Interview with Abigail Fine, conducted by Annie Liu, Spring 2024

Annie Liu — How did you get into musicology?

Abigail Fine — Well, knowing as I do that many musicologists come in through the performance side of things, my path was a little different. I did play the piano in high school, but I started relatively late, at least for those who specialize in classical music. I started at age 13 or 14, and actually even before that I was interested in music, but I was really into Irish music, so I was playing the penny whistle. Just picture 12-year-old me playing the pennywhistle. So yeah, learning by ear from recordings, and it was a very nerdy time in my life and I still do have all the penny whistles. But I started learning to read music. And at around that age, I just had heard some of my friends playing piano and I got kind of jealous. And I just really wanted lessons. And I’d already started playing by ear. Also very nerdy, I was playing Claude Bolling by ear, which is very awkward. Like, of all things, had some old Claude Bolling CD, and I was very obsessed with it so that was kind of the start of my interest in music. And then I actually started with a jazz teacher but I was too type A to improvise, so I started getting absorbed into classical music instead. But I do also remember some early, like even at age 15, 16, kind of goosebump moments with that repertoire. Why exactly I love that repertoire is a whole other story and not what you’re asking. But it’s kind of interesting to reflect on why we are drawn to or get goosebumps from the music we do. A whole host of reasons, some of which are easy to define and some of which are a mystery. So I also had this other very nerdy side that loved reading and writing and learning. I remember as I was getting into piano lessons. I also was going to the Public Library and going to the music stacks and already in high school pulling down books. I started reading Schumann’s writings and also Hector Berlioz, his letters.

Yeah, 16-year-old me was reading these. I didn’t know what musicology was at that point, of course, but I was just like, oh, this looks interesting. And just finding these kind of eccentric romantic personalities so alluring. And then I had this idea that I was going to make a film at the time. I thought biopics were novel and interesting instead of tired and overdone. I wanted to make this Schumann biopic, where there’s like Floreston and Eusebius, and the character cuts back and forth between the characters and you never know which one’s going to be in which scene. 16-year-old me was very excited about this idea. Did not come to pass, but I went to college and at that time I still really had one foot largely in creative writing and literature. And so I went to college, all excited about majoring in English and being a creative writer. And that was what I wanted to do. And then I started going to these poetry readings and things at this little writer’s house, and for various reasons I just realized it wasn’t my scene. I think there’s still part of me that’s itching to have a more creative output than I do as a scholar, but that scene just wasn’t for me for various reasons, and I just got sucked into my music courses. The thing I remember doing is, and I never have my own students do this anymore, which is a shame, because it’s what got me into it, but we used to go every term we were taking a music course, and we would look at the list of books we needed to buy and go in and it was just a row of Dover scores in every course we took. Sometimes Dover minis. You would just stack up this big stack of Dover scores and bring them into class. And I still have my Dover scores, my minis all marked up, and I remember just getting into this, like nerding out over these scores, you know? And this close listening and circling things and making observations and just like the nuance of the music really enticed me and drew me in, so I just got sucked into that in undergrad. I think that undergrad point of contact is where people just get kind of like really drawn in and like, oh, I wanted to do more of this. And then I did. I tackled some independent study research projects, and that was my first time doing a larger scale research project. I was writing about Peter Maxwell Davies and I was already interested in material culture. I was interested in how many different strange objects he treated his instruments in some of his sort of theatrical works from the 1960s. It’s weird how now my first book is all about materiality. And I was already actually seeing some of those interests bubbling up in undergrad as well.

AL — Speaking of here at University of Oregon, what do you find is sort of special or unique or, you know, alluring about the department here?

