TCC 36. Politicization, Autonomy, and Resistance - Professor Michael Buchler

[Aaron] Welcome to the Theorist Composer Collaboration, a podcast interview series highlighting modern composers and music theorists. My name is Aaron D’Zurilla,  I'm the host of this podcast and also a music theorist myself. Today I'll be talking with Professor Michael Buchler, who, among many other things, he is a former president of the Society for Music Theory and current professor of music theory at Florida State University. And without further ado, Professor Buchler, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing?

[Dr. Buchler] Well, thank you, Aaron.

[Aaron] Yes, yes, good. I know that the semester just ended, and so thank you for coming on.

[Dr. Buchler] It's certainly less busy than it was last week.

[Aaron] Oh, I'm sure. I'm sure. And for... Now, you are pretty well known within our field, of course, but for those who may not be familiar, can you please introduce yourself personally, professionally, academically, whatever you choose?

[Dr. Buchler] Sure. I'm Michael Buchler. I taught at Florida State University for, well, I think this was the end of my 23^rd year here. Time flies. Before that, I taught at Indiana briefly. And before that, I taught at University of Iowa for five years. Yeah, I'm not sure. how much more you want in the way of introduction. I'm from Cleveland, Ohio, initially. Before coming to Florida State, I'd lived my entire life north of the Ohio River in grad school and in jobs. And the son of an immigrant father and a first-generation mother and a diehard Guardians fan, which especially as school is over, that's where a lot of my attention turns.

[Aaron] Yes. I've always wondered how you ended up at Florida after having so much career up in the Midwest.

[Dr. Buchler] Oh, that's easy. My wife, Nancy Rogers, also a music theorist, was teaching at St. Lawrence University in Wisconsin. I was teaching at Indiana University in Bloomington, which is about a nine-hour drive between the two of them, which is hardly ideal. And Florida State University had two equal tenure track jobs the same year. And so we started here in 2002. We got both of the jobs and came down. It was really fortunate.

[Aaron] That is quite the, you know, myself and my cohorts have always talked about how much of an amazing story that is, how both of you ended up here at Florida State with that. And so, as you said, I'm not really sure what else to add about bio. You've done quite a lot, you know. President of Society for Music Theory, President of Music Theory Southeast, numerous executive board positions on both regional conferences, on national, union -related things, as we will be soon getting into in more detail, all sorts of different things. But I'm wondering, through that litany of different things, what, you know, position or place in all these professional occupations? Have you, was like one of the most informative to what you do?

[Dr. Buchler] Informative can mean different things. So let me say two different positions, I think. First of all, being on the program committee and then sharing the program committee at SMT, which was about 10 years ago, 10, 11 years ago. That was my biggest bit of service before becoming president of SMT. And that was an amazing experience. I had never been on a program committee, either regional or national. And I contacted the president of SMT, at the time it was Lynn Rogers, and said, gee, I've never served on a program committee. I'd love to do that. And then be careful what you wish for. I got a call from her asking me not only to serve on the program committee for the Charlotte conference, but then to chair the program committee for the following year. And so normally it's a one-year stint. And in my case, it was a two -year stint, which is great because you're on the program committee and you see how it's done. And it was that year it was chaired by Jocelyn Neal, who did it. Amazing job. Um, so it was mostly like taking notes and making sure I, you know, I don't mess up. But that is that role. I think we read about 280 proposals. It was a lot of work, to read, but that, you know, they're, they're all 500 words or less. And you get, I've never had as strong a sense of what's going on in the field. As that position, even the president of SMT, that's a lot of that is about, you know, making sure society functions well, making sure that the committees are staffed, making sure that all of the people who are chairing committees, serving on committees have what they need to do well. So it's as much as anything, a support position. And you can also advance some big ideas. But in terms of actually knowing what's going on the ground, seeing what was proposed to SMT, that was really eye-opening. And it was a great education. It was like the most schizophrenic doctoral seminar. Because in the committee then, in those days, we met in person. And for like three, four days. And we talked through the proposals and you, you know, everybody in the committee is an expert in something different. I mean, the committees are created in a way that you have as wide a variety of expertise on the committee as possible. So to shift topics that quickly and to hear from experts and to engage in some really good. Arguments uh not contentious arguments but just really scholarly arguments that that was eye -opening it was uh it was it was a great education so that in terms of uh understanding the field I feel like I've never understood the field more than when I've been program chair and I've been very very lucky to have served as programmed to be in a program committee for SMT now four times which I think is more than about anybody can do because I served on it I've chaired it and then I was on it for two years in my role as president this is an ex-officio which, I mean I didn't have to do all that reading but I certainly did some of the reading and I was there for all the discussions so that was that was great. However, in terms of like diversifying my own work serving the program committee was great but it was also getting involved in the faculty union, surprisingly. Just getting to know people outside of your own field, I think is just enriching. And this started for me at the University of Iowa. I had a great faculty mentor in Thomas Christensen, who was my senior colleague there when I was on the faculty at University of Iowa. And he was great about introducing me to people in the humanities, people who are working on issues of sound, but not tied to music across campus, people in literary theory. And those people expanded my sense of what scholarship can be about music. And getting involved in the faculty union took me out of the College of Music and socially and professionally put me in lots of discussions with people from a lot of different areas from English literature, from sociology, physics, business. And I found that librarians, I found that the various perspectives enriched my sense of what I was doing and gave me ideas for scholarship that I never would have conceived of without that.

