Peter J. Schmelz is a Professor in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University specializing in 20th and 21st-century music. His primary interests lie in Soviet and Cold War-era music, popular and experimental music, film scores, the intersection of music and politics, and sound studies.
Professor Schmelz is working on multiple books, including Intimate Histories of the Musical Cold War: A Ukrainian Composer, Conductor, and Musicologist Struggle for Independence, Recognition, and The Avant-Garde in the 1960s.
Among multiple honors, his article on Sylvestrov’s Symphony No. 5, published in the Journal of Musicology, earned him the ASCAP Virgil Thomson/Deems Taylor Award in 2015. Additionally, his third book, Sonic Overload: Alfred Schnittke, Valentin Silvestrov, and Polystylism in the Late USSR, received the same award in 2022. In recognition of his contributions to the field, he was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2019.
This interview explores the professional journey of Professor Schmelz, delving into experiences at Berkeley, challenges in writing, current projects, the significance of research from diverse perspectives, the intersection of musicology and politics, and the impact of AI on academia.
M. How would you describe yourself?
P. Fundamentally, I’d like to think that I am curious, always asking questions, and interested in learning new things. I try to maintain an open mind: I try not to judge things before I’ve had time to think about them and understand their context. Also, I like exploring new things. I think that I’m hardworking and always try to maintain a good sense of humor. That’s crucial for getting through life–making sure that you understand the high degree of absurdity in the world we live in. If you understand that, without sacrificing your own humanity, and understanding that there are moments when humor is not appropriate, you’re okay. You must be able to laugh. If you can’t laugh, what’s the point?
M. How would you explain musicology to a child?
P. It should probably be a fairly old child to understand musicology. Musicology enables us to talk about music in a very broad sense. It’s one thing to play the piano or to play another instrument, but that can become a very closed-in activity. Fundamentally, making music for people is about broadening it out and making contacts with others.
One of the best ways to facilitate that kind of contact is to talk about the music and to look at what it means to the people playing it, what it means to people listening to it, what it has meant in the past, what it means in the present, and how (or if) those meanings have shifted. It’s all about asking questions: “What does this thing that we call music do to us?” and “What can it do for us?” That’s a basic example.
If you hear a piece of music and you like it, you might think, “Why did I like that?” That question begins to open a whole bunch of other questions. If we listen to a piece of music together and I like it and you really don’t like it, then that’s an interesting conversation to have. I find that those moments of friction are some of the most productive.
Musicology is interesting! Look at the way, for example, the unions of composers were set up in the Soviet Union; there were only two categories of people involved in those unions: composers and musicologists. The performers weren’t part of the unions. And it was always that musicologists had to explain what the composers were doing. That’s what musicologists do, but it’s broader than that because it’s not just about advocacy. It’s not just saying: “Oh, this composer is great, and this is why he’s great.”
I think that there needs to be a critical component as well. Why are these pieces of music being used in these sociopolitical situations, for example? What can this music mean, both good and bad, for different kinds of societies at different times? It has a historical component, such as looking at archives and primary sources, if you’re thinking about the music of the past, and it also has a contemporary resonance. I think about musicology in the broadest of terms. Let’s put it this way: musicology should be able to encompass what today in the United States is divided into music theory, ethnomusicology, and musicology. I think that all of those should fit under the umbrella of musicology. That’s the foundation, the umbrella term of everything that involves talking about music in a systematic way.
M. Can you describe your journey to becoming a musicologist in the United States?
P. I was a French horn player and played French horn seriously through college, where I was a music major. My dream in high school was to be a professional player. But I was also deeply interested in history. That period was at the very end of the Cold War, at the end of the 1980s. I dreamed of something like musicology even though I didn’t yet know it existed. It was only when I got to college that I realized it was something you could do and pursue seriously.
My parents were not academics; I had no exposure to that kind of employment. I didn’t know it was even a thing that people did. I had some very encouraging faculty members and mentors as an undergraduate student at George Washington University in Washington, DC, for example, Laura Youens and Roy Guenther. At that point in time, I was deeply interested in Shostakovich’s string quartets. Roy Guenther, a Scriabin specialist, helped me to prepare for graduate school, even though my parents were not happy about that at all because they didn’t see financial possibility in it. In fact, I had been a geology major. For a while, they wanted me to keep both majors, but it proved logistically impossible. So, I dumped the geology major. (I still have a geology minor, even though I’ve never used it.)
