RESEARCH FOUNDATIONS
6 Research: An Expert Panel
Kathleen DeLaurenti
Each of our expert panelists shared the way they define research with us. One thing that’s consistent with musician-scholars is acknowledgment that research requires building and access to knowledge systems to understand or construct new knowledge. They also view this as a core part of their musical lives.
“Research is a system in which to find the deepest, truest facts and information of a particular subject. It’s an exploration to get to a deeper core, which of course really ties into the core of music and the value of what music is.” Jonathon Heyward
“Research is studying anything that’s unknown to you and potentially finding something that is also unknown to others as well. You’re starting with this kind of question of wanting to know about something that you don’t know about. You’re starting to read and listen and explore various resources about that, and continuing to read and find out all that there is to know. Perhaps then stumbling onto a gap in the kind of general knowledge base and being able to uncover new information about a particular subject.” Paula Maust
“The artistic research I do is diligent. It’s usually systematic research and something I’m interested in, something I’m curious about. There’s a lot more self-motivation involved in my artistic research as opposed to maybe research I might do for a journalistic story.” Kyoko Kitamura
“Research is intentional inquiry to make meaning. In the classroom, I feel like I’m doing research all the time. I’m often with students who I haven’t met before, so I have to get to know them. I have to do research about them and their interests. I’m always asking questions. I’m always probing, I’m always trying to learn about them so that the experience that we’re making together is relevant and interesting to them. So that’s kind of a microcosm sort of research that applies to me. But also, of course, research really impacts my work in the big study kind of way—really looking at how we know it’s effective in teaching, how we know it’s effective in the arts in terms of impact. Research is both mini-inquiries into people in the moment but also very broad studies into the bigger picture of the work that I do.” Christina Farrell
“Research is a process of seeking to better understand something about the world through asking questions, gathering information, critically and examining materials and information, analyzing data, and then sharing those results and coming up with new ideas as a result of that process.” Lauron Kehrer
Dr. Suzanne Kite acknowledges the different lenses in her definition of research and the different modes of research that exist in different cultural contexts.
“I think I have a unique perspective on this. It’s different than other kind of academic researchers. My view of research is as a toolkit of inquiry for any medium or mode of learning. To me, research is just a term in a larger toolkit of ways we make new knowledge. I think of research in my practice as specifically the creation of—I guess, the curation of all tools available to become prepared to make an artwork, to become prepared to make a statement or develop a thought out loud or into a sharing possibility. So to me, research is very flexible and can include traditional forms of research, like reading, discussing, interviewing, and extremely heavily cited works, or it can be modes of indigenous research, which are very much listening, showing up in community, co-creating. And then I also see research as even the act of making or experimenting as in artworks.” Suzanne Kite
However, understanding how research fits into your artistic practice as a musician-scholar is something that you’ll realize over time. Professional musicians, teaching artists, and musician-scholars in the academy recognize that often, novice musician-scholars often have misconceptions of what research is.
One of the biggest misconceptions they experienced was thinking that research would not grow to be a significant part of their professional work as musicians.
“One of the biggest misconceptions is the idea that it [research] doesn’t relate to what we do on a daily basis. Research really is embedded into the way that you perform, why you perform, where you perform, what you perform. It answers a lot of bigger questions. It’s one of the things that I sort of wish someone would’ve nudged me about—the deeper meaning of what you’re trying to achieve as a musician.” Jonathon Heyward
“A misconception that I had for an unfortunately long time was that research and academic work was something that you did as one separate thing. And practicing and studying your repertoire and playing recitals and concerts were things that you did separate from that, and they weren’t this merged concept. I believed that for quite some time. When I had this epiphany moment that I couldn’t do one well without the other, it completely changed the entire trajectory of how I structured all my academic and creative practice and work.” Paula Maust
“Students ask why it matters to study this, and other people are studying that. I just want to play really well. We should all want to play well, but playing well can be significantly amplified by also doing research, and you can have this balance of both, and they both inform the other.” Paula Maust
“I think probably the biggest misconception is that it’s not necessary. I think the other misconception is that it’s not political and not absolutely necessary for contextualizing what we do. I also think another misconception is that it is only in reading. And I think that leads to a lack of citational politics in artists when, even as a classical musician, as a classical violinist, by learning from one person, I’m citing everybody who taught them. So yeah, I think those are misconceptions. But I also think that people think they’re not doing research when they are—they’re already doing it.” Suzanne Kite
It can take time to identify what research might emerge as being central to your practice. Different lenses and methodologies to approaching research-creation projects can be important in different parts of your career. You might find research opportunities in unexpected places. Sometimes research questions emerge from defining your mission as a musician or realizing that it’s the missing piece in advancing your practice.