[Aaron] I'm sure. On your first half of the answer, I'm sure going from never being on a program committee to arguably the biggest in our field, I'm sure that was a work shock. But I hope to one day be in that position because I'm sure you got a good sense of what's going on. And on the second half, that's something that I'm sure that your perspectives helped. in getting outside of the College of Music form even more in what we're going to talk about next, which I'd like to get into. And one of the main reasons why I invited you onto the podcast, other than your experience, and also we know each other from Florida State, but aside from that, is, you know, something that I've always appreciated about yourself and your willingness to speak about and to literally act as you were just talking about. Let's get into the heavy stuff, I guess you could say. Right away, let's not mince words. You know, from this high activity in our field, in just the field of academia, as you were talking about, and organized labor, you are also very active in political. discourse in a number of different ways, whether that's from your activity in the faculty union, or even, you know, if you look on your Facebook as well, you know, just talking about and engaging with different people on all sorts of different things. And, you know, there's so many different things to talk about with this, but I just wanted to ask, what, Professor Buchler, what the hell is going on?

[Dr. Buchler] I wish I knew. Yeah, we're certainly in an interesting time. And you mentioned that I'm politically active, and that's true. A lot of the politics is a lot of it is things that arguably shouldn't be very political. Because, you know, a lot of the advocacy that I do through the union is just about maintaining rights. And I serve on our collective bargaining team. And so that's really a matter of, in addition to, you know, trying to get the best salary we can out of our administration, arguably more important than that is just making sure that we have the academic freedom and that we maintain the right to self-governance. Which is something that's terribly important in academic circles. I see challenges both from the governor's office and nationally now to our ability to self-govern, to self -govern, to our ability to collectively bargain, to our ability to teach what we want. And that should really spur anybody into political action.

[Aaron] Yeah, that was one of the things I was thinking about when writing these questions is the word political. Because when someone says, oh, that's just politics or, oh, that's just political discourse, it's like a distancing sometimes. Whereas a lot of these topics and the ones that you're talking about, it's the rights of people to live and be free and make decisions for themselves and their own institution.

[Dr. Buchler] Exactly. When people who have been attacking academia talk about the politics in the classroom, I mean, I haven't seen anybody advocate in a partisan way in the classroom. So I'm not going to show up in the classroom with a T-shirt for my favorite presidential or gubernatorial candidate. I'm not going to tell students how they must. vote or suggest how they vote. But when politicians are affecting or trying to affect what I can teach in the classroom, that becomes a place where I think I have to and I can either disobey or at least, you know, loudly advocate for it. So here's a barometer. The League of Women Voters. is not a partisan organization. They're a nonprofit because they're not a Democratic or a Republican or a Libertarian or anything like that organization. They support voting rights. So if the League of Women Voters, they will never endorse a candidate, but they certainly can endorse ballot initiatives, especially they will go to bat for ballot initiatives that seem to be restricting voting rights. Likewise, the Society for Music Theory is a nonprofit organization. And I was very aware of this, especially when I was president, that I could not take any position that would imperil. I should say that in an organization, a scholarly organization, there's only two people who can actually speak on behalf of the society. It's the executive director and it's the president. So when I was privileged to hold that position for two years, I was more careful about what I said, realizing that anything that I said is just personally could be conflated, could be taken as speaking for the society. And so I had fewer political posts on Facebook. Although when it came to censorship, when it came to funding for the arts, funding for the humanities, this is where we can speak loudly. That's not partisan, shouldn't be partisan. And it's completely fine to do that. I took. my lead often from an organization that the Society for Music Theory is a part of, the American Council of Learning Societies, the ACLS, which is a sort of super, it's like a federation of scholarly societies in the arts and humanities and social sciences. So it includes It includes the Society for Music Theory, the American Musicological Society, AMS. It includes Society for American Music, SAM, and it includes the Society for Ethnomusicology, SEM. So all of those are within. And when the ACLS makes a statement against censorship, against detention of students, against cutting of funding for the arts, you know it's not political. For one thing, they have a cadre of lawyers who are, who you know we help support through our individual society dues but when we when we needed a legal opinion we would we would go to the ACLS and ask because they you know that's a national organization and they have better funding. SMT is by scholarly societies, pretty small, a couple thousand members. So yeah, I that was where I would take my lead. That if, you know, if they're coming at us we should just make it clear that professors are not the people who are politicizing education. That's certainly true. That's being done at the national and state levels. So yeah, when they're telling us what we can and can't teach, when they're trying to ban books, and faculty say no, the faculty aren't the ones being political.

[Aaron] Certainly, certainly. With the banning book thing. My mother is a varying exceptionalities pre -K teacher or the newer name for special needs public school teacher in southwest Florida. And when the book bans were first happening, she had firsthand experience of having PTO members, unelected, unregistered people. come in and shift through all of these children's books and get rid of ones, what almost seemed arbitrary. I don't want to get her in trouble, so I'll move on from that. But yes. And, you know, how do you, as a writer, academic, someone who is in a position of social and sometimes literal power, whether in the classroom and institutions and so on, how do you play the balancing act of wanting to be even-handed, respecting the opinions and the charges of whether students or your colleagues or people who might be under you for whatever thing who may disagree and say that, no, some of this is not evidently not political or whatever, you know, there's a hundred different arguments you could come up with there. But then your reaction is like, that's, for example, when it comes to the deportation of international students who have full embodied right to be here and be students and be people are not being treated as such. And let's say someone were to, on an offhand, disagree with that in a meeting or something. How do you go between throwing the table at them and respecting opinions of discourse in that sort of situation? Because for me personally, that's something I find harder and harder to do as the temperature gets hotter and hotter.