I applied to a number of graduate schools, and I was lucky to get into my top choice, the University of California, Berkeley, because I wanted to work with Richard Taruskin. I said to my undergraduate mentors that I wanted to study Soviet music and they replied that he was the only person I should study with. George Washington University was not a traditional feeder school for Berkeley. Berkeley tended to recruit from Oberlin, Cambridge, and Ivy League schools. I count myself lucky that I was able to get into Berkeley.
The amazing thing is that I was able to get a job right after finishing my PhD. At that point, in the early 2000s (my PhD is from 2002), there was still an okay market for musicology in the U.S. Now, after the Great Recession and the pandemic, it’s become incredibly difficult. Those dried up the number of opportunities for musicologists. Unfortunately, it’s a very challenging time to go into the field, even though there’s a greater emphasis on exploring other pathways and other things you might do with a musicology degree, not just being a professor.
M. Regarding your time at Berkeley, what are some major lessons you learned there?
P. That was such a foundational experience for me. I learned how to read a lot because the professors would assign an immense amount of reading on a weekly basis. You had to learn how to read very quickly and efficiently. I learned how to write because I didn’t know how to write until that point and sort of pretended that I did. I don’t think I really learned how to write until I had been a professor for probably a decade. I’m still working on it every day, as writing is always a challenge.
I was lucky enough to be there with an incredibly talented group of people who pushed each other. They were all doing amazing things around the world, going to places I had never dreamed that people could go to, learning incredibly challenging languages, and then coming back and reporting on all of it. There was a heady mixture of ideas floating around. Interesting people were constantly coming to campus.
I remember coming into the office where all the teaching assistants had desks, and Peter Sellers was there just chatting with the students. It was like, oh, this is Peter Sellers!? I was in the music library my first month, and Michael Tilson Thomas walked through, getting a tour. I remember Greil Marcus gave a fascinating series of talks. Nabokov’s son was there for a series of lectures about translation. There were always a lot of significant things going on in that place at that time.
M. You mentioned that you are still learning how to write, and I’ve heard from my musicological colleagues that it can be quite challenging. Why do you think writing is so difficult? Have you learned any useful tricks from your experience?
M. Writing is always difficult, and it’s getting more difficult because our attention spans are getting shorter. It takes a lot of work for us to focus on writing. We send these texts to one another all day, and they are just a couple of words, so putting a longer sentence together already feels like a lot more work.
I learned how to write by reading a lot of good contemporary fiction. Part of that had to do with unlearning bad ideas about what academic writing should sound like. This happens with every student I have when they are just starting out. They think that academic writing needs to be really complicated and challenging to write and read. Whereas I like writing that’s clear and comprehensible. That takes a lot of effort because you shouldn’t diminish the ideas as a result. You still want to convey complicated ideas, but you want to do it as clearly as possible. That’s the real trick.
I think that the writing in American musicology, at least, has gotten so much better over the past 20 or so years. I guess this is because of Susan McClary and Richard Taruskin, among others. They understood that writing is essential to focus on and to make the material more accessible. I pick up new books and articles, and I think, wow, this is a much more sophisticated way of writing than I had seen before, in the sense that it’s often even fun to read.
M. What are you working on nowadays?
P. I have too many projects right now. I’m putting together a collection of essays on Ukrainian music with Leah Batstone. That’s at the top of the list. At the same time, I’m working with two Georgian musicologists, Nana Sharikadze and Maia Sigua, on a book about the Soviet Union that is told from the perspective of the periphery. We’re focusing on Ukraine and Georgia to retell the history that we think we know, but really, we don’t know it at all. We are trying to undo all the myths about Soviet music that emanate from focusing only on Moscow.
I’ve also been working for a long time on a book about Soviet experimental music, rock, and jazz from its last two decades (with a focus more on the periphery than on the center), and that book is almost 70 or 80 percent done. Everything had to change after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. I went through a long period where I couldn’t do any work at all. I was trying to figure out how to adapt my work to fit the new environment. That’s why that project is taking a little longer. I had to reshape it in my mind.
M. Why is research from the perspective of the periphery important for American musicology today?
P. It’s important now because we saw what happened when we didn’t look at it. We have this misguided understanding of Russian music. For example, I’ve been looking at recent research that talks about Sylvestrov as if he’s a Russian composer.
The pervasive russification of the Soviet Union has infused musicology, leading to the misguided idea that we can talk about everything by talking about Russian music, that Soviet music equals Russian music.
