From the Desk of Aaron Lohmeyer
November 10, 2022: International Summer Institute for Reggae Studies
I recently had a chance to sit down with Scott Currie, director of the International Summer Institute for Reggae Studies at the University of Minnesota. This program offers a weeklong course of study in Reggae history, culture, and performance geared for educators. CEUs are offered as is graduate credit. The program registration fee is $200. Teachers at the Institute are internationally recognized artists and scholars.
Aaron Lohmeyer
VP Mid-Secondary Classroom
Below is a transcript of a few highlights. As you’ll see, what started out as a conversation about the institute really lead to some interesting thoughts about teaching any kind of music.
Lohmeyer: Thanks for making time to talk. With this interview, I hope to invite music teachers to think about secondary general music courses beyond music appreciation. Of course, a lot to the students who may not be in band, orchestra, or choir still love music and would love to learn how to make music. I think your course makes an interesting proposal for MN educators. Secondly, I’m hoping to connect music teachers with training options for curriculum expansion since what may work for the other 80% may not have been a part of their teacher prep program.
Currie: Thanks, for the opportunity. I think it’s always great to connect with educators who are trying to give teachers the tools they need to diversify and decolonize their practice. I think there is a lot of time brow beating, saying “Do this, do that” but never really saying, “Here, maybe this will help.”
Lohmeyer: So you did this a few years ago before Covid, tell me about that program when it ran in 2019.
Currie: One of the reasons why I knew I needed to do this again was because of the phenomenal growth I saw and the feedback I got from the students. The artists saw it too…you know at the festival, Third World—one of the most important reggae groups from the 70s, 80s and 90s– heard them play and invited some of them up on stage with them. I’d like to take credit for that, but Third World also did two days of workshops with them and leading up to that, there were two days of workshops with Minnesota’s International Reggae All-Stars and the first day was a Nyabinghi drum workshop by Douglas Ewart. So there was just this really rich, immersive environment.
…when word got out about this first American Institute for Reggae, actually the Jamaican minister of culture found out and she came in 2019.
Lohmeyer: Wow. that’s amazing. So how did you get into reggae?
Currie: I came up like everybody else in a public school system playing in a jazz band. I also was a punk rock musician in my teenage years and that had exposed me to reggae because almost from the beginning of punk music, reggae was interwoven as this sort of revolutionary counterpart to punk. The bands that I liked were all playing reggae; every one of these bands had at least one reggae tune which sent me back to The Harder They Come, Jimmy Cliff and Bob Marley. And so reggae seemed like something that every competent musician on the punk rock scene could do. At the same time, in the public school, I was getting your basic big band jazz…I was also motivated to take private lessons so I learned some of the basics of modern jazz and improvisation.
Lohmeyer: So is the Reggae Institute the kind of thing where educators would come and develop first as reggae musicians and then imagine how the pedagogy would look in their own classroom?
Currie: That’s not entirely incorrect, but we really did start around the Jamaican Music Education Forum organized by my colleague, Akosua Addo. The idea really is to work with both students and educators. I think Adrian Davis was also very central to the conception of the workshop. So, you know, in the mornings we’ll have interactive seminars with Jamaican artists and scholars talking about the music and looking into the cultural and musical issues involved in studying it and bringing it into the classroom while also having plenty of time to explore the ensemble side of it.
Lohmeyer: You know, even as I use the word “musicianship” I realized how loaded that term has become. As if the only time that I’m developing as a musician is when I have an instrument in my hands and I’m working on my chops. Of course, understanding the social and political context…this is musicianship too. Sounds like this is a very global view of musicianship…where it’s not just about the notes, but it’s also about what the notes mean to people.
Currie: Well yeah, as a card-carrying ethnomusicologist, I guess that’s my stock and trade. But you know, we need to make sure that as people come in with different skills and knowledge bases we can prepare them to teach through the modalities that they are best suited to pursue this. It’s immersive enough that you’ll get something out of everything that we are offering. We also got a lot of community participation due to the community engagement work of Keitha Hamann. I think a lot of people who may not have otherwise associated with the University of Minnesota found a community to connect with through this workshop.
Lohmeyer: Yeah, that’s great. One of the things I often try to get across to my students is that, while you may not know it just from looking, your students are all surprisingly diverse. The first time I heard of the UM music education partnership with Jamaica and the reggae institute, I though…hmm, well this is different. But you make the point, the community is there…is here. I think our problem in music education though is that when you just do one thing, you only know one community. But as soon as you open up to a new thing, you find new communities.
Currie: Well, yeah and that’s the idea of a university too. You should just be open to discovering new worlds of experience. In that way, I’ve just been lucky here at the U of M to get enough funding to bring culture bearers into the classroom. Yeah, just when you start looking, you start to find amazing talents. I mean, it turned out we had an amazing powwow singer working over in the philosophy department working on a doctorate in linguistics.