[Dr. Buchler] Right. I have there's a lot there's a lot there the first answer to how do you deal with these things it's very much a solidarity answer. I'm not just active in the faculty union I'm also on our faculty senate. I’m an elected member of our faculty senate and when, it was a day before the shooting on campus, a few a month ago Florida State and every other, we have 12 state universities in the state of Florida, Florida State was one of the last to sign but we all signed on to an agreement with the government that allows our campus police to act in service of ICE. That bothered me more than anything else in a long long time and I because I'm actually in union leadership I actually had chance to talk to the president and to the upper administration about it. We have consultations with the president and upper administration a couple times a year. That happened to fall right in that period. And I also, as a faculty senator, I proposed a resolution where the faculty senate could speak in unity against this. And we did. The vote was something like 83% of faculty senators voted to ask the administration to pull out of this agreement with ICE, they must be getting very, very strong political pressure from on high to have signed into that. I would not want to be an upper administrator. I can't imagine what they're facing. But I know that just morally, what concerned me, aside from everything else, the argument on the administration side is that we would rather have our students deal with our own police officers than with ICE. Absolutely. I would trust FSU police far more than these ICE agents who come in often with their faces covered. They don't have any knowledge of our campus. They don't have any interaction with students. So of course, I would rather have our own police deal with that. But the counter of that is that if our international students can't trust our police, if they think that the police are going to act in a way that could detain them, then our international students are not going to feel free to call the FSU campus police when they're robbed, when they're the subjects of violence. They have then no recourse to law enforcement. And that creates an unsafe place on campus. And it's all of our jobs to, I mean, it's the university's job to make sure that students feel safe. And so to me, this agreement with ICE runs directly counter to one of the university's responsibilities to make sure that students feel safe. And the idea that international students would feel less safe than American students. That just seems deeply wrong. We should be treating everybody on campus should feel welcomed. Acting alone can feel like you're yelling into the wind and you can feel very powerless, but that's the whole notion of solidarity. This is why totalitarian regimes want to disband unions and want to make sure that collectives don't have power. I don't know if I got into all the parts of your question. Feel free to re -ask any part of that.

[Aaron] Yeah, no, that does answer a good portion of it. If you can't answer this, what did the president say when you asked about this?

[Dr. Buchler] Yeah, he expressed surprise that students would feel unsafe.

[Aaron] That's surprising.

[Dr. Buchler] I found it surprising too. And, and I mean, I, I basically gave you the argument from our, it was mostly our general, the university general counsel who was talking and you know, she was saying that we give basically giving the argument that, that she would rather have our students deal with FSU police than with ICE. But also she made the case that FSU police will not act on any, will only act on a warrant. that's been duly served. The question that I then asked and really didn't get a response to is, you know, what constitutes a crime? If somebody was jaywalking, if somebody was, you know, attending a political protest and staying too long on the central quad, is that a deportable offense? Is that a detainable offense? It sure wouldn't be for an American citizen. So and they really didn't have an answer to that question.

[Aaron] So that might be the answer then.

[Dr. Buchler] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we've seen we, you know, we saw at Tufts University, a woman who simply wrote a letter to the editor and was detained. I mean, that that that is such a strong violation of our First Amendment rights that it's hard to imagine. It's hard to imagine a legal argument for that kind of treatment of our students. Sure. And things that really concerns me, I mean, if we don't have an international student body, we're not a major university. We're not a research university. You can't have a research university that doesn't invite ideas and people from all over the world.

[Aaron] Certainly. Absolutely invaluable. And I suppose the other part of my question that I'm going to, I'm going to add something else to it that on a personal level, how do you stay fortified? Because like for me and for a lot of, you know, I grew up in Florida. I went to University of Florida as well. While I'm certainly not loyal to University of Florida, I am loyal to the College of Music. I love the people there, the professors, the students, of course. And if I one day in the news saw that my entire program was being defunded like the students at Jacksonville did, I would. And I knew people who were getting their master's who did their bachelor's and Jacksonville, you know, all sorts of things. So growing up in this Florida community, I would feel completely I would want to give up. And like it's how do you deal with that personally and how? Yeah.

[Dr. Buchler] Yeah. OK, so I'm going to talk a little bit. Part of it has to do with my own privilege. I mean, which is, as you pointed out, substantial. I've been president of national organization. I'm a full professor. I've got tenure. Tenure means less now than it used to. We're reviewed every five years. But I still feel like for FSU to fire me would be a political act on their part. And I have enough cockiness that I would go to, I would go to national outlets. I would go to the New York Times. I would go to the Washington Post. I would certainly go to the Miami Herald, not to mention the Tallahassee Democrat, and talk about firings. University of Florida is kind of a different situation in that they have had, unfortunately, a longer history of presidents who are unwilling to stand up to the administration.

[Aaron] Oh, really? Yeah.

[Dr. Buchler] I mean, and, you know, it was, I mean, obviously there was corruption, good for the student newspaper at University of Florida for reporting on the corruption of Ben Sasse, the most recent president. But the current acting president and previous president, Fuchs, also has shown a willingness to agree with the administration over supporting his own faculty. I feel like we get more support from Florida State University's administration. I feel like FSU's administration is in a difficult position. As I said, I wouldn't want to be them, but I also feel like they are going to bat for us more than UF's administration has for them, which I don't understand because UF is a higher ranked organization. They have a large medical school. They've got lots more money. And I think that they would have the power to fight back. But it's hard for any state institution to feel that they have the power to fight back, given that most of our funding comes from the state and federal resources. So if we're, you know, I get that you have to be seen. And part of that's just the corruption of the whole system. The idea that the Board of Trustees is largely appointed by the governor the Board of Governors which oversees the Board of Trustees are also largely um appointed by the governor. There's a couple of positions like faculty senate presidents on the trustees, student body presidents on the trustees but those are two votes among many. The whole system, there really aren't the kinds of checks and balances, there's not the independence that you would hope. So it's not surprising when the Trustees do what the governor wants because the governor has the power to replace them if they don't. So you asked how do I make it positive and I just give you a very, very negative response. So again, part of it is cockiness on my part that I'm in the position I'm in and I, number one, believe that I could probably find a job somewhere else. It would be harder for two of us to find a job somewhere else. Not that I want to leave. I want to stay and fight. And number two, I'm 58 years old and close enough to retirement that I'm not seeing a long career ahead of me. And that means that I have a little bit more freedom, I think, to say what I want than somebody who's just starting their career and hopes to stay and you know needs to support a family and all of that. So I have a bit more um freedom to do things that a lot of people don't but I mean if that answer, and the other part of that is that my work as a music theorist has never been that political until fairly recently. And I was lucky enough in 2019 to get asked to keynote Music Theory Midwest. And they asked me, it was during the first Trump administration, and they asked me, I think seeing my Facebook post, if I would do something political. They had a workshop leader who was also going to do something on sort of the politics of music theory. That was Dean Hubbs longtime friend of mine. And that's when I started thinking about, I've been working in musical theater. I started thinking about musical theaters that stake a kind of political position. And I started looking at musical theater and labor. And that led me down a rabbit hole that I'm still climbing into. And something that's been a real joy for me, thinking about interactions of music and meaning, thinking about music's role in advocating for positions. That's a different direction than I had been traveling. And it was really renewing. It's nice to find something new. And I found that working along these lines has given me a lot of joy. And I suppose part of the idea that I'm violating the supposed intellectual freedom bans. I'm not violating anything. A lot of people are preemptively complying with things that they think they should be doing. So yeah, I'm doing work that I really enjoy is the answer. And that helps me stay positive.

