Preface

Why This Book?

As musicians trained in a conservatories, we understand the demands that are placed on musicians and performers throughout their careers. While musicians are deeply collaborative people, audiences rarely experience the hidden, solitary hours spent in practice rooms and at rehearsals developing the techniques necessary to bring together a live performance. This isn’t limited to classical music: contemporary composition, jazz, experimental music, improvisation, and performance art are steeped in diverse oral traditions where artistic practice is shared from mentor to student over a lifetime of artmaking. The authors are musicians who have also pursued information science and know the challenges of leaving and returning to an artistic career.

As a classically trained opera singer, Kathleen DeLaurenti first stepped onto the stage at age 10 with Dame Gwyneth Jones in Pittsburgh Opera’s Turandot. After completely four years of conservatory operatic training and a stint as DJ at college radio station WRCT, found herself moving across the country in her early career. Then-newly available internet radio was a vital connection that allowed her to maintain her musical community. When changes to copyright law threatened internet radio in the late 1990s, Kathleen pursued librarianship to advocate for balanced approaches to copyright, help artists navigate research and copyright issues, and develop policy aimed at helping the arts thrive in a constantly shifting information economy.

In 2017, Andrea Copland enrolled at Peabody as a graduate student, pursuing dual majors in oboe and musicology. That same year, Kathleen began her role as the director of the Arthur Friedheim Library. After graduation, Andrea joined the library staff as the first engagement and instruction librarian. This led to a collaboration with Kathleen, focusing on how research integrates into the Peabody Conservatory curriculum. Together, they aimed to teach skills that enhance students’ media and information literacy beyond their course work.

Kathleen and Andrea both initially trained in the performing arts, but their current careers in librarianship require expertise in the social sciences. As practicing librarians, Kathleen and Andrea are trained and interested in understanding how information moves through society as well as how learners of all backgrounds interact with information resources to be better performers, researchers, and people.

From this unique perspective as musicians and social scientists, Kathleen and Andrea are curious about how performers in training need to apply knowledge of the information landscape to their entrepreneurial practices.  They collaborate with colleagues in curriculum and instructional design to develop new ways to implement information literacy and research practices into the traditional conservatory curriculum. This culminated in the redesign of Foundation of Music Research, a new approach to graduate music information literacy designed specifically for performing musicians.

As the professional studies curriculum at the Peabody Conservatory evolves, students are engaged and thriving in learning how to build professional practices into their artistic practice. In this course, Kathleen and Andrea have worked to construct a parallel pathway that helps students connect their musicology and theory seminars to professional studies and studio work. Fostering these connections is a major component of this book.

Purpose

Contemporary musicians have more information available to them than ever before. Evaluating sources to find the most reliable information can be overwhelming, especially when the most thoroughly vetted informational platforms are only available behind paywalls.

This book helps music researchers at any experience level build strategies to increase efficiencies in acquiring, evaluating, and using the vast quantities of information available to them.

Such skills position today’s musicians to spend less time trying to make sense of 3 million results in a Google search and more time contextualizing their thoughts, ideas, and artistic projects. This is critically important because the performing artist is not just experimenting in the isolation of a lab and sharing the results of repeated trial and error. Live performance is a volatile experience where the results of research, and sometimes even the research itself, happen in front of a live audience.

This research exists in a place between the academy and practice. Even today, many creative researchers at colleges and universities have different ways of demonstrating their work, unlike colleagues who publish monographs or scientific articles. Even in disciplines like musicology or ethnomusicology, which share some methodologies with other fields in the humanities, we see increasingly creative outputs, like Anna Kijas’ interactive biography Documenting Teresa Carreño or the powerful Musical Passage project by Laurent Dubois, David Garner, and Mary Caton Lingold. Creative research can also entail historical practice, discovering the socio-historic context of music, or designing performances to engage audiences around specific learning goals. The authors want every musician to see the scholarship in their creative work, even if it is not peer-reviewed. The legacy of training and research that goes into every performance means that all musicians are also musician-scholars.

With this book, we hope to help students better understand different modes of creative research and how that fits into the larger landscape of research and information. Post-COVID, many of us are wary of faulty research—or even research taken out of context—and how quickly misinformation spreads via social media. It’s therefore imperative that as a society we critically assess information to mitigate the spread of misinformation, whether we’re interpreting research from scientists or researchers in the arts.

Beyond evaluating information, the musician-scholar must also strive to share the results of research ethically and legally in a way that aligns with their personal values and artistic mission. Recent technological advances allow the musician-scholar to maximize opportunities provided by new technology to make stronger connections to their audiences. We want to make sure that today’s musician-scholar has a solid foundation in how information systems have evolved. The reader will learn how to harness these skills, not only to make informed decisions about using the work of others but also to share their own work as they build these connections. Beyond consuming and creating research, we want to empower artists to advocate for emerging systems that value art and society over profits.^[1]

In this book, unlike existing music research texts, we do more than focus solely on resources and techniques used in musicology and historical research. Instead, we endeavor to help readers understand how our current publishing system works and how that impacts where and how they might access content. We also know that by learning this kind of system-oriented knowledge, researchers can apply their skills and master any kind of search environment.

