Music and Memory (2021 – 2022)
​
During this honors experience, my partner Max and I collaborated with a PwNDD (Patient with Neurodegenerative Disease) and their Care Partner to brainstorm and participate in a variety of musical activities. For my year in review, I chose to display our most ambitious project: using subjects, verses, and melody lines suggested by the PwNDD, we wrote a song. When brainstorming topics, Dave, the PwNDD, surprised us by suggesting a rather dark subject matter to focus on for this song. “Drowning,” he said, “because it’s largely inevitable.” After a bit more talking, we realized that, rather than drowning in the literal sense, Dave wanted to express the feeling of “Drowning in a sea of expectations” through music. For the most part, we would brainstorm verses and melody lines together, but occasionally, Dave would come up with verses in his own time, which was an activity he seemed to both excel at and enjoy. During our weekly check-ins, Dave previously had difficulty thinking of things that happened since our last visit that he enjoyed or even remembered, but once he started working on the song, he would almost always cite “coming up with verses” as something he was happy about, and “working on the song” as something he looked forward to doing. We were able to compose a full-length song together, which I then wrote composed and recorded some light piano accompaniment for.
Self-Designed Honors Experience: The Musicking Podcast (2021 - ?)
​
For this honors experience, my goal was to record conversations featuring a variety of musicians who practice musical styles and traditions from around the world, creating a platform for people to learn more about and start supporting these lesser-known artforms in the West. I chose to present one of those episodes for this year-in review, as each episode is the culmination of hours of research and immersion into the music style covered. This episode features a conversation with CCM's professor of Ethnomusicology, Scott Linford, covering the Ekonting, a spiked lute similar to the banjo played primarily in Senegal amongst the Jola people. Dr. Linford is, in my humble opinion, one of the leading scholars of the Ekonting, as he makes it a goal to focus on the Ekonting in the context of Jola culture rather than in its connection to the Banjo, which is the popular angle that most scholars take when viewing this instrument. This honors experience is far from over, as I still am planning on recording episodes throughout my entire time here at CCM, but the broject has been a great learning experience and success so far.
​
Throughout my first semester here at UC (University of Cincinnati), the experience that has impacted me the most has been my foray into the Ethnomusicology program through the College-Conservatory of Music. Through this program, I have gotten connected with many people who have similar interests as I do, and it has also enabled me to carry out my self-designed podcast experience with greater ease. (Just to refresh, my self-designed experience is to start a podcast where I speak to musicians who practice music styles from all around the world.) I began studying the Tabla, a drum played in North Indian Classical Music at the beginning of the school year through a class under Professor Jim Feist, who later became my first guest on the podcast. In this same class, I met many other fantastic musicians from different music traditions that were interested in collaborating with me not only on my podcasting project, but in my musical endeavors as well. For a future honors experience, I am planning to compose a piece for piano and Tabla with a good friend of mine; I am extremely interested in exploring the possibilities of the musics and am excited to tackle the challenge of combining the structure and planning that constitutes a Western classical music piece with the intellect and improvisatory brilliance that characterizes the Indian classical music tradition. We are also considering starting an Indian Classical/Folk/Jazz ensemble with the musicians and faculty members in this class, which we would take on the road for gigging in the surrounding venues. Along with these individuals, I also got the chance to become more familiar with the South Asian professor of Musicology here at UC, Stefan Fiol, who also happens to be my advisor for the podcast project. Last semester, he taught a class on the Zimbabwean Mbira, a thumb-instrument found in various forms throughout the African continent, which I was able to participate in, and next semester he will be teaching a class on Indian Raag Theory, which I will also be participating in. Eventually, he will be another guest on the podcast, most likely to talk about the style of Dohl drum practiced throughout the Himalayan region of South Asia. Finally, I also had the pleasure of taking Scott Linford’s class on African musics before he left CCM (College Conservatory of Music), as well as have him as a guest on my podcast. He has been extremely supportive of my musical and intellectual endeavors, and even recommended me for an internship position with Smithsonian Folkways, an organization which helps fund, record, and publish musics from all around the world for musicians who would otherwise be unable to in the hopes of increasing interest and support for the world’s various fading music traditions. I plan to apply for this internship next summer and hope to learn a lot about how to organize and build up interest and funding for traditional music-related projects. Getting connected with these individuals and planting seeds of future ideas in my first year of college has helped me build a road map for the remainder of my time at CCM, and I feel much more confident in my goals now that I have the support and guidance of so many incredible individuals.
Year in Review, Summer 2024
Prompt 2:
"What complex problem or social issue was most significant to you this year and why? How did you go about learning more? What are your goals and next steps around this complex problem or social issue?"
In both personal and professional projects, many complex and hidden issues in the world of music and music education were the main focus of this year. With the continuation of my "Musicking" podcast project, I undertook the task of creating an associated website dedicated to providing educational content centered on diverse music styles for beginner listeners. Considering the unfamiliarity of some of the musical ideas and practices to Western audiences, breaking down certain concepts and presenting them in a digestable way was a great challenge. This project tackled two issues of music education: accessibility and diversity. Music education has a high barrier to entry, especially music education concerning music styles outside the west. Educational resources on topics like these are only accessible to those inside of academia, and many of these writings are very complicated and heavy, making it difficult for beginners to understand the basic concepts. In my blog, I broke down the basics of these music styles starting from their most foundational concepts, and built up from there using sound clips, diagrams, videos, and other resources as supplementary content over the course of many articles. Unfortunately, due to the financial burden of hosting a website and podcast, and the work burden of writing these pages as well as researching, recording, and publishing the related podcast content, I was unable to continue this project into the present, and the website platform (Ghost) that I hosted on has a policy where, if you cancel your subscription, the website you have built will be deleted, so I cannot display examples of the actual website. However, here are some of the detailed transcriptions and descriptions I did for the article on North Indian Classical Tabla.
​
Taking on this project was very taxing, but I learned a lot in the process. These skills helped me get hired as an intern at the Cincinnati Public Radio, where I currently work, making recordings, interviewing, and publishing educational content aimed at student audiences. This work is very similar to the work that I was doing throughout this project without the individual financial burden, and I am very grateful that this honors experience has allowed my to continue to do this kind of work. At my time at CPR and WGUC, I have also been tackling the issues of accessibility and diversity. We have a program called "Classics for Kids," where we publish free content for teachers, students, and parents to use in the process of learning or teaching about music, and I hope to bring this program to the next level by bringing it to a wider audience, and by expanding on the content available.