[Aaron] So that's similar to what I've heard from other professors. I've asked similar things to others, not necessarily on this podcast, just in life. How do you stay? How do you keep your head up? And I remember Professor Lumsden pointed out how Trump was being inaugurated at the same time that, you know, our department was having a doctoral seminar in feminist analysis of contemporary opera, something that would make a fine Fox News headline in the political times. And so just pushing forward with that kind of work is a similar kind of sentiment. And I will say about the University of Florida with Ben Sasse. Oh, yeah. I was there for the student protests, the sole finalist, which is just that phrase, sole finalist, is comical. And I'm looking up at my degree above my desk, which has the signatures of Ben Sasse and Ron DeSantis on them from University of Florida. So, yeah, it's been quite a ride with that. How about on a level of something that is, I want to combine the topics here. I want to pivot and ask about you know the field of music theory in general and some of the things in the Society for Music Theory and also you know in combination with what we've been talking about. Because You know, just as any other organization in the country, the Society for Music Theory and the field in general has to react to the current situation. You can't just ignore it because then you're going to be gone with the halls of history if you ignore it. And I just want to preface. I've said this before on the show, but, you know. I'm relatively new to this field, and this past SMT in Jacksonville was my first one ever. And it was a very motivating event. The amount of different interest groups, and the diversity of the papers, and the diversity of the presenters, and all the different things that are happening inside the Society for Music Theory. Things like LGBTQ interest groups, feminist interest groups, sessions on pedagogy with disability, all sorts of things that are like antithetical in direction to the national conversation. And which I find very motivating and driving as someone who wants to be part of this field. And I suppose my question, Professor Buchler, is what position do you see? Things like the Society for Music Theory and perhaps the regional conferences and smaller offsets, their role in this entire conversation?

[Dr. Buchler] That's a good question. First of all, I'm really glad that you had such a great time at SMT. I heard you say that on other podcasts, and it means a lot to me. I mean, I didn't really have a role in putting together, although actually I guess I did serve on the program committee. No, not through the last time. One time ago, I did. I was not in the program this time. In fact, I spoke in the program this time. Yeah, this was my last time on the board. And it was really a very special conference to me, too, for all kinds of reasons. And the diversity of the society is something that I celebrate, that I celebrate repeatedly. It's grown. I take a lot of inspiration. All the things that you mentioned shouldn't be political. The idea about feminist scholarship, the idea about figuring out how to work with disability and to, you know, accelerate people who have disabilities, the idea of, well, just, you know, diversifying the field in any way one can think of. I mean, none of these should be political ventures. And yet, again, politics takes different meanings. And sometimes we talk about all disciplines are political and all disciplines go through shifts. And there are scholarly trends that happen across disciplines. So, I mean, part of. I'm trying to remember exactly what your question is here. What's SMT's role? I think SMT's role is just to continue to be human and good humanists and musicians and to celebrate and study as much of diverse literature, whatever music theory means. And I will say that both serving as program chair, and serving as president, and I have less and less of an idea. I wouldn't want to define what music theory is. I heard Joe Strauss defined it as, you know, the work that music theorists do, which is kind of wonderfully circular and gets around the notion that it should be something that's in this box. I had a much better sense of what music theory comprised when I was a grad student and an assistant professor. But I'm really happy that our field intersects so much now with our sibling disciplines, with ethnomusicology, with historical musicology, Americanism, media and culture, feminist scholarship, or just gender scholarship, scholarship on race, scholarship on identity. I mean, these are all things that are in the zeitgeist and things that we should be drawing upon. Just as, you know, getting active in the faculty union opened my eyes to other kinds of works that I could do, that I could bring into the realm of music theory. So I think that music theory is in a very, very healthy place in that we are drawing from a lot of different disciplines. And I think that's helping to make us a more mature discipline. We're also in a period of, sorry, of such growth, intellectual growth, that you will get people who feel like the work that they do no longer matters. And let me hop into that because I think that one of my greatest fears for SMT is that we will lose our sense of identity from being overly broad. It's not a huge fear that I have, but I also worry that the eagerness to do what's new in the field will lead some to ignore what has been historically our field strength. And so, I mean, when I was president of SMT, I often heard very polarizing reactions to, especially in the wake of the 2019 plenary session and the sort of call to improve, which was a really clarion call. Some of the reactions that I got, especially from younger scholars, but not exclusively, was that, you know, we need to diversify like yesterday. We need to, you know, burn it all down, no more Beethoven scholarship let's just be looking at you know scholarship that that honors people who have been historically disadvantaged in our field and scholarship of music of people who've been historically disadvantaged in our field and it's the burn it all down part that I can't get behind. Because the other reaction that I was getting is that fear from people who, I mean mostly but not entirely senior scholars, people who want to study Beethoven, people who want to study classical music. That's why they got into the field and who have something to say about classical music. And I don't want their work to be slighted and dishonored. And I think that this is why growth is hard, that the people who are advocating for new directions also need to make sure that they're not insulting scholars who are doing the work that they want to do.

