Dr. Brian Jude de Lima, an instructor in our Music Industry Arts and Performance program, has been conducting research in the music industry for several years now. Most recently, he has written an essay that has been peer-reviewed for the MUSICultures journal on alternative modalities in teaching Western art music in post-secondary education. He has also been exploring the topic of anthropomorphism, specifically about the artist Prince, and his research has been featured in a new book about the singer and his music.
Learn more about Brian, including the incredible research he has conducted, below.
Q. What courses do you teach at the School of Communications, Media, Arts and Design?
I teach courses in the Music Industry Arts and Performance program that are mainly grounded in both musicology and ethnomusicology, such as The History of Western Art Music, Orchestral Arranging, Worlds of Music, Theory 1 and 2, and Music in Community. I also teach performance-based courses such as Ensembles and private lessons.
What differentiates my pedagogical style from other professors at other institutions I have taught at is that I've structured ALL my courses for students to learn in a manner that gives them opportunities to collaborate and compose material utilizing technology that other professors are simultaneously teaching and using in their courses. This would mean in that in my courses, I am constantly getting students to analyze, contemplate and react to the music by way of using their ears (aurality), compose and write music into notation software and finally use a Digital Audio Work Station platform such as LOGIC PRO for collaboration with their peers to bring their compositions to fruition.
My methodology has seemed to have great success with students because they are utilizing the material they have learnt from my weekly lectures and then going into groups to brainstorm and collaborate on composing material to present for the class on the following week. What makes this learning fresh and exciting for students is that they are free to compose a song in any genre of style (Rock, RnB, Disco, Soul, POP, Metal, Electronic, World, etc.) based on the material that I have taught that is usually hundreds of years old—all done with collaboration and technology.
Q. Can you provide an overview of your peer-reviewed research?
My research intersects with several idioms in exploring why post-secondary programs need to offer their students skills and capacities to embrace modalities of learning that would enable them to contemplate, analyze, and eventually improvise the music they learn. More importantly, these post-secondary music programs need to understand that improvisation and its teaching are, at root, anti-racist sociocultural practices, and if taught properly, have the potential to penetrate directly to the "purely musical" substance that these programs have to offer, as they are always omnipresent in day-to-day culture.
For example, I want programs to consider the improvisatory practice partimenti, in which students employed harmonic and contrapuntal conventions to realize pieces to a given bass or melodic line. Partimenti (from the Italian: partimento, plural partimenti) are sketches (often bass lines) written out on a single staff, whose main purpose is to be a guide for the improvisation ("realization") of a composition at the keyboard. Seldom seen in today’s academic classrooms, it was core to some European Art Music genres—and it intersects in a variety of ways with how contemporary jazz musicians would improvise over a chordal structure. But partimenti are just one example of a variety of European improvisatory practices that aren't taught much anymore; others include figured bass, melodic ornamentation, variations over bass formulas, cadenzas—to name just a few.
Although both classical and jazz music are still being taught widely across Canadian post-secondary institutions, jazz programs still manage (albeit, and in my opinion, incorrectly) to teach their students improvisation, whilst classical programs have abandoned it. I raise this point because I believe students should learn to consider European Art music as a wider social and cultural practice involving oral/aural learning and improvisational practices – an idiom whose practitioners could interact with those involved with other idioms and traditions. If this was the case, music students could greatly benefit from learning the repertoire and its related performances as interdependent wider social and cultural practices delineated from communities and cultures from which they are a part of.
Consequently, if post-secondary institutions are willing to make the changes I am suggesting, we may see marginalized communities, Black musicians in particular, flock towards programs that they may have never considered before. University music scholars, teachers, and students would greatly benefit from the more diverse methodologies and modalities for learning such music.
Q. What are some of the elements about this topic that ignited your interest?
I have always loved classical music as a child. And my father (a graphic artist and jazz guitarist) would constantly be playing records of Chopin and Bach and especially artists such as Jacques Lousier, George Shearing, Dave Brubeck, Stan Kenton, Glen Miller and Peter Nero— all artists that blurred the lines between Classical and Jazz genres.
Then, as a teenager, I became more interested in the jazz artists from the BeBop era, such as Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, that were gleaning from the from the works of Bach and Chopin in their improvisations and harmonic textures whilst drawing inspiration from 20th Century composers such as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bartok, Ravel and Debussy in their compositions.
I truly believe in the philosophy of "those who look the furthest in the past have the ability to see the furthest into the future," and this is why my ongoing love and admiration for musics, such as classical and jazz, make it easy for me to adapt to the evolving sound of contemporary music today and subsequently, bring to it a grounded history that pays homage to the great Men and Women that created these musics.
Q. What are some of the findings that you discovered related to anthropomorphism, particularly about Prince?
What I find fascinating is that although musicians play instruments, the best ones know how to make their instruments "sing." Even though that may sound like a cliché, it does hold merit as some of the earliest compositions, both classical and jazz, had used anthropomorphism—the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities, in this case, instruments sounding like humans speaking.
In my research for the pop star Prince, I found that his early electronic compositions had a very calculated formula that elucidated Master and Johnson's research on the human sexual response cycle. Meaning Prince's instrumental parts in his compositions were following the trajectory of attack, amplitude, climax, decay, and release akin to Masters and Johnson's research. Although this may seem as a controversial topic, it really is not. The best music, regardless of genre, captures the very essences of human characteristics and utilizes it within their music, but we seldom oversee this because of other musical factors.
Learn more about this book: Feel My Big Guitar: Prince and the Sound He Helped Create.
Congratulations, Brian, on these incredible accomplishments related to your research! Brian is currently pursuing ongoing research on the intersections of Classical and Jazz music and how he feels both idioms should be taught simultaneously in post-secondary institutions that offer such programs. He is also working on improvisation using vocal inflections, as he explains, “I mumble rhythms (not pitch) and map notes in my improvisation to those vocal inflections.” You can view an example of this on Brian’s YouTube channel.
Article By: Alexandra Few
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