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      Past Students Say Professor of Rock ’n’ Roll Sexually Harassed Them

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      Six former University of Michigan students have filed legal papers accusing a former lecturer of sexually harassing them and the school of not doing enough to protect them.During 16 years teaching at the University of Michigan, Bruce Conforth stocked his lectures with tales from a life filled with boldfaced names: He had rubbed elbows with Bob Dylan, played music alongside B.B. King, apprenticed for the abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning and befriended the poet Allen Ginsberg.Students clamored to enroll in his courses on blues music and the American counterculture, later raving about how he had changed their lives.A musician, scholar and founding curator of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Mr. Conforth was a riveting lecturer who, in his trademark black vest and jeans, could discuss everything from Buddhism to psychedelics, and who, in 2012, was chosen teacher of the year by students.“There was almost a celebrity-like aura around him,” said Amelia Brown, who took a Conforth class called “Beatniks, Hippies and Punks” in 2016. “It wasn’t a normal class. He would go on these long tangents about life and spirituality.”But there was a dark side to Mr. Conforth, according to Ms. Brown and other women who said the teacher used his charisma and, sometimes, Svengali-like manipulation to sexually harass his students.Six of the former Michigan students have filed court papers saying they plan to sue the school, asserting it failed to protect them from sexual harassment.  Erin Kirkland for The New York TimesIn 2008, one recent graduate complained to the university that Mr. Conforth, a lecturer in the American Culture Department, had propositioned her when she was a student. The university put him on formal notice but quietly resolved the complaint. Two more women came forward, though, in 2016, to report that Mr. Conforth had worked to engage them in sexual relationships when they were his students, and, in the midst of the university’s investigation, he agreed to quietly leave his faculty position.Now six former Michigan undergraduates — the three women who previously complained and three others — have filed court papers announcing their intention to sue him and the university, asserting he engaged in a litany of sexual misconduct and the school failed to protect them.“He should have been fired,” said Isabelle Brourman, one of the women. “But they allowed him to thrive. They allowed him to win awards.”Ms. Brourman says, according to the court papers, that Mr. Conforth pressured her into a series of sexual encounters, some of them in his campus office, and later, after she had graduated, raped her in his Ann Arbor apartment.A second former student, Ms. Brown, said she was pressured into a sexual encounter with Mr. Conforth after he told her he had feelings for her and pursued her for several weeks. A third woman said he aggressively kissed her. The other plaintiffs say Mr. Conforth propositioned them to have sexual relationships, at times sending them sexually-charged messages or emails and persisting even after they said no. One woman said he gave her a raccoon penis, suggesting it was a talisman.Mr. Conforth declined to discuss the accusations. “I’ve tried to move on with my life,” he said in a brief phone conversation. “This is a past issue.”The university said it handled the 2008 complaint against Mr. Conforth appropriately and set firm restrictions on his behavior. When the subsequent complaints came in, it said it took swift action to investigate and that Mr. Conforth would have faced dismissal proceedings if he hadn’t agreed to retire in early 2017.“You will note in the separation agreement that the university took immediate and lasting action to assure that Mr. Conforth would not be in any further contact with U-M students, even after his employment ended,” a university spokesman said.Sexual misconduct allegations at universities across the country have sparked calls for policies that hold faculty and student offenders accountable. Last year, Michigan fired David Daniels, an opera star and voice professor, after he and his husband were charged with sexually assaulting a singer.Also last year, the university reached a $9.25 million settlement with women who accused Martin Philbert, then the school’s provost, of sexual harassment.The university said it is constantly working to improve its sexual misconduct policies in a statement that cited a number of changes it has made in recent years.Mr. Conforth arrived at Michigan in 2001 with a doctorate in ethnomusicology from Indiana University and a résumé that included his work as the founding curator with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, which he left in 1993.Since leaving Michigan, Mr. Conforth, 70, has co-written an award-winning biography of the blues singer and guitarist Robert Johnson and helped narrate a Netflix documentary about the musician.While at Michigan, Mr. Conforth was so popular that students chose him as the winner of the “Golden Apple” teaching award in 2012.But four years earlier, Katherine McMahan, a recent university graduate, had told the school about a disturbing incident the previous fall. Ms. McMahan, then 22, said she had attended a blues concert connected to Mr. Conforth’s course and, at a bar after the concert, she said he cornered her outside the bathroom, put his hand around her waist, pulled her closer to him and asked her to come home with him to sleep over. She said she declined but that he persisted until she pushed him away. (Ms. McMahan is a New York Times employee who works outside the newsroom.)Katherine McMahan, left, and Isabelle Brourman, both accuse their former teacher, Bruce Conforth, of sexual misconduct.Kholood Eid for The New York TimesMs. McMahan later received an email from a Michigan official that said the university was taking steps that “it feels are likely to deter future behavior of this nature towards students.” University records, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, show that after McMahan’s complaint, the school had Mr. Conforth sign a “Last Chance” agreement, which stipulated requirements he would need to fulfill to avoid termination.Other former students recount similar experiences, though they did not report them to the university. Cassie McQuater said that in 2007, when she was 20, Mr. Conforth, who was not her teacher and whom she had met only briefly, began sending her emails, declaring his love. In one, she said, he included an erotic drawing of a man and a woman with her name at the bottom. When she eventually agreed to get dinner with him, he asked her to return home with him; she declined.Lauren Lambert, who said she plans to join the intended lawsuit, said that starting in 2011, while she was his student and afterward, Mr. Conforth sent her sexually charged messages, saying he had fantasies about her.Two women said that as part of the effort to engage with them sexually, Mr. Conforth had employed the ruse of suggesting he was a member of the so-called “Order of the Illuminati,” a secret society whose mysteries were popularized in Dan Brown’s novel “Angels & Demons.” The women, Ms. Brourman and her friend, Maya Crosman, said they believed he was responsible for emails they received, purportedly from Illuminati leadership, that recommended they engage in relationships with Mr. Conforth, whom the emails called the “Chosen One.”Ms. Crosman kept a copy of one of the emails — sent from an email address designed to be anonymous — in which a person who identified themselves as Grandmaster Setis recommends she return the “intensely profound love” that Mr. Conforth had for her.The women said they thought Mr. Conforth had the potential to be a kind of spiritual and artistic mentor, but then things grew strange. In legal papers filed in a Michigan court, Ms. Brourman said Mr. Conforth invited them to an arboretum on campus where he engaged in a mysterious ritual that involved cutting off pieces of their hair and giving Ms. Brourman a series of objects, including the raccoon penis, seeds and some kind of medallion. She was warned to keep them with her, or there would be “repercussions,” the court papers said.Both women said they received what appeared to be homemade horoscopes in which it was predicted they were romantically compatible with Mr. Conforth.Ms. Crosman said Mr. Conforth inundated her with messages online, declaring his love. One included a Pablo Neruda poem that said, “I crave your mouth, your voice, your hair.” At the end of the semester, she said he forcibly kissed her and stuck his tongue in her mouth during a visit to his office.The two women said they feared reporting their encounters to the university at the time.