music

When the Room Becomes One: Conducting as a Technology of Collective Communication

Arts, communication, music, STS Faculty, Technology

By Gerrit Scheepers

This past week, my colleague and friend Dr. Elisabeth Cherland invited me to serve as an Artist-in-Residence at Minnesota State University, in Mankato, MN. During my time on campus, I had the opportunity to give a guest lecture in a music education course and to work with two of the university’s choirs – the Concert Choir and their Chamber Singers.

It was a wonderful few days filled with music, conversation, and some particularly insightful discussions about how we communicate as conductors and educators. What made the experience especially meaningful was the chance to move back and forth between the classroom and the rehearsal room. In one space, I taught future music educators about conducting and communication. In the other, I put those same ideas into practice with the choirs.

This experience got me thinking about something I have witnessed countless times throughout my career: the remarkable moment when a room full of individual people suddenly become one.

When the Room Becomes One

There is a moment in every choir rehearsal when a room of individuals suddenly become one. I stand in front of the choir, raise my hand, take a breath, and wait. Forty singers are looking at me. Some are watching my hands; others are watching my face. They are listening to one another, feeling the pulse, reading the music, and waiting for some indication that it is time to begin. Then, I move. With an intake of air and an output of sound, they sing as one, a synchrony. It is such an ordinary moment in a choir rehearsal that it can often wash over me. But being with the MSU choir students reminded me of the magic of this synchrony – one I have experienced countless times as a conductor and teacher and continue to witness in my current role at South Dakota Mines, where music brings students together in meaningful and transformative ways. I also experienced this with Dr. Cherland on the podium this past week. She was pure magic with her students. I could tell they adore her.

If I am not careful, this synchrony can pass me by. But the more I conduct or teach about conducting and communication, the more remarkable this ordinary moment of becoming one seems to me. How is it that a gesture of one person’s hand coordinates the voices, breath, attention, and bodies of an entire group of people? During my time as Artist-in-Residence at MSU, I considered this question from several angles. What became increasingly apparent to me was that conducting is a form of communication that depends on much more than the conductor.

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Score-Score: A Music & STEM Project

Arts, music

Director of Bands Dr. Haley Armstrong and a team of SD Mines computer science and engineering students have created Score-Score, a program designed to let music teachers and professors find and review sheet music. Score-Score went on to take fifth place and a $1,000 prize in the student division of the 2023 South Dakota Governor’s Giant Vision Business Competition. Armstrong is delighted with the success of this project, saying, “The students have made my wild idea become a reality. Their dedication and vision have taken the project further than I could have hoped to bring new ideas and focus to an idea that would have been subpar without their expertise.”

Score-Score highlights the way our faculty in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences encourage students in their own research and help them see connections between their disciplines and ours. It also beautifully illustrates the interdisciplinary and creative nature of STS.

Hear Dr. Armstrong talk more about this project on South Dakota Public Broadcasting’s In the Moment.

Three college students with their computers in an office full of bookshelves.

Technology and Bluegrass: More Than Just the Electric Banjo

history, music, Technology

By Christy Tidwell and Matthew Bumbach

After Matthew Bumbach’s recent Brown Bag presentation on the history of bluegrass, I found myself thinking about the role of technology in the genre. I’ve long listened to bluegrass myself but have largely taken the technologies involved for granted. I wondered what we can learn about technology by thinking about its role in the arts and also what we can learn about bluegrass specifically by paying attention to its relationship to technology. To find out more, I invited him to discuss the topic.

Christy Tidwell: For any readers who may not be familiar with bluegrass, let’s quickly provide some basic information. How would you define bluegrass in just a couple of sentences? And what is the basic history of the genre?

Matthew Bumbach: Bluegrass music emerged from old time music and hillbilly string bands from the historically isolated region of Appalachia. The primary instruments in the genre are fiddle, mandolin, banjo, guitar, upright bass, and singers. Bluegrass emerged, as a genre, during the 1940s and 1950s and owes a lot of its character to the unique playing and singing of Bill Monroe, Lester Flatt, and Earl Scruggs.

CT: With that established, I’d like to focus more specifically on the relationship between bluegrass and technology. People often tend to think about technology as high-tech or futuristic, and bluegrass is not seen as either of those things. Historically speaking, what technologies were important for the creation and dissemination of bluegrass music?

MB: That is an excellent question and one that we don’t often discuss when we talk about this genre. Bluegrass could not have developed the way it did without the microphone. In the early days of bluegrass, the entire band would gather around a single microphone in both recording and live performance applications. They would create blend and balance through the use of proximity to the microphone.

The microphone was first invented and introduced to the public in 1877 by Emile Berliner, but it would be decades before we had a microphone that was effective enough to do what the pioneers of bluegrass needed. E.C. Wente invented the condenser microphone (or capacitor microphone) in 1916, a much more sensitive microphone than the earliest moving coil mics from the previous century. It took several more decades for condenser microphones to be study and cheap enough for use by the general public.

I mention the microphone as an indispensable technological advancement in the development of bluegrass music because bluegrass was professional music played by professional musicians. Unlike old time and hillbilly music that was played in churches, porches, and barns, bluegrass music developed in part because it could be played live for large audiences. Virtuosic professional musicians toured the country spreading these new sounds. Furthermore, bluegrass spread through recordings and radio. None of this could have happened without the microphone.

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