Two faculty members listen closely to music from Trinity's neighborhood

BY RICHARD URBAN
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 Lise Waxer [right] hears the world as she travels between Trinity College and her home just off campus. It has a predominantly Latin beat, and the sounds are very much different from those one might expect to hear rising from the recital halls in the Austin Arts Center.

            Gail Woldu hears the sounds of urban America as she drives around Hartford, sometimes annoyingly drowning her out as she hums the classical French compositions from the 19th or early 20th century that she prefers. Still, the steady thump-thump-thump of amplified hip-hop bass riffs through open car windows suggests a vibrant culture surrounding the College.

        The two assistant professors of music do not leave all that varied music behind in the neighborhoods, however. Instead, they study it, embrace it, and bring it back to their classrooms as part of an expansive discipline called ethnomusicology, loosely defined as the study of non-Western, world music.

         “I think it makes the rest of us in the music department happier to know that we really are opening ourselves up to new ranges of inquiry,” Music Department Chairman Gerry Moshell says. “Ethnomusicology in some ways is very much its own discipline. It ties in with a whole lot of entities on campus. And it’s not just on campus. It’s also with the community and the world beyond. I think it’s symptomatic of the College’s interest in global issues.”

            Waxer comes by her interest non-Western music as a result of growing up in Toronto, a truly international city where cultures come together at one of the world’s busiest crossroads. Five years ago, she was completing her doctorate at the University of Illinois, having just returned home from field research in salsa music, an Afro-Caribbean form that has developed in New York City. Trinity College was advertising for someone to teach world music, when she dropped in on an ethnomusicology conference in Toronto. There, she first met several of her soon-to-be colleagues. She was invited to Hartford to interview. She began teaching in fall 1997.

            “I do a lot of musical theater, a lot of casting. I like to think that I don’t miscast,” Moshell says of his hiring Waxer. “I didn’t miscast.”

           Waxer arrived as the College was diversifying its curriculum to incorporate different cultural perspectives. Trinity was also embracing its city setting and creating links among faculty, students, and the community. “It was really exciting for me to be here when all of that was happening,” Waxer says.

            Woldu’s reputation as an expert in urban popular music has its roots in a paper she wrote on hip-hop music about six years ago. “It was just out of the blue, because it had been interesting me for a long time,” says Woldu, who has been at Trinity for 14 years. Her work was so well received that she was inundated with invitations to talk about urban music. “It became a sub-specialty that I’ve been cultivating for six years,” she says.

            But how does one get from 19th and early 20th century French music to hip-hop and rap? Woldu says the leap isn’t as unlikely as it might seem. She has always lived in cities, and whether she wanted to be part of the music or not, there it was -- everywhere. She also was interested in the genre’s roots in other black music forms, from Delta blues and jazz to Motown.

            “It’s part of a culture, a kind of music that I didn’t necessarily embrace,” she admits. “Anybody living in the United States who turns on the TV becomes part of hip-hop culture unwittingly. I just decided that this would be something to pursue.”

            The result of both women’s work is a deeper connection with the communities surrounding the College, as well as greater Hartford and the people for whom the music is an important part of their daily lives. They send their students into the community and bring the community to campus, both to classrooms and to performance halls.

            “I think there’s a general tendency in this generation of young people to want to explore the world,” Waxer says. Woldu agrees. “What I realize about the students at Trinity is that they’re absolutely extraordinary and sponge-like. They want to embrace this music and understand it,” she says.

            Waxer’s approach combines interaction with community ensembles and a study of various music forms’ history with a performance component that has students producing concerts and Web sites based on their findings. “Those are two common
areas of applied world music in our current world,” Waxer explains, “concert festival production, especially in larger cities, and the Internet.” (Two of the students’ projects can be found on the Web at www.solsinfronteras.com and www.raygonzalezband.com.)

           And even if students are taking the course simply to fulfill a course requirement and have little interest in performing, they can find ways to participate by interviewing members of the ensemble, conducting research on the music’s traditions, working on Web page production, or promoting the concert.

            “It’s a very ambitious kind of project,” Waxer says. It also departs from traditional study courses built around mid-term and final exams, two major pushes during the year that involve staying up all night for a week preparing to be tested. It requires them to be organized and to sustain the effort the entire semester.

“It’s working against the grain of campus life,” Waxer admits. “They learn about teamwork, responsibility, and interpersonal, cross-cultural encounters.”

            When she’s not in the classroom, Waxer directs the Latin band, Salsafication, which brings together students and community musicians for a series of on- and off-campus concerts throughout the year. It teaches students how to play different instruments and different beats, and it’s all in Spanish. “That’s another practical part of it,” Waxer says.

            Says Moshell, “Latin band is another instrument, so to speak, for taking art into the community and bringing art from the community here in a sort of cross-fertilization. It’s another way in which world music is taught here, not just in the classroom, but in the making of music.”

            For Danielle Brown, who graduated with a music degree in May and was a vocalist for Salsafication, the experience of performing helped her relate what she experienced growing up in a predominantly West Indian neighborhood in Brooklyn and attending a largely Hispanic high school. “Watching Lise direct the Latin band reminded me that music is not supposed to be stressful but fun,” she says. “Lise has been more than a professor to me; she has been one of my inspirations.”

            Woldu also reaches out to the community, but to her way of thinking the effort is geared more toward shattering myths and preconceived notions about how hip-hop and especially rap reflect life in inner cities. Her classes have established a relationship with students at the Benjamin E. Mays Institute, an all-male school for at-risk pre-teens housed within Hartford’s Fox Middle School.

            “My way of looking at urban life as a 46-year-old woman has very little in common with the way a 13-year-old black kid looks at urban life--or the way an 18-year-old white kid from an affluent suburb may look at urban life,” Woldu says. “This is a wonderful way of introducing students from a variety of backgrounds to what’s right here in Hartford.”

            What they gain, Woldu notes, is an experience that dispels what she calls the “foolishness” that the music reflects life in the inner city.

“The focus is that students can think for themselves about what they believe and come up with their own opinions based on a variety of things they have seen for themselves,” Woldu says. “It’s not just about what someone on the radio tells you, 'Yo! This is the way it really is in the ghetto.’ I ask them to think about what they’ve seen and heard just using Hartford as a model.”

            It’s not exactly what her students expect. They’re used to having someone provide answers. Woldu simply wants them to think and to consider the music’s roots.

            “Teaching 18- and 19-year-olds who can sit and lip-synch every single hip-hop piece I play, yet have never heard of Dinah Washington or Sarah Vaughan or have never heard Billie Holiday’s voice or haven’t heard the music of Motown is profound,” she says. “It’s with the understanding that they take these classes, knowing that it’s going to be more than foot-tapping, that this is going to be a profound, historical look at most black musics and a lot of aspects of pop culture.”

            In the end, Waxer and Woldu hope Trinity students will come away with a better understanding of their connection to music and its role in their lives, and through the music gain a better understanding of the world.

            “It’s introducing them to the sounds and opening them up so they’ll take the next step to explore the world on their own,” Waxer says.