Jeffrey van den Scott
Jeffrey van den Scott is an Adjunct Professor of Musicologies at Memorial University of Newfoundland. From 2020 to 2024, he served as Teaching Assistant Professor of Indigenous History. During 2018-19, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Tradition & Tradition Research Partnership. His current project, "Inuk in the City: Musical Identity-Work Among Nunatsiavut's Urban Inuit" examines the lives and meaning of music for Inuit living in city spaces, particularly in light of how Inuit identity is so often tied to "the land."'
Jeff currently serves as the Vice President-Elect of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction and recently completed a six-year term as Treasurer of the Canadian Society for Traditional Music.
Since 2016, Jeff has been engaged in a variety of teaching assignments at Memorial, including Canadian Musical Traditions, History of Jazz, and North American Popular Music in the School of Music, Indigenous Studies in the Departments of History and Archaeology, and Police Studies through the Department of Sociology.
From January 2019 to mid-2020, Jeff has also served as project coordinator of "Indigenous Voices: Steps Toward Decolonizing the Music School Curriculum." This SSHRC-funded project is focused on developing Indigenous Research Capacity and challenging the underlying biases of musical training in the university setting.
Jeff earned his PhD in Musicology at Northwestern University in 2016 with a research project which examines the intersection of composed Canadian music and the culture of the nation's Inuit population. This study reveals the importance of the North in Canadian musical culture alongside a complex relationship between Inuit and Euro-Canadian populations, each of which expresses the desire to know the other.
Jeffrey is also a musical director with a particular focus on community organizations. He has worked with choirs, bands, and opera in communities from Chicago to Newfoundland, and from Nunavut to Nova Scotia. In 2015-16, Jeffrey was Assistant Director of the Memorial Concert Band in Brantford, Ontario, where he sought to bring more Canadian compositions to the band's repertoire. In 2017, Jeffrey started the Interfaith Choral Project - a St. John's-based service choir committed to developing positive relationships among the cities Faith groups.
Jeff currently serves as the Vice President-Elect of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction and recently completed a six-year term as Treasurer of the Canadian Society for Traditional Music.
Since 2016, Jeff has been engaged in a variety of teaching assignments at Memorial, including Canadian Musical Traditions, History of Jazz, and North American Popular Music in the School of Music, Indigenous Studies in the Departments of History and Archaeology, and Police Studies through the Department of Sociology.
From January 2019 to mid-2020, Jeff has also served as project coordinator of "Indigenous Voices: Steps Toward Decolonizing the Music School Curriculum." This SSHRC-funded project is focused on developing Indigenous Research Capacity and challenging the underlying biases of musical training in the university setting.
Jeff earned his PhD in Musicology at Northwestern University in 2016 with a research project which examines the intersection of composed Canadian music and the culture of the nation's Inuit population. This study reveals the importance of the North in Canadian musical culture alongside a complex relationship between Inuit and Euro-Canadian populations, each of which expresses the desire to know the other.
Jeffrey is also a musical director with a particular focus on community organizations. He has worked with choirs, bands, and opera in communities from Chicago to Newfoundland, and from Nunavut to Nova Scotia. In 2015-16, Jeffrey was Assistant Director of the Memorial Concert Band in Brantford, Ontario, where he sought to bring more Canadian compositions to the band's repertoire. In 2017, Jeffrey started the Interfaith Choral Project - a St. John's-based service choir committed to developing positive relationships among the cities Faith groups.
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Caroline Traube (2004, 2012) offers that composers represent the musical north through the use of cold, dry sounds: metallic flutes, piercing harmonics from stringed instruments, and the avoidance of “warming” vibrato. In this paper, I contrast the representations of the sound of the north in compositions such as Schafer’s Snowforms and North/White and Jean Coulthard’s Symphonic Images: Visions of North with the concept of the sound of the North from its inhabitants. Despite the vastly different experience of – and limited collaboration between - Inuit and composers of the European art music tradition, the two cultures share many elements of the sonic North: those related to the cold, crisp, and dry celebrated both in European folkore and in Inuit daily life.
