Category Archives: Academia and/or Musicology

Employment Counselling and Jobs vs. Career

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My self-employment business advisor is still optimistic that http://ourmus.net (a collaborative community for music history & culture) can move forward and be successful in making me some income.  However, music scholars probably think that the way they do things (peer review, committees, etc.) actually works properly and that something also directed towards the public would not be sufficiently academic.  Meanwhile, the music-interested public would probably find the site too academic.  A “happy medium” may not be possible.  My self-employment coordinator (different from my advisor) got me an unrelated appointment with an Employment Ontario job developer.  However, that person has not really been of any use to me, probably because my background (in academia, music, and IT) doesn’t fit the types of jobs and employers she encounters.

I’m also now enrolled in an individualized job-search program.  The employment counsellor for that (actually a friend from my past!) and I concluded that I should do my academic work, music-making, and IT/website activities on the side (“evenings and weekends”).  For employment, I should use my local network outside of those areas to find some other type of work.  The areas of work I have in mind could be in administrative assistance (at a business, social service agency, church, or school), arts admin (at a museum, library, or performance organization), retail (such as technology, musical instrument, and/or other music-related sales), or publishing (editing, web content, etc.).  I have some people advising me in those employment directions, as well.

Meanwhile, I’m now lined up to do a book proposal for a “listener guide” about Rush’s music.  So, hopefully that project will move ahead.  The editors involved are both fans of Rush’s music, so that helps!  In addition, four out of six of my conference paper proposals have been accepted this spring, although I’ve had to bail from two of the four for lack of money.  The two I’m doing are about songs and mini-musicals in The Simpsons (in less than two weeks) and on the employment situation for popular music university courses (six weeks later).  I also still have possible conference papers coming up in July and October.

Musicology & Ethnomusicology Job Outcomes

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I recently undertook research using the websites of 146 graduate programs in musicology and ethnomusicology: 104 in the U.S., 13 in Canada, 16 in the UK, and 13 elsewhere.  Of the relevant university departments, 37 provide lists of their current graduate students, from several to as many as 58.  My investigation resulted in a list of 822 M.A. and Ph.D. students enrolled in those 37 programs in early 2013, thus averaging just over 22 per program.  About two-thirds of those students are in Ph.D. programs and many (though not all) of the M.A. students will continue into Ph.D. work, but how many academic music graduate students (i.e., a lot more than those 822) are likely to get jobs in academia?

The average time in graduate school (for people who complete it) is probably six or seven years, taking into account not only terminal master’s degrees but also those Ph.D. candidates who take longer.  The Musicology & Ethnomusicology Job Wiki goes back a little over six years (for jobs starting between 2007 and 2013), which is pretty much an identical amount of time.  So, a reasonable estimate of how many graduate students are likely to end up with jobs in the field (tenure-track, visiting/one-year, 2-3 year, or postdoctoral fellowship) can be ascertained by calculating the ratio of each institution’s recent academic-job placement outcome to its current graduate-student population.  Most academic hires have not yet been announced for the upcoming school year, so I factored in 2013 as a third of a year (thus, 6.33 years in total), based on the information available to date.

The following are the eleven most successful departments of the 37, based on the ratio of academic-job placements from 2007-13 relative to each institution’s number of enrolled graduate students in early 2013:

  1. 217% – New York U.
  2. 120% – The U. of Texas at Austin
  3. 100% – Columbia U.
  4. 65% – UCLA (Musicology) – for all Ph.D. graduates from 1991 to 2013, the rate is 38% (or 42% lower)
  5. 62% – Harvard U.
  6. 55% – Cornell U.
  7. 50% – UC Santa Barbara
  8. 44% – U. of Illinois
  9. 40% – UC Davis
  10. 38% – Stanford U.
  11. 38% – U. of Michigan

The placement rates for academic jobs starting in the past 6-7 years of the next seventeen programs (relative to their early-2013 graduate student populations) range from 31% down to 2%.  Those are:

