Public/Applied/ ‘Non-Academic’ (Ethno-)Musicology

Over the course of my career as a music scholar I’ve engaged with work that could fall under the categories of public/applied/’non-academic’ musicology. I use scare quotes around the term ‘non-academic’ because it implies that “academic” is the main career path, and the “non” implies some kind of shortcoming, but the term is so pervasive (although problematic) that it merits inclusion. I worked at Indiana University’s Latin American Music Center for six years and as program specialist for the Society for Ethnomusicology for a full year before starting my tenure-track position at the University of Miami. In these positions I applied the skills and knowledge gained through my doctoral studies in musicology/ethnomusicology in the service of programs and projects that expanded beyond the halls of academia.

This week at the Frost School of Music’s Department of Musicology Friday Forum we had a robust discussion on these topics. This blog post is meant to capture and disseminate some of the resources we covered in our forum meeting.

We first teased out the difference between these three terms: public/applied/’non-academic’.

I shared a list of possible career paths beyond being a university professor:

Librarian
Radio production, programming, hosting
Write of music reviews, music critic
Cultural non-profits
Government positions (research and programming)
Freelance writing and editing
Depending on your skills: communications and marketing, web content manager/designer; data management/programming
Editor for academic presses
Museum curation, programming, acquisition, etc.

This was followed by an overview of a variety of resources that I share below. We ended with an extended conversation with one of our MM students, Greg Stepanich, who has had a long career in newspaper publishing as a writer and editor and who had tons of advice for the younger students (and the rest of us) on how to get started in writing for the public press.