“I had a huge misunderstanding about what music was. I never asked why music exists. Practice time took a lot, and I didn’t really question why I was doing it. I also didn’t question why I was playing European music when I’m obviously not European, right? Once I started asking those questions, I realized that I could approach music in a more holistic way. That it’s not about producing, it’s not about composing—it’s about communicating. Communicating through music, communicating with music, communicating with your peers, and making your ensemble members sound great, right? Because if we all sound great, and if we’re all working to make the other person sound great, we’ll all be great. So that’s an interesting parallel to society. But the main thing was that I did not understand the holistic nature of what music was, which today also encompasses the marketing and the commercialization of music.” Kyoko Kitamura
“When I think of my early career, I probably didn’t think about research much, honestly. I think research really impacted me as a musician, just in terms of my artistry—researching a role that I was going to perform or researching the history of the music, right? As a performer, research started to come in the form of data collection in terms of audiences—how do we sell tickets, who’s coming to the show—and doing research into demographics. But there’s a much broader world. The misconception might be that research is limited to some of these obvious things, but as I’ve gotten older and sort of expanded the scope of the work that I do within the arts, research appears everywhere. The misconception is that it’s only for certain people who are interested in that. But research really makes an appearance in all aspects of the work we do, as artists and when trying to promote our work and have others support our work. It’s everywhere.” Christina Farrell
Identifying the ways you’ll integrate research regularly into your practice can take time. Eventually, it may become a fully realized aspect of each performance you create. It also helps you understand when your research is a creative practice, when it informs a creative practice, and when you choose to make creative decisions that might go against research. Once you understand that research is integral, you can build and refine approaches that align with your practice and artistic mission.
“I have created a space in my artistic practice for it to be crossing over a flow between both, where I make sure I carve out time to do research in a lot of my projects. I also make sure that there are parts of my performance, art practice, or music-making practice that don’t, where I can just let the knowledge kind of flow through me, where I can just perform or improvise. I keep a special place in performance for that. But I do know that I have the option to seek out long-term projects where I can say, well, there’s going to be a research phase. This project’s going to take me 10 years, and there’s going to be a two-year research phase, or this project is this composition, and this commission is at a site-specific area. I’m going to make sure that I collaborate with people to find out as much as I can about the context and history before I show up and do something. In that way, I can either build in those methodologies to the very real art-making practice or I can allow research and reading and discussion to be part of the entire process. I have a special interest in doing that sort of thing. Not everybody’s very interested in including a lot of research methodologies, but I see how they are the core part of what makes new knowledge. If I’m not very carefully and thoughtfully situated, I can’t come out with a piece that I can stand behind in the long run. I don’t want to make shallow work.” Suzanne Kite
“In my artistic practice, [research] forms a basis for the way I perform pieces and the aesthetics that I aim for. But at the same time, I have to balance these formed opinions I have with the things that I enjoy. As a performer, that’s something that we should always keep in balance, remembering there can be an informed way that this is supposed to happen. That does not invalidate your opinion about how you want to perform the piece.
“This is particularly prevalent in Western classical music, where everything is supposed to be written down and given to us from the creative part of the process. Be okay with saying, ‘Oh, well, all this research says to do it this way, but I like doing it this [other], way and I’m going to do it because I think it sounds better.’” Robin McGinness
This doesn’t mean that professional musician-scholars don’t have common, ongoing challenges in their research-creation process. Just like habits in our playing or performance that we want to be aware of, it’s important to think about our own biggest challenges with research as you develop your research-creation practices.