  1. 31% – U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
  2. 29% – Eastman School of Music, U. of Rochester
  3. 25% – U. of Chicago
  4. 24% – U. of Virginia
  5. 22% – U. of Nottingham
  6. 21% – Princeton U.
  7. 20% – Brandeis U.
  8. 20% – U. of Pittsburgh
  9. 17% – U. of Colorado
  10. 15% – U. of North Texas
  11. 14% – Boston U.
  12. 13% – Brown U.
  13. 12% – UCLA (Ethnomusicology)
  14. 10% – Indiana U.
  15. 10% – U. of Oxford
  16. 2% – King’s College, London
  17. 2% – U. of Cambridge

In addition, the final nine programs do not appear to have been at all successful in placing people in academic positions.  Overall, relative to the 822 current graduate students in those 37 musicology and ethnomusicology programs (in early 2013), the average subsequent placement out of those programs into academic positions from 2007 to early 2013 (6.33 years) is:

  • 22.6% – in tenure-track positions
  • 6.7% in temporary (occasionally renewable) positions or postdoctoral fellowships

for a total of 29.3%.  Using UCLA Musicology’s statistic of 42% lower in academic outcomes in early 2013 for 23 years’ worth of Ph.D.s (compared to the outcomes for the six or seven years from 2007-13 and thus excluding earlier temporary positions) suggests a more “career length” success rate into academic careers for these 37 departments of only 17%.

Of the people newly hired between 2007 and 2013, only a tiny fraction were outliers:  hired at senior levels (thus having been graduate students well before 2007) or appearing two or three times (because of multiple temporary positions and/or postdoctoral fellowships).  In addition, some people were hired before completing their Ph.D.s (“ABD” – “All But Dissertation”), and a few searches did not succeed (i.e., they failed, were cancelled, or were extended).  However, those last two factors are virtually irrelevant for purposes of this study, because an ABD generally has to complete his or her dissertation with a year or two of landing a job, and no-one ends up being hired for a job that no longer exists.

Most musicology and/or ethnomusicology university programs (including a number of major, large ones) do not include the type of graduate-student information used in this study.  It is likely, though (given 146 programs), that there are currently around four times as many graduate students in those fields than the 822 (in 37 programs) accounted for here:  so, more than 3,200.  About 500 people must enter and exit graduate programs in musicology and ethnomusicology every year.  However, there was only an average of 75 new academic jobs per year in those fields between 2007 to 2012—and that includes non-tenure-track positions, temporary teaching positions, and postdoctoral fellowships.

Musicology and ethnomusicology need to cut back substantially on their number of graduate students, possibly reduce their number of graduate programs (and certainly refrain from adding new ones), and, especially, make a concerted effort to address what other types of work could be done by their many colleagues who do not end up in academic positions.  As an example of how poorly this is done, the American Musicological Society’s official career-advice document (revised in 2011) is 195 pages long but includes only a few, scant pages about non-academic careers (borrowed from other disciplines, decades out of date, and almost completely useless).

Academic music societies do not include information in their directories pertaining to the student-status and/or variable- (including non-) career situations of their members—supposedly for “privacy” reasons, but actually because they need to believe that everything already works correctly and that almost everyone ends up in a tenure-track position.  They also don’t have websites that allow their membership communities to contribute directly.  These fields need to do much, much better.

More about Ph.D. Career Outcomes

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Re: The Atlantic on Ph.D. Professorial Outcomes

So, in 2011 it was 39% of humanities’ Ph.D.s getting immediate, full-time, tenure-track positions, was it?! That seems really high to me. The 1999 study that’s also discussed in the article has, for English and Political Science 10-14 years after Ph.D. completion: 60% tenured and 5-6% tenure-track (for a total of 65-66%). The article’s main point, though, is that the longer-term result is going to be somewhat worse for recent Ph.Ds into the future (i.e., from 2011 on).

MY point is that it’s always been much worse in musicology, but no-one (unbelievably) has ever actually tracked the relevant information. So, I’ve started on this issue as a bit of a side-project. As an example, the outcome for UCLA’s Department of Musicology is 32% tenure-track or tenured (probably around 38%, if one were to include full-time adjunct instructors)—but that is for 21 years’ worth of Ph.D.s (1991-2011). Fully a quarter of those degrees were completed in the four years from 2008 to 2011. Supply and demand, people!