[Aaron] Certainly. I mean, this is a discussion that, as you probably know, happens among people my generation and age all the time. I mean, I'm especially thinking about this having just completed the readings in music theory class with Professor Lumsden. It's funny, you know, one of the biggest things we're, you know, that class historicizes, you know, our field. And conversely, our sister field, kind of AMS with musicology, you know, that's where we came from as a, as an organization with SMT. And, you know, the current fears, as you were outlining a bit in your own way of re -assimilating, or at least not clearly defining. Our own existence in contrast to the field of musicology and the related ones to that. And on the subject of repertoire or study or like that sort of stuff, that has been I've been having shifting views on that because, I mean, I graduated high school in 2019. I wasn't necessarily aware of the world and I still certainly am not totally. But I'm of two minds with that because you never want to tell someone that they can't study or research something that's regressive, as we've been talking about with federal and state means. So doing that within our own classrooms or halls and so on is not good. Right. And in another way, when I hear people talking about that, it's just my own gut reaction. Is does that scholarship hold up to modern standards of relevance?

[Dr. Buchler] What scholarship?

[Aaron] Let's say, I don't know, a hypothetical paper wanted to do a Schenkerian style analysis, not necessarily Schenker, of a Beethoven piano sonata and talk about the interpretations of it. Does that hold up to standards? And sometimes my gut reaction. um, is, you know, people being scared of having competition with newer music. I don't know if that's fully flushed out in my mind, but I'm a little skeptical sometimes when I hear that fear. Because I study, myself, you know, as you could probably tell from this podcast, more recent composition and in my other way, also rap and hip-hop music. So things that are, very contemporary in contrast. So just from my position, I get a little skeptical, maybe cynically, when I hear that.

[Dr. Buchler] So I don't see why it wouldn't stand up. I mean, I think, as you know, you, although probably not most of your podcast listeners, heard my speech at Music Theory Southeast this year. And it was, in many ways, a defense of the methodology that that prolongational analysis linear analysis Schenkerian analysis whatever you want to call it. It was also a call to rethink a lot of the assumptions of that an analytical method and the repertoire of that analytical method. But I've gotten enormous satisfaction of you know sketching Beethoven sonatas. I don't see any reason not to sketch Beethoven sonatas. I mean, it would be a problem for a program if you were only being asked to study Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Brahms, you know, if we were enforcing that canon. But to me, there's also a problem of ignoring the music that has fed our field and therefore not really knowing the literature of our field. So I think that we don't want to throw out scholarship. We want to, you know, over time, historicize it. We want to evaluate it. But I think if people can no longer do the work, that kind of work, there's a critical problem. One of the things that I find most troubling is when people criticize prolongational analysis who have never done it and who don't have the tool set to do it. So, I mean, I'm a big proponent of helping people come to that tool set without feeling defensive, without feeling like you have to admire either the method or certainly not the person who created the method, or the people who created the method. But I think there's a real problem if we are simply rejecting methodologies. To me, rejecting methodologies, rejecting literature, rejecting repertoire puts us in the same camp as people who would censor us and tell us what not to study, what not to read. So, I mean, just as I would fight anybody who says you can't, you know, read feminist scholarship, you can't read anti-racist scholarship. You also shouldn't be saying you can't study this dead white German composer.

[Aaron] Certainly, certainly. And as you know, well, people don't know, but my only experience learning Schenkarian or prolongational analysis, as you do say, was one semester with yourself two years ago, a year and a half technically. But yeah, I, again, have the recency of my entrance into the field and then my, let's say the music that I study is not congruent to that kind of music. What I see prolongational analysis as is something similar to that of transformational or set class theory, where I don't see it as a pillar of the field, but it's a tool that you can use selectively depending on context. You know, like when you do a transformational analysis, you're probably not doing an entire piece and you're not like, this is the answer to this piece. It's a section. Maybe it's a transition and somewhat similar with set class, unless if you're looking at, you know, particular composers like Schoenberg or Webern or so on. Is that out of line or is that about how you see prolongational analysis?