“We were trying to protect ourselves in ways where we didn’t have to insult him, we didn’t have to fight him,” Ms. Crosman said.Maya Crosman, left, and Cassie McQuater, said that Mr. Conforth inundated them with messages, declaring his love. Ms. Crosman said he aggressively kissed her.Joyce Kim for The New York TimesThe court papers say Brourman felt intimidated by the strange emails she received, including ones that directed her to “service” Mr. Conforth. In 2014, she said they had a sexual encounter in his office on campus. After that encounter, Ms. Brourman and Mr. Conforth met regularly for “spiritual lessons” that required sex beforehand, the papers said. Ms. Brourman said in an interview that at the time, she was confused and thought she might have feelings for Mr. Conforth, but in retrospect, she said she recognizes that she was being manipulated.In fall 2017, after she had graduated, Ms. Brourman said in court papers that Mr. Conforth raped her at his apartment in Ann Arbor. She did not report it, she said, because she feared retaliation, but in February filed a complaint with the police.The two women whose complaints played a role in Mr. Conforth’s departure from Michigan approached the university after learning about each other’s accounts. Shaina Mahler had been 22 in 2014 when she said Mr. Conforth, her favorite teacher, began sending her messages on Facebook. She was flattered at first, but then the messages escalated into expressions of how attracted he was to her.When Ms. Mahler told him that she was starting to feel “confused and anxious” about his messages, Mr. Conforth apologized and said they could be friends, writing, “Please please don’t ruin my life here.” But a few days later, Mr. Conforth sent her more sexually charged messages, saying he wanted to “kiss” and “touch” her, according to court papers.Ms. Mahler let it slide until two years later, when she spoke with Ms. Brown, who recounted a nearly identical experience of being pursued by Mr. Conforth. Ms. Brown, then 21, told him several times his advances were “inappropriate,” according to notes taken by a Title IX coordinator who interviewed her. But one day in his office, when he insisted they hug, they ended up kissing too, she said.That semester, their interactions escalated into a sexual encounter in his office, and Ms. Brown told the coordinator that, at first, she believed it was consensual. She acknowledged having feelings for Mr. Conforth but told the coordinator that she quickly became anxious and conflicted after their sexual encounter. She soon recognized, she said, that she had been manipulated, especially after learning from a friend — another student in his class at the time — that Mr. Conforth had left a note for her saying that he found her attractive.Ms. Brown and Ms. Mahler reported their interactions with Mr. Conforth to the university at the end of 2016 and he retired shortly thereafter.The university said its policy is to share the school’s investigative findings with complainants and that it could not comment on individual cases. But both of the women said that the university did not alert them to the outcome of its review until last year, when Ms. Mahler said she checked in after hearing complaints from other women.“I let it go for a while,” she said, “but I always wondered.”Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. More

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      When Boston Ruled the Music World

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      Three recent recordings conjure the mid-20th-century moment when the city was a center of innovative composition.When I moved to Massachusetts in the mid-1970s to start a doctorate at Boston University, there was a specific professor I wanted to study with: the formidable pianist Leonard Shure.But Shure was hardly the only renowned pedagogue in Boston. The city had at that point long been a hub of academic music, with distinguished programs at Harvard, Brandeis and Boston universities, the New England Conservatory, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Until I arrived, though, I didn’t realize what a center the Boston area was for contemporary music; from afar, the city had seemed to me too staid and traditional for that. But in its own buttoned-up New England way, it was a modernist hotbed. Each of those institutions was like a little fief, with eminent composers on the faculty. Each maintained active student ensembles, including many devoted exclusively to new music.If you wanted to be on the front lines of the battle between severe “uptown” music and rebellious “downtown” postmodernism, you headed to New York. If you were drawn to mavericks and intrigued by non-Western cultures, especially Asian music, you probably found your way to Los Angeles or San Francisco.But if you wanted a classic education, studying with a true master composer — and at that time, almost all the major university composers were white men — you went to Boston. But the music that emerged there in those decades has faded in favor of work from other American cities.Not entirely, however. Keeping that legacy alive is part of the mission of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, and its record label BMOP/sound. The ensemble champions modern and new music from all over. But according to its founder and artistic director, Gil Rose, 40 or 45 percent of its recordings have been of works by Boston-area composers.Schuller in the late 1970s. His overlooked operatic collaboration with John Updike, “The Fisherman and His Wife,” has been recorded the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.Fletcher DrakeSeveral recent releases have brought me back to my first years in the city, when composers at those various academic institutions loomed large. Three recordings are especially exciting: Gunther Schuller’s overlooked opera “The Fisherman and His Wife” and albums of orchestral works by Leon Kirchner and Harold Shapero.Schuller, who died in 2015 at 89, once described himself as a “high school dropout without a single earned degree.” Technically that was true. But he was a protean musician who in his late teens won the principal horn position at the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and then, two years later, moved on to the Metropolitan Opera, where he held the same post until 1959. Yet, he also played and recorded in jazz groups with the likes of Miles Davis.When I moved to Boston, Schuller was in the final years of his transformative tenure as president of the New England Conservatory. There he had established the first degree-granting jazz program at a major American conservatory — bringing in the pianist Ran Blake to chair it as well as hiring giants