This paper examines archival documents from the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Chicago’s Field Museum alongside Burton’s published works placing his musical arrangements in dialogue with two of his novels, _Strongheart_ and _Redcloud of the Lakes_. In these works, Burton fictionalizes his views through the voices of both Indian and non-Indian characters. By juxtaposing Indian melodies with a Chopin nocturne, Burton implies that under proper guidance, this music can be rendered suitable to meet the tastes of "civilized" company. When we combine these observations with the notes he prepared on his 1904 phonograph recordings of Ojibwe songs and his correspondence, a fuller picture comes into view. Easy as it is to recognize the condescending attitude behind some of his ideas, Burton was admirably open to the integration of Indians and their music into modern American life. At the same time, his urging of American composers to make use of Ojibwe sources before Canadian musicians beat them to it underscores the essentially arbitrary nature of these traditions in projecting a specifically American musical identity.
Music helps to “preform” our knowledge of other places (Stokes, 1994, 4), and the borrowed Inuit music present in the southern Canadian concert halls falls directly into this model of pre-forming our knowledge of the North. This paper considers musical implications and representations of the North in the context of contemporary Canadian culture to test the limits of the idea of Arcticism. Canadian musical works from its centennial year of 1967 to the present illustrate the use of Inuit themes as composers such as Murray Adaskin, Diana McIntosh, and Raymond Luedeke contribute to a homogenizing narrative of the Canadian North and its role in promoting Canada’s identity as “the true north, strong and free.”
Caroline Traube (2004, 2012) offers that composers represent the musical north through the use of cold, dry sounds: metallic flutes, piercing harmonics from stringed instruments, and the avoidance of “warming” vibrato. In this paper, I contrast the representations of the sound of the north in compositions such as Schafer’s Snowforms and North/White and Jean Coulthard’s Symphonic Images: Visions of North with the concept of the sound of the North from its inhabitants. Despite the vastly different experience of – and limited collaboration between - Inuit and composers of the European art music tradition, the two cultures share many elements of the sonic North: those related to the cold, crisp, and dry celebrated both in European folkore and in Inuit daily life. These elements combine to strengthen the North’s position as a significant symbol of Canadian identity.
Two works from 1967 typify period interpretations of the north. Glenn Gould uses “The Idea of North” to explore the human condition, highlighting the solitude and remoteness that he so valued in his own life. In contrast, Tivaldis Kenins’s “Fantasy Variations on an Eskimo Lullaby” draws the listener to a physical and imagined locale inhabited by Inuit. Creating imagery of this specific, Inuit north emerges as a theme among several composers more recently, as the north itself becomes more accessible. T. Patrick Carrabré, Derek Charke, and Christos Hatzis are the best known among many other composers who join them in the exploration of the Inuit north.
I challenge these norths that emerge as increasingly specific in the late-20th and early-21st centuries. While many of the audiences of this repertoire lack personal exposure to the north, the idea of north transforms from one of remoteness and solitude to one inhabited by Inuit whose lives, in turn, transform with help from the intruding ideas from the south.
Caroline Traube (2004, 2012) offers that composers represent the musical north through the use of cold, dry sounds: metallic flutes, piercing harmonics from stringed instruments, and the avoidance of “warming” vibrato. In this paper, I contrast the representations of the sound of the north in compositions such as Schafer’s Snowforms and North/White and Jean Coulthard’s Symphonic Images: Visions of North with the concept of the sound of the North from its inhabitants. Despite the vastly different experience of – and limited collaboration between - Inuit and composers of the European art music tradition, the two cultures share many elements of the sonic North: those related to the cold, crisp, and dry celebrated both in European folkore and in Inuit daily life. These elements combine to strengthen the North’s position as a significant symbol of Canadian identity.
Caroline Traube (2004, 2012) offers that composers represent the musical north through the use of cold, dry sounds: metallic flutes, piercing harmonics from stringed instruments, and the avoidance of “warming” vibrato. In this paper, I contrast the representations of the sound of the north in compositions such as Schafer’s Snowforms and North/White and Jean Coulthard’s Symphonic Images: Visions of North with the concept of the sound of the North from its inhabitants. Despite the vastly different experience of – and limited collaboration between - Inuit and composers of the European art music tradition, the two cultures share many elements of the sonic North: those related to the cold, crisp, and dry celebrated both in European folkore and in Inuit daily life.
