The tale of my PhD

As of last week, I am the proud recipient of a doctorate in music education from NYU. It was quite a journey! (Isn’t it always?) The official part took me six years, but the whole process really took more like ten years, or twenty, or thirty, depending on how you count. In this post I’ll do my best to tell the story of how I got here. Let’s start at the end, with my defense. Meet my advisor Alex Ruthmann, my distinguished committee members Matthew Thibeault and Charlton McIlwain, and my outside readers Jason Thompson and Nancy Smithner:

You can read my dissertation here, and listen to the mixtape here. 

So here’s the back story. In 2012, I started the Music Technology masters program at NYU. I had spent my twenties playing in a lot of bands, producing electronic music, and doing experimental theater. Then in my early thirties, I worked a series of digital marketing and copywriting jobs that I hated and was terrible at. My wife observed that I would never be happy if I didn’t pursue music again, and she was right. My idea in going to grad school was that I would learn how to write software so I could end up working somewhere like Ableton, making the kinds of tools that I had been enjoying using in my own creative life. (I did end up working for Ableton, but on the education side, not the technical side.)

Halfway through the program, NYU hired Alex Ruthmann, and he quickly became my advisor. For my thesis project, I designed a circular drum machine that evolved into the Groove Pizza. I was much stronger on the learning design aspect than the coding side, so I traded improvisation and production lessons to my friend Chris Jacoby for Max/MSP support. As I was wrapping up, I was offered a couple of adjunct jobs, and I got the message: I should be teaching, not writing code.

After the masters program, I taught classes at NYU and Montclair State University, worked as Alex’s research assistant, and collaborated with the Music Experience Design Lab on various projects, including the aforementioned Groove Pizza. The lab hosted regular education and technology meetups, which connected me to lots of progressive educators, including Martin Urbach. The lab also launched the CORE Music Program, which opened up NYU’s studios and facilities to young hip-hop musicians on the weekends. One of the regulars was an emcee and producer named Brandon Bennett. The program also introduced me to the veteran emcee and hip-hop educator Toni Blackman. Martin, Brandon and Toni would be the focus of my first stage of dissertation research.

It quickly became apparent that if I was going to get anywhere as a music academic, I would need to get a doctorate. I didn’t even consider applying anywhere other than NYU. I wanted to keep working with Alex, and I had made many other close connections there. It took me a couple of years to get approved for a fellowship, but as of 2016, I was on my way. I was going in with less formal music education experience than a doctoral student usually would, but I had already started publishing: Alex had invited me to write a chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Music Education and Technology.

I entered the doctoral program with an idea about designing more technologies for music learning. I was enthusiastic about the ways that computers have radically expanded the possibilities for music learning and creation, especially at the beginner level, and the success of the Groove Pizza validated my enthusiasm. To that end, I started doing learning design coursework. However, the more I dug into the topic, the more I realized that technology was not the main thing keeping schools from embracing creative electronic music production. The real obstacle was culture, specifically, the classical hegemony of music teachers’ own training. So for my second year of coursework I took classes on the sociology of education, the history of the African-American freedom struggle, and a couple of courses each on ethnomusicology and music therapy. 

Somewhere in here, I had applied to teach music technology at the New School. I wasn’t really expecting them to hire me, assuming (correctly) that they would want someone more experienced and with a more avant-garde sensibility. However, the following year, Ivan Raykoff, a member of the music theory faculty was going on sabbatical, and they needed a sub for him. They remembered my application and thought, maybe this guy would be the right fit. I was delighted to be offered the gig; I love music theory but do not love the traditional pedagogical approach, and the New School could not have been a more congenial environment to try doing things my way. Even better, they kept me on after Ivan came back. I loved teaching there, and there was even some conversation about my possibly coming on full-time.

By the end of my coursework, the path was clear: I would do a study of hip-hop educators, seeing how their practice differs from traditional music education, and how they might inform the training of preservice music educators. I planned to do a study of Toni, Martin and Brandon. I had done some informal observation of these folks: attending Toni’s freestyle rap workshops, visiting Martin’s classroom, and leading a hip-hop afterschool program in Harlem with Brandon. I defended my proposal and was in the process of getting IRB approval when the pandemic hit. I had no idea how I was going to observe my participants teaching if no one was doing any teaching, and I was not enthusiastic about pivoting to a study of Zoom pedagogy. It seemed like I was going to have to come up with a new idea. (I got laid off from the New School around this time, along with many other adjuncts there, and they are only just now starting to bounce back from the financial hit of the pandemic.) 

But then I had a stroke of good luck. NYU needed someone to take over the teaching of the Popular Music Practicum course. I proposed that I teach it as a songwriting class with a hip-hop focus. The department decided to split the class: one half would be taught by Dr Kimberly McCord, focused on rock instrument pedagogy, and the other half would be my proposed songwriting workshop. I would draw on what I learned from Toni, Martin and Brandon in my approach to it. I wouldn’t be able to do formal observation of them at work, but I could at least interview them. So my dissertation became a study of the class, its background and my preparation for it. That background included a study of my own hip-hop learning process, which I demonstrated by remixing my interviews with my research participants.

Meanwhile, I wrote a book with Will Kuhn. I had been thinking for a while about writing a resource for teachers of music technology, but I didn’t have enough lesson or project plans – the ones that I use in my classes are too loosely defined and improvisational to be useful for high school teachers, or really anyone other than me. Meanwhile, Will had been pitching a book to Oxford University Press based on his excellent lesson and project plans, but was being told that he didn’t have enough scholarly references or research backing. Fortunately, the references that I had collected for my dissertation literature review were a perfect philosophical and theoretical basis for his project plans. The book came together fast after that. The experience of putting together something so big and complicated and getting it through Oxford’s many rounds of rigorous copyediting were excellent practice for writing a dissertation, too.

Anyway, Kimberly McCord and I taught the Pop Practicum, I took a lot of notes on it, I got my new proposal approved, I wrote it up, and then rewrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it. And that brings us to the present.

And so, now what? I’ll keep adjuncting while I look for a full-time faculty position, ideally in New York City because a) this is where my family is and b) I like it here. I’ll develop my dissertation into a book proposal. I have a bunch of other possible books and articles in the pipeline. I will keep doing professional development sessions for music teachers, and more projects for Ableton. And I will see what other opportunities present themselves.