Musical Musings; Pamela Saunders Transcript

>>INTERVIEWER: LetÕs start with introducing this man on your desk.

>>SAUNDERS: [Laughing].

>>INTERVIEWER: If you donÕt mind.

>>SAUNDERS: This is Lionel, Lionel Richie, for those of you who donÕt know, and heÕs almost like a little deity. He kind of watches over my desk. ThatÕs what he does [laughing].

>>INTERVIEWER: Sounds fitting. Alright, speaking of musical figures youÕre kind of a musical gal.

>>SAUNDERS: [Laughing] Nice segue. Nice.

>>INTERVIEWER: [Laughing] Talk about music and literacy.

>>SAUNDERS: Okay. The way that I started learning to read and write and the way that I started learning to play music, I think, both had their origins in mimicking something that I heard. So [it was] very aural the whole way. When I was really little my mom read books to me every night before I went to bed, and I was a really habitual child [laughing], and so it was often the same book over and over again. Usually [it was] a Disney book like 101 Dalmations, which I really liked, but sometimes it was this book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and then the sequel which is If You Give a Moose a Muffin. ItÕs a very important, really rich text. But she read it so often to me because I liked the repetition that I brought the book into preschool for Show-And-Tell and I started just reciting it, because I could turn the pages and look at the passage and then just recall what it said word for word because we had read them many times over [laughing]. And my preschool instructor thought that I was reading. She freaked out and called my mom, and I was just reciting. I had memorized something that I heard and was repeating it synchronized with the process of turning the pages, and that looked like I was reading.

Music was the same way for me. ThatÕs often how you teach someone when they first start playing music. YouÕll ask them to mimic a sound or a pitch that they hear. Only later do you, kind of, bring in the visual of the note on the staff. But for me, when I first started learning music, I was in the first grade and I started with piano, and you just start with very basic elements, very basic building blocks. You start to associate a letter with a pitch on the staff, and then you associate that pitch with a corresponding key on the piano, and you work on getting that to sync up faster so that your processing time is not as great.

But some people learn to play music without ever looking at notes for a long time. I think itÕs called the Suzuki method, where you learn to play by ear, and thatÕs not how I learned. I went into a theory course, itÕs like a certification course for music theory where you learn to write scales and compose simple pieces and things like that. But to me, writing music and reading music is its own type of literacy. ItÕs its own type of language that has a lot to do with how you process something aurally, how you hear something, and then reproducing the sound.

>>INTERVIEWER: So can you connect that now with the kinds of literate things you do now, like maybe the way you write or the way you go about encountering texts?

>>SAUNDERS: Sure. I feel like there are a lot of ways in which my musical practice forms my writing practice. The biggest one being that I donÕt procrastinate very much. Musicians canÕt procrastinate. You canÕt learn a symphony the night before you perform it. It has to be this habitual, daily activity, and so for me, returning everyday for three hours to the same project is how I produce something. The night before, I donÕt like to do any work on a project. I like to fine-tune the bibliography. So music is extremely process oriented. You have to do it over and over again, and itÕs something that you canÕt really do in spurts. It needs to be a constant thing.

But in terms of reading music, when I got to the college level my performance didnÕt change that much. I was still reading the same type of music, but I started to compose more. We had to take required music theory courses where we learned to compose and we had to compose and perform vocal pieces or piano pieces, and that process was new to me, such as learning the rules of what sounds good and what effect different sounds can create for someone who is listening. ItÕs similar, I think, to how you would write to an audience. It was a new process of learning the way that you wrote things on the page and what that would sound like, and developing your ear so that you could glance at a line of music on a staff and know what it sounds like in your head and be able to understand how a piece functions like that.

>>INTERVIEWER: Do you do that at all with your academic writing? Is there any similarity between [your writing and] this idea, this learned practice youÕve been talking about Š this aural practice? I really thought it was cool what you were saying earlier about how you donÕt procrastinate. What about the actual composition process? Do you find any connection there?

>>SAUNDERS: Probably, again, just the orientation around the sense of hearing. If I read someoneÕs handwriting, I hear their voice saying what theyÕre writing, and so I like to read handwritten things because I feel like they transmit more because sometimes people have totally bizarre handwriting or write in all CAPS or have really bubbly, loopy handwriting and when I read something I hear it in my head. That orientation around hearing is something, I think, that I got from music in a big way.

>>INTERVIEWER: ThatÕs really interesting. One more music question: So I know that you are a flautist or flutist. Is there a way to say that correctly?

>>SAUNDERS: Either or is fine.

>>INTERVIEWER: Either one? Alright. But you started on the piano?

>>SAUNDERS: Mmhmm.

>>INTERVIEWER: Again, IÕm actually really interested in music as well and how it connects with composition, but my question is as you switched modes from piano to flute and any other genres, like I know youÕd mentioned vocal performance, in other words, [were you] mapping some of the same kind of knowledge from one genre or one tool to another? You can talk about that just a little bit, but then again maybe you can find some place to connect that practice with composing in different genres. IÕm really interested in seeing if you can connect some of these things with your academic writing or even with the other creative things you do with more traditional writing.

>>SAUNDERS: Yeah. I think that making the switch from piano to flute was really a physical thing, and thereÕs a physicality to producing music and producing sound that I almost feel like doesnÕt exist in writing, or at least exists less and less in the Ņdigital ageÓ because with music, thereÕs air. Well, not with piano, so the biggest difference between piano and flute is that with flute thereÕs a lot power involved and you have to use your mouth, and with piano itÕs just hands and your feet. So that physicality of it something that interests me and I think that thatÕs carried over into what I like about the writing process. I like to handwrite things. I like to hold physical texts. I have a hard time with reading something on a screen. I like the physicality of a bound book and I like having something to do with my hands to keep them active.

In terms of transitioning on the instruments, you just have to kind of discover what youÕre capable of doing on each instrument. The piano is obviously capable of producing multiple, or simultaneous pitches, and thatÕs why a piano can play alone and can play an entire piece by itself, because you have multiple lines of music. And the flute can only produce one pitch at a time. Well, it can produce two, but thatÕs kind of like an avant-garde, harmonics style of playing thatÕs not really mainstream. Mostly, you play one pitch at a time, but I think that the flute is capable of a more nuancing tone. On the piano, you can press a key and it will emit a pretty uniform pitch, and in fact, thatÕs kind of what a good piano might be designed to do is to not have a bunch of changes in pitch when you hit the same key. But with the flute, the more you study it and the more you play it, each pitch that you play is capable of having a different tone or a different sound, and so in that way you can manipulate tone and timbre, or the quality of the sound. You can manipulate that more with flute than you can with piano. And so with the flute, a lot of people think, ŅOh, itÕs just not as complex.Ó And that fits into this value system of good equals difficult and complex, but with flute I think that intonation, pitch and tone are all categories that on a piano, just arenÕt included, and so itÕs a different way of looking at complexity and a different way of valuing the sound and what itÕs capable of producing.

And I think itÕs similar with writing in different genres. Some writing is complex and it has multiple, varying layers of complexity, and then some writing is simple, but maybe weÕre just not looking at it the right way or maybe we donÕt need to treat everything like that, like trying to understand how each instrument is different than the piano or trying to understand whatÕs unique about it. [Laughs].

>>INTERVIEWER: Awesome.

>>SAUNDERS: ThatÕs all.

[Laughter].