to teach, including Jaki Byard and George Russell.Anticipating by decades creative practices that are commonplace today, he had coined the term “third wave” to describe music that drew from both classical and jazz genres. Schuller, who as a composer was drawn to 12-tone idioms, though not in the strictest sense, also appointed the brilliant modernist Donald Martino to lead the composition faculty. He had all the bases covered. Schuller also taught for two decades at the Tanglewood Music Center, serving as artistic director for 15 of those years, until 1984.For all his formidable skills and vision as a composer, Schuller may have been more consequential as a teacher, mentor, conductor and a tireless (sometimes shrill) agitator on behalf of contemporary music and living composers than as a writer of music himself. That perception has long seemed unfair, but it persists. Though fine pieces from his large catalog have been gaining attention, “The Fisherman and His Wife” has languished.It was commissioned as a children’s opera by the Junior League of Boston, and first performed in 1970 by Sarah Caldwell’s Opera Company of Boston — though Caldwell had another composer in mind for the project when she found herself working with the imposing Schuller.The 65-minute opera, based on a familiar story by the Grimm brothers, boasts a libretto by none other than John Updike. As the story unfolds, a lowly fisherman makes repeated trips back to the restless sea to summon a magical fish he has caught and released — the fish is actually an enchanted prince — and to ask for the granting of yet another of his wife’s increasingly grandiose wishes. Schuller inventively, yet subtly, organized the score like a theme and variations. Most boldly, he wrote whole stretches of the score in his trademark modernist language — steeped in, but not beholden to, the 12-tone approach, with some jazz chords folded in.A 12-tone opera for children?Yet Schuller was on to something. The story is full of darkness, strangeness, magic, evocations of a threatening sea and cloudy skies, bitter confrontations between the wife and husband. Why not convey it through flinty, atonal music? The voice lines are written with skill to make the words come through clearly. Updike introduced the character of a cat that both meowed and talked, a charming role that Schuller assigned to a high soprano. The orchestration, for a smaller ensemble, is alive with myriad sonorities and captivating colors.Though released last year, the BMOP/sound recording was made in 2015 in collaboration with Odyssey Opera, founded by Rose, following a semi-staged concert performance. The commanding mezzo-soprano Sondra Kelly as the wife, the plaintive tenor Steven Goldstein as the fisherman and the sturdy baritone David Kravitz as the magic fish are excellent — and Rose draws glittering, swirling, mysterious playing from the orchestra. I could be wrong, but with a vivid staging, I think an audience of children would respond well to it.Schuller, an accomplished, exacting conductor, wrote a comprehensive book about conducting. Across the river in Cambridge, the respected composer and Harvard professor Leon Kirchner also had a following as a conductor back then, though he was not the most efficient technician. He was, however, a skilled pianist and a probing musician who understood how pieces were supposed to go.Leon Kirchner, a composer and conductor based at Harvard, in 1982.John GoodmanIn 1978, with the support of a dean at Harvard, Kirchner founded the Harvard Chamber Orchestra, a professional ensemble of freelance players organized purely so that Kirchner could conduct free, routinely packed concerts. With those dedicated players, he led scores like Debussy’s “La Mer” and Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony as if he had written them. A remarkable 1984 account of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, with Peter Serkin as soloist, was issued recently on a Verdant World Records release, and it’s just as exhilarating and profound as I remembered.As a composer, Kirchner was powerfully influenced by his teacher, Arnold Schoenberg. Like Schuller and others of their generation, Kirchner adopted the aesthetic and approach of 12-tone music but with freedom and flair, unbound by strict rules. I do remember him being narrow-minded about composers who stuck essentially to tonal harmonic languages — let alone to Minimalism, which he could not abide.But I’ve always admired the depth, imagination and engrossing complexity of his music. Those qualities abound in five orchestral pieces on a riveting BMOC/sound recording from 2018 — particularly the 11-minute “Music for Orchestra,” from 1969. It’s a transfixing score that feels subdued in a lying-in-wait way, as if at any moment pensive stretches of lyricism could break out. And sometimes do, through cascades of skittish riffs and teeming bursts.Harold Shapero, born in Lynn, Mass., in 1920, may have been the most precociously gifted American composer of his generation, which included his friend Leonard Bernstein. As a student at Tanglewood, Shapero deeply impressed Aaron Copland. He earned the attention of his idol, Stravinsky, when that composer came as a guest to Harvard, where Shapero was a student.Harold Shapero, born in Lynn, Mass., in 1920, may have been the most precociously gifted American composer of his generation.Gordon Parks/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty ImagesShapero set about adapting Stravinsky’s Neo-Classical style, giving it a jolt of American spunk and unfettered intricacy. From 1940 to 1950, he produced a breakthrough series of ambitious works, including his daunting 45-minute Symphony for Classical Orchestra, composed in 1947. Bernstein adored the piece and led the premiere in 1948 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He recorded it in 1953 on a single hectic day with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. Then the work disappeared until André Previn discovered it and led a triumphant performance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 1986, and later recorded it. You could make a case for the piece as one of the great American symphonies.The BMOC/sound album includes Shapero’s Serenade for String Orchestra from 1945, a 35-minute, five-movement score that vividly demonstrates how Shapero, while writing in a Neo-Classical idiom, was attempting to make essentially tonal music modern and challenging. The first movement is an engrossing jangle of counterpoint, yet somehow transparent. The Menuetto is like a diatonic retort to Schoenberg’s 12-tone minuets. The slow movement is weighty and searching, yet harmonically tart and suffused with tension. The finale is frenetic, pointillist and wonderfully jumpy.In 1950, Shapero helped start the music program of the newly founded Brandeis. That department soon became the unofficial headquarters of the “Boston School” of composers, as it was called, which included Irving Fine (who died in 1962, at 47) and Arthur Berger. All three began as Stravinsky-influenced Neo-Classicists. But over time, Fine and Berger slowly adopted their own brands of the 12-tone writing that was taking hold in universities, for better or worse, as the de facto language of modernism. Shapero, who died in 2013, explored the technique but never went along. He composed less and less, until he had a renewed burst of creativity running Brandeis’s electronic music studio.But he was a great mentor to countless student composers. And his life offered a lesson, a kind of warning: Stick to your guns; don’t be intimidated; write the music you want to write. They were lessons eagerly learned in the explosion of creativity happening in Boston. More

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      Is the Music Over at Mills College?