AF — What I personally have found very appealing about what we’ve built here, I feel that we have an uncommonly warm and unpretentious culture in musicology that nonetheless holds scholarship to a high level. I mean, people overuse the word rigorous and almost as a boast or a brag. I think we do care about the work that’s being produced, the work on the page from each other and from our students. We want it to be strong work. We want it to be something that someone outside the institution would want to read, you know? We also care about putting our work out there in places where it’s really circulating and, at the same time, I’ve never sensed the puffed-up ego among any of my colleagues and/or our students, you know. So I think it’s possible that this is a West Coast thing, also it’s hard to describe, but I personally have never felt competitive with my colleagues. I feel excited for them when they have accomplished something. I feel supportive of them. I feel they support me and I feel, you know, I hope at least that we have the same culture among our graduate students. You’re all excited for each other when you’re accomplishing things. And it’s not cutthroat. Like everybody’s kind of like neck and neck. I feel like everyone’s so different in what they do. So we’re not all kind of jostling against each other. Yeah, it’s an environment that I really appreciate.

And we do read each other’s work and nerd out over it and send each other drafts of things before they go out and it’s a very stimulating environment intellectually. I just, yeah, I just appreciate the support I’ve had from colleagues and I’m beaming with pride at our students.

AL — What can students do with their degree in musicology?

AF — So I think this is a really tough question. And anybody who makes it sound like a facile question is, you know, out of touch with the state of careers in the arts in the United States. Public and state funding for the arts has dwindled over the years with various sorts of budget cuts. And we’ve seen the effects of that. And, you know, people used to say you could work in a museum with this kind of idealized sense, that there are so many jobs and museums that are all just ripe for the picking if you have a liberal arts degree and I think we all know that even the world of, let’s say the arts or arts administration, things have become hyper specialized now you may need a special certificate to be considered for this or you may need you know chops in certain kinds of softwares to work in museums.

I want to sound realistic, but I think what we’re laying is a foundation, and I can elaborate in a moment on what I think that foundation is, upon which one may need to build additional credentials for highly specialized career avenues in various areas of the arts or sort of public education or public facing educational roles, and one may need additional certifications to be best qualified for those roles because they’re few and far between and there’s competition for them. The foundation that I feel we lay, which I’m very proud of and proud to take part in, it all has to do with critical thinking, and that is a phrase that is used all the time and rarely defined, which is something that I think is, you know, kind of a shame. So if you will humor me and allow me to sort of offer a few passages from what I authored on the website because I did think through it.

What do we mean, though, by critical thinking and what I arrived at is, well, this involves in part the understanding of ethics, the nuanced understanding that certain things are not black and white, and just that alone may sound trite, but to really understand that on the ground is complicated. That’s really what the humanities is about, is richer pictures than just kind of the pixelated picture that comes down to you through publicly available sound bites. And like the way that information is just distilled in these, you know, not always very nuanced ways. Also, the ability to kind of look at sort of a mess of evidence in front of you and pull up above it and say you know there’s something, a pattern here. There’s a theory here that I want to hold that would explain this mess of evidence, or we don’t have a theory yet to explain this, we need something new. We need a new idea that’s going to help make sense of the world around us. These are examples of like, what is critical thinking, like what type of thinking do you learn in a degree? And that type of thinking is so valuable. I mean, it’s part of building thinking humans, you know, like people who can participate as citizens in a thoughtful way. I’m really committed to that mission. And I think if you build just like, a powerful thinker, a sensitive thinker, then you can take the degree in a lot of different directions.

I’m not up in the clouds now and I want to just say that we have seen our graduates find a lot of success in various forms of arts administration jobs, working for festivals, for example, we had one alum who came back and gave a talk and she was working for a while at the Cleveland’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, doing sort of curatorial work and storytelling there. We have a graduate now who’s doing a certification in copy editing and going into more of an editing and publishing route. So we really have seen success in our students in those paths in addition to of course the success in, you know, pursuing academic paths, which is kind of like the natural inclination for, you know, this program. But by no means the only one. And I feel what we offer goes beyond that.

AL — What is your go to coffee or tea order? Maybe you could do one for both categories?

AF — Totally, I feel slightly self-conscious about my answer which is going to sound very bougie, but I love a good quality medium roast. I just need not too dark, not too light, and then I just want an espresso with a little milk in it. But I’m going to also update that answer and say affogato, because that’s actually the most delicious thing in the world. It’s just not my standard order, because that’s a special treat.

I love so many different teas, it’s hard to even narrow it to one. I guess a good quality masala chai.

 

 

Read the longer version of this interview.