PUBLISHING PRACTICES
12 Publishing: An Expert Panel
Kathleen DeLaurenti
In this chapter, we bring together insights from seven accomplished musician-scholars , each engaged in various facets of publishing. These experts are aware of their diverse audiences and tailor their dissemination strategies accordingly. Here, they delve into their unique approaches to sharing their work, emphasizing the importance of aligning these dissemination practices with their personal missions and values. Their insights offer a nuanced understanding of the challenges and opportunities in the contemporary landscape of publishing.
Our expert musician-scholars are engaged in publishing in a variety of ways. Some of that is very informal and one-to-one sharing of expertise.
“One of the challenges of working as a teaching artist is that each situation is so unique. The partner’s needs are different, the budget is different, the scope of the work is different. Every project has its own parameters. When it comes to disseminating the work, much of my work in arts integration is designed to help teachers do what I do. I leave behind strategies, I leave behind lesson plans, I leave behind experiences with the hopes that those teachers will continue to try to write songs with their kids or bring out the drums in their classroom or whatever it is that I’ve modeled and worked with them on. There is an intentional dissemination of teaching strategies and effective lesson plans with the teachers I work with. That sort of informal dissemination is built into that teaching artist.” Christina Farrell
“Over the last couple years, I’ve tried to approach my art making from a point of view of ‘I want to choose making things that I think are good art and not choose things that are paying me money.’ Within that context, the proof of sharing can come out in the performance. I don’t think that it has to be a scholarly document that comes along with it.” Robin McGinness
They also consider the audience for their different works when they are considering how to publish it with a broader audience.
“There are a lot of audiences for teaching artists: artists, funders, schools, arts organizations. In trying to further the field of teaching artistry and help people understand the value of this work, I’m often trying to think of how to reach all these different groups of people. Occasionally, there are opportunities to present at conferences or opportunities to do professional development. A big part of my dissemination is speaking and demonstrating the work. For me, doing the work is better than publishing the work. The most impactful way to disseminate the work is by doing and showing and sharing. I do a lot of in-person workshops to demonstrate the kind of work that I do.” Christina Farrell
“I also think about audience, right? I want a particular piece to reach musicologists, ethnomusicologists, or beyond the field. Am I talking to hip hop scholars or popular music scholars? I am talking to scholars in American studies? I think about what I want the conversation to be, and in terms of which journals or which conferences I want to participate in. I also think about public access. Those things are very much related but may be done through different modes. Unfortunately, a lot of institutions don’t value public work as much as they do the peer-reviewed work. But the public work is super important to me because I want more than just five people to read the thing that I’m working on. But I also think that I have something to share with the more general audience that can help shift some of the narratives that are happening in the mainstream or popular discourse. I will do things like ABC News or USA Today that might reach a broader audience. It really depends on the realities of the job versus the venue versus the conversation I’m trying to be in the moment.” Lauron Kehrer
“I would say I haven’t enjoyed any of my academic publishing processes. But I will say sometimes, the call for proposals is too good, too precise for me to resist contributing. That’s where I’ve decided to do it, where it’s like the American Indian Culture and Research Journal is doing an ‘extraterrestrials call’ for proposal. I can’t say no. Same with MIT’s Media Lab resisting reduction with artificial intelligence. We could not say no—it was for us. I couldn’t say no to those things. There are some journals that I haven’t published in that I would like to. The way I’m choosing them is based on the editor, the guest editors, and my relationship to them or my confidence in their previous work. That’s probably the best way to do it, though I still think traditional publication is extremely difficult and inaccessible to most people.” Suzanne Kite
When talking the differences between her book publication[1] and website on music theory examples,[2] Paula Maust shared these reflections.
“I was most concerned about making sure that the materials that I’ve created have the broadest possible application and user base. Everything that was already available could remain part of that open educational resource, even though some of it is going into the book. The way that the book is set up is different than the way that the website is set up in terms of organization. There’re also additional materials in the book that aren’t on the website. The website is for an instructor, and the book is specific to students. My editor and I talked about audience and how the material was curated and who it was being presented for.” Paula Maust
It is also incredibly important to our musician-scholars to make sure that their decisions are mission aligned. They consider their mission when planning a project or writing a grant and how it aligns with the way their work will be shared.
“I was willing to walk away and say, ‘Thank you very much for your time,’ and not proceed with the project if it felt like it was going to compromise my values. I know that we don’t always have those kinds of choices. That’s a powerful privilege to feel like that in a situation.” Paula Maust
“Because I’m Japanese, I have so much respect for tradition. I think that we’re building on the past. I’m going with my intuition to see what kind of information I can get because I don’t exactly know what I’m going for. There’s really no roadmap.” Kyoko Kitamura
“What denies us in this current age the right to make choices and to change how things are performed? You should ask the people who are telling you that something has to be done a certain way to share why their opinion is that way. Asking lots of ‘why’ questions. You’ll get to learn about why they have this opinion. It’s finding ways to have that conversation and asking ‘why’ questions that can lead to great growth for everyone in the room.” Robin McGinness
Our expert musician-scholars are also finding valuable ways to share scholarship in nontraditional formats and media outside of traditional publishing models.
