From the issue dated September 5, 2003
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Lyrical Writing About MusicBy SHARON WALSHMusic makes its impact in a world beyond words. Yet Beth E. Levy is a music
"She's an unusually powerful writer," says Richard Crawford, the dean of American musicologists, who came to know Ms. Levy while she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan School of Music last year. "She has a particular gift for interweaving Herculean research and acute musical insights. So that, if you know the music and you read her, you say, 'Yeah. That's it!' Something you might have known intuitively, she can put into words." Ms. Levy, 31, finds pleasure in choosing the words -- just as a composer weighs the notes and varies the tempo. That satisfaction drew Ms. Levy, a serious musician since childhood, to choose the small and relatively obscure field of historical musicology, where she studies not just the music and musician, but also the economic impetus on the composer, the cultural and political influences, and the audiences and the critics of the time. Most American musicologists make names for themselves by studying European music. (Americans have no Mozart, they may reason.) But, even as an undergraduate at Oberlin College, Ms. Levy was drawn to American music's history. She remembers visiting the Cowboy Hall of Fame as a child and taking an early interest in American Indians. "Everything I discovered when I was looking for American topics seemed interesting to me," she says, "and I thought there were real gaps, real contributions to be made." Part of what Ms. Levy is doing is casting new light on American composers like Charles Wakefield Cadman, Roy Harris, and Aaron Copland and capturing readers with the grace of her writing and the originality of her thinking. "She's writing at a level of sophistication that any European scholar would be grateful to command," says Mr. Crawford. Adds Richard Taruskin, her dissertation adviser at the University of California at Berkeley, "She has an enormous gift for coming up with new ideas ... like using the myth of the American West as the common denominator to study very well-known figures." Her friend and colleague from Michigan, Travis A. Jackson, an ethnomusicologist who will be an associate professor of music at the University of Chicago this fall, calls Ms. Levy one of the most unassuming people he knows. Because of that, he says, her "wicked intellect and sharp sense of humor" often surprise people who have underestimated her. When she presents a paper, she frequently starts with something mildly provocative, and then she builds a case so strong that it sometimes shocks people, he says. But Beth Levy isn't a person who thinks of herself as provocative. And she's low-key even when she talks about a summer she spent as the only nonscientist in a group of tornado-chasers. She describes her passion for her field simply: "I knew pretty early that music history would be a good field for me," Ms. Levy says, "because I really like the reading and the writing. I'm not sure I had the nerves for performing." (She studied both the piano and the violin as a child, helped start a string quartet in high school and now plays the violin with various early-music groups.) "I imagined a life teaching." She certainly had a vision of what academic life was like. Her parents are longtime professors at the University of Oklahoma at Norman. Her father is a professor of American intellectual history, her mother of medieval English literature. She says that colleagues are sometimes surprised to learn that she comes from Oklahoma, as though there were little culture there. But she and her brother -- now a graduate student in music theory at the University of Maryland at College Park -- benefited from and were influenced by the music programs in the public schools in Norman, she says. Musicology is not a field with a plethora of jobs, so it is rare for a newly minted musicologist to receive a number of job offers. After she received her Ph.D. in musicology from Berkeley in 2002, Ms. Levy was offered jobs at the State University of New York at Buffalo and at the University of California at Davis. But she turned both down to take a two-year postdoc at Michigan, where she had a chance to work with Mr. Crawford, who has just retired. Michigan is considered a top center for the study of American music. And Ms. Levy would have been happy to be on the faculty there. But, because of budget cutbacks, the university decided to suspend a search to fill Mr. Crawford's position. She was "struck by how many fewer jobs there were just a year later," she says, and decided to forgo her second year of postdoctoral study for the Davis job. (When Mr. Jackson announced that he, too, was leaving, the dean appealed to the provost and the search was reinstated; the position was recently filled.) "Michigan is the model American program," says Ms. Levy, "and Davis is just building its American program. ... They've always had important composers and scholars here. But there's an extra energy and excitement now. I'm very optimistic about where they're going." Davis's program is attempting to step out of the shadow cast by three music powerhouses in the state: Berkeley, the University of California at Los Angeles, and Stanford. With a new concert hall and four recent hires, the faculty "is exactly what we want," says D. Kern Holoman, a professor of music at Davis and chairman of the search committee that hired Ms. Levy. After Ms. Levy chose to go to Michigan, Mr. Holoman read the work of dozens of young musicologists, but a paper of hers was still the most "unputdownable" of the lot, he says. "She's certainly among the most promising of her class." One of the things she looks forward to at Davis is serving as a mentor to students for more than a semester and teaching them to be active listeners to music. Whether she listens following the score, thinking about the history of the piece and how it must have sounded in a concert hall when first performed, or ruminating on a way to explain it, her reaction is never passive. "Music is not just the sounds for me," she says. For her dissertation, ("Frontier Figures: American Music and the Mythology of the American West, 1895-1945"), which she is now revising into a book, she listened to two classically trained composers and looked for what motivated them to become involved in a completely different kind of music, namely Western, or cowboy, music. "They're not cowboys, why did they do it?" was the question she sought to answer. For Roy Harris, a composer and Oklahoman who grew up in California, the impetus grew out of folk songs, which he said were "mother's milk to me." For Aaron Copland, a New Yorker who couldn't make that claim, the explanation was rooted in Depression-era populism. "It was a very self-conscious response to the audience and socially useful art" for Copland, she says. Mr. Crawford calls the choice of Copland a particularly interesting one, since the composer best known for Appalachian Spring knew from an early age that he would be famous and meticulously kept his papers, diaries, and reviews -- which, along with his genius, have made him an oft-studied figure. But Ms. Levy found an avenue that had not been plumbed. After this book, she would like to write about race in American music, an area she believes has not been studied deeply. At the moment, though, she is listening to different sounds from her new home in Davis, which is near a railroad track. "I'm starting to collect songs about trains for my own amusement," she says. http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 50, Issue 2, Page A10
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education