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      A hotbed of experimental sound for nearly a century, this school in Oakland, Calif., is preparing to close its doors.Even the concert hall at Mills College is different.Looming at the back of the stage is a huge, bright mural of a forest opening onto a deep blue lake. The ceiling is painted in geometric patterns and vivid colors. Frescos of Gregorian chant scores flank the stage.We are not in sedate, monochromatic Carnegie Hall. No, Littlefield Concert Hall at Mills, in Oakland, Calif., is a vibrant, even eccentric place, where it is clear from the surroundings that music outside the mainstream is not simply tolerated, but celebrated.“There was a real atmosphere of comfort and support for whatever it is that you wanted to do,” the composer David Rosenboom, who led the music program at Mills in the 1980s, said in an interview.Now that program and the electronics-focused Center for Contemporary Music, together among the most distinguished havens for experimental work in America over the past century, are facing possible closure. On March 17 the college, founded in 1852, announced that ongoing financial problems, exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, would mean the end of its history as a degree-granting institution made up of an undergraduate women’s college and several coeducational graduate programs.Pending approval by its board of trustees, the school’s final degrees are likely to be conferred in 2023. The statement announcing the proposed closure alluded to plans for a “Mills Institute” on the 135-acre campus, but the focus of such an institute — and whether it would include the arts — is unclear.For composers and musicians, the potential loss of the Mills program has come as a startling blow, even if the college’s finances have been shaky for years. “I long feared this might be the worst-case scenario, but I am still devastated by the news,” said the harpist and composer Zeena Parkins, who teaches there.The pianist Dave Brubeck, who studied at Mills, performing there in 1988.Ariel Thomas, via Mills CollegeIt has been an astonishing run. The school’s faculty over the years has been practically an index of maverick artists, including Darius Milhaud, at Mills for three decades beginning during World War II; Luciano Berio, who came at Milhaud’s invitation; Lou Harrison, who built an American version of the Indonesian gamelan percussion orchestra; the “deep listening” pioneer Pauline Oliveros; Robert Ashley, an innovator in opera; Terry Riley, a progenitor of Minimalism; the influential composer and improviser Anthony Braxton; James Fei, a saxophonist and clarinetist who works with electronic sounds; and Maggi Payne, a longtime director of the Center for Contemporary Music, Mills’s laboratory for electronic work since the 1960s, when Oliveros was its first leader.Among the alumni are Dave Brubeck, Steve Reich, John Bischoff, William Winant and Laetitia Sonami; several former students ended up returning to teach after graduating.“What Mills College had was unique,” said Riley, who taught there from 1971 to 1981. “I have never in my travels encountered another institution like it.”Mills’s defining feature was its sense of community. Despite all the famous names involved, the overriding impression was that music is not created by lone geniuses, but by people working together.Fred Frith, whose career has included avant-garde rock and idiosyncratic improvisations and who retired from Mills in 2018 after many years there, said, “Music is essentially a collaborative activity, and if I’m going to teach improvisation or composition without real hands-on involvement, then we’re all going to miss out on something.”In the first half of the 20th century, when composers like John Cage became associated with the school, Mills developed a reputation for nonconformity. Performances ran the gamut from traditional instruments to obscure electronics to vacuum cleaners, clock coils and other found objects. Riley recounted an early performance of “In C,” his open-ended classic from 1964, at which the audience was dancing in the aisles. Laetitia Sonami recalled taking singing lessons with the master Indian vocalist Pandit Pran Nath, guru to Riley and others.At that time, the program was practically public access. “In the 1970s, Mills was still like a community group,” said the composer Chris Brown, a former director of the Center for Contemporary Music. “It still had the idea that community members could come and use the studios.”Robert Ashley, a guiding presence from 1969 to 1981, helped foster that spirit. Though the radically open sensibility faded as the years went by, Mills maintained a commitment to access through frequent performances in and around Oakland, many of them free.The composer Robert Ashley in 1970. Through the ’70s Ashley was a guiding presence at Mills.Tom F. Walters, via Mills College“One of the amazing things about Mills is the rich musical community that it creates through the entire Bay Area,” said the composer Sarah Davachi, who graduated in 2012.As the personal computer revolution was taking hold in the nearby Silicon Valley, experiments with home-brew electronics and microcomputers, like those of David Behrman, were common at Mills, where technology had long been at home through the Center for Contemporary Music. Serendipitous moments abounded: As a student in the ’70s, John Bischoff remembers running into David Tudor, renowned as a collaborator with John Cage, in the hallway and being asked to assist with recording Tudor’s work “Microphone.” William Winant said he found an original instrument built by the composer and inveterate inventor Harry Partch hidden under the stage in the concert hall.“It felt like utopia: an environment where students are encouraged, and given the support they need, to pursue any and all ideas that came to mind, free from the stifling pressures of capitalism,” said Seth Horvitz, an electronic composer who records under the name Rrose.Students built their own instruments and sound installations, exhilarated by the freedom to do what they wanted. “We commandeered every square inch of the music studio and surrounding areas,” said the composer Ben Bracken, “putting up rogue installations in the courtyards, hallways and hidden rooms, inviting friends to perform in inflatable bubbles, screening Kenneth Anger films in the amphitheater with live studio accompaniments, Moog studio late nights that bled into morning.”