I’ve been in Tbilisi, Georgia, for the past month on a Fulbright fellowship [May 2024]. By being here and looking at Georgian sources, it became even clearer to me how drastically different the Georgian experience was from what was happening in Moscow and from what was happening in Ukraine. There are points of overlap, of course.
But telling that fuller, decentered and re-centered story makes our understanding of Shostakovich, for example, more complicated, and many people are not going to like that. Shostakovich is often held up as the kind of person who protested against the Soviet regime. But, when you look at Shostakovich from the periphery, he becomes this very powerful figure who is, in some respects, dominating in a very unpleasant way. I think that people really, really, need to hear about the implications of his colonial presence for music-making in Georgia, Ukraine, and across the other Soviet republics.
The other thing that is important is that it forces us to rethink what nationalism in music means. There was a discussion about this that started at the end of the 1990s. Taruskin was one of those who spearheaded it, but many of my colleagues from Berkeley did so as well (including Beth Levy, Klára Móricz, David Schneider, and Leslie Sprout, to name only a few). This idea of musical nationalism is something we thought we’d figured out because we’ve been doing it now for 20-some years. Still, I think that the idea of nationalism in Georgia, the idea of nationalism in Ukraine, and the concept of nationalism in the Baltics make us rethink what nationalism can mean.
When you put it within a decolonial or post-colonial framework, it takes on different meanings and it becomes really complicated. Being able to sort that out in a systematic way is a challenge. Nana Sharikadze, Maia Sigua, and I have an article coming out later this summer in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. The title is “Throwing Off the Russian Lenses from the Study of Soviet Music.” It’s a position paper, and I’m anticipating–hoping–that it’s going to create a lot of conversations. I know that people have reacted both very positively and somewhat negatively to earlier versions of this article, because they think that there’s something russophobic about that title and our arguments. We don’t mean it that way at all, but you do have to understand what nationalism (and colonialism) means in a more comprehensive and critical way.
M. You are working on multiple books and articles, participating in conferences, and teaching. How do you manage to balance all these responsibilities simultaneously?
P. It’s tough. Psychologists and cognitive scientists have shown that working on that many tasks simultaneously is impossible. To do it successfully (or try to do it successfully) involves moving from deadline to deadline, looking at what is due first, doing that, and moving on to the next task. I’ve got lengthy to-do lists and try to work my way through them. It became challenging, I think, for everyone after the pandemic or during the pandemic to get things done on time. I see it with my students, who have a hard time submitting papers when they are due. They’re always asking for extensions, which I’m happy to grant. Everything has shifted in that respect.
There’s such an emphasis on producing so much scholarship quickly in academia today and I think that it leads to a lot of work that is not as well-developed as it could be. I’m trying not to have that happen in my own work, trying to be as thorough as I can, but that’s always a challenge.
It is also crucial that I have an incredibly supportive partner and children, who are always helpful and who tolerate my frequent absences. My work would be impossible without them.
M. What is your writing process when working on multiple books? Can you explain your workflow from developing an idea to publishing a book or paper?
P. In terms of getting from the idea to the book — those are baby steps. I think you’ve got to take them in small increments. I love the ideas. I’ve got a million ideas for projects. I love the research; I love finding sources, listening to new music, and accumulating references. But you must know when to stop those stages and get to the writing stage. You need to get to writing as quickly as possible because you can collect notes for years, and that’s dangerous.
That’s the trap I fell into with my book Sonic Overload. It’s really my second book, but it came out as the third of my books because I spent so much time collecting materials and thinking that I was writing, yet I wasn’t actually writing. That’s what I tell my students. You need to write sooner than you think. The more quickly you can put words on the paper, the better the result is going to be. Or the more quickly you’re going to get to the result, let’s put it that way.
M. One of your research topics is the Kyiv Avant-Garde. What do you find interesting about the Kyiv Avant-Garde group?
P. There’s something that I find very sympathetic about these people, in the sense that I remember being at that moment in my own life. They’re in their late teens or early twenties, and they discover this music that they had never heard of before, and they were intensely curious about it and wanted to try it out. Obviously, their situation was different than mine because I could listen to it without any repercussions. In their lives, listening to the music that they found appealing meant that they could be punished. There was a sense of a vibrant creative group producing these works that no-one thought could come from Kyiv at that time. I enjoy reading the accounts of reporters from the United States or Western Europe. They always think: “…oh, this is so strange, what are these people doing?” I want to counteract that and show how it makes sense in that context but also show how and why the music is interesting and significant.