This paper examines archival documents from the American Museum of Natural History in New York and Chicago’s Field Museum alongside Burton’s published works placing his musical arrangements in dialogue with two of his novels, _Strongheart_ and _Redcloud of the Lakes_. In these works, Burton fictionalizes his views through the voices of both Indian and non-Indian characters. By juxtaposing Indian melodies with a Chopin nocturne, Burton implies that under proper guidance, this music can be rendered suitable to meet the tastes of "civilized" company. When we combine these observations with the notes he prepared on his 1904 phonograph recordings of Ojibwe songs and his correspondence, a fuller picture comes into view. Easy as it is to recognize the condescending attitude behind some of his ideas, Burton was admirably open to the integration of Indians and their music into modern American life. At the same time, his urging of American composers to make use of Ojibwe sources before Canadian musicians beat them to it underscores the essentially arbitrary nature of these traditions in projecting a specifically American musical identity.
Music helps to “preform” our knowledge of other places (Stokes, 1994, 4), and the borrowed Inuit music present in the southern Canadian concert halls falls directly into this model of pre-forming our knowledge of the North. This paper considers musical implications and representations of the North in the context of contemporary Canadian culture to test the limits of the idea of Arcticism. Canadian musical works from its centennial year of 1967 to the present illustrate the use of Inuit themes as composers such as Murray Adaskin, Diana McIntosh, and Raymond Luedeke contribute to a homogenizing narrative of the Canadian North and its role in promoting Canada’s identity as “the true north, strong and free.”
Caroline Traube (2004, 2012) offers that composers represent the musical north through the use of cold, dry sounds: metallic flutes, piercing harmonics from stringed instruments, and the avoidance of “warming” vibrato. In this paper, I contrast the representations of the sound of the north in compositions such as Schafer’s Snowforms and North/White and Jean Coulthard’s Symphonic Images: Visions of North with the concept of the sound of the North from its inhabitants. Despite the vastly different experience of – and limited collaboration between - Inuit and composers of the European art music tradition, the two cultures share many elements of the sonic North: those related to the cold, crisp, and dry celebrated both in European folkore and in Inuit daily life. These elements combine to strengthen the North’s position as a significant symbol of Canadian identity.
Two works from 1967 typify period interpretations of the north. Glenn Gould uses “The Idea of North” to explore the human condition, highlighting the solitude and remoteness that he so valued in his own life. In contrast, Tivaldis Kenins’s “Fantasy Variations on an Eskimo Lullaby” draws the listener to a physical and imagined locale inhabited by Inuit. Creating imagery of this specific, Inuit north emerges as a theme among several composers more recently, as the north itself becomes more accessible. T. Patrick Carrabré, Derek Charke, and Christos Hatzis are the best known among many other composers who join them in the exploration of the Inuit north.
I challenge these norths that emerge as increasingly specific in the late-20th and early-21st centuries. While many of the audiences of this repertoire lack personal exposure to the north, the idea of north transforms from one of remoteness and solitude to one inhabited by Inuit whose lives, in turn, transform with help from the intruding ideas from the south.
Caroline Traube (2004, 2012) offers that composers represent the musical north through the use of cold, dry sounds: metallic flutes, piercing harmonics from stringed instruments, and the avoidance of “warming” vibrato. In this paper, I contrast the representations of the sound of the north in compositions such as Schafer’s Snowforms and North/White and Jean Coulthard’s Symphonic Images: Visions of North with the concept of the sound of the North from its inhabitants. Despite the vastly different experience of – and limited collaboration between - Inuit and composers of the European art music tradition, the two cultures share many elements of the sonic North: those related to the cold, crisp, and dry celebrated both in European folkore and in Inuit daily life. These elements combine to strengthen the North’s position as a significant symbol of Canadian identity.
Many of these imagined Arctics come from composers who have spent little or no time in the arctic itself, yet the use of arctic imagery helps in answering the question of what it means, for them, to be a Canadian composer. In this paper, compositions by active Canadian composers will be examined as representations of the Canadian arctic and contrasted with the experience of life in the arctic through ethnographic study among Inuit in Nunavut’s Kivalliq Region."
Many of these imagined Arctics come from composers who have spent little or no time in the arctic itself, yet the use of arctic imagery helps in answering the question of what it is to be a Canadian composer in the past twenty years. In this paper, compositions by Michael Colgrass, Christos Hatzis, and T. Patrick Carrabré will be examined as representations of the Canadian arctic and contrasted with the experience of life in the arctic as experienced by Inuit in the Kivalliq Region.