“There’s either too little or too much information about a given topic. I see this a lot with my students and with researchers who are just starting out, who are kind of afraid. Either something they’re really interested in has already been talked about to death and there’s nothing new to say about it—and that’s almost never true—or they swing in the opposite direction, and they think that there’s just not enough information out there. There’s not enough that’s already been said. Neither of these things are true. When that comes up for people, it just means that people are thinking about research in a pretty narrow way and not thinking about the bigger connections between their questions and what interests them and what does already exist out there.” Lauron Kehrer
“That it has to happen in a book or on the internet—obviously in the modern age—but in some sort of print medium. A more traditional researcher within the area of performance practice is Will Crutchfield. Crutchfield, known as a conductor and a music writer, has done a lot of research about the bel canto style of singing and how it applies to performance practice, both in terms of technique and style. He’s done a lot of original source material research with recordings and original treatises. That’s very specific—we’re going to the books; we’re going to the original sources. But at the same time, he has spent a lot of time working with singers, working with people in this context that’s not just reading books. It’s interactions, it’s listening, observing, doing all these other things that don’t involve sitting down and reading something that informs that opinion. To me, that makes his discussion much more interesting. That is also an important thing to keep in context when you’re trying to form an informed opinion.” Robin McGinness
Sometimes, as Christina Farrell notes, those challenges can happen when you’re trying to communicate value to policymakers, funders, and government agencies. Knowing how to access information in ways that your audience is willing to engage with can be another challenging part of the process.
“In trying to advocate for teaching artistry and arts integration, I really do want to provide academic research. But I have definitely hit that barrier of just wanting to pull a quote and refer someone to that paper, and I can only get the excerpt or the highlight. Another barrier to dissemination is who are the people reading white papers? It’s really only academics. The people who I need to be reading those white papers are legislators, arts administrators, and school board members, right? They’re not going to go pull out these papers. How do we get some of this valuable information that’s happening with researchers in the fields of arts integration and get it in an accessible, easy-to-handle, easy-to-read way to people who actually could make an impact by knowing that information? So that seems to be a disconnect. Even with the papers that I’ve been a part of, I end up simplifying and translating in a way that makes it more palatable for audiences that are not going to sit and read a research paper.” Christina Farrell
When you’re first getting started, it can feel overwhelming to try to address these challenges in your research-creation practice. We asked our expert panel what their turning point was in integrating research into their practice. They shared key moments in their professional lives when the research in their research-creation process started to make sense for them.
“I was studying conducting on the research side of things and how that [process] embedded in my ideas on how to interpret and what to interpret and how to bring certain things out. To me, that was a turning point as a conductor to become an artist, a real thinker of what and why I needed to analyze or why I needed to research—it was to get to the deeper meaning of an interpretation.” Jonathon Heyward
“When I first started teaching music theory, I was teaching the core theory classes and had to choose a textbook. None of the books had any significant examples of music by historical women and or people of color. That was a moment where I wanted to use research to change the way that I was teaching my classes. In 2015, when I started collecting those examples and talking about this problem, no one really listened or cared. Several people told me it wasn’t possible to devise a set of musical examples that were good for teaching because women weren’t writing music before the 20th century. That was the important moment of realizing that I could use research for a significant social impact as well as an impact on my performing career. Ultimately, that work led to a very messy spreadsheet of a collection of examples by women and/or people of color active before the 20th century that I was using to teach. When COVID canceled a year of concerts, I took those examples and found a lot more and developed them into Expanding the Music Theory Canon. Then, due to the growing awareness of disparities in music theory education, it went viral and was suddenly being used in 61 countries in 24 hours. The moment was realizing where the significant gap was in the literature, a literal gap in literal literature, and knowing that it was something that I had the pedagogical expertise and desire to fill.” Paula Maust
“Research as a journalist often was job dependent. [I realized] artistic research feels more about me. Although it is also job dependent, it depends on what the vision of whoever I’m working for is, and I will have to research that vision. So that’s something that’s very common that runs through both my professional fields. In both journalism and music research, I must be very diligent and stay on target. It’s systematic. There are no shortcuts.” Kyoko Kitamura
“I had to learn different methodologies for keeping at the core—the artistry, the fun, the personal connection, and the meaning making—while still providing a tangible source of evidence that it’s impactful, that connects to learning, that’s going to be sustainable over a long period of time. Without that kind of research on the impact of my work, I wouldn’t get funded. It just comes down to the basic fact of needing to get paid for the work. To a grant organization, you really do have to provide evidence for how impactful it is.” Christina Farrell
“I am a classically trained flutist, so I went to college thinking I wanted to be an orchestral musician. I was also very interested in women’s studies. What ultimately drew me to start to do research was as a performer taking the required music history courses. But looking at primary sources and looking at the historical and social context in which the music I performed was written and originally performed helped give me a better understanding of how to interpret it. That’s true for a lot of classically trained musicians, and that’s something that music research can be helpful with.