“What Mills College had was unique,” said Terry Riley, who taught there from 1971 to 1981. “I have never in my travels encountered another institution like it.”Diane Gilkerson, via Mills CollegeBut pressures on institutions of higher education around the country, which have intensified in recent decades, did not spare Mills. In 2017, as a cost-cutting measure, it began laying off some tenured faculty. The celebrated composer and multi-instrumentalist Roscoe Mitchell learned his contract was not being renewed — news that was met with an outcry from the experimental music community. (Mitchell’s contract was eventually extended, but he chose to retire.) In 2019, the college sold a rare copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio at auction for just under $10 million, and a Mozart manuscript for an undisclosed sum. But the losses continued — and then came the pandemic.Many musicians said they were concerned about the fate of Mills’s archives. Maggi Payne said it includes over 2,000 tapes of performances, lectures and interviews, along with scores, letters and synthesizers — and hundreds of percussion instruments owned by Lou Harrison.David Bernstein, the current chair of the music department, said the archives would be protected. “We have been working on this project for quite some time,” he said. “And yes, there are instruments at Mills of significant historical importance. We are very concerned about their fate. Most of all, they should not be stored but used by students interested in exploring new sounds and different musical cultures. And they should also be played by virtuoso performers, as they are now.”But if Mills’s future is unclear, Roscoe Mitchell said, its legacy is not. It will live on “much longer than you and I,” he said.“It’s history,” Mitchell said. “It’s not going to go away.” More

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      What Is March Madness Without the Bands?

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      Neither the men’s nor women’s N.C.A.A. basketball tournaments will allow bands this year — and canned music just can’t compare.INDIANAPOLIS — In a normal year, when a player sinks a buzzer-beating shot in a N.C.A.A. tournament game, tens of thousands of fans erupt in celebration.This year will prove to be a bit quieter, even if the venue is larger.The men’s Final Four tournament will take place at Lucas Oil Stadium, a 70,000-seat arena home to the N.F.L.’s Indianapolis Colts. The crowd will be capped at 25 percent of capacity, with fans masked and seated in socially distanced pods of two, four or six. And the area reserved for each 29-member band will be empty.“I understand the N.C.A.A’s decision,” Jake Tedeschi, 22, a senior tenor saxophone player in the No. 1 seed University of Illinois’s basketball pep band, said in an interview on Thursday. “But man, I wish I could be there. I’m hoping they’ll reconsider for the Final Four.”But now, that dream is dashed, too.After previously excluding bands only through the Elite Eight, an N.C.A.A. associate director of communications, Christopher Radford, said in an email on Friday that no bands would be allowed at any of the games in either the men’s or women’s N.C.A.A. basketball tournaments this year.The decision, he said, was based on health and safety protocols developed with local health authorities, which “led to reductions in the size of official travel parties and limits on overall capacity in venues.”The six Indiana venues that will host this year’s games, he said, will still play school fight songs and anthems. They will screen cheer video performances, and other band music will be in rotation.But the honking tubas and energy-building improvisation of pep bands are what attracts many fans to the college game — they are the antithesis of the N.B.A.’s reliance on canned noise to punctuate big blocks and thunderous dunks. And bands have an even more crucial role in the N.C.A.A. tournament, Barry L. Houser, the director of the University of Illinois’s marching and athletic bands for the past 10 years, said.“There’s nothing like live music to bring a stadium or arena alive,” he said in an interview on Thursday. “The playing of a fight song after a great play or going into a hot timeout after an amazing play for the team can really get the crowd riled up.”Tedeschi, the University of Illinois band member, believes a band can “absolutely” change a game.“We scream a lot,” he said. “And, especially late in the game, we do our best to distract the other team’s players.”There will be no band for players to interact with at this year’s tournaments.Richard Shiro/Associated PressBut pep band players aren’t just passionate about school fight songs or “Sweet Caroline” — they’re some of the biggest basketball fans in the arena and the spark that ignites most student sections.“The chance to travel with the team and be their number-one supporter is a big reason I do athletic bands,” Tedeschi said. “It takes time away from my other coursework, especially when we’re traveling more, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. It’s near and dear to my heart.”But seniors like Tedeschi will never get the chance to play at an N.C.A.A. tournament game —- a big part of why he joined the pep band his freshman year, he said. (The Illini did not make the men’s or women’s N.C.A.A. tournament his first two years, and the pandemic derailed last year’s games.)He understands the N.C.A.A.’s decision to prohibit bands in the first two rounds, but thinks they could have been allowed for games later in the tournament. “The bracket is smaller, and fewer teams’ bands would show up,” he said. “It would mean less other fans, but for seniors, it’s the only chance we have. Mid-major teams don’t make it every year.”Michael Martin, a 21-year-old senior at Ohio State who plays snare and bass drum in the pep band, has never been to any of the N.C.A.A. tournaments. And he’s now missed his chance.“I prepared myself for it,” he said. “But I’m still really disappointed. I was looking forward to playing ‘Buckeye Swag’ for everyone.”Houser, the University of Illinois band director, feels terrible for his seniors — especially in a year that the men’s team is a No. 1 seed.“The teams went through a lot of challenges, and now they’re doing so well,” he said. “I just wish our students had the opportunity to cheer them on in this situation.”But having steeled themselves to the reality of a tournament without live music, band directors are looking forward to the coming year with optimism.Christopher Hoch, who is in his fourth year as director of the Ohio State University marching and athletic bands, has been persevering with his athletic bands class, even absent opportunities to play at games.“I felt it was important for students to continue to have the opportunity to play, even though they weren’t necessarily performing at events,” he said.Now, Hoch is preparing his students for the halftime show they typically do at the spring football game. “We love being there to support the team and university,” he said. “And I’m hopeful we’ll be able to get back to doing that soon.” More

