L I S E.  A.  W A X E R

The following feature story appeared in the campus publication MOSAIC in October, 1999.

OPENING EARS AND MINDS TO DIFFERENT SOUNDS AND MUSICAL TRADITIONS

Whether it’s Celtic or classical, rock or reggae, music strikes a resonant chord within each of us. "Music is a fundamental form of human expression," contends Assistant Professor of Music Lise A. Waxer. "We all have our favorite styles of music, and we often use music in deliberate ways to heighten or subdue emotional states. But music is also tied to much larger social, economic and political processes."

To understand these ties, Waxer challenges her students to see, for example, how a hereditary caste of musicians in west Africa resemble rock stars. "Praise singers or Jalis have a great deal of prestige and are enormously important because they have the power to speak, or to not speak," Waxer explains. "Despite their prestige, they’re right at the bottom of the caste system." The same social stigma is frequently attached to rock stars, Waxer suggests to students in her "World Music" course. "What I try to do is have students look outside their own immediate purview to see how similar things play out in other cultural contexts," she says.

For Waxer’s students, expanding their understanding of music may also require descending into the crypt of the College’s Chapel and raising their own voices in song to gain an insight into religious music of the Middle Ages. "The high arches and stone interiors of churches and chapels in the Middle Ages were great resonators," Waxer notes. "When you get voices bouncing off the walls, you get a very visceral feeling, like being filled with pure energy. Scientists might theorize this as sound waves generating physical energy, but it’s not a far stretch to think about how in religious contexts, people might think about deeply resonant sound as a conduit for spiritual force. After we stop singing and listen to the echo of our voices, I always ask students "Did you get ‘the Holy Spirit’?"

An ethnomusicologist with a salsa focus

An ethnomusicologist, Waxer shares such insights when teaching courses on world music, Latin American and Caribbean music, or South Asian and African music. She joined Trinity’s faculty in 1997 while completing a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In addition to teaching, she is the musical director and pianist of Trinity’s Latin band, "Salsafication," a college performance course established in spring 1998.

A classically trained pianist, Waxer became intrigued with salsa and Latin music while in graduate school in her native Toronto, where she served as a research consultant for the documentary film Latin Nights. That experience led her to focus her scholarship on the adoption of salsa, a Cuban-Puerto Rican style, in Cali, Colombia. She is currently preparing several articles about her research on Colombian salsa, and a book manuscript is under consideration by Wesleyan University Press for its Music/Culture Series. In addition, she is editing a collection of essays on salsa by several international scholars, for submission to Garland Press for their new Perspectives on Global Pop Series. She has also written multiple entries for the standard reference on music, the New Grove Dictionary, as well as chapters on Cuban and Puerto Rican music in New York for the American Musical Atlas.

Associate Professor of Music and department chair Douglas B. Johnson says of his colleague, "Lise is a very sharp scholar in the field of ethnomusicology. Her work is getting a good deal of attention from her peers around the world. Ethnomusicologists study music within its cultural context. Lise keeps all of us on our toes by reminding us of that perspective. I have the highest regard for her. She stimulates and challenges her students in the classroom. As director of ‘Salsafication,’ Lise inspires students to work hard in rehearsals, so that they can give their very best in performance. When I go to a concert of theirs, I can hear all that careful preparation, I can hear the freedom it gives our student performers to create an evening of really exciting music."

An inspiring mentor

Waxer’s students echo Johnson’s sentiments. Steve Czak ’99, with whom Waxer performed a two-piano jazz recital last May, says he gained a new appreciation for Latin music while performing as a pianist for "Salsafication." "Professor Waxer wrote all the musical charts, translating them into different keys, and made tapes for us so we could really listen and get a feel for the music we would play. She always had the patience to show me different techniques and knows exactly where to put her fingers on the piano to get nice rich sounds."

Karmen Brownson ’00 is an Individualized Degree Program (IDP) student with a self-designed performance and culture major who has taken Waxer’s world music course and independent study units with her on ethnomusicology and the harp. According to Brownson, "Professor Waxer brings an amazing breadth of knowledge on world music practices, sounds, and purposes to the department. She can play several instruments and knows how to contextualize them in the culture they're from. I have come to appreciate and broaden my musical tastes as well as knowledge because of her."

Waxer hopes that after taking one of her courses, students will hear music through ears that are tuned in and listening in new ways. "Music is part of our everyday lives, Waxer asserts, "whether we tune into the radio on the way to work or listen to it on a Walkman. But few people really recognize the importance of music and how much music can tell us about life."

                                                                                                                                            -Suzanne Zack