The Handbook on Music Business and Creative Industries in Education - Daniel Walzer

The Handbook on Music Business and Creative Industries in Education - Daniel Walzer

Putting Down Roots: Making Music and Embracing Messiness in Graduate School

The Handbook on Music Business and Creative Industries in Education - Daniel Walzer

Taylor Ackley [+-]
Brandeis University
Taylor Ackley is a scholar, composer, and performer of American Roots music. His work explores and understands American folk and popular music through historical research, composition, analysis, performance, and ethnography. His integrated intellectual and creative practice builds upon lived experiences of poverty among the rural working-class to provide a foundational knowledge for studying, creating, and teaching music. He holds a master’s degree and a PhD in Composition as well as a master’s degree in Ethnomusicology from Stony Brook University and is currently an Assistant Professor of Music at Brandeis University. He directs the Deep Roots Ensemble and has three commercially released albums.
Joe Sferra [+-]
Composer, performer, and theorist
Joe Sferra is a composer, performer, and theorist who advocates for a broad musical curiosity as an essential trait of a modern musician, and he embodies this in his teaching and creative work. As a clarinettist, he is featured on both abstract electronic improvisation with the ACCAD Sonic Arts Ensemble for Ravello Records and American Roots music with the Deep Roots Ensemble for 4Tay Records. His compositions entertain with popular gestures while revealing a love for the harmonic and formal ideas of modernist concert music, and have been featured in performances in the USA, Canada, and Spain. He has served on the faculties of Earlham, Vassar, SUNY-Potsdam, and the Cleveland Institute of Music.

Description

Taylor Ackley and Joe Sferra describe the Deep Roots Ensemble, a student-run mixed chamber group drawing musical inspiration from American folk and roots music, jazz, and classical styles. Written primarily as an autoethnography undertaken by the two authors, the chapter explores aspects of the complicated history of American music, institutional politics in higher education, and how an inclusive pedagogical style inspires deeper and more meaningful connections to ensemble performance, creativity, and professionalism. Along with interviews with former students, Ackley and Sferra challenge the hegemonic and limiting structures commonly found in academic music departments. The chapter concludes with a clarion call for how educators might adopt a similar ethos in their ensemble pedagogy.

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Citation

Ackley, Taylor; Sferra, Joe. Putting Down Roots: Making Music and Embracing Messiness in Graduate School. The Handbook on Music Business and Creative Industries in Education. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 191-209 Sep 2024. ISBN 9781800505223. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=45325. Date accessed: 21 Nov 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.45325. Sep 2024

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