[Dr. Buchler] No, I see it differently. But I see it. Okay. So in Music Theory Southeast, one of the things that I was advocating against. is a strong sense of the fundamental line, of the fundamental structure, that this is the answer that we're going toward. Because I find analysis at the foreground, especially I look mostly at song. So where my analysis can no longer interface with the text of the song, I tend to get less interested. So I'm not somebody who's looking at big, broad forms. I'm not looking at sonata theory. If I were, I would care probably more about middle ground structures and things like that. But it's not what I happen to be interested in studying. So my call was to get rid of a lot of the expectations, but not the methodology. I could make the same call about transformational analysis and set class analysis. And I think, and I've said this in a couple of pieces that I wrote about why I don't teach set class analysis to undergraduates anymore. I still do absolutely teach it to graduate students. For one thing, I think it's important to know the field. It's important to know the history of the field. It's important to be able to read historically in the field. And I think it's an important tool to have in your toolbox when you understand its limitations. And to me, one of the big limitations, one of the big expectations, I think that set-class analysis, transformational analysis are, if anything, more doctrinaire than, let's call it Schenkerian analysis, even with the expectation of finding a three-line and a five-line. The expectation, which is an unwritten expectation, well, actually, it's not that unwritten. It's in Alan Forte's The Structure of Atonal Music, where back in the day, we were expected to come up with inclusion tables, KKH tables, and find the nexus set that sort of bound everything together in the piece. That's an organicist analysis every bit as much, more so, I think, than Schenkerian analysis. And the idea that a piece of music will cohere in every way is to me a much, much more limiting assumption. It's limiting in that you are selecting repertoire, you're cherry-picking repertoire, which is what I always did, that works in whatever sense works means. And I think that the more radical move in music theory. Would be to take away the sense of what it means to cohere, to have a much, much wider range of middle ground background structures of all music. And I'm not talking about tonal music. I'm talking about acceptable paths for popular music, for concert music. or really anything you're looking at, but doing that, approaching out analysis without a, an expectation is also very, very difficult and maybe a fool's errand. So, so yeah, my project looking forward is really to, to think about what parts of the piece do I care to focus on? I mean, for me, it's like beginnings and endings, especially with small songs. Bridges are interesting. There's a lot of things that one could focus on and talk about as interesting. But I think that the diversification of music theory, at least as I see it, I would love to see it be less about throwing out methodology, but more about throwing out the expectations of methodology. Because what is transformational analysis if you're not adhering to your collection of transformations? Some people will come up with new transformations, but still if something, and then you'll have things like, you know, the fuzzy transformations. You know, it doesn't work, so we're going to have an offset, which is still basically saying it's a kind of this. You know, we're very, very good at taxonomy. We're good at putting these in boxes. We're less good at situations where boxes make less sense

[Aaron] Sure and I guess I hadn't thought of that. I'll have to sit on that a little bit for my for my own work. And how about so we're talking about the fear the we should not be throwing away methodologies, which I do agree with. And I've always enjoyed your approach to Schenkerian analysis and the allowances and disallowances and the discussion of the ideology versus the methodology. That's always been.

[Dr. Buchler] Thanks. I'll also just jump in and say that one of the things that I love about prolongational analysis is it's a springboard to close reading. And it's a common notational system. It's a common way of expressing analysis so that we can read each other's analysis and understand what we're saying. Sure. And we don't want to have a Tower of Babel situation where everybody's doing tonal analysis in different ways and with different notations. So I think having a notation that's understood widely gives one the ability to scrutinize more thoroughly and to say, no, I don't agree with this analysis because of this, or I do agree with it. But again, it, this, one of the things that I like about prolongational analysis is the notational system that it is, it's much, much more clear than writing passing tone, neighbor tone, escape tone, whatever.

[Aaron] No, I agree. I mean, even I can be ardently anti that methodology sometimes in my head, but it's still so satisfying to make a graph. It's like someone will make a lot of money at SMT selling like an adult coloring book, but it's like making a Schenkerian sketch. It's so visually and intellectually satisfying, regardless of all the peripheral things. And so I wanted to ask.

[Dr. Buchler] Oh, you're welcome to try to make that money.

[Aaron] Oh, yes. Yes, with unlimited time. But, oh, then there would be debates about the different pages of the coloring book. But anyways, so.

[Dr. Buchler] I think anytime you start a sentence, somebody will make a lot of money at SMT. You're probably wrong.

[Aaron] You are right. Yes. So I was wondering, so we're discussing the different movements of the music theory field, what we should be and should not be doing, and so on. I have a general sense of this. Of course, my scope is limited only to the people that I've met, of course. But what is your scope about the generations around mine or the people who are just starting to go through graduate school and get PhDs, I get a general sense, maybe this is from conditioning, maybe this is for other reasons, that the prevalence of prolongational Schenkerian methodology is very much the burn it all down or I don't care. I'm not saying that there's no one. I actually met a number of people at the FSU reception who wanted to study with you because they want to do sketches. But what, what is your perception of the up-and-coming generations of music theorists and their interests or influences?

[Dr. Buchler] I so admire the, the various paths that people are going in and I'm not somebody to say that, you know, somebody must study this and this and this to be a music theorist. I, although I, you know, I have advocated as some, as Phil Ewell talks about in his book, a lot of departments are not requiring machine learning analysis, prolongational analysis anymore. And I've maintained an advocacy for a requirement. at least at our master's level, because I just think it's part of being fluent in the field and being able to read widely in the field. Not certainly to, the word of the day is indoctrinate. It's certainly not.

[Aaron] I'll give a word of defense on, so I've said a couple of times here and other episodes that that's not the sort of music that I study generally, but I find myself thinking, yeah, we don't need that stuff. But also, it's kind of funny because I think about all the pop research that I do, and if I didn't have the classes on advanced tonal analysis such as yours or two semesters of atonal analysis, there's actually a fair number of things that I would assume have nothing to do with it that I wouldn't be able to read or fully understand for something that you wouldn't necessarily put next to each other, but it's all part of the same field.

[Dr. Buchler] Yeah, you know, having exposure to various methodologies enables one to see relations. It may also bias one in favor of certain relations. So it's a double-edged sword. But I'm a big, you know, I love that we're getting some new methodologies. I love that the field is diversifying. But I also think that. It's important to keep one foot in where SMT has been so that we're a coherent field through time. I love this generation of grad students and what they're doing. And I think that older people like me should be supportive of new ventures. I think that SMT has been very supportive of the field's expansion. I will say that, again, one of the things that worries me is older scholars no longer submitting to SMT. And it's a kind of preemptive sense of what the field is. When I was coming into the field, the field was dominated by too few methodologies. So if you were doing a tonal analysis and you didn't have something like a Schenkerian sketch, it might be hard to get on. If you were doing an atonal piece and you weren't looking at set classes, it might be hard to get on the program because there was a methodological expectation. It's almost the opposite now where people feel like if I have, um a prolongational sketch in my proposal I'm not going to get onto the onto the program committee and that is a belief with absolutely no basis in reality. I say that having served over the last decade on four different program committees and I've never seen anybody suggest that we reject a paper because of the methodology they use. I've never seen anybody suggest that we reject a paper because it uses a Schenkerian sketch or because it uses a transformational graph or anything like that. There's probably more scrutiny. A pretty sketch isn't going to be enough to get you on the program anymore. But I very intentionally, this last year, I couldn't submit to SMT for a few years because I was president. But this last year, I very, very intentionally submitted something and included voice leading sketches. In my proposal, in part because I wanted to be able to say to people, yes, you can get on SMT with voice leading sketches and people are self -censoring, which is very alarming to me in the same way that people teaching classes in Florida are self -censoring because they don't want to get in trouble with the government. I, you know, I let the powers that be tell you you can't do something before you decide you can't do something. And I've not seen anybody in SMT. And I think we've put together very good program committees with really, really diverse scholars on them. But I haven't seen anybody suggest that you can't do this or that.