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      Florence Birdwell, Singing Teacher to Broadway Stars, Dies at 96

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyFlorence Birdwell, Singing Teacher to Broadway Stars, Dies at 96She was a tough yet empathetic voice professor at Oklahoma City University for 67 years. Two of her students, Kelli O’Hara and Kristin Chenoweth, won Tony Awards.The voice teacher Florence Birdwell in 2015. She helped her students unlock the mysteries of captivating an audience.Credit…Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesFeb. 25, 2021Updated 3:57 p.m. ETFlorence Birdwell, an inspiring voice teacher whose many students included the Tony Award-winning musical stars Kelli O’Hara and Kristin Chenoweth, died on Feb. 15 in Yukon, Okla. She was 96.Her death, in an assisted living facility, was confirmed by her son Brian.Professor Birdwell taught voice from 1946 to 2013 at Oklahoma City University, establishing herself as a dramatic, no-nonsense mentor. She helped aspiring musical theater and opera singers unlock the mysteries of captivating an audience, but she could also make her students weep with her candid feedback on their progress.“That’s life,” she told The New York Times in 2015. “If they can’t take the criticism they’ve asked for — don’t come.”During a visit to Manhattan in 2015 to see the Tony-nominated performances of Ms. O’Hara in “The King and I” and Ms. Chenoweth in “On the Twentieth Century” — Ms. O’Hara would win (Ms. Chenoweth had already won a Tony in 1999, for “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown”) — Professor Birdwell conducted a master class of about a dozen former students.“At 90, she is girlish and soft one minute, fearsome and sharp the next,” Sarah Lyall wrote in The New York Times, “and she commands all the attention in the room.”After Scott Guthrie performed “It All Fades Away,” from “The Bridges of Madison County,” for the class, Professor Birdwell cheered, then ticked off his imperfections: He was tensing his shoulders, forcing his vowels and doing something wrong with his breathing.He sang the song several more times. She pointed to a spot where his neck met his shoulder and said: “You’re putting a strain on that muscle. I don’t want it to get worse.”Professor Birdwell emphasized that singers must memorize the words of a song before learning the melody, so that the lyrics are not only in their vocabularies but also in their hearts.“You have to open up a little bit of your insides,” she told The Times. “You have to learn about yourself as a person.”Professor Birdwell backstage in 2015 with her former student Kelli O’Hara. She traveled to New York to watch Ms. O’Hara in “The King and I” and another former student, Kristen Chenoweth, in “On the Twentieth Century.”Credit…Julieta Cervantes for The New York TimesFlorence Gillam Hobin was born on Sept. 3, 1924, in Douglas, Ariz., on the border of Mexico, and raised in Santa Fe, N.M., and Lawton, Okla. Her mother, Grace (Gillam) Hobin, was a legal secretary; her father, Warner, was not a part of Florence’s life from the time she was young.Florence’s operatic soprano helped her earn a scholarship to Oklahoma City University after a music professor heard her sing with her high school orchestra. Before she graduated in 1945 with a bachelor’s degree in voice, her plans to perform on Broadway were derailed by an infection in her throat that damaged her larynx.Recalling the critical moment for The Oklahoman in 2015, she said that she tearfully told her teacher, Inez Silberg, who advised her, “You cannot sing now, maybe, but you can certainly talk.” She suggested that Florence teach, and sent her three students.“Each one of them was terribly lost in one way or another,” Professor Birdwell said. “And what I learned was warmth and caring and love. And it stayed with me all my teaching life.”One of those students was Barbara Fox (now Barbara DeMaio), an opera singer who, at 19, was in an emotional spiral: She had been sexually assaulted, and her father had recently died. When her voice teacher threw her out of her studio, her music theory teacher suggested that she study with Professor Birdwell — who, she recalled, later told her, “‘I couldn’t believe they were so willing to throw out the talent I saw in you.’”“And she made me go to therapy,” Ms. DeMaio said by phone. “She took me by the nape of the neck and said, ‘I will not let you waste this talent.’”Ms. DeMaio went on to perform widely in Europe is now a professor of voice at the University of Central Oklahoma and the executive director of the Painted Sky Opera company, based outside Oklahoma City in Edmond.“When I say that Florence Birdwell saved my life,” she said, “I’m not exaggerating.”In 1985 Professor Birdwell received the Governor’s Arts Award, the State of Oklahoma’s highest arts honor. She was inducted into the Oklahoma Higher Education Heritage Society’s Hall of Fame in 2012.And in the late 1950s she recovered her voice, if at a slightly lower register, and performed regularly, most notably in an annual one-woman show in Oklahoma City during the 1980s and ’90s, in which she sang music from various genres and recited poetry and short stories.“People have so much inside of them that just has to come out,” she told The Oklahoman in 1990 before her 11th annual show. “This is my coming-out party.”In addition to her son Brian, Professor Birdwell is survived by her daughter, Robyn Birdwell; seven grandchildren; and one great-grandson. Another son, Todd, died in 1980, and her husband, Robert, died in 2013.Despite Professor Birdwell’s sometimes daunting style, Ms. O’Hara said she had never feared her.“She ripped me down, she tore me apart,” she told The Oklahoman in a video interview in 2015. “She built me back up, and every single bit of it seemed to be the path that I was supposed to be on. It never scared me. It just made me feel right.”During her Tony Award acceptance speech, Ms. O’Hara thanked Professor Birdwell “for giving me wings.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Obscure Musicology Journal Sparks Battles Over Race and Free Speech