“Because of my training, I felt more closely connected to more historical musicology. Popular music was not really integrated into musicological study. It was still very much the outskirts and not fully incorporated. I didn’t have any coursework related to popular music study. But in terms of being a popular music scholar, it was important to me that I engage in other disciplines, like women and gender studies, but also Black studies, also American studies, sometimes with people working in English and other departments. Pop music studies and hip-hop studies are by their nature interdisciplinary. It was important that I be part of those conversations and know what other people are doing in other fields. I could then take it back to the fields I was trained in and look at these questions. This way, we can still focus on music, which is what sets ethnomusicology and musicology apart. But we could be asking some different questions, and we could be framing our work in ways that are more attentive to the communities that are making this music.” Lauron Kehrer
“[Research] has influenced my art. If we’re thinking about performing artistic perspectives, this experience has influenced it a little bit, but it has influenced the way I work much more broadly than just in terms of performance. In terms of how I teach, how I engage with people, generally how I go through my life is kind of an understanding that we are very predisposed to getting stuck on early ideas, getting stuck on the first solution that comes to us. It’s not something that is a reasoned decision, so figuring out methods for moving past that or through that. Artistically, this applies to figuring it out and not getting stuck on the first interpretation of a piece.
I’ve always been interested in having informed opinions about how our minds work, how creativity works. This was something that came up through—I wouldn’t say dedicated research, although there has been dedicated research that I’ve done on the subject—decision-making and how we are creative, which basically became part of my method of living life. If you are listening to a podcast that you find interesting or effective and you can incorporate it into your art or incorporate it into your life, why don’t we think about that as research? The catalyst point [for research] can be anywhere.” Robin McGinness
Many of the experts we spoke with are also interested in understanding whose voices, ideas, and perspectives have been privileged by traditional archival, publishing, and research practices. They use their expertise in traditional Western research skills to identify opportunities to elevate new voices and perspectives in their research-creation practices.
“I think that there’s a lot of important reconfiguring of the term ‘research’ that’s been done, especially by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, who’s a Maori researcher. There’s been a lot of effort in the past 20 to 30 years to try to create space for other forms of knowledge making outside of science and the modes of knowledge making that science does. We know that that is not the only form of knowledge creation in the world. There’s a difference in indigenous communities between truth and community truth, and then a scientific truth. Just because science can’t deal with a certain topic like spirituality or the question in my research of ‘Where do songs come from?’ Just because it’s not the right tool for that doesn’t mean it’s not the right tool for other modes of knowledge making. And both can be helpful.
“I think the point I’m making about community truth—my favorite paper [about this is] called ‘Truth in Native American Epistemology’ by Jim Cheney. When we deal with community truth, that means that it’s good and true and healthy for the community. So those things apply very much to art making, where we’re making art and ideas about storytelling and myth and nonhuman beings speaking. This is very important to communities and keeps our communities healthy spiritually as well as physically. We talk about storytelling and art making—those things tie in and have important crossovers into science and technology. They do get complicated, but that doesn’t mean we have to throw them out altogether.” Suzanne Kite
“I think about which communities and music practices are being taken seriously and what it looks like to take them seriously. In my most recent work, I’ve privileged the work of black, queer, and trans artists. These are communities that have been marginalized as subjects in ethnomusicology and musicology in terms of projects and people’s focus on them.
“One of the things I try to challenge myself with my research is not only say, hey, look, here is some stuff that is happening, but also talk about why it’s relevant, beyond just those communities. It was important to me to convey, especially in the last book project, breaking down this misconception that these queer artists who we see now in the mainstream, who we hear on the radio, that this is an entirely new phenomenon that’s never happened before. Instead, put them in a larger conversation with a sort of historical lineage of other black queer artists historically and consider how these things are tied together. I want to show that these communities with rich histories have been intertwined with popular music for a very long time and call attention to those histories that have been very much marginalized in our conversations about popular music.