[Aaron] I hope that's comforting to hear to a number of listeners, because I know that there's a number of people within my cohort and I'm sure many others who don't say it who are fearful of that. auto rejection because of the content in their graphs or in their figures, if it's a graph or not, or something of that sort. So I'm sure that's comforting. And something I want to touch on before we close, a newer, I'm not going to say brand new, newer and growing part, an extension of the field is the idea of public music theory. Something that you could probably imagine is important to myself because in a way I promote it every other week for the past year. And I'm just going to leave it general to you. What are your thoughts on the idea of public music theory and its role in expanding the field?

[Dr. Buchler] I think it's one of the best things that we have done as a field. And it's, again, music theory is not isolated. Music theory, the field, the sense that we should have more public scholarship has been growing. And it's more important now than ever, because we have to be talking to people outside of our field about how important it is to do what we do. I was a strong advocate. I was on the program committee when Steve Rogers was program chair and put together that great plenary session on public music theory at the New Orleans conference. That session also included, sorry, not the New Orleans conference, the Denver conference. I can't remember which is which anymore. The Denver conference. And in fact, the Professional Development Committee also had a session on public music theory at the same conference. And the AMS also had a session on public music scholarship at the same conference. So there's a lot of thought about this. And the work that Danny Jenkins has done has been, he's wonderful and spearheading, and he's been just a great, great advocate for this. But I think it's – so I was asked to write a response to the plenary session in Denver, as were a number of other people, including two of my colleagues, Rachel Lumsden and Jullian Grasso. These are all now out in digital form in Music Theory Spectrum. And the next issue of Music Theory Spectrum that's printed is going to be just a litany of both the talks at that conference and responses to them, including mine. And I tried to respond with the position of, you know, I was president of the field at the time. President not of the field, president of SMT at the time. The field is much broader than SMT. In my response, I talked about the importance of public music theory in the diversification of our field. Because you saw, I mean, you commented how diverse SMT, the SMT conference was in Jacksonville. And my concern is that music theorists see that and people who read Spectrum or MTO or SMTV, SMT Pod. can see the diversity. But people in an AP theory class in high school don't. They see that they're being asked to do a lot of the same kinds of tasks, four-part writing, counterpoint, two-part dictation, one-part dictation. I'm going to go off and grade AP exams next month, as I have done for many, many years.

[Aaron] Bless you.

[Dr. Buchler] But just as I'm working for the College Board when I'm doing it, or the educational testing service while doing this, I've also had more and more critical eye about what we're testing and the message that we're sending to our students. So I think that we need to be evangelical about this. I think that members of SMT, members of the community need to be better about sharing podcasts. I love that you have your own podcast. Love that SMT's two newest journals, SMTV, our videocast, and SMTPod, our podcast, are both listed under publications of the society. They're listed as journals. So I think it's important for people to publish in these, to list it on their resume under publications. And I think it's important, for one thing, they are juried publications. They have an editorial board. That looks through them. It's not automatic to get on. And I think that one of the things that I've been trying to do, and one of the reasons that I'm still a very eager AP grader is that I like to use the time at the AP reading to be a bit of an evangelical for these resources. And I think that in addition to the stuff that teachers need to teach their students to get four or five on the AP exam, they should also, it would be great if they had the time, if they could expose students to what music theory is as a field. Because I'm afraid that people with diverse interests, people who want to make their, you know, life in commercial music, won't see music theory as something that speaks to them.

[Aaron] I will say, I have had a bit of personal growth on this. When I first started this podcast I was in a more of a mind that music theory was a lot more behind than it really was. Which may be part of that is the presentation of the field as you're talking about right there. But that's something that I've been for the past months in the more recent time on this podcast trying to promote. It's funny that you said this episode that was posted right before yours when I was talking to a composer, Emelia Ulrich. She is masters of composition at Florida State, and she was talking about that perception. And I encouraged her. I said, I understand why you have that perception of music theory being this archaic, you know, voice leading in the classical music, like classical era and all that and all that sort of things. I encouraged her and the audience to. please go to SMT or look at what's on the website. Look at these different things because it's much bigger than how it's presented in some cases, like the AP music theory exam. I mean, part of it is practicality. I know there's only so much you can do in a year of high school, but yeah.

[Dr. Buchler] It's also, the exam has to be something that can be graded consistently. Yeah. So getting into subjectivity is very, very difficult to assess.

[Aaron] Certainly.

[Dr. Buchler] If you care about assessment. They certainly do.

[Aaron] Oh, yes, they certainly do. And now, before we move on to close, there is something that Professor Jenkins talked about a little bit when he visited our class. And it's something that, as someone who is a promoter of and part of public music theory, something I'm thinking about as well. Is the concern of not leaving behind the more traditional journal print like one of the benefits of public music theory is that it's relatively quick compared to, you know, like we can stay on top of things. You know, if there's something topical that happens and things come out in half a year, not a year and a half in JMT, however you want to say. But also maintaining the importance of the traditional journals and incredibly rigorous peer review system of, I guess, traditional, let's say the rock-solid part of the field in some of the most prestigious publications. Do you share that kind of concern or, yeah?