Ethnomusicology, Becker presents an idea that I find is still relevant today, namely, that sociological and ethnomusicological work seem to be two hands of a single body that have little idea of what each other are doing. Becker identifies this, and makes attempts to bridge the distance through evocation of Charles Seeger, a great champion of a comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach to the study of
music. Drawing on the work of scholars such as Becker and Harris Berger, I propose a modified model for the construction of the music event that highlights the relationship among the processes behind the affective experience, and the ways in which each of the processes engages with the music event whether actively or passively. Finally, I will provide a case-study of Inuit throat singing to demonstrate the effectiveness of this model.
Cooperative Activity: The Importance of Audiences
David T. Bastien, St. Cloud State University
Jeremy Rose, University of Minnesota
In this study we extend Couch’s 1986 Theory of Coordinated action and Bastien & Hostager’s Theory
of Cooperation through exploring higher levels of analysis. Videotape and stimulated recall were used
with working musicians to explore how they manage on stage cooperative and communicative issues at
the level of the recurring ‘gig.’ The data include both data from jazz and reggae groups. Among the
issues explored are how mistakes and errors by individuals are managed by the rest of the group, how
new music is added to the repertoire, and how the audiences are enfolded into decision making.
Couch’s theory is used as a basic analytic frame of analysis.
Scenes, Personae, and Meaning: Symbolic Interactionist Semiotics of Jazz Improvisation
Scott Currie
University of Minnesota
From the pioneering work of Howard Becker on jazz scenes, to the influence of Erving Goffman on
Ingrid Monson’s foundational framework for jazz ethnography, symbolic interactionist premises have
powerfully impacted the study of jazz improvisers and improvisation. Expanding upon these
precedents, I endeavor to illustrate the manner in which critical elaboration of symbolic interactionist
notions including social worlds, generalized others, and facework can hold the key to a hermeneutics of
musical meaning premised upon improvisational interplay. Specifically, I propose, the internal
structures of local jazz worlds or scenes, arising from distinctive modes of meaning production, gives
rise to particular types of generalized other, which in turn structure the development of artists’
March 31, 2014
The classroom is a social space. Whether it is a small seminar or a large introductory class, it is the interactions within the classroom that lay a foundation for learning. Likewise, without understanding the social and cultural context of music, it is difficult for students to come to terms with the music they are studying. Just as the Balinese Gamelan is more deeply understood when placed in the context of the relgious and social life of Bali, Italian madrigals make more sense and become more relevant to students when the undertones of the poetry of the cinquecento are realized. Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique only breathes full life when placed in the context of France's revolutionary culture in the early-nineteenth century. Finally, the music of Canada's Inuit can only be fully valued when it is placed in the context of their constantly changing social and cultural roles in Canada.
I believe that whether the topic is Western or non-Western, the same values lay the foundation for learning about music. Music does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in a socio-cultural setting that fosters the interactions that make a specific musical style possible. My classroom also develops a culture, one that allows students the freedom and flexibility to express their ideas and challenge their own ways of thinking about and understanding music. Many educators imagine ideal scenarios of small classes and seminars where each student has the opportunity for hands-on learning. The reality of so many universities today is larger classrooms and courses being taught to the general university population that seem to hinder this vision.
In larger class settings, where small group work, or even debate is impractical, I believe it is still possible, and necessary, to engage all students in the process of learning. Through regular opportunities for brainstorming through building on prior knowledge and asking students to reflect on their own experiences, I have had success in creating an environment for students to share their thoughts and take risks in presenting ideas related to the experience of music history. Expecting this kind of participation from my students has led to a documented history of engaging students in learning, from small intimate settings to large introductory courses that often present challenges to the professor.
In reaching the goal of universal participation and learning, I recognize that each student must come to their own understanding of the course material, and that this will take different shapes for different students. Being flexible in my own practices and recognizing teachable moments that lead to learning in my students and myself helps in achieving this goal. Creating a culture in the classroom that welcomes interaction through lecture, discussion, and performance, helps my students feel that they are moving toward the goals of mastery of course content and more generalizable skills such as applying critical thought to their work.