One of the most obvious ways that has a connection to the work I do for LAUNCHPad is promotional material if you’re a performer, right? This is the stuff that really helps get people excited and integrated into what you’re creating. So, if you can talk about, like, ‘Oh here’s this cool nugget of information about this piece that I’m performing. I’m going to share it with you in a video.’ Who’s not going to get more excited to come hear that piece and hear how you’re using that information in your interpretation? That is, to me, the gold standard. We should share the information, share it in the medium that makes sense, integrate it into advocating for the art, and advocate for the performance. It obviously doesn’t look like a research paper, but that’s okay.” Robin McGinness
“Open access is important to me because I want people in academia, regardless of what kind of institutional access they have, to be able to read the work. But I also want it to be freely available to people outside of academia and to the people that I worked with. That is really important to me. But it’s not free, right? I was fortunate to get some subvention grants that helped offset the costs, mainly of making this an open-access resource. The press that I worked with, University of Michigan Press, is invested in open access as well. It found some funding. But it’s not free, and it’s not something that everyone can do, even if they want to. These are different factors that I think about—where I want to publish or where I want to share some work.” Lauron Kehrer
Our expert musician-scholars also aren’t completely free from the systems we must consider when making decisions about publishing. They also are aware of how things like copyright impact the way we share and how and where we can access the scholarly and musical record.
“One of the things that I find to be so challenging about intellectual research right now is that so much of it is still locked up. It’s not something that you can access if you don’t have a connection to an academic institution that values research enough to spend the significant amount of money to subscribe to those. It’s the same with journal articles and with academic monographs that are incredibly expensive. The author’s not really making any money on those very expensive books, and they’re inaccessible to most people. Research is something that should be shared with the broadest possible group of interested people. Of course, not everyone is going to be interested in knowing about a woman writing harpsichord lessons in 1756 the way that I am. But lots of people could be interested in that who wouldn’t otherwise have access to that information without those expensive subscription services.” Paula Maust
“I view it as both a challenge and an opportunity. My resources are limited, so I know what I’m good at and what I enjoy doing. I want to focus my energy on training teachers, training teaching artist development programs. I don’t always have the time to formalize the kinds of research that I’m doing informally. But the opportunity in having limited resources is that I’ve developed my organization with partnerships in mind. I have Throughline Arts as my organization, so I can provide my individual services. I recently did a project that shows an example of the kind of collaborative approach that shows how I can pull in expertise from different people.” Christina Farrell
“I’ve always found the copyright laws for recording fascinating, and the royalty system that exists in almost every other art form than classical music is fascinating when we’re talking about copyrighting licenses of particularly recordings. Some of my most thrilling recordings that I like listening to are free on YouTube. It boggles me why that sort of history has been enabled for this art form. That’s something I would love to see change because there’s something about the ownership of a particular performance—the ownership of that research, if you will—when you are doing a live performance that should at least have an identity for the artist.” Jonathan Heyward
“Being with the Lincoln Center, there’s a huge archival department I now have complete access to. However, there is also a lot more that I have to do to go out and get more research. But that to me is a wonderful challenge because what it does is streamline my thinking and allows me to really go directly to something a bit more specific. In a way, being in an institution, you feel like you’ve got everything at hand, and you go in many different directions. But as an individual researching, you’re trying to figure out the piece to the puzzle that you may need to get the whole piece. Accessibility isn’t as easy, but in a way, it feels like I’ve had the ability to streamline my process. That’s pretty exciting.” Jonathon Heyward
“It would be nice to get paid for publication, but that also doesn’t fix the problem of access. Paywalls are a problem. I think more and more, we’re seeing open-access journals, which is great. That means that the work is more widely available. That speaks to the larger issue of how little we fund higher education in the United States more generally. We don’t have the same models to support making our work widely available. In terms of tenure and promotion policies, the kind of public scholarship and the value that has and could have for a university could also reshape how committees are looking at different types of publications.” Lauron Kehrer
“If it’s an American Indian subject, it needs to be open access. … It’s really important to create access for people. I’m very encouraged by just looking at the statistics, the open-access stuff is clearly read and distributed far more readily. All of the open-access things get way more reads, and I think that’s important.
Especially with the Indigenous AI position paper, since it’s free and open online, we do get contacted often by a tribal leadership in the U.S. and Canada. That means that Concordia University has done a good job of making it accessible. They’re finding it. I’m very proud of that work, and the original artificial intelligence paper that I put out with Lewis, Arista, and Pechawis[3] because it is on a lot of syllabi. That is extremely meaningful to me, to know that I am on syllabi and that young people everywhere are reading my writing.” Suzanne Kite
The insights and experiences shared by our expert musician-scholars reflect the current state of publishing and hint at emerging trends and possibilities. Musicians-scholars continue to experiment with nontraditional publishing avenues, place greater emphasis on open access, and explore innovative ways of integrating technology into their publishing strategy. They are motivated to find publishing opportunities that provide increased flexibility, creativity, and a stronger alignment with their personal values and artistic missions.
Media Attributions
- Publishing concept © Peabody Institute is licensed under a CC BY (Attribution) license
- Paula Maust, Expanding the Music Theory Canon: Inclusive Examples for Analysis from the Common Practice Period (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2024), https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/PublicFullRecord.aspx?p=30562218. ↵
- Paula Maust, “Expanding the Music Theory Canon,” August 27, 2020, https://www.expandingthemusictheorycanon.com/. ↵
- Lewis, J. E., Arista, N., Pechawis, A., & Kite, S. (2018). Making Kin with the Machines. Journal of Design and Science. https://doi.org/10.21428/bfafd97b ↵
a musician who has integrated research into their artistic identity and practices