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyObscure Musicology Journal Sparks Battles Over Race and Free SpeechA scholar’s address about racism and music theory was met with a vituperative, personal response by a small journal. It faced calls to cease publishing.A debate about racism, musicology, free speech and the music theorist Heinrich Schenker — pictured here with his wife, Jeanette — has roiled academia.Credit…N. Johnson for The New York TimesFeb. 14, 2021Updated 4:27 p.m. ETA periodical devoted to the study of a long-dead European music theorist is an unlikely suspect to spark an explosive battle over race and free speech.But the tiny Journal of Schenkerian Studies, with a paid circulation of about 30 copies an issue per year, has ignited a fiery reckoning over race and the limits of academic free speech, along with whiffs of a generational struggle. The battle threatens to consume the career of Timothy Jackson, a 62-year-old music theory professor at the University of North Texas, and led to calls to dissolve the journal.It also prompted Professor Jackson to file an unusual lawsuit charging the university with violating his First Amendment rights — while accusing his critics of defamation.This tale began in the autumn of 2019 when Philip Ewell, a Black music theory professor at Hunter College, addressed the Society for Music Theory in Columbus, Ohio. He described music theory as dominated by white males and beset by racism. He held up the theorist Heinrich Schenker, who died in Austria in 1935, as an exemplar of that flawed world, a “virulent racist” who wrote of “primitive” and “inferior” races — views, he argued, that suffused his theories of music.“I’ve only scratched the surface in showing out how Schenker’s racism permeates his music theories,” Professor Ewell said, accusing generations of Schenker scholars of trying to “whitewash” the theorist in an act of “colorblind racism.”The society’s members — its professoriate is 94 percent white — responded with a standing ovation. Many younger faculty members and graduate students embraced his call to dismantle “white mythologies” and study non-European music forms. The tone was of repentance.“We humbly acknowledge that we have much work to do to dismantle the whiteness and systemic racism that deeply shape our discipline,” the society’s executive board later stated.At the University of North Texas, however, Professor Jackson, a white musicologist, watched a video of that speech and felt a swell of anger. His fellow scholars stood accused, some by name, of constructing a white “witness protection program” and shrugging off Schenker’s racism. That struck him as unfair and inaccurate, as some had explored Schenker’s oft-hateful views on race and ethnicity.A tenured music theory professor, Professor Jackson was the grandson of Jewish émigrés and had lost many relatives in the Holocaust. He had a singular passion: He searched out lost works by Jewish composers hounded and killed by the Nazis.And he devoted himself to the study of Schenker, a towering Jewish intellect credited with stripping music to its essence in search of an internal language. The Journal of Schenkerian Studies, published under the aegis of the University of North Texas, was read by a small but intense coterie of scholars.He and other North Texas professors decided to explore Professor Ewell’s claims about connections between Schenker’s racial views and music theories.They called for essays and published every submission. Five essays stoutly defended Professor Ewell; most of the remaining 10 essays took strong issue. One was anonymous. Another was plainly querulous. (“Ewell of course would reply that I am white and by extension a purveyor of white music theory, while he is Black,” wrote David Beach, a retired dean of music at the University of Toronto. “I can’t argue with that.”).Professor Jackson’s essay was barbed. Schenker, he wrote, was no privileged white man. Rather he was a Jew in prewar Germany, the definition of the persecuted other. The Nazis destroyed much of his work and his wife perished in a concentration camp.Professor Jackson then took an incendiary turn. He wrote that Professor Ewell had scapegoated Schenker within “the much larger context of Black-on-Jew attacks in the United States” and that his “denunciation of Schenker and Schenkerians may be seen as part and parcel of the much broader current of Black anti-Semitism.” He wrote that such phenomena “currently manifest themselves in myriad ways, including the pattern of violence against Jews, the obnoxious lyrics of some hip-hop songs, etc.”Timothy Jackson, a professor at the University of North Texas, was removed from the Journal of Schenkerian Studies after publishing an issue that was denounced as racist.Credit…N. Johnson for The New York TimesNoting the paucity of Black musicians in classical music, Professor Jackson wrote that “few grow up in homes where classical music is profoundly valued.” He proposed increased funding for music education and a commitment to demolishing “institutionalized racist barriers.”And he took pointed shots at Professor Ewell.“I understand full well,” Professor Jackson wrote, “that Ewell only attacks Schenker as a pretext to his main argument: That liberalism is a racist conspiracy to deny rights to ‘people of color.’”His remarks lit a rhetorical match. The journal appeared in late July. Within days the executive board of the Society for Music Theory stated that several essays contained “anti-Black statements and personal ad hominem attacks” and said that its failure to invite Professor Ewell to respond was designed to “replicate a culture of whiteness.”Soon after, 900 professors and graduate students signed a letter denouncing the journal’s editors for ignoring peer review. The essays, they stated, constituted “anti-Black racism.”Graduate students at the University of North Texas issued an unsigned manifesto calling for the journal to be dissolved and for the “potential removal” of faculty members who used it “to promote racism.”University of North Texas officials in December released an investigation that accused Professor Jackson of failing to hew to best practices and of having too much power over the journal’s graduate student editor. He was barred him from the magazine, and money for the Schenker Center was suspended.Jennifer Evans-Crowley, the university’s provost, did not rule out that disciplinary steps might be taken against Professor Jackson. “I can’t speak to that at this time,” she told The New York Times.Professor Jackson stands shunned by fellow faculty. Two graduate students who support him told me their peers feared that working with him could damage their careers.“Everything has become exceedingly polarized and the Twitter mob is like a quasi-fascist police state,” Professor Jackson said in an interview. “Any imputation of racism is anathema and therefore I must be exorcised.”This controversy raises intertwined questions. What is the role of universities in policing intellectual debate? Academic duels can be metaphorically bloody affairs. Marxists slash and parry with monetarists; postmodernists trade punches with modernists. Tenure and tradition traditionally shield sharp-tongued academics from censure.For a university to intrude struck others as alarming. Samantha Harris, a lawyer with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, a free speech advocacy group, urged the university to drop its investigation.She did not argue Professor Jackson’s every word was temperate.