“In that way, my research and the research conversations that I engage in are about calling attention to music practices that have otherwise been marginalized and that can, beyond our research, hopefully also give some credit to artists who may not have received that historically.” Lauron Kehrer
The experts we spoke with also talked about some of the details in their research-creation process. They think about accessing, organizing, and evaluating the sources they use in many of the ways we explored in this book.
“I often ask my students to consider if the source is right. By source, I don’t necessarily mean the journal or the publication, but the folks involved in presenting research. What are the stakes? Who are the stakeholders in terms of information being presented and can you ascertain what their level of involvement is with those stakeholders? I’m speaking largely here from the humanities perspective, which is different than public health or STEM-related fields. Being a white scholar who works predominantly on black music, what are my citation practices? Who am I engaged with? What is my track record in terms of who I collaborate with? This is something I look for from other scholars, right? If someone publishes an article on Beyoncé, does this person have a history of working on this topic? Related topics? Or is this someone who went to a Beyoncé show and really loved it and published something rather uncritical of the artist?
“What are people saying about a thing from this perspective versus what gets published about a thing from another perspective? It gets increasingly challenging as everything moves online. It can be hard to determine the type of source when everything has similar URLs. This is why spending some time on a topic and getting to know what the bigger conversation can help build up that literacy. So, when you encounter a new piece of writing or new literature, having the background knowledge to evaluate where it fits in to what I have already encountered and what is the purpose of this piece? Is it supposed to be persuasive? Is it supposed to just add information? Is it reporting? Is it analyzing from a particular framework? Those are kinds of questions that I want folks to consider when they’re encountering a new piece of information.” Lauron Kehrer
For many novice musician-scholars, archival research often seems like something you only do when you’re studying at a university. However, our experts talked extensively about the ways that archival research continues to be critical in their work. From comparing original manuscripts to published editions of music to identifying how different cultures voices are accessible to researchers, they provide invaluable insights into music traditions.
“Whenever I can, I try to go to these mega archives where you can see the real manuscripts, you can really understand the letters, you can understand what’s going on, because that gets to a truer interpretation of what the composer is trying to say. That’s what we are as artists, as conductors, as musicians—what is our responsibility. We have to get closer to the utmost true meaning of what the intention of the music is about.
“Just understanding and researching moments like this getting the truer deeper meaning of what [Schumann] was going through, where he was, informs almost everything that I do on the podium, from the tempo, from the architecture, from what I program even around the symphonies. Archival research for me has always been a deep interest because it makes me feel that I can get to a deeper meaning of the music, which I think is core and pertinent to being able to interpret the music.” Jonathon Heyward
“If we take ‘archive’ to mean a few different things in traditional arts, I’d say my engagement with Lakota archives is very dependent on institutions that have collections of Lakota artifacts, both collected in good ways and collected in bad ways. Putting them online and having them be accessible is critical because otherwise we don’t have access to them. I have felt the pressure of knowing I could not physically access an archive unless I went through some really extreme process—I’d have to get a residency with the Smithsonian, go through their whole process in order to even just see some of these very private objects. So having them be accessible online is critical. In terms of song archives, that is not very accessible. I’d have to go all the way from wherever I live to the tribal colleges in South Dakota to listen to songs. They’re not online. And in terms of artificial intelligence research, that is the form of archive that is so big as to be difficult to even deal with. I’m talking about data sets. So large data sets: We’ve gone from using small data sets to exponentially large ones, and the ability to traverse them is nearly impossible. It’s a black box of data, and it’s really up to data scientists and people who do knowledge translation to make those easier for us to navigate. I rely on people’s papers who deal with those.” Suzanne Kite
