Valuing Collaboration in American Music Studies

More than two years of living with the COVID pandemic has changed how many of us approach our profession, including our work as researchers, scholars, musicians, teachers, and administrators. Like many other nonessential workers in the United States, I witnessed my workplace redefined overnight (literally) in the middle of March 2020, at the beginning of the first lockdown in the United States. Planned travel for research and conferences was canceled, and my university moved all teaching and administrative commitments online. Even as I experienced a level of isolation that was previously unimaginable, the widespread and long overdue adoption of Zoom and other online collaborative workspaces provided new opportunities to connect with colleagues, students, and professional organizations, and to virtually attend musical events around the world from my home office.The combination of physical isolation and online connectivity is one of many paradoxes created by the pandemic's impact. While there is no question that the global impact of COVID was and continues to be devastating, it afforded unique opportunities for those of us who were fortunate to work remotely. Several professional organizations moved their conferences online, for example, which offered greater accessibility for those who would not normally be able to afford the expenses of an in-person event, as well as anyone who could not attend due to health concerns or care-taking responsibilities, for example. While the experience of online conferences was arguably not as engaging, and most likely not as profitable for sponsoring professional organizations, the pandemic created a unique moment to finally address these issues, which have been a matter of concern for many years.For me, the pandemic shutdown provided an extended opportunity to rethink how we approach our work in the field of musicology. Although single-authored, refereed research publications remain the professional standard for employment and advancement, the pandemic heightened my awareness of the need for and benefits of scholarly collaborations. These are particularly critical for timely and relevant projects that may be able to reach a wider and more diverse audience outside of the ivory tower.As it happens, other arts and humanities scholars have recognized the value of collaboration as part of a larger generational and professional reckoning that was well under way before the pandemic. In 2017, Maria Bonn of the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign wrote in College & Research Libraries News that “[c]ollaboration in the humanities is on the ascent, by necessity and design,” linking the incentive for collaboration to the need for humanists to “become fully resident in the digital landscape and need to learn and deploy tools that ensure success there, an imperative that means engaging with others as mentors, tutors, and partners.”1The COVID crisis accelerated this “shift in institutional cultures from siloed thinking to a collaborative mindset,” as Wendy Hesford wrote in 2021, requiring an “investment in both core disciplinary and cross-disciplinary competencies” within the arts and humanities.2 Hesford is specifically well positioned to endorse these types of projects as Faculty Director for the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme project at Ohio State University. This program supports collaborative research to “showcase the distinctive affordances of the arts and humanities in addressing this global crisis . . . to chart new ways to address pandemic-revealed disparities and pandemic-related research that reveals that neither crisis nor remedy exist without culture.”3 The studies include research on online audiences and reception focusing on dance and musical performance, as well as the sonic landscapes of religion during the pandemic. Both the OSU initiative and the University of Michigan's Humanities Collaboratory include collaborative studies that intersect with social justice issues, particularly the global challenges of racial justice, income inequity, climate change, and access to the internet and technology in general.4In addition to these institutionally sponsored initiatives, I would like to highlight two recent publications that capture the value of international, interdisciplinary, collaborative work within the field of music studies. The first is “Marian Anderson's 1953 Concert Tour of Japan: A Transnational History,” by Katie A. Callam, Makiko Kimoto, Misako Ohta, and Carol J. Oja, published in this journal in 2019.5 The recipient of the Society for American Music's Irving Lowens Article Award article, this publication embodies collective, transnational research among four scholars, two in the United States and two in Japan. In crafting a bicultural history that engages intersectionally with race, gender, post-World War II United States–Japanese relations, and the Civil Rights movement, the researchers were able to combine extensive archival work in multiple languages—English, Japanese, and Korean—from collections on either side of the Pacific. Published simultaneously online in a Japanese translation, the authors “sought to respect the related yet distinctive methodologies of the United States and Japan, shaping a working relationship that was both a collaboration and a negotiation.”6 As such, the article greatly exceeds in depth, breadth, and scope what any one individual could accomplish within a period of years, if ever. And moreover, its inclusion in a well-recognized, peer-reviewed journal such as American Music reinforces that established periodicals previously dedicated to single-authored work can foster innovative scholarly models.7My second case study is “Dry Signals,” a collaboration researched and written by ethnomusicologist Michael Silvers with original artwork by Manuel Neto, web design and development by Lucas Almeida, and Portuguese translation by Álvaro de Alencar.8 Published in 2020 in the peer-reviewed online journal Sensate, A Journal for Experiments in Critical Media Practice in 2020, the work is described as “a digital ethnographic sound diorama based on research in Brazil's semi-arid sertão [region] in 2015.” Silvers describes this piece as “an interactive acoustic ethnography that layers a normative vision of [the Brazilian state of] Ceará’s interior with the specific, diverse, and meaningful contexts in which the various sounds were recorded” during a period of extreme drought caused by climate change. In its transnational collaboration and immediacy in examining global issues of climate change and equity, “Dry Signals” reveals the move of cross-disciplinary scholars into digital, multimedia forms. As in Callam et al., the bilingual nature of “Dry Signals” further advocates for the central role of translation in American music studies, by including languages other than those considered canonic in our field—namely, German, Italian, and French.Despite the terrible impact of COVID, I am cautiously optimistic that institutions, professional organizations, and scholars within musicology and related fields will use this historic moment to revisit our relationship to our fields, and to each other. The willingness of programs such as those at Ohio State and the University of Michigan to support collaborative research is admirable, especially given the social consciousness and global perspective that informs this funding. As such, valuing the creation and dissemination of greater and increasingly varied collaborations can help us to visualize a future in which the field of American music studies is more engaged, relevant, and inclusive.