Childhood
I was born in 1954 in Peace River, Alberta, a small town in northern Canada. Both of my parents were raised on prairie farms during the Great Depression and I figure that I come from a long line of peasant stock.
My paternal grandparents realized that the way to a better life was through education, so they worked hard to send my father to an agricultural college. Given my father's experience of the Depression, it is perhaps not surprising that his studies centered on the twin issues of farming and economics. My father completed university and became an agricultural economist. We moved frequently due to my dad's job.
My mother's parents somehow saved enough for a piano, so my mom learned to play. I guess they didn't have enough money for many lessons, so my mom never became especially proficient -- although she loves music. She was adamant that her kids have an opportunity to learn music. Throughout my childhood, mom encouraged my musical interests. Piano lessons were a high priority. Later, flute and organ lessons were added, as well as private lessons in music theory.
Secondary School Years
Through a series of career promotions, my dad brought the family to Ottawa, the capital of Canada. By a stroke of luck, I was able to attend a newly opened high school for performing arts in Ottawa. Apart from music, I found school utterly boring and was a mediocre student. Both of my older brothers had dropped out of school -- an unhappy situation for my parents.
In my final year of high school, we moved to Guelph, a small city not far from Toronto. By comparison with my high school experience in Ottawa the quality of the music-making in my new school was awful. I followed in the path of my two brothers and dropped out of school. Although I had lost interest in school, I had gained a deeper commitment to music. For a year, I commuted to Toronto and studied flute with Karin Schindler at the Royal Conservatory of Music.
The following year I attended a community college in London, Ontario, where I studied "creative electronics". Mostly I took courses in sound recording and electronics. The curriculum was fun, but not challenging. I lasted the autumn term. I decided to go back and finish my high school education so I could attend university.
Physical Labor
The following summer, I worked as a laborer at Guelph Pipe Organ Builders, where I was one of three employees. I learned a lot about pipe organs. I installed organs in Dearborn, Michigan and Washington, DC. I also removed and reconditioned an organ in Erie, Pennsylvania. The company was poorly managed, and I left about two months before it went bankrupt. My pipe organ building career lasted about nine months in total.
After that, I worked at Foseco -- a steel-related manufacturing facility in Guelph. It was the quintessential blue-collar job. I worked on an assembly line for a while and then graduated to being an oven-tender. Two of us tended five natural-gas furnaces, each about the size of a car wash. The work was totally mindless, but I made effective use of the time. I would think about music, hour after hour, day after day -- jotting down questions and observations in little notebooks I carried in my breast pocket. Despite the lack of stimulation