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.”