Ph.D. Job Outcomes in STEM vs. Humanities

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Re: The Atlantic‘s article on recent STEM Ph.D.s

You think this—immediate Ph.D. outcomes (in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) of 37% getting jobs, 28% receiving postdoctoral fellowships, and 35% having nothing—is bad?! The outcomes for people right out of completing Ph.D.s in the humanities is around 10% getting jobs related to the field (including 3% non-tenure-track and 3% part-time), 5% on postdocs, 20% in other jobs (part- or full-time and unrelated to the field), and 65% having nothing. The science people are complaining about postdocs now being necessary for more than a year or two. They should try to imagine a bunch of fields where there almost aren’t any!

It takes a long time for things to sort themselves out in certain areas of academia—many years, in fact, for a group of humanities Ph.D.s to approach the immediate outcomes for a group of STEM Ph.D.s. For example, my research on one particular department of musicology shows that for two decades’ worth of Ph.D.s (1991-2011), in the 2012-13 school year 32% of them are in tenure-track or tenured positions, 18% are lecturers or adjunct instructors (many part-time) or visiting assistant professors, 11% are performers/studio-instructors/conductors, 4% work in libraries or as university admin people, 4% have post-docs, 3% work as IT folks in music software or instructional design, and 1% each work as a freelance political journalist, a visual artist (painter), a legal secretary, an airport retail manager, and a dog trainer. More tellingly (i.e., in our age of pervasive social networking), nearly one quarter (24%) of those Ph.D.s are pretty much “off the radar.”

Nerd-Sourcing

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I’m going to consolidate some of the open-source materials on http://www.openculture.com/category/music into my own site at http://OurMus.Net.  The range of music at Open Culture is narrow (a lot of punk and blues, for example), but at least this way I can “nerd-source” some of the things that are already out there on YouTube and elsewhere.  I’m going to do the same thing with music-related blogs.

This kind of collaborative and open-source work is at the heart of Web 2.0, as explained by Tapscott and Williams in their 2006 book Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything. They point out that: “If a small, underperforming company in one of the world’s oldest industries [mining] can achieve greatness by opening its doors to external input and innovation, what would happen if more organizations followed the same strategy?  Couldn’t just about any social or economic challenge be solved with a critical mass of self-organized contributors seeking an answer to the problem?” (2008 edition, pp. 268-69).  They could easily be talking about the pseudo-scientific peer reviews, closed loops, sub-disciplinary silos, and hidden-away trailer groves of academia, and music academia is easily one of its worst culprits.

As the authors of Wikinomics also suggest, new, upstart, start-up, “non-legacy” organizations “can experiment for very little cost and at very little risk on the Web, and in ways that incumbents can’t.” (p. 301).  However, they are point out that: “Self-organized projects … marshal the efforts of thousands of dispersed individuals, sometimes in miraculous ways.  Loose, voluntary communities of producers can self-organize to do just about anything: design goods or services, create knowledge, assemble physical things, or simply produce dynamic, shared experiences.  But don’t overlook the fact that these communities operate according to well-defined norms and have internal structures and processes to guide the group’s activities” (pp. 295-96). 

In their followup book, Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World (2010), Tapscott and Williams indicate that: “Collaborative communities not only transcend the boundaries of time and space, they can reach across the usual disciplinary and organizational silos that inhibit cooperation, learning, and progress” (p. 19). Also, in their chapter on “Rethinking the University,” they paraphrase Brown and Adler’s 2008 EDUCAUSE Review article by saying that: “[O]ur understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions” (p. 142).

In Music History & Culture, it’s time to move on to something that should actually prove to be of great benefit to millions of people:  a free, online, open, shared, and collaborative community that generates “public musicology” simply by being all of those things.

A Digital End-Run around Musicology

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I’ve been struggling for quite some time as to how to proceed with a combination of music scholarship and information technology. I have a Ph.D. and work experience in musicology (including research and courses taught on popular music and film & TV music), but I also have a Certificate and work experience in software development (including a web database project for the American Musicological Society).

