Teaching Philosophy
Andrew Clark
Director of Choral Activities, Senior Lecturer on Music
Statement of Teaching Philosophy, 2019
"The point is, art never stopped a war and never got anybody a job. That was never its function. Art cannot change events. But it can change people. It can affect people so that they are changed...because people are changed by art – enriched, ennobled, encouraged – they then act in a way that may affect the course of events...by the way they vote, they behave, the way they think."
– Leonard Bernstein, Harvard College Class of 1939
"The music that matters mustn't be cheap emotion but rather incarnate reason passionately expressed as a vehicle of freedom.”
– Cornel West, Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy, Harvard Divinity School
The year 2019 marks the 100th anniversary of music professor Archibald T. Davison’s appointment as the conductor of the Harvard Glee Club: the first faculty director of a collegiate choir in the United States. Davison’s teaching emphasized the refined performance of venerated European repertoire while preserving the ensemble’s exceptional communal spirit. Following Harvard’s lead, similar groups around the country likewise refocused their pedagogical priorities and practices in a similar fashion. Harvard can proudly credit Professor Davison and his students for defining the twentieth-century prototype for collegiate choral music.
As we mark the centenary of Davison’s appointment, we find ourselves at a pivotal moment for music education around the world. Our recent projects and initiatives have aligned with a burgeoning global interest in the arts “as a vehicle for freedom,” advancing the common good. Just as Professor Davison established the model for the twentieth century choral program, I believe that Harvard is poised to create a new blueprint for choral music education for this century with a vision rooted in justice, equity, and inclusion.
Choral music in the twenty-first century demands that our students be not only sound musicians but reflective and engaged citizen-artists committed philosophically to the endeavor of listening with and learning alongside others in a lifelong process of self-inquiry. Our work should harness, in the words of my colleague Kay Shelemay, “the generative role of music to build community” and influence positive change in people’s lives with respect for diversity, human dignity, equal rights, and shared responsibility. Though I remain committed to our rich traditions and to teaching the invigorating craft of choral music and facilitating our students’ growth and fullest realization of their potential, I also believe that the normalized concepts and definitions of “excellence” in conventional choral music education and performance deserve some critical interrogation. Too often, my educational practice has been myopically invested in what essentially amounts to an exercise in self-actualization: fetishizing and prioritizing the acquisition of a narrow set of skills, while subverting larger goals of facilitating each student’s acquisition of personal meaning, individual and collective transformation, and a deeper enactment of the potential of the arts to catalyze meaningful change.
In recent years, our choruses have linked music-making to real-world questions, problems, and opportunities. We will continue to challenge ourselves to integrate our artistry with diverse and non-normative perspectives, knowledge, and expertise, to have an impact within and beyond the academy while maintaining a radical attunedness to the needs and desires of the communities with which we work.
Singing can be a powerful vehicle for both inclusion and exclusion. To make music education truly accessible, educators and students must not only be present in diverse communities, but also make ourselves (and our practice and pedagogy) relevant to these communities. In our experience at Harvard, it is in these settings that we have been most acutely confronted with the need to examine our own biases, to listen carefully and critically to people and musics in the community, and to strive to understand and respond to knowledges and means of knowledge production that differ from those with which we are familiar. It is in those contexts where we feel the least prepared by our own musical and pedagogical training that we have been forced to listen, learn, and allow the world to tune us.
Our Choral Program will aspire to empower singers, student leaders, and communities through nourishing the roots and pushing the boundaries of the choral tradition, devoting ourselves to projects and experiences that:
Cultivate Compassion. By rooting our work in empathy, we will affirm, support, and honor people who experience a reality much different from our students, including those unsettled by injustice, insecurity, and political, social, economic, and climate change.
Build Community. Our choruses continue to share their passion for music while engaging one another, building trust, and developing a mutual respect that sustains individual and collective self-worth.
Foster Creativity. By operating against convention, we will create new pathways that challenge established norms of musical value, expertise, tastes, and social hierarchies by affirming individual voices, democratizing the creative process, and advancing the socio-musical agency of each singer.
Teach History. Through art, we invoke and interpret our history to sound warnings and to also present alternative epistemologies and ontologies.
Inspire Joy. The choral experience instills a conscious and subconscious celebration of being involved in creative happiness, nurturing a culture of positivity, humility, sincerity, gratitude, and openness.
The following are examples of the ways that the Harvard Choral Program exemplifies these values:
Community Ensembles – In partnership with Lesley University’s Threshold Program, a college-based program for young adults with diverse learning differences, we have recently launched Cambridge Common Voices, a neuro-diverse vocal music ensemble. We will seize this and other exciting opportunities to further connect the university with the broader community through shared creative and performative experiences.
Partnerships – The choruses’ local, national, and international partnerships create an invaluable bilateral learning experience for all participants. Our recent collaborators include Joyful Noise (a chorus for adult with intellectual disabilities), Lexington’s SNAP (Special Needs Arts Programs) Chorus, the Y2Y student-run overnight shelter, Dorchester’s Ashmont Boys Choir, the Common Ground Voices Refugee choral ensemble in Sweden, and other organizations operating beyond the normalized conventions of arts practice.
Projects Beyond the Concert Hall – Recently, members of our choirs have led workshops and provided teaching support for music classes in prisons, juvenile detention centers, pediatric oncology clinics, senior care facilities, and schools for the blind and hearing impaired. These experiences in and with vulnerable and under-represented communities have profoundly shaped our values, impacting and informing our practice in traditional settings.
Justice-Oriented Concert Experiences – From reflecting on the trauma of the Armenian genocide in Tigran Mansurian’s Requiem, the chilling consequences of scapegoating and the history of Kristallnacht in A Child of Our Time by Michael Tippett, to the legacy of a tragic hate crime in Craig Hella Johnson’s Considering Matthew Shepard, our concerts often share stories that illuminate critical and timely issues for audiences and performers alike. We will continue to curate concert projects that intentionally teach history, raise questions, further reconciliation, and provoke, disrupt, and challenge our complacency.
Festivals and Symposia – Our successful 2014 Beyond the Concert Hall symposium, in collaboration with Joyful Noise, exemplifies an ideal artistic and intellectual convening of scholars, practitioners, activists, and other members of the community. In 2017, our students produced the Act One inclusive and integrated arts workshops in collaboration with community partners, using principals of Universal Design to welcome participants of all abilities during our long-standing, campus-wide Arts First Festival.
I am honored to serve as Harvard’s Director of Choral Activities at this moment in history and believe we are poised to provide consummate leadership in a choral music education rooted in the belief that access to the arts, as a fundamental human right, is an essential tool for personal, social, and intellectual transformation.