A little after midnight on
the east coast I posted this on Facebook:
"At 12:01, January 1, 2012, Distinguished Professor and
Regents’ Professor of Music Christopher Shultis, after more than 31 years of
service, officially retired from the University of New Mexico. Happy new year
everybody!"
Christopher and I had just watched Lady Gaga (his favorite
artist, one of mine too) push the "crystal button" allowing the famed
ball in Times Square to drop and officially bring 2011 to an end. Waking up to
an outpouring of kind words from so many of my Facebook friends was an ideal
beginning to 2012!
And 2012, being the John Cage centennial (born in 1912),
will be a busy year for me, Cage-wise, having spent much of my last twenty
years learning from him and his work. I'm going to write a post about that
sometime soon. For now, let me just say (in relation to "looking back and
looking forward") that I always admired Cage for his continued search for
"newness." Even when he looked back, as he did toward the end of his
life, it was as a means of transformation, of taking the material of the past
(his own as well as that of others) in order to make something new.
Looking back on thirty years of teaching at the University
of New Mexico, thinking about the past, of why I couldn't teach what I didn't
still do (like when I quit teaching percussion in the mid-1990s), of how
important it has always been to me for my life to be about the present and
looking forward, always looking forward to the "next thing." Of why,
in the end, I decided I really could not continue to teach at all, especially
in an environment like what currently exists at UNM, and other schools I'm sure,
where teaching is becoming increasingly important as a skill, where being a
"good teacher" is related to how well your students are learning, and
how that has become your responsibility as teacher rather than theirs as a
student.
There are many reasons, both personal and professional, for
why I left UNM. But one of the reasons has to do with that environment, about
teaching and how important it is at universities now, and about how the
retention of students as bodies has taken precedence over the retention of
learning within those students as people and how what they learn, sometimes not
fully grasped until years later, is much more important than what they are
taught. I always used to tell my students that I was a "terrible
teacher." But the truth is that I just don't believe in teaching. And
this, of course, is something quite different. I had teachers in high school
who really were terrible and they did
incredible damage to talented students like myself who were a challenge to
them, something they were intellectually incapable of handling. So their
"job" as teachers was to "teach" instead of promoting an
atmosphere of learning. This latter was always my goal as a teacher. I learned
so much from the people I studied with: in percussion, Mark Johnson (at MSU),
Thomas Siwe (Illinois), one great lesson on tambourine and triangle from
Michael Udow when we played together at the Santa Fe Opera; timpani with
Detroit Symphony timpanist Salvatore Rabbio; conducting with Harry Begian
(Illinois); musicology with Alexander Ringer (Illinois); and great independent
studies with Lee Bartlett and Gary Scharnhorst (literature); Fred Sturm
(philosophy) and Ed Bryant (visual art)--all at UNM. These latter influential
teachers told me what to read and I read it. And then how to write about what I
learned from those readings. That was all I needed. In composition I'm intentionally
self-taught but I did get encouragement from David Liptak when I was an undergraduate
and I learned a lot from the many composers I had the good fortune to work with
as a percussionist and conductor in the 1980s and 1990s. So I believe in
learning and when I was teaching I liked to share what I learned. That's what I
did for thirty years at UNM.
I started this blog to be a means of expression for me in my
new life as a composer and writer in a new place here, just outside of
Philadelphia, and will definitely devote the majority of my writing time to the
documenting of that new life. But before I do I wanted to spend a little time
looking back, as a way of clearing out a path before moving forward, but also
as a way of acknowledging the importance of memories, of honoring our pasts, of
taking stock of the enormous role that the time I've spent in New Mexico as a
place, and the University of New Mexico as an institution has played in my
life. Because the truth is, for
most of the time I spent at UNM, I was able to call my own shots, do what I
wanted and believed in, and tried to include as many students in those
activities as possible. As my
artistic and scholarly goals moved increasingly away from such collaboration it
made less and less sense for me to continue at UNM.
Since my purpose is not biographical I'll leave the rest of
that history, with its many treasured memories, for other more artistically
motivated occasions. And in closing,
as I wrote at the end of that Facebook message: "To all my students here
on Facebook, my sincerest thanks to you for a great thirty years. I learned a
lot and appreciate your choosing to study along with me: in percussion,
composition, or the history of music and the arts, becoming, as John Cage once
wrote, 'students in the school from which we’ll never graduate.'”