Also, based on the papers I’ve written for the conferences we’ve been to together, I’m thinking about assembling papers about the Kyiv Avant-Garde. At some point, I realized that I was actually, without intending to, writing another book about Sylvestrov, a collection of essays on him. I thought I was done writing about Sylvestrov with Sonic Overload, but I can’t seem to stop writing about him. There is something about him, Hrabovskyi, and Zahortsev. All of them have individual personalities that are worth digging into more deeply, especially in that context, showing how they were coming out of a Ukrainian tradition, beholden particularly to Lyatoshynskyi, but also Revutskyi. The development of that culture is fascinating to me.
I taught a Ukrainian music class this past semester at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins and the students really had a great time, I think. We started at the beginning with Bortnyanskyi and worked our way up to the present. The students produced very interesting papers, and it was very helpful to focus on Ukrainian music in a more methodical, systematic way. The students are very sympathetic to Ukraine and Ukrainians and are eager for possible collaborations with young Ukrainian musicians and composers, so I’m going to try to facilitate that over the next academic year.
M. Let`s imagine a young student aspiring to pursue a PhD but struggling to find a topic. What advice would you give them? Also, what are the current musicological trends in the US?
P. It’s going to be quite difficult for a student to finish if they don’t have an immediate thought for a topic. They need to have something that’s compelling to them. They need to have a question that they must have answered. You must be willing to sink a lot of time and effort into something. So, if you don’t feel the motivation to do it, then that’s going to be a real challenge. But you should do something that interests you. One shouldn’t do it because of trends or things like that. There are a number of instances where that has backfired on people, where they wrote about something because they thought it would be a good way to get a job, and it turns out that the field shifted before they finished.
Unfortunately, you need to have a sense of the area you’re interested in studying before applying to graduate schools and go from there. The field, like I said, is so diverse right now with many kinds of music being talked about at many kinds of institutions. Hence, you should be able to find a good home if that’s what you want to pursue, knowing full well that heading towards an academic job right now in the United States is very challenging. You should be aware of that going into a PhD program, knowing that you should keep your options open and pursue possibilities that are not in academia.
Speaking of new academic develoments, there are a lot of interesting conversations going on about race in the United States. These discussions really took off among a larger public around 2020 during the pandemic when there were many protests against police violence in the United States. There is a very strong political component to that kind of research, as well as decolonial research. The field has opened up regarding discussions about race, identity, gender, queerness, trans-identities, and disability studies since the 1990s. Susan McClary and Philip Brett, among others, for instance, began talking and publishing more directly about gender, sexuality, and race at that time. The work that we’re seeing done now would not have been possible without them.
There is also an active desire to broaden out the canon (ed. Reference to a slogan, “Decolonizing the Canon”, that was especially vocal in 2020 and took seriously the discontents of those excluded from the art historical mainstream). Philip Ewell has done a lot of work on that in music theory, but it has crossover resonance, too. Let’s analyze not just Mozart and Haydn but also Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Sun Ra, and Tania León, as well as other genres and musicians from around the world that we can use to teach music theory.
M. Do you have thoughts on the idea that contemporary music events sometimes prioritize political agendas over artistic quality? What is your perspective on the close relationship between musicology and politics?
P. I have a hard time separating art from politics because they’re so infused with one another. That’s when I tend to take a more scholarly approach, take a step back and think about it. Okay, so what is this music doing right now for this audience at this time, in this place? That helps me to articulate what’s going on, even if, personally, I don’t find the music to be particularly moving, or I don’t think it’s necessarily fulfilling the agenda that it’s composers, performers, or programmers had.
I think that every performance is political on some level. For example, I went to the Tbilisi Opera House and there was a performance of Sleeping Beauty by Tchaikovsky, and I was surrounded by Russians. I kept thinking that this is the weirdest situation:
You go around Tbilisi and there’s anti-Russian graffiti everywhere –”Russians go away,” “Stop your war” — and then you are at this packed performance of Tchaikovsky, who is one of the most imperial composers from the Russian empire, who spent time in Tbilisi, and here’s his ballet being presented with no commentary, surrounded by an audience that’s probably 60% Russian.
Let’s think about the politics of that. How do we unpack that kind of politics? Even though I’m sure that for most of those audience members, that was not explicitly a political event at all. But that makes it all the more interesting to me.