“I’m always trying to have a variety of different venues or avenues or means of distributing my work. The book is a published physical copy. The website is an open education resource that is freely available. Concerts are either recorded and then available later for people depending on what I decide to put online or they’re a one-time experience for an audience. I’m always trying to have a mix of things that have a very niche or specific audience and things that could be much more broadly or globally distributed. My goal is always to have kind of a mixed portfolio of what it is that I’m producing and how it’s being disseminated.” Paula Maust
“In 3D, you can walk around a performer: Look at his hands, look at the way he’s engaging with the instrument. For me, the immediate shock was the amount of information we could gain from that as compared to something that we might read or something that might be 2D video. It was incomparable. Archive relates very heavily on the model of technology that’s existing. Archive is fluid.” Kyoko Kitamura
“One of the methodologies of arts integration is using a work of art as a lens for learning. If we’re looking at a historical period, for instance, I try to find archival photos or original documents to enhance some of the curricular pieces that students might have in the classroom. Admittedly, it’s a little bit of a wild goose chase sometimes. I just Google, Google, Google until I find things. Because I’m working in the classroom, I do sometimes have questions about the permissions I have to use it. If I’m just using it in the classroom, is it OK? If it moves out of the classroom and maybe into a community presentation, then is it OK to use somebody else’s image or historical document?” Christina Farrell
“The folks who are invested in preserving the legacies of historical figures are sometimes reticent to really embrace queer figures or queer identity. There’s often a downplaying or a cautious approach to what materials might be made available to researchers that could shift the discourse to being, yes, this is a queer person, right? What I really learned from a lot of my archival work is to listen for the absences of voices that are not being adequately represented or are harder to trace, harder to document. I learned more from that than what I actually found in terms of more recent queer literature and magazines.
“One thing that I have used in my work a lot is oral histories. This is another example of something that could be archived. I’m thinking specifically of the hip hop archive available online through Tulane, which also houses the Homicide Research Center. It includes interviews with local artists, again available online. You don’t have to be there, which is wonderful if you don’t have funding to take a trip. But it takes a lot of foresight to document these histories while artists are still alive and active, and memories are fresh. I have seen more of this interest in documenting these oral histories to archive historical information. We’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of hip hop. This is an important moment to start thinking about what hip hop archives might look like in terms of how oral histories could be part of how we maintain and document a lot of this history.” Lauron Kehrer
“I’m going to go back to my interactions with Crutchfield and my experience of that research around early opera recordings and bel canto style. Interacting with archive material often feels a little difficult and daunting. There’re often problems of access. Our library tries to make that as easy as possible. But there are also problems of translation because there may be norms that we’re used to. For example, the recording technology is so different that, for me, being someone who’s only a couple decades old, I have no experience of thinking about what recordings that were made on nondigital technology sound like with nondigital microphones. That’s just not something that was part of my audio space as a human. There’s a whole translation that you have to go through. You can be taught how to listen as the technology changes and, of course, listening to recordings of similar singers at different points can help you go through that.” Robin McGinness
Our experts have advice for novice musician-scholars. Their perspectives as performers, teaching artists, academic scholars, and professors can help you see the different pathways to research you might engage with as your career takes shape. Their varied experiences can help you as a musician-scholar reflect on how research will be critical to your professional practice, no matter what kind of musical profession you decide to pursue.
