Originality guides UCLA musicology to notoriety

Howard Ho
Published: Monday, June 23, 2003

When Elizabeth Upton started her job as musicology professor at UCLA, she was not prepared for the initiation process: creating a new general enrollment course. A medievalist, Upton created “Getting Medieval,” a course about modern incarnations of medieval things from Wagner’s operas to Disneyland castles and “The Lord of the Rings.”

“I didn’t know anything about getting a new course approved. It’s a lot of work to get a new course number on the catalog,” Upton said.

But as with all the faculty at the musicology department, Upton was expected to create a new course entirely from scratch rather than take over older courses and dust them off. It’s a tradition that began with what may be the most progressive, inclusive and perhaps notorious musicology department in the country today.

Looking at the course catalog, the range of classes dealing with pop music extends from rock and roll, the Beatles and jazz to electronic dance music and gay and lesbian pop music. Most of these classes were created at UCLA, and some are still not taught anywhere else. While the inclusion of popular art and interdisciplinary approaches had been integrated into English classes, film classes and cultural studies, it wasn’t until the late 1980s that a new group of academics tried to do the same for the ivory tower of music.

“When I was an undergraduate, you could have Mozart or Beethoven,” said musicology professor Robert Fink. “That was your choice. The idea that you would take a class on popular music, there wasn’t one.”

The inclusion of popular music has been part of a new trend in musicology, derogatively called “New Musicology.” This school of thought seeks to interpret musical works as indicative of larger historical and cultural issues. For example, rap music is not simply discussed as having transgressive lyrics, but also as having musically complex rhythms, political overtones and postmodern soundscapes, often involving the manipulation of samples, turntables and stereos.

In fact, UCLA’s course catalog used to look a lot different. UCLA had many musicologists who were specialists in early music (music from the Renaissance and earlier) and regarded their work as mainly editing old texts. Around the mid-1990s, many of the faculty were ready for retirement. The incoming Dean of Humanities, Pauline Yu, (who is now leaving), decided to hire then marginalized professors Susan McClary and Robert Walser, from the University of Minnesota. These professors literally wrote the book on heavy metal music (“Running with the Devil,” the first and only major study of the genre), to completely rebuild the department around a new approach to musicology.

“It was an experiment but it wasn’t a very risky one,” McClary said. “The concentration on gender, queer studies, minority cultures had already become central to English and art departments. Music needed to catch up with that.”

In fact one of the first things McClary did was to create her class, “Music and Gender,” a class still not taught anywhere else. While the topic seems plausible today, McClary doesn’t even remember a mention of women composers during her collegiate training, let alone issues of gender, identity and selfhood. In the class, she connects Madonna to a 12th century nun to help students understand culture.

“It seems to me if you don’t have a sense of how music engages with the cultural issues of your own moment, then you’re not likely to be able to do that with another time when you don’t even know what the issues are,” McClary said. “What I want students to come out of my classes with are the techniques for understanding the music that surrounds them.”

With the recent hiring of Upton, the department now has a specialist in almost every musical, historical time period. Even with this balance, the department still gets most of its fame and notoriety from its popular music department. After the program’s development, applications for graduate degrees went from about five a year to 50 a year, and now many of the graduate students are quickly snatched up after they finish at UCLA to teach at burgeoning popular music programs in other universities.

“Every school needs a popular music person,” said fourth-year musicology graduate student Louis Niebur. “A lot of people are looking for a film music person now and no one’s teaching them. Pretty much everyone who finishes here with a jazz Ph.D. is almost immediately hired because they’re studying with professor Robert Walser who’s a huge name in jazz studies.”

Niebur came to UCLA after he realized his interests lay in a realm too “popular” for most schools.

“I did a masters at Texas in musicology,” Niebur said. “It was a good school, but I wanted to write about television music and they didn’t know how I could do that. They knew nothing about the field.”

But even as recently as last November, at the annual American Musicological Society national conference, UCLA musicologists were described as a group of communists by one lecturer. The department must continue the struggle against intractable colleagues who still fear the postmodern, the transgressive and the popular, but are slowly catching on to UCLA’s definition of what musicology is.

“Now everyone is scurrying to catch up,” McClary said. “Harvard, Princeton, Michigan, they are all trying to find people who can have programs (like ours), but we were first.”