Lohmeyer: Wow!
Currie: I mean one of the great things about being in the Twin Cities really is just how many cities there really are here. Minnesota has become a heck of a lot more diverse in just the 15 years that I’ve been here. And, you know, if we can bring that into the classroom, how rich is that? And how important is that for communities who are currently marginalized to recognize the levels of attainment and knowledge that exist in this diversity? Why don’t we do more of this…I mean, let’s just do this all the time.
Lohmeyer: Yeah, like with culturally responsive pedagogy, it’s about tapping into community resources. But to find these human resources, you may need to open doors…open new doors. I know several incredible, musically talented faculty members here in other departments that just never made it in music through academia because they didn’t fit the small box that university music studies asked them to squeeze into. That’s one thing that excites me about what you are doing—that it opens the “institution” up to other musical identities. When I hear of shrinking programs and people asking “I don’t know where the music students are going” they really should ask “I don’t know where the band students are going” or “I don’t know where the choir students are going.” The “music students” have always been there…just now they might be headed into art or shop or something else. They are still musicians, just a different kind than what we’re asking them to be.
Currie: Right—they are musicians, just not who we recruit to be music students….and recognize.
Lohmeyer: That’s right.
Currie: Yeah, and all those students who vote with their feet, walking away from the school of music to get a chemistry degree instead (actually, I can’t even plead innocent here, because my first major was physics).
Lohmeyer: Ha! Yeah, mine was religion.
Currie: When I was at NYU at the time, I was in the jazz band, but you know if you weren’t doing all classical, you weren’t getting a degree. If there was a jazz band, it was a side thing and it wasn’t considered very important. But still, we see programs replicating that same model—you do that stuff on the side, but when you come here you need to play “seriously.” Then we wonder where are all the students.
Lohmeyer: Right.
Currie: I mean we put out a class on guitar and people flood us. We have to hire more faculty just to cover the class…but that would be at the expense of other less popular but more valued courses. And so we are in a liminal position.
Lohmeyer: Oh yeah, when I taught guitar at the high school level it started as 4 sections just to meet demand the first year. As those beginners became intermediates, the job became 7 periods of guitar in just one year. Other schools offering guitar in Florida have two full time guitar teachers just to meet student demand.
Currie: Yep.
Lohmeyer: I know you say some of these things with awareness of the multiple discourses within which words like “seriously” or “on the side” or even “music” are understood. I think of “traditional vs. non-traditional” and how educators might wield the word “traditional” as a way to secure what it is that they are doing, yet outside of music education “traditional” is the very folk-based music which music education calls “non-traditional.” In fact, what we music educators call “non-traditional” is what the majority of the world calls “traditional!”
Currie: (Laughter)
Lohmeyer: So back to reggae, how does reggae get at a musical understanding that can be applied to multiple musical discourses? I think of how jazz has really become a more presentational type of thing, taking it away from its more participatory roots. Where is reggae in providing a new kind of access point for musical study?
Currie: Well yeah, the price of entry, really is negotiable. The bar is not set so high that you have to prepare and prepare for years in advance. I mean, the simplest way to participate is just to play a simple beat on a nyabinghi drum or a ‘heart beat’ pattern. But, you know, simple isn’t really easy. It just allows you to contribute in whatever way to you can to a larger whole. You know the classroom is a really valuable place, but sometimes this system where we are always looking at who is a better musician or what is a proper musical training…why don’t we just take people where they are and help them get where they want? (pause) And, you know, reggae has that as kind of its basic founding ethos.
Lohmeyer: Yeah, as a jazz musician and educator, I’m still a little uneasy about how the university has changed the music.
Currie: What is funny is that the university began to embrace jazz just as every jazz club in the US was shutting down.
Lohmeyer: (Laughter)
Currie: But you know, you can learn how to play reggae and get a gig tomorrow. Reggae is still going on. It’s still out there. People are still listening, dancing…there’s still a living, social cultural space for it.
Lohmeyer: Before we go, I did want to ask what does a reggae classroom look like? What are some things you’ve learned about music teaching through leading a reggae classroom?
Currie: Well I think we touched on this when talking about decolonizing the music classroom. I feel like the most important thing that transforms my practice is making sure everyone sings and everyone drums. It’s a rule. If we start from a place of this kind of participation, then I can get the students in the right frame of mind. It tends to level out all these status distinctions and different levels of training and so-called musicianship. The majority will come with greater or lesser experience with one or the other. This serves to create another kind of foundation and that, I think, is the most transformative part. Let’s get together, let’s get outside our cultural comfort zone.
Lohmeyer: I love that. Thank you for that—that’s a great approach that I could try to work on implementing in all my classrooms. Thank you also for taking the time to talk about your work. I’m really excited about this program available for music educators and I look forward to seeing some of the impacts of this work across the state.
(….there’s more, but that last line from Scott really gives a great summary of the conversation!)
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