Object Lessons: Teaching Musicology through Museum Collections

Abstract

Musical instruments and related performance objects are central to human artistic and cultural expressions. As such, they have long been subjects of research in music as well as an important component of many museum collections, where patrons can appreciate them both as aesthetic objects and as material embodiments of their performance contexts. However, material objects have a reduced role in undergraduate music education. Teaching undergraduate students to curate instruments and other performance paraphernalia presents unique opportunities to crosscut traditional disciplinary approaches to teaching musicology. In a narrow sense, examining instruments can help students better understand their technical and functional properties as physical, noise-making entities. Students can also better understand the historical and sociological aspects of instruments by considering their materials, construction methods, and aesthetic embellishments. However, the pedagogical benefits of having students curate a museum exhibit are even more extensive. In the course of this work, students may synthesize non-textual primary source information, text-based documents, and audiovisual information; write interpretive texts for a general audience; discuss the politics of historical and cultural display; and work in teams toward a measurable goal. Moreover, students who complete such projects express greater appreciation for the musical objects, the culture or group of people who created the objects, the challenges of primary source and object-based research, and a sense of pride in being able to conduct meaningful research that contributes to a public project.

Using our own students’ work as a primary case study, we examine how and why studying musical instrument collections serves as a pedagogically satisfying interdisciplinary project within the context of collegiate music education. We provide readers with insights into how to work with collections in their own classroom settings. Based on our work in developing a student-curated exhibit, we discuss all aspects of collaboration, including communicating and partnering with museums and other types of collections; articulating student learning objectives that are grounded in musical, historical, and anthropological theory; developing exhibit themes; facilitating collections-based research; instructing students in interpretive writing for a general public; and organizing community outreach programs. We also discuss strategies for finding (or assembling) appropriate collections of objects for use within a variety of different institutional settings. Finally, we share student reflections on how their approaches to music, history, culture, and the value of public culture-work have changed because of their curatorial work.