To that end, this book contains techniques for searching, information on how search systems are built, and information about open access and publishing economies. We introduce the basics of copyright so readers can understand why some materials may not be readily available online, how to approach the use of copyrighted material in their own work, and how to make decisions about sharing their work with a broader audience.

Audience

For Artists

This book is meant to assist musician-scholars in the early stages of their transition from student to professional artist and more seasoned musician-scholars who want to build solid strategies for incorporating research into their practice. Some of the basic research skills we cover may be familiar to readers. We have consolidated a few traditional academic resources into a simple reference guide and research companion for practicing artists based on established sources and strategies. Rather than digging through endless search engine results trying to determine accuracy and credibility, readers gain strategies for finding and evaluating information that fit their unique needs.

This book also helps learners build a skill set to efficiently find and synthesize high-quality information outside the conservatory and university settings. Understanding how publishing and information economies work—including how to leverage the power of open access—streamlines any research process. It also helps researchers make informed decisions about their publishing options. Finally, we introduce copyright essentials so creators can ethically and legally use existing information in any format and understand how the law impacts their own work.

For Instructors

This book may not seem like a good fit for the traditional required music research course—few music research (or “bibliography”) courses are structured like ours. Because our students are focused on their professional next steps after the master’s degree, and many have not had access to academic libraries in their undergraduate education, we focus on building solid foundational information literacy skills and helping students understand how they relate to their professional work. If you teach a similar course and we are not in touch, please let us know.

We are always looking for ways to expand and improve education for researchers in music and the performing arts. As such, we encourage instructors to take full advantage of the open nature of this text: It is licensed to be translated, remixed, excerpted, and leveraged in the ways you deem best to help your students master the learning goals of your course. Reach out to us if you adopt or adapt any part of the text.

We also hope this text will be useful to other curriculum areas. While presented here as a unified book, we encourage instructors to excerpt the text where it may be useful. The research sections can be used in many information literacy contexts, while the copyright and publishing sections might be appropriate to bolster stand-alone assignments or flesh out concepts in introductory music business courses.

For Librarians

Librarians are often asked to collaborate with faculty to deliver instruction in music and the performing arts as teaching partners. The research section of this book serves as a compendium of skills and concepts we often teach separately and reference in disparate places in our work as librarian-educators. The copyright and publishing sections may be helpful for librarians collaborating with faculty, especially those who want to introduce these concepts and need foundational texts that are cohesive and provide a solid foundation for specialized assignments.

Organization

In this book, we explore three critical areas: developing a solid practice in research foundations; understanding the essentials of copyright; and navigating the complexities of publishing practices. This book equips you with the knowledge to succeed in today’s diverse music research and publishing landscape.

Part I. Research Foundations

The text begins by building strong research practices that serve the multidisciplinary needs of modern musician-scholars. As citizen artists, you are often asked to understand community needs, teaching theories, and social or urban planning when devising projects with community impact. This requires a strategic skill set to find, evaluate, synthesize, and share research findings across many disciplines.

Part II. Copyright Essentials

By developing some basic competencies in copyright, you can confidently develop projects that consider potential legal and ethical issues when using copyrighted works. We provide an accessible compendium of the different licenses and exceptions to copyright most often used by musician-scholars. In addition, you will understand possible avenues of revenue for your work. This ensures that your projects include adequate funding to manage any copyright administration.

Part III. Publishing Practices

Understanding traditional and modern publishing practices can help you decide how to disseminate your work. In a complex world where publishing decisions can impact how you and your audience access your work, musician-scholars are often uncertain when to collaborate with publishers or follow a do-it-yourself path to sharing their work. We provide you with the a history of how publishing evolved and how to manage your own publishing projects today so that you can make decisions that maximize your professional goals while remaining aligned with your artistic mission.

Features

Throughout this book, you will find exercises to help you plan, conduct, and organize your research and publishing projects. Each chapter will follow the story of a group of musician-scholars through illustrated examples that help learners imagine how to apply these concepts and skills. In addition to a narrative example, we also include perspectives from an expert panel of musician-scholars whose members share the various ways research is a part of their professional creative lives. References are provided at the end of each chapter with bibliographies provided in each section. Glossary terms are defined within the text and compiled at the end; they are bolded the first time the appear in the chapter.

Unlocking the Digital Age: The Musician’s Guide to Research, Copyright, and Publishing is available in digital formats. While it is available for learners to print in PDF or EPUB formats, it is designed for online interaction. While readers are welcome to print copies to interact with and annotate in any way they desire, this publication was designed to be interacted with in a digital environment where resources, references, and templates are linked and available online.

All hyperlinks open in new tabs. When publicly accessible websites (e.g., Google, Google Scholar, YouTube, Spotify) are shared, they are linked the first time they appear in the chapter as well as in the exercises.

Expert Panel

We spoke with musician-scholars about how they incorporate research into their practice. They also shared their experiences with questions about copyright and publishing choices. Visit the About the Artists section for full bios.

• Christina Farrell, teaching artist
• Jonathon Heyward, conductor
• Lauron Kehrer, musicologist and ethnomusicologist
• Kyoko Kitamura, vocal improviser, bandleader, composer, and educator
• Suzanne Kite, artist, composer, and academic
• Paula Maust, performer, scholar, and educator
• Robin McGinness, operatic baritone and career coach