My first attempt at a Digital Public Music History & Culture, the Music Discussion Network (MDN), would have resulted in a member-based community open to the public to post links to pieces of music, fill in relevant information fields, and participate in discussions about that music. It would have been paid for through annual fees of $40 per member (a cart mechanism was incorporated into the site), and I also experimented with on-site ad placements (i.e., about music, but it never worked very well). The first incarnation of MDN, however, never made it past its beta-testing stage in the summer of 2011.

My second attempt, the Music Discussion Network mark II (MDN2, now at http://music-scholars.net/mdn), was inspired by the Khan Academy (instructional materials for high-school students in math, science, etc., at http://khanacademy.org) and its humanities sub-site Smarthistory (an art history web-book mostly used by university students, at http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org). The Khan Academy is free, public, and funded by multi-million-dollar educational-foundation support from the Gates Foundation, Google, and so on. It has delivered 225 million lessons to people all over the world (including discussions, etc.), and even Smarthistory (which was originally developed at other institutions) has had 5 million visits. For MDN2, in late 2011 and early 2012 I made eleven music instructional videos of about 10-15 minutes, but each of those took about 20-25 hours create. Without institutional affiliation (i.e., unemployed), it seemed extremely unlikely that I would be able to (1) build a full system without getting other scholars to collaborate on it with me or (2) monetize my efforts, such as by making its materials available for purchase by students enrolled in specific courses at colleges and universities.

My third attempt, the Music Scholars Network (MuSNet, http://music-scholars.net), tried to combine MDN and MDN2, but according to a member-contributed subscription model geared specifically towards music academics, including adjunct instructors and graduate students. The site thus included job postings, calls for papers, teaching materials (such as my instructional videos from MDN2), conference information, research activities, and so on, and discussions possible for all posted items. MuSNet had a substantial portion of its materials available to the public, but only its members would be allowed to add or discuss things. It offered a 1-2 month free trial, then a modest membership fee of $30 per year (incorporated via PayPal). A web survey suggested that some music scholars would be willing to pay a small amount for such a thing, but it was never clear that this could become a viable business that would grow beyond more than a few hundred members. Very few music scholars have the time or energy to participate in such a thing and it is also not how they expect to do things, so it actually makes much more sense to focus instead on building something useful for interested members from within the vastly larger public of music aficionados.

MuSNet2 will focus once again on instructional materials, but it will be free, public, and with discussion capabilities available to any registered member. It will retain the name “Music Scholars Network,” but with the significant change in emphasis that anyone who studies music is a “music scholar.” The site will initially be built by me, including at least a few new instructional videos each month, but it will also be “collaborative” in the sense of including links to many existing music instructional videos already made publicly available by others but also fully researched and tested by me. I will thus endeavour to have the site become similar in scope to the Khan Academy’s Smarthistory web-book within about six months and with a large-scale, public, promotional undertaking through YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. This renewed focus would potentially reach hundred of thousands (or even millions) of people, as opposed to a few hundred music academics. The site would then become part of—and paid for through—an existing system of educational materials, such as the Khan Academy (free and public) or a college or university that offers online arts and humanities courses for money (increasingly the case in the UK) or Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs, which are free and typically have thousands of students for each course). Once MuSNet2 is part of a larger system, it could then also begin to include contributions by specialists covering additional areas of music history & culture. That is what Smarthistory was able to do to expand its art-history offerings once it became part of the Khan Academy.

The Music Scholars Network, the Public, etc.

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I created and developed the Music Scholars Network (MuSNet) to enable a professional, interdisciplinary, member-contributed community.  Of the respondents to my October 2012 Music Scholars Web Survey, 69% felt that the conferences, journals, and websites of music academic societies are not always efficient enough.  In fact, 62% of them said they would be willing to pay between $10 and $50 per year for a membership in a network that allowed them to post, tag, find, share, and discuss such things as conference information, calls for papers, teaching materials, job postings, and research.

