URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Fall_2019_Melissa-McCarthy

She pushes students to grapple with the complex narratives underlying music and connect music to disciplines outside of the performing arts.

“When I went to the performance, I was struck with how overwhelmingly earnest it was,” Aaslid says. “Here was this intense, emotional plea for engagement.” She noticed how the poetic elements of the piece draw on sentimentality, which she underscores in her book, Listen In: Poetry as Politics in Jazz. “The piece’s main job is not to impress you or comment on something. Its primary purpose is to move your heart,” she says. “With your heart moved, you may take action.” Her book also includes chapters on the politics of genre, gender and language in jazz, the politics of interactivity and Black Nationalism in the 1960s. The wide-ranging project is one Aaslid describes as fun, challenging, and incredibly satisfying by drawing on music’s intersections with philosophy, gender studies, rhetoric, sociology and beyond. She hopes that her work can cut across the often- rigid boundaries of music studies, where the methods of research are too often determined by the kind of music being studied rather than the kinds of questions the researcher wants to answer. “In both my research and in my teaching, I find myself bouncing into walls: ideological walls, political walls and unintentional restraints that people have placed on interactions with music in their lives,” she says. “Whenever I encounter those, I want to tear them down, because they stop us from having a free and full relationship with music.”

and “When jazz musicians and poets come together often what they make is explicitly moving and inspires a reaction or action,” she says. “Jazz’s encounters with poetry gives us an opportunity to understand jazz better. Often when we are talking about absolute music — music without an external referent — we bump into challenges when we try to describe what the music is actually doing. When we put language to it and watch how it reacts — as through poetry — we can learn more about what jazz signifies.” For example, take artist Samora Pinderhughes who composed a piece in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. The work includes improvised passages, a jazz score and poetry.

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