Looking back, looking forward (2011-12)

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.'”