Most music academic societies, however, have ignored or refused my requests to distribute an email announcement inviting people to join MuSNet.  Getting the word out and encouraging people to add things to the website (even through free trial memberships) are thus turning out to be much more difficult than I had imagined.  Tenure-track academics (even people I consider to be friends and/or close colleagues) and academic societies (even ones to which I belong and/or for which I have worked) are not used to being second-guessed by so-called “independent scholars.”  I suppose it is also possible, though, that they are all just too busy.

Amazingly, members cannot directly add things to the websites of music academic societies.  Everything is channelled through executive directors, webmasters, moderators, and various sub-committees on specific topics, issues, etc.  The American Musicological Society’s (AMS’s) plan for “public musicology” (a vague and far too patronizing plan) is likely to take years to unfold, and it will undoubtedly prove to be highly unsatisfactory.  Another difficulty is that music academia is plagued by the problem of “silos” that consistently separate musicologists from ethnomusicologists and music theorists, academics from composers and performers, classical “snobs” from jazz and popular music “believers,” and so on.  It is not at all a healthy situation!

Over the next several decades, the various MBAs who now run most universities (and have been hired at a rate ten times that of tenured academics) will find ways to shut down or otherwise mess with numerous music departments.  They will reasonably ask:  Is music a part of the humanities, or is it a part of the fine and performing arts?  It will make no difference that music is obviously both of those things.  Many more music scholars than currently do so will end up having to do their work in places other than university music departments, but, in fact, a lot of us already do.

With MuSNet, I am developing an “alternative academic” venue for music scholars of various sorts to accomplish things efficiently, quickly, and affordably.  However, I am also very keen on the idea that the majority of materials posted and discussed by the site’s members should be made available to the public, used directly by students, consulted by journalists and music enthusiasts, and so on.  I hope to administer and maintain the network on a part-time basis, I’ve been enrolled in a self-employment (small business) program since September, and part of the goal of the business is to get myself off of social assistance.

The people who would probably be able to make the best use of MuSNet are current Ph.D. students and adjunct (a.k.a. sessional) instructors, including the many who work only part-time, as I often did from 2001 to 2008.  In 2012, more than 70% of US university courses are being taught by non-permanent faculty.  However, the American Musicological Society, for example, will not release the names and email addresses of its graduate student members, even to me: a long-time AMS member who worked at its office in 2010 to redevelop the successful new version of its Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology web index (which is, in fact, the AMS website’s most popular function).  Even worse, the AMS does not know how many of its members have non-permanent teaching positions.  It does not track its members’ “career stages” (as it calls such information), because it wants to believe that every Ph.D. eventually lands in a tenure-track position.  In what I take to be a related issue, there was some discussion at the AMS in 2010 about having a member-portfolio system, but the society wasn’t willing to commit to the cost of the 200 hours (e.g. $5000) I felt that it would take to develop it.

My research (more to come later) shows that two-thirds of music academic Ph.D.s since the early 1990s have NOT landed in tenure-track positions.  Even those among the fortunate one-third have referred to the past two or three decades as having produced a “lost generation,” but some of us still manage (despite being “lost” and even with the odds stacked against us) to publish books and articles, present conferences papers, teach part-time, and so on.  Music academia (unlike history, English, and other larger fields) has not prepared the majority of its members for the reality of needing to establish other types of career paths.  For example, the American Musicological Society’s official “alternative academic” career advice comprises only a few scant pages, which are lifted almost entirely from publications addressing non-music fields and are, quite frankly, almost completely useless.  MuSNet, on the other hand, provides an innovative, dynamic, networking context precisely so we can (among other things) help ourselves navigate some of these difficulties.

American Musicological Society – Lost Gen

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Hey, American Musicological Society, maybe there wouldn’t have been such a “lost generation” of musicologists (1980-2010) if you hadn’t:
  1. substantially over-supplied Ph.D.s for the available academic positions,
  2. almost entirely ignored the need for alternative-academic career paths,
  3. frequently jammed your heels in on an ideological high-horse regarding many types of music that actually matter, 
  4. alienated tens of thousands of music students and colleagues,
  5. forced virtually all content through endless committees and rules, and poorly-implemented uses of technology,
  6. made it virtually impossible for individuals without academic jobs, and/or the thousands of dollars necessary to present at conferences, to do anything useful.