“Being able to see research as a catalyst to performance practice is essential. They aren’t two different things, you know? You don’t suddenly turn on a research brain and then turn on a performance brain. There’s so much beauty, interplay, and parallel to how we research something and then put it into our interpretations on the ways that we perform, the ways that we program. It really dictates everything for me—tempo, architecture, the development, and the pacing. That really creates the whole evening and the whole experience for an audience. To be able to infuse this concept and idea that research is really the catalyst, and the beginning of all great musical interpretation is really important to understand.” Jonathon Heyward
“Ten years ago, if you had told me that I would be a music theory professor at Peabody, a book would be coming out, and that I’d be recording CDs and designing concerts of music about early modern women that are being picked up by major early music festivals across America, I would’ve laughed at you. Be open to whatever might come and find what it is that interests you the most. Find a way to use all the different aspects of your musical and intellectual personalities and to create a package of who you are as a musician and a researcher and as a professional.” Paula Maust
“As a young musician, you’re interested in developing a performance program or working in a community or a school setting. You want to do interactive work. One of the things I say in my consulting work is to build in a reflection tool, build in an assessment question—just build in something in which you’re getting feedback from people. It’s easy when you’re first starting out to forget to collect that information. Over the years, I’ve gotten more and more creative. I’ve sort of approached that assessment as an art form in and of itself. Don’t feel overwhelmed. You don’t have to do a giant research study around every program you do, but make sure you build in one good, juicy question you want to know the answer to in terms of your impact. Just start there, and your skills with doing research about the impact of your work will grow over time.” Christina Farrell
“Take classes outside of music. This is hard as a music major. But any time you have elective space, think about taking some of those outside of music. Read widely. Pick up books that sound interesting that maybe you wouldn’t have thought were connected. Because you never know—they could be very much related. If you’re at a world-class institution with a lot of resources and invited speakers, go to public talks and see what the conversations are. What are people working on? People are invited to give talks on the cutting edge of research in their disciplines, and that’s a really cool way to see what people are working on and how they’re framing research questions, but also the results of their work. Explore. Stay curious and be open-minded about other interests that might come up for you as you’re as you’re working on your education.” Lauron Kehrer
“I think that indigenous methodologies as a broad field in itself—and methodologies in general—are really important for not just indigenous researchers and artists. I think that they point to finding new ways to make knowledge. So I personally think that all human beings have this amazing ability to create new things. And when we want to create new things, if we do them the same way they’ve always been created, we’re really going to end up with the same outcomes.
“But we have the opportunity in our fields to include ways of making and ways of learning from the communities we come from. It doesn’t matter what community you come from—there’s probably something that your cousin does, your aunt said, that would unlock an amazing potential for a new way to make something. It’s the way my aunts sit down at the table and discuss something. It’s the way they passingly tell me about a ghost story. It speaks to the deep depths of possibilities of cultural knowledge.
“This is not a call to make identity-based work. It’s a call to know that there are other forms of research that aren’t just in books. But I will say that books are important too. Just like in The Interview with an Ant , each book contains so much research by that person. It’s a total cheat code to getting very deep into something just by opening up or listening to a book. I would encourage musicians and artists, when they’re starting their careers, to value ways of making knowledge that aren’t or don’t feel valued in your community, like what your aunts and cousins and grandparents know and how—not what they know, but how they know what they know or how they go about learning what they learn.
“It’s also making time for deep engagement and contextualization in practice. At the start of your career, you have so much more time than you will ever have ever again your entire life. And I am very grateful for those say three or four years I had, where I had nothing to do but make one piece a year because I had no audience, no one gave a crap about me or what I did. And so I was able to commit a year’s worth of research to one 20, 30 minute-thing. And I really encourage people to embrace the time of their lives where no one cares because they will care later and you will care later. ” Suzanne Kite
“It feels almost too trite to say, ‘Be curious,’ but be curious. Allow yourself to say, ‘Oh, why is this like this?’ Then go down a little bit of a rabbit hole. We have this idea of the YouTube rabbit hole as being slothful, that we do it when we’re being lazy. But indulge the YouTube rabbit hole sometimes if it leads you to learning something about a particular artist or style of music or historical period. That really getting lost in those little bits of curiosity is where we find information and make connections that are going to inspire others and give us things to be giddy and excited to talk about.” Robin McGinness
As we wrap up our discussion on research practices, our panelists have shared their diverse experiences engaging with research in different research-creation modalities. Each panelist has underscored the critical role of research as a foundational element in their work, whether it involves understanding the intricacies of musical composition, engaging with audiences, or contributing their knowledge to the scholarly record. They have collectively highlighted the importance of curiosity, diligence, and a willingness to explore the unknown as key drivers of innovative research.
Research is not a one-dimensional activity confined to academic settings; it is a dynamic process that permeates every aspect of a musician-scholar’s practice. It informs interpretations, fuels creativity, and fosters a deeper connection with the material and the audience.
Our experts have also addressed common misconceptions about research, helping us shift our perspective from one of music making to one of research-creation. From debunking the myth that research is separate from artistic practice to highlighting the ways in which research enriches performance, they have offered valuable insights for both novice and seasoned musician-scholars.
Media Attributions
- Music Research concept © Peabody Institute is licensed under a CC BY (Attribution) license
research that includes performative or non-text creative aspects as the result, motivation, or methodology for the research itself (see Chapman and Sawchuck)