Yet I know what you mean. I’ve gone to plenty of performances that were marketed as being political, but that didn’t move me at all and I don’t know how they succeeded, if at all, as political acts. That’s the real question: What kind of political act is it to have a concert that is so overtly politicized? And is that the most efficacious way to achieve the policy goals you are trying to achieve? I don’t know. That’s an unanswered question.
M. I would say that, whether consciously or unconsciously, they are inevitably part of politics and policies, and they are deciding to support certain agendas.
P. It was such a shock to me… there is this debate that’s going on with the conservatory’s name in Kyiv, and yet here in Tbilisi it doesn’t seem to be a debate at all. We’re going to play Tchaikovsky at the Opera House here, and that’s okay.
M. What are your thoughts on the decreasing number of Russian music performances in the US?
P. I’m not sure that bans are ever a great idea in general, especially since we have a pretty vocal movement in the United States right now to try to ban books for kids. I think we should let anyone read whatever they want. But I don’t see why, in most cases, we can’t add a piece by a Ukrainian composer to a program instead. Why do we need to hear Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony for the millionth time? Why can’t we listen to something by Lyatoshynskyi or other composers that people don’t know as well that would be as satisfying in a performance? Why do we need to keep listening to Beethoven?
I understand that there are audience dynamics and demands here, but it is possible to build out the repertoire and fundamentally reconsider our criteria of value. It’s not the same, but it’s related to the discussion that has been taking place regarding incorporating music by African American composers into concerts in the United States. Why shouldn’t we listen to Florence Price? Let’s build this canon out and make it more inclusive. That’s the approach I take with Russian composers. I know that there is music from Ukraine and Georgia that deserves attention but is not getting it.
M. A bit about finances and employment. Where can someone work after completing their studies? For a new musicologist who has just finished their PhD, is it possible to find a job given the current challenges in securing university teaching positions?
P. Is it possible? People do it; there are job postings, and people get those jobs. But the competition is fierce. I know a lot of people who are incredibly talented, have achieved impressive things, and yet can’t, for whatever reason, get a job. It’s always been challenging, but I don’t think it’s ever been as hard as it is now. There are a lot of people who end up teaching a number of one-year positions. Sometimes, it turns into a full-time job; sometimes, it doesn’t. That becomes a difficult decision for them: Do they want to continue trying that, or do they want to admit that it’s not going to happen and do something else? They’ve done numerous studies that show that people with PhDs tend to make more money than other people, and they tend to be more fulfilled in their lives overall.
The idea is that the people who tend to get PhDs are intellectually driven, they’re hard workers, and they’re able to take the abilities that they’ve achieved through a PhD program and put them into other areas of activity, whether they become involved in different kinds of private sector activities, whether they are in university administration, whether they work in arts administration, you name it. I think there’s a minuscule percentage of those people who have PhDs who are unemployed. And often, when they leave the academic area, they’re able to make more money than they would had they stayed.
M. Is it possible to pursue a purely scientific career in musicology, focusing solely on writing articles, conducting research, and publishing books? Or is it generally necessary to balance teaching with scientific work to cover living expenses?
P. I don’t think so. In that case, you would have to come from a family with money, be independently wealthy. Everyone that I know is teaching and doing research. But, almost without exception, everyone I know enjoys teaching too, and I count myself among them. Teaching drives research and vice versa. During the time I taught the Ukrainian music class, I learned a lot and was able to think about ways to apply that to my research, and I applied my research to that class. I think of it as a virtuous circle. I don’t know if I’d want to give up teaching. It would be lonely not to be able to be in the classroom. I know a lot of professors who don’t want to retire, and I think that’s one of the reasons. The research is fine, but if you’re just sitting at your desk every day, it can become isolating.
M. We all recognize the significance of research in fields such as physics and biology, where we see tangible impacts on our daily lives, from advancements in medicine to technological innovations. However, musicology occupies a somewhat different space. I pose a provocative question: Do we truly need it? And what would be the consequences if it ceased to exist?
P. That’s interesting. That’s sort of the question that is happening in a lot of households as young people are going to university and trying to pick majors. They see fields that are incredibly lucrative, anything related to the sciences, to computer science in particular, compare those fields with the humanities, and think that it’s not possible to make a good living with the humanities. That’s how the economy, the market, in some respects answers the question you’ve asked. The idea is that musicology can be fun, but it’s not something that is as crucial as AI, for example. I don’t agree with that, obviously, because I’ve devoted my life to musicology. We’re saturated with music to a degree that we have never seen before, making it more crucial than ever to discuss, analyze, and understand it.
