled it somewhere.

(Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.)