[Dr. Buchler] I think they're two different kinds of things. And I think that we should acknowledge that our journals like MTO and Spectrum and JMT and Music Analysis are written for experts. They're written for people with knowledge of the field. And there is a strong place for that. You know, we're a scholarly field. We should be free to write in whatever detail and sophistication. Sophistication is the wrong word because you can have very you can have things that are written in a public music theory, open way that they're very very sophisticated. But sometimes you have to go into the weeds sometimes you really really have to go deep into the weeds and there has to be a rule. There has to be a place for that. So I think generally speaking, our academic writing could be more friendly to everyone. When I was a student, I didn't come from academic parents and I tried to sort of imitate academic writing in my term papers and all. And I think I was a pretty terrible writer because of it. It was only much later, especially when I started working on musical theater that I felt like I could write in my own voice. And I still get, you know, criticized for that by some reviewers, anonymous reviewers at journals. That's a tangent. Anyway, I think that I think roles are kind of different. Also, I think it's a really good thing that if you have if you have an SMT podcast, if you have an SMT videocast, SMTV, that doesn't preclude you from using the same material. in one of the print journals. And I'm counting MTO as a print journal, as opposed to a multimedia journal. So, yeah, I think there's got to be a role for print journals. I think the notion of juried publications is really good because a good trip through that process can really improve your article. And we all need editors. We all need people to look at our work and say, what do you mean by that? Or can you make that more clear? Sometimes it's painful to go through the editorial process, but my work is always made better by people who have critiqued it and edited it. And I worry about losing that in the kind of anything may go in a publish what you want, self-publish whatever you want field. So I think we're in a good place. I think that Society for Music Theory is out in front as we've been many times. SMT had an online journal, MTO, long before most fields did. It was just text. And we've got an official videocast and podcast long before I think most fields do. And we're defining it as publications, I think, before most fields. We're seeing more and more of that come along. But one of the benefits of being a relatively small academic society is that I don't think most people view SMT as nimble, but in my experience, it's been very nimble. It's been shocking to see what one can get done in just a short period of time.

[Aaron] Yeah, something that I have parroted many times on this show and to people around me is that I am highly, highly optimistic about where this field is going. There's always concern with things here and there. And my gosh, the political and atmosphere of the nation and state aside, as a field, I feel very positive about where everything is going as well. And, uh, well, you know, Professor Buchler, this has been a wonderful conversation talking about, it almost feels weird to say politics because we talked about how that's kind of superfluous, but talking about politics, talking about the music theory field as it is, was, and hopefully will be. And, uh, before we close, what projects do you have going on? What's coming up?

[Dr. Buchler] Well, this summer is going to be a busy one for me in terms of writing. I've got two chapters in books. One is the Oxford handbook. One is a Cambridge Companion, both on musical theater that I need to write over the summer. And beyond that, I've got a couple of article projects that I'm working on. I really am trying to figure out how to take the stuff that I presented at Music Theory Southeast and turn it into something larger, possibly a book. I don't know yet. And I also, I had a sabbatical this last fall and I managed to get a ton of resources from various archives in Great Britain that I've digitized, but I haven't really gone through and read. And so there's a long, long project ahead of me. I'm hoping to do a number of things about a workers' theater in Great Britain and the music that they that came out of that movement that just about nobody knows about. And I've never seen, there's no publication of these songs I'm hoping to make them more available to the public. That kind of crosses my union, my sense as a unionist and also my work as a musician

[Aaron] Yes, certainly. That kind of archival work is priceless in many different ways spreading such unknown things. And what would be a good way for the audience to contact you with any comments or questions?

[Dr. Buchler] Oh, feel free to email me. My email is available probably on your website. And also, if you simply Google Michael Buchler, I don't think there's more than one of me. You'll find my email address and contact information. And I'd love to hear from people.

[Aaron] Certainly. Well, Professor Buchler, thank you very much for coming on to this podcast, especially so close after a semester ending. And also, I know you've always been willing, whether publicly in the classroom, personally, willing to talk about such things on a public forum that are, let's be honest, a bit scary for a lot of people, not just to talk about, but in people's personal lives right now. It's something that I hope to continue to platform. And I have always appreciated you being such an advocate for while I was at FSU and seeing all the work that you do.

[Dr. Buchler] Thank you, Aaron, for doing this. I appreciate your work. And I'll also say, in the topic of what I'm doing over the summer, it's collective bargaining season. And weekly, I meet up with the Board of Trustees team, and we hammer out issues in the contract. So if you can join a union, join a union, whether you're a grad student, faculty member, whatever. It's more important now than ever to band together and to put your foot down. And say, these are the things that matter in academia, and you can't do it alone. So it's power in the people.

[Aaron] Power of the people, indeed. Thank you very much for that message. And thank you for coming on.

[Dr. Buchler] Thanks, Aaron.

[Aaron] Hello, this is Aaron again, I want to thank you again for listening to this week’s episode. I also want to give another big thank you to Professor Michael Buchler for coming onto the podcast. His contact information will be listed in the description, I would appreciate it if you could show him some support. For further updates and notifications on Theorist Composer Collaboration, make sure to follow our Instagram and Facebook pages. You can listen to future episodes through our host websites, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, and YouTube. So make sure you subscribe to the platform of your choosing. If you want to monetarily support the work of the TCC, you can click the link to our Buy Me a Coffee page. All donations are highly appreciated. All of the relevant links to follow, listen to, and support the show are in the description. TCC episodes are posted every other week on Mondays, and don't miss our blog posts, which go live a few days after a new episode is added. Make sure to follow our social media accounts and relevant streaming platforms because you won't want to miss it, but until then, this is Aaron and thank you for joining the TCC.