Interview with Zachary Wallmark, conducted by Annie Liu, Spring 2024

 

Annie Liu — How did you get into musicology?

Zach Wallmark — I think my story is actually really typical in the discipline of musicology. I was a performer and got bit by the bug of musicmaking in middle and high school as a bass player. I played bassoon too. Then I played sousaphone in marching band, so multiple instruments in different ways. I was like one of those very stereotypical American Pie-style 1990s band kids: band, symphony, jazz band, pep and, every musical opportunity imaginable, and I went to college to do that, to play jazz. I was trained to do that, but kind of discovered early on, and I think, when I talked about this with other musicologists, this is a storyline that is so average. It’s so normal, loving music from the perspective of a performer, but then also being a nerd who loves to read and write and get into deep, philosophical conversations about music and think about music and realizing at some point that there might be a way in the world to combine a sort of love of letters and knowledge and simply being in school. Like, I kind of want to be a professional student. School’s fun.

For me, the kind of moment of ignition came, actually, here at the University of Oregon. I was a masters student, with my advisor, Anne McLucas, who was the Dean of the School of Music and Dance. Anne had very recently, when I came in in 2005, decided to return to the faculty. Anne McLucas was a polymath thinker who specialized in folk music and orally transmitted sort of folk ways of different song transmission paths from Scotland and the British Isles to Appalachia and to the Americas. But she did things in these iconoclastic ways. This is a woman who got her PhD from Harvard in the 60s and thought at that time, oh, I need to write a computer program in FORTRAN, to actually sort of use epidemiological tools to see different song version histories and develop maps of this using computation. Her book is a book about folk culture, but then she had these little brain interludes in her book, where there’s a bunch of stuff about the cultural context, then it’s getting to the brain science of how you learn music and memorize music.

And I think to me that model was really powerful because it showed the broadest possible vision of what musicology can be. It wasn’t just limited to a specific time period or style or set of methods. It was a kind of musicology that embraced everything. That was really a significant part of getting me into the discipline. And then when I was at UCLA as a PhD student, that was an opportunity to actually kind of put some meat on the bones of my science-curious attitude earlier and learn proper methods and immerse myself in that world.

So those are the various strains that sort of pushed me into the discipline.

AL — What would you say is special about studying musicology at the University of Oregon?

ZW — I think three things stand out to me. The first is that we have a philosophy of advising that works very well. It’s kind of a group or collaborative model of advising. The principle here is that students have access to and will have close contact with all the faculty members, and so it creates this sort of collaborative as opposed to competitive advising model where you can really have access to multiple people. This in some ways is exhibited in this new practice we’ve had the last two years now, of end-of-the-year two-on-one faculty meetings with students. Two faculty members, maybe your advisor, but maybe not, meet with each student, but the conversation reflects the whole area talking about each student’s progress. So, we’re very collaborative in how we think about each student holistically and we talk about each student collectively about how we can best serve the student. We’re also really collaborative with music theory, which I think is a real asset. And I’ve seen enough programs to know that it’s not necessarily a given that people will advise with an open, generous heart and actually sort of think of it in terms of an advising community as opposed to the kind of possessive idea about your advisee that you are shaping individually.

I think another element is the breadth of training we provide here. I think all of us are committed to helping students to read and think generously across topics, across specializations. I think we’re all committed to helping students to nurture a very well-rounded orientation towards the field to be scholars and teachers who can thrive in a variety of different settings and who aren’t sort of limited to just their research specialty. For example you can see the success of this model in various job placements of people at the MA level, who eventually go on to get academic jobs and at the PhD level, people who are equipped to jump into a new position on day one and have some facility in popular music, in ethnomusicology, in all the major eras in Western music history, and so that breadth, I think, is really important. But there’s also space for depth. I think our specializations, and this is about the whole university, are a good way to put precision on training that is meant to be sort of broad.

The third element I’m proud of here is the community. I think it’s close knit. It’s nonpretentious. It’s collaborative rather than competitive. Again, I think being the Pacific Northwest, we’ve absorbed a lot of just regional culture on these counts. The THEME group, which we have every week, is an important way to bring people together and to create that sense of community that’s open and relaxed.

AL — What can students do with their musicology degree? This could be at the Masters or PhD level or also the BA.

ZW — I mean the obvious path, but one that we really need to lead the conversation with, is to teach and to research music very broadly writ. We really view ourselves as prepping MA students who see themselves doing this professionally to be maximally well situated, to access some of the top PhD programs in the country and in the world. And for PhD students, we see this as a space of really narrowing in on, having a very tight research focus, but a very broad teaching background and portfolio, so this dual approach of breadth in teaching and depth in individual research projects in order to equip them to go out and be competitive in the academic space.

More generally, musicology as a liberal arts, as a humanistic tradition, I think there are a number of skills that are applicable across a large number of different types of career trajectories. To sort of boil down some key skills that I think you can get with the degree in musicology, there’s a lot of collaboration that goes on, a lot of working with others, really refining your communication abilities, both in writing and in public, speaking in oral address, of course, research skills. Critical research skills, leadership skills, critical thinking and engagement more generally, and these can have very important uses in the public sector and nonprofit work in the private sector, in entrepreneurial endeavors. People with musicology degrees have positions in cultural organizations. They have positions in the tech sector, particularly tech sort of facing onto sound and music. So I think that the general liberal arts orientation situates people well for a variety of different paths.

AL — What’s your go to coffee or tea or beverage of choice?

ZW — Earl Grey tea hot. Like Captain Picard from Star Trek.

 

 

Read the longer version of this interview.