Many people engage in musicology without knowing it. All these discussions around codes in Taylor Swift’s lyrics, and about the ongoing battle between Drake and Kendrick Lamar involve a kind of textual analysis that is very musicological. Being able to take a step back from the fan level, take that apart, and show the larger implications economically, socially, and in terms of gender and race is highly important. If you have the idea that everything must be monetized, then maybe not. Musicology should talk about things that matter. But musicology also needs to be, to a certain degree, disinterested; it needs to be able to talk about things that are somehow separate. There is value to that kind of thinking.
M. What difficulties do you think the musicology community in the US is encountering?
P. The biggest issue that we’re all facing–in some ways it led to my Sonic Overload–is that there’s too much. One of the biggest problems is that there’s too much scholarship coming out. There are too many people doing too many things that are all of very high quality. As a result, it is becoming nearly impossible for any single person to keep up with the field.
Maybe that’s not a completely bad thing? We have subfields. You keep up with your subfield and you have a general sense of the overall scope of the discipline, and maybe that’s okay. But it leads to a lack of a comprehensive overview and the ability to do comparative studies of trends in different sub-disciplines or in different sub-fields. However, the overabundance of scholarship is not necessarily unambiguously good. There are a lot of complications that come with it. One of them is that people are not reading as much as that might suggest. I often see it in papers that I’m asked to referee or even in younger people’s work; they’re not citing works (both from the past and the present) that are central to the discipline and that should be cited.
There’s also what has become the default of using Google (and often only Google) as a research tool. This happens with my students all the time: they come up with bizarre sources and they do it because they simply put some search terms into Google. While the sources are sometimes quite good–or at least interesting–more often they’re completely out of left field and not what we should be looking at, at all.
M. How do you perceive the influence of AI on academia, particularly in relation to students incorporating it into their everyday research and thesis projects?
P. I’ve talked to several colleagues who are already dealing with it in the classroom. Even if institutions have prohibitions about using AI for students, they’re still using it. While teaching at Johns Hopkins in the spring, a student mentioned he was unhappy with his draft and ran it through ChatGPT. He showed me the result and asked for my completely honest feedback. I have to say that, without exception, what AI did to his writing made it worse. The suggestions of ChatGPT to fix the writing flattened it out. Sure, the initial ideas that the student had were a little rough, but he had his own voice in a way that the AI didn’t. That’s what makes me concerned now: people use AI as a crutch, and they’re going to continue using it, but it’s not going to be beneficial in the end–it’s going to have a homogenizing effect. But who knows?
For me, the biggest thing that I’m wrestling with in relation to AI is translation. There are increasingly sophisticated translation tools that can bulk translate articles. This is something that I’m wrestling with regarding music from the part of the world that I’m in now and the part of the world that has my attention. Georgian is an incredibly difficult language. But there are things worth reading from this culture. How do you make these accessible to a broader, global audience? One answer is to pay a translator, but it costs a lot of money and takes a lot of time. Plus, you must find a translator willing to do it. Or you feed it into translation software, clean it up a little bit, and then you can publish it.
This is the dilemma I’m having with Ukrainian music too, to be honest, because there’s an immense amount of literature on Ukrainian music that deserves a wider audience. I know plenty of people who don’t speak Ukrainian and want to teach about Ukrainian music, but there aren’t a lot of sources in English. Can bulk translation using AI help with that? There are costs as well. I would much rather pay a translator who’s in Ukraine now or is Ukrainian to do it because then they would be getting money, and there would be a human involved. But AI for translation is tempting. I haven’t fully come to a conclusion about the ethics of that.
M. What do you like about your profession?
P. It allows me to engage in a professional manner with things that I love: listening to music, thinking about music, talking about music, and engaging with people around that topic. Musicology plays an important role in thinking about how we hear, how we feel, and how we think.
Everyone loves music. I don’t know anyone who says, “I hate music.” They might love different kinds of music and disagree about that. I’m incredibly skeptical about the idea of music as a universal language because, in my opinion, it’s very particular. Yet at the same time, at the Tbilisi Jazz Festival at the end of May 2024, I kept thinking that I don’t speak Georgian; I can speak a handful of Georgian words, I can read signs, and that’s about it. Yet in this concert hall we’re all here really enjoying this music. That’s something that should not be discounted. We might enjoy it in different ways, but that’s the beginning of a dialogue that can be created. You’re able to get people to think in deeper ways about something that they do instinctively, which is to like music or to play music.