Proposed Website Update of the American Musicological Society

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According to its August 2012 newsletter, the American Musicological Society (AMS) wants to update and “bifurcate” its website (http://ams-net.org) to have:

  1. a members-only part, with much of the site’s current content, but possibly also a new, wiki-like, member-contributed database of primary and secondary sources
  2. a non-specialist part, which supposedly might include:
  • a digest of user-friendly articles on topics of general interest (one on Sousa marches apparently being the best example the society has)
  • commentaries on current topics related to music (e.g., film scores)
  • strategically-planned short videos about individuals
  • info on potential speakers
  • links to writings intended for a general audience
  • lectures on great composers/themes in music history

It sounds way too patronizing and predetermined to me. Who’s to say which things should definitely be “members only,” who’s a “non-specialist,” what’s “user-friendly” or of “general interest,” which current topics get to have public “commentaries” and are merely “related to music” (presumably as opposed to “being” music), which members get to release video profiles and/or potential-speaker status, which things are obviously intended to be for a “general audience,” and which composers and themes get to count as “great.” It’s quite the potential train wreck, and why should the issues for the AMS website be any different from what would be considered by the proposed AMS Standing Committee on Internet Technology and/or from what would be accomplished by the idea of having a new tagline and logo for the society?

Too little. Too late. Not nearly good enough.

See instead:

The best way for musicology to engage with the public is just to:

  1. put things up 
  2. let individual members decide if something is public vs. private (and let them change their minds later)
  3. let anyone use the public items (but giving proper credit)
  4. let members discuss every type of content

The content types include:

  1. research
  2. teaching materials
  3. pieces of music
  4. interviews
  5. film/TV/media items
  6. job postings
  7. paper calls
  8. events 
  9. general discussion

    Digital Humanities and/or Music

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    The 2012 Canadian Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences took place at Waterloo, Ontario’s Wilfrid Laurier University and University of Waterloo from May 26 to June 3.  In the past, I would have exclusively attended music society sessions, but this time about two-thirds of what I attended had to do with the digital humanities.  I have very good reasons for that!

    For my ongoing attempts to find the correct path forward for http://music-discussion.net (free/open/public vs. partially monetized vs. closed/publisher-based, etc.), the Society for Digital Humanities (SDH) does quite useful work.  So, from May 28-29 I attended various SDH papers and events (including a paper on MOOCs: massive open online courses; and several papers on copyright issues), and on June 1 I mostly attended inter-society, panel-like symposiums about public knowledge and open-access.  The June 1 meetings largely involved new methodologies and infrastructure concepts being explored for research projects, scholarly societies and journals, academic publishing, and (to a lesser extent) teaching.

    On June 1 and 3, I attended some sessions of the Canadian University Music Society (CUMS), especially ones involving film music, Canadian music, and jazz (and even papers involving Canadian jazz film music), plus a symposium on the future of music in the academy.  Music is still trying to break down traditional music-department silos, such as achieving a balance among such things as performance, theory, and history; classical, popular, jazz, and world music; majors and minors; and core requirements, electives, and general education courses.  However, it is my impression that it would be at least as useful to break down the silos separating music itself from the wider humanities, such as history, art history, and English.

    Although the theme of the Congress was “Crossroads: Scholarship for an Uncertain World,” it is rather telling that I (developing an independent project and currently without an institutional home) was the only person in evidence both at SDH and CUMS.  So, for 2013’s Congress at the University of Victoria, I will propose a music-related joint session between SDH and CUMS, and I may also participate in UVic’s annual summer digital humanities workshop.  A leader in the field is Ray Siemens, who is a professor at UVic and also an old undergrad friend of mine.  He and his wife Lynne (also an old friend) introduced me to a lot of people, and I look forward to building a greater level of understanding and collaboration between the digital humanities and music–especially music history and culture involving a wide spectrum of 20th-century music.