People over Publications: A mini-manifesto

Burgess Meredith as Henry Bemis in "Time Enough At Last" (Public Domain)

Well, a three year hiatus is a long time...even for me. It isn't that I haven't had anything to say, but I've been taking a step back to monitor my field for awhile. There's a lot of good stuff happening--some of it online, some of it in print, and some of it in the classroom.

Something I've noticed lately is the privileging of print (publication) over other types of work. I'm not talking about tenure and promotion. I don't mean in regard to the job market. I'm talking about every day musicologists (ha!) and how they measure each other's expertise.

Much of my own research has not been published, but it has provided rich and provocative fodder for inquiry in my teaching and my graduate seminars. I really enjoy discussing these seminars with colleagues and hearing about the seminars they are teaching as well. If I find resources I think might be helpful, I share. If I know someone has previous experience with the topic, I often consult them, believing that multiple sources of input can enrich my own syllabus.  To me, it matters very little how much they have published. What matters more is their willingness to share and participate in professional dialogue. I have colleagues whose publication dossiers might focus on seventeenth-century opera but would also be people I could go to for information on hip-hop or country music. I know this because we have conversations. I listen and I learn from what they know. I don't ask for their credentials. They are invested and interested in the research and that is enough for me.

I feel we've lost some of that old nostalgic quality of the "life of the mind." I was lucky enough to work with a dissertation advisor who could discuss Du Fay, Brahms, and Zappa in the same half hour without ever signposting a change in direction. One of the things that makes musicology so exciting for me is what I DON'T know. And while my youthful fantasies of being a Henry Bemis have now downgraded to "I wish I had more time to read," there is much I'd rather learn from a conversation over beers than a lengthy journal article.

This also means that a good chunk of conference papers I attend are for the person giving the paper. I might have little interest in the topic, but I am interested in the person's interest, and that for me is reason enough to go. I'll admit to having a rather disheartening experience recently where I gave a paper at a national conference for my "subset" of specialization and only one colleague showed up for my paper. I know there are plentiful reasons why people didn't show up, and certainly I've missed many many papers due to conflicts of my own. But when I finally pushed my pride out of the way, I realized that a 20-minute conversation with one interested person would probably be more engaging and fruitful than having two rows of uninterested people sitting at my paper thinking about where they were headed for dinner that night.

So, all of this to say: I will continue to privilege people over publications. And if that keeps me on the outside looking in (to what, I'm not always sure), so be it. If you see me at a conference, sitting at the bar, come tell me what you're up to--even if I'll never read about it in JAMS.