Linda Burman-Hall–Teaching Statement 2000-01
Professor, Music

In general, my approach to education has been to find balance and connections between diverse topics and pursuits. I have used my 'traditional' assignments to quite different areas of the UCSC music curriculum as opportunities to seek connections and resonance between areas. Most of the teaching I do falls into three broad categories: 1) integrated theory and musicianship skills for pre-majors and majors/minors (Music 13/14/30); 2) survey and applied ensemble courses in ethnomusicology and world music (Music 80A-D/180/203G-H and Music 8/265/Porter 21); and 3) studio instruction in early keyboard instruments.

Music instruction ideally consists of properly situating material in relation to cultural context and student level. In teaching music at the undergraduate and graduate levels, I try to relate course materials to culture and community and also to develop a feeling for the individual student. I quite often find myself referencing history, society, and architecture to explain tonal structures and find that all forms of music benefit from interdisciplinary and multicultural perspectives. On the first day of most courses, I ask my students to complete a self-profile for my use. By considering the various past, present, and future relationships of my students to music instruction, and their career aspirations and possibilities, it becomes easier for me to relate to them as individuals and to discover how best to inspire and motivate their studies. Knowing the trajectories or life-paths of my student--their diverse backgrounds, interests and ambition--helps me identify student readiness to learn and suggests new ways to help students develop their individual aesthetic sensibilities. My goal when teaching in the classroom, and through assignments, is to inspire my students to be curious about sound, to notice how music comes from, hovers above and returns to silence within a culture, and yet encodes a world of meaning. From simple curiosity as to how and why sounds are put together meaningfully, students can build competence and discover their own creativity, leading to confidence that they will succeed in their chosen profession. Whenever I share my own enthusiasms for musical discoveries--my excitement about a performance I am rehearsing, a new sound or source I have found, or a new way of looking at or listening to something familiar--I send the message that a professional life in music can be one of unending discovery.

Knowing that students learn music in different ways, I support questions and discussion in classes, including faculty to student, student to faculty, and student to student. All my classes occasionally break into teams for group exercises and practice. Since students also learn through faculty modelling, I continue to perform early non-western and contemporary music regularly with and for students and have been very active in bringing internationally acclaimed musicians to UCSC to interact with students.

I have found that effective presentation of musical materials may often be accomplished by simultaneously working at various levels--beginning, intermediate and advanced--and focusing on the transformative relationships that bind them all together. Music, it seems, is easy to start yet impossible to finish.

Teaching Western Musicianship and Theory
Due to the relative unavailability of public schools music instruction in recent decades, most students intending a music major or minor must first acquire a secure foundation of practical and theoretic skills (style composition and analysis, dictation, sightsinging, and keyboard harmony). This 'catching up' occurs during the pre-major courses I teach for my department (Music 13/14 ). In both the preparatory courses and the 'boot camp' course which formally begins the major or minor (Music 30), I push students to transcend their limits, with accelerated presentations of harmony writing and lab skills. I encourage students to see writing assignments in the style of Palestrina, Bach, or Mozart as true compositions empowering their aesthetic judgment. I ask them to develop a fluent command of traditional writing and, within the stylistic constraints, to take risks and seek originality as did the composers of the time. For this reason, I play their finished assignments in class and schedule compact presentations of student composition and analysis projects as the culmination of their work in the first year core course (Music 30C).

I try to teach theory and musicianship skills as a focal point that applies to all areas in western and non-western music, including performance, composition, and musicology/ethnomusicology. Emphasis is on developing an 'inner ear' that allows music to be 'heard' when reading a score; dictation, sightsinging, analysis, and prepared musicianship exercises all build this skill.

In courses with so much at stake, it is easy for something to go wrong for individual students. When students do not complete the preparatory course at satisfactory level, they are unlikely to qualify to begin the major course sequence. When students do not complete a quarter of the core course successfully, they must wait until the next year to try again. Helping students to get back on track is one of the most important aspects of teaching such a multi-skilled class. I am very pleased to have been able to help several students who needed to reattempt a course to know how to build their skills in the interim; eventually they have gained confidence by completing the course in good standing.

Because so much of the canon of 'Classical' music studied in music major core courses is unfamiliar to California students who come to us from public education, I became the principal force behind an initiative that established curriculum-related departmental requirements for classical music concert attendance. Through attending concerts on and off campus, students encounter less familiar styles of music that are the basis for style study exercises they undertake in the core curriculum.

In theory core courses, I give written feedback on homework at least weekly, and sometimes daily. Lab midterm scores and final examination scores are presented promptly to students as an important element in the learning process. Since students are committed to a sequence of similar courses, I usually provide written feedback to students well before their official narrative evaluations reach them

Teaching a World of Music
I am fortunate to teach courses in world music quite regularly, at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Within the larger field of Asian music, my focus has been the traditional music cultures of Indonesia, where I engage in annual research. Through travel and fieldwork during my years at UCSC, I have been able to experience physical, economic, historical, anthropological, and spiritual elements of various cultures and to witness and document music in all of the Asian and European cultures I teach in my survey classes (Japan, China, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, Turkey, North Africa, and Western Europe). I find this has given me a much more vivid sense of the relation of music to context. I try to ground my lectures in cultural perceptions that illuminate the music. My aim is to successfully share a sense of 'living other live' with my students, and to this end I require them to make site-visits to whatever non-western performances are available. I also encourage them to immerse themselves in multiple music worlds domestically and abroad, to travel to wherever the music calls them, and to practice applied ethnomusicology by becoming bi-musical.

Thanks to support ten years ago from the Committee on Teaching (COT), every quarter I have taught since then has brought my field research in Bali into the classroom through 'hands-on' courses in Balinese ensemble. The Gamelan Angklung set acquired through COT support is a ritual Hindu-Buddhist ensemble of gong-chimes, drums, and flute for 18 performers, and thus a contrast to the West Javanese (Islamic) tradition taught for 25 years on our campus. Now, a decade later, UCSC Balinese Gamelan Angklung 'Swarasanti' plays an original repertoire of archival transcriptions (mostly my own) and new works commissioned for our ensemble. I believe the large number of students who have repeatedly enrolled in gamelan demonstrate the success of the ensemble, which meets twice as often as other campus gamelan ensembles. With both gamelan traditions represented, our program serves more students than any other outside Indonesia.

For most UCSC students, the experience of playing gamelan contrasts sharply with western popular and classical forms of music such as band or orchestra: the instruments are an indivisible set made by a master gong-smith and thus are not owned individually or taken home for practice; teaching is by rote, and learning is kinesthetic and aural; intricate on- and off-beat parts are rhythmically interlocked to make a larger structure, and thus performers must know how to play other parts in order to place their own; and finally, performances are memorized rather than read and often involve dance and theatre elements. I teach from my fieldwork, then direct the ensemble by musical cues given by hand and stick-drumming.

To enable beginning and intermediate gamelan students to learn outside rehearsals, in 1993-95 I created the GET-IT (Gamelan Experimental Teaching-Interlock Trainer) in collaboration of Peter Elsea and with support from COT. This virtual gamelan device allows a headphone-wearing student to practice an individual part while hearing the compatible interlock.

In order to allow intermediate and advanced students in Balinese and West Javanese gamelans to work directly and regularly with Indonesian master performers and to create new work, I have annually hosted and collaborated with visiting artists funded through the Pacific Rim Research program, Regents' Professorship, or Porter College funds. I have even taught while on leave in order to create continuity for students (F'95).

I believe that intercultural music-making has resonance for lives in both cultures. One example related to my teaching began with my transcription of an interesting ritual piece recorded in an unknown village in Bali during 1941. I taught the piece to my students, where it became a favorite; meanwhile I eventually determined the village of origin through interviews with elder musicians. Three years ago, when a group of my current and former UCSC Gamelan students met in Bali for advanced study, we were thrilled with an invitation to visit Kamasan village to play this and other pieces for (and with) a new generation of musicians, who understand now that their music is valued in America.

Teaching the Past Through the Performance of Early Music
The teaching of European early music is in many ways similar to the instruction of world music. Although we cannot visit by time machine as we do by jet, original notations have been preserved as sketches that point toward how things might have sounded, and we may more likely be able to read and interpret source documents in Latin, Italian, French, German, or English.

Since I have been at UCSC, I have consistently shared my professional early keyboard work in harpsichord, organ, and fortepiano performance practice with graduate and undergraduate students. This is usually by individual instruction, which (by contrast with other UC campuses) must be voluntarily added to my duties in order to be available to students. Because the performer of early music must reconstruct performance practices and especially improvisational practice of various times and places, early music instruction is actually more complex than instruction in the 19th and 20th century instrumental repertoire. Knowing how important the knowledge of historical technique and musical rhetoric are to gaining some insight into the thought of the Renaissance, Baroque, or Classic period, I have always made time to mentor student keyboardists; each quarter this year, I have had four such students.

I believe that an educator's responsibility does not stop at the campus gate. As Artistic Director of Santa Cruz Baroque Festival, a not-for-profit producing and presenting organization, I have shared a sense of historical and cultural context with the audience through several years of pre-concert talks. In order to allow advanced UCSC ensembles such as Chamber Singers and Taki Nan Latin American Ensemble to collaborate with professionals, I have annually created opportunities for students to present work to the community through Baroque Festival concerts. Several of these projects have resulted in CD releases. I have helped Baroque Festival to build its outreach program to local schools Grades 5-12 and to Cabrillo and West Valley Colleges. At my suggestion, the Baroque Festival has also taken the unusual step of opening its concert series to UCSC music students, who pay only a $1 fee for ticket printing and processing.

Teaching-Related Service to UCSC
My commitment to teaching has also been expressed in curricular development and administrative tasks. Several years ago, with the concurrence of the entire music faculty, I wrote the successful proposal for the current Music Graduate Program (M.A.), which integrates scholarship and performance and allows faculty research to be shared with advanced students, who in turn are mentored as student teachers (TAs). For the past five years, a portion of my committee service has also been devoted to the support of teaching excellence on campus through my service to Arts Division CAP, which promotes and rewards teaching excellence in the non-academic arts staff.

During the current academic year, I have served as the Music Department's representative and disciplinary mentor for ArtsBridge. I have supervised 16 student teaching interns regionally in K-12 classrooms, including especially placement to the (currently underachieving) UCSC Partnership Schools. I am strongly committed to this program since it supports public school arts teachers and their students by providing high quality student interns. I note that these interns are discovering teaching as a career option and that some are now hoping to complete a teaching credential after graduation. In addition to site visits to provide feedback on teaching and meetings with their host teachers, I found and mentored one talented middle school student composer who completed my Music 14 musicianship-theory course. Most recently, I addressed regional educators in a UCSC-sponsored Symposium event to describe the ArtsBridge program; in June of this year, it will be my pleasure to host an open showing of K-12 ArtsBridge Music projects at UCSC Recital Hall.