“This is an academic disagreement and it should be hashed out in journals of music theory,” Ms. Harris said. “The academic debate centers on censorship and putting orthodoxy over education, and that is chilling.”That said, race is an electric wire in American society and a traditional defense of untrammeled speech on campus competes with a newer view that speech itself can constitute violence. Professors who denounced the journal stressed that they opposed censorship but noted pointedly that cultural attitudes are shifting.“I’m educated in the tradition that says the best response to bad speech is more speech,” said Professor Edward Klorman of McGill University. “But sometimes the traditional idea of free speech comes into conflict with safety and inclusivity.”There is too a question with which intellectuals have long wrestled. What to make of intellectuals who voice monstrous thoughts? The renowned philosopher Martin Heidegger was a Nazi Party member and Paul de Man, a deconstructionist literary theorist, wrote for pro-Nazi publications. The Japanese writer Yukio Mishima eroticized fascism and tried to inspire a coup.Schenker, who was born in Galicia, part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, was an ardent cultural Germanophile and given to dyspeptic diatribes. He spoke of the “filthy” French; English, and Italians as “inferior races”; and Slavs as “half animals.” Africans had a “cannibal spirit.”Did his theoretical brilliance counter the weight of disreputable rages?Professor Ewell argued that Schenker’s racism and theories are inseparable. “At a minimum,” he wrote in a paper, “we must present Schenker’s work to our students in full view of his racist beliefs.”The dispute has played out beyond the United States. Forty-six scholars and musicians in Europe and the Middle East wrote a defense of Professor Jackson and sounded a puzzled note. Professor Ewell, they wrote, delivered a provocative polemic with accusations aimed at living scholars and Professor Jackson simply answered in kind.Neither professor is inclined to back down. A cellist and scholar of Russian classical music, Professor Ewell, 54, describes himself as an activist for racial, gender and social justice and a critic of whiteness in music theory.Shortly after the Journal of Schenkerian Studies appeared in July, Professor Ewell — who eight years ago published in that journal — canceled a lecture at the University of North Texas. He said he had not read the essays that criticized him.“I won’t read them because I won’t participate in my dehumanization,” he told The Denton Record-Chronicle in Texas. “They were incensed by my Blackness challenging their whiteness.”Professor Ewell, who also is on the faculty of the City University of New York Graduate Center, declined an interview with The Times. He is part of a generation of scholars who are undertaking critical-race examinations of their fields. In “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame,” the paper he presented in Columbus, he writes that he is for all intents “a practitioner of white music theory” and that “rigorous conversations about race and whiteness” are required to “make fundamental antiracist changes in our structures and institutions.”For music programs to require mastery of German, he has said, “is racist obviously.” He has criticized the requirement that music Ph.D. students study German or a limited number of “white” languages, noting that at Yale he needed a dispensation to study Russian. He wrote that the “antiracist policy solution” would be “to require languages with one new caveat: any language — including sign language and computer languages, for instance — is acceptable with the exception of Ancient Greek, Latin, Italian, French or German, which will only be allowed by petition as a dispensation.”Last April he fired a broadside at Beethoven, writing that it would be academically irresponsible to call him more than an “above average” composer. Beethoven, he wrote, “has been propped up by whiteness and maleness for 200 years.”As for Schenker, Professor Ewell argued that his racism informed his music theories: “As with the inequality of races, Schenker believed in the inequality of tones.”That view is contested. Professor Eric Wen arrived in the United States from Hong Kong six decades ago and amid slurs and loneliness discovered in classical music what he describes as a colorblind solace. Schenker held a key to mysteries.“Schenker penetrated to the heart of what makes music enduring and inspiring,” said Professor Wen, who teaches at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. “He was no angel and so what? His ideology is problematic but his insights are massive.”How this ends is not clear. The university report portrayed Professor Jackson as hijacking the journal, ignoring a graduate student editor, making decisions on his own and tossing aside peer review.A trove of internal emails, which were included as exhibits in the lawsuit, casts doubt on some of those claims. Far from being a captive project of Professor Jackson, the emails show that members of the journal’s editorial staff were deeply involved in the planning of the issue, and that several colleagues on the faculty at North Texas, including one seen as an ally of Professor Ewell, helped draft its call for papers. When cries of racism arose, all but one of those colleagues denounced the journal. A graduate student editor publicly claimed to have participated because he “feared retaliation” from Professor Jackson, who was his superior, and said he had essentially agreed with Professor Ewell all along. The emails paint a contradictory picture, as he had described Professor Ewell’s paper as “naive.”Professor Jackson hired a lawyer who specialized in such cases, Michael Allen, and the lawsuit he filed against his university charges retaliation against his free speech rights. More extraordinary, he sued fellow professors and a graduate student for defamation. That aspect of the lawsuit was a step too far for FIRE, the free speech group, which supported targeting the university but took the view that suing colleagues and students was a tit-for-tat exercise in squelching speech.“We believe such lawsuits are generally unwise,” the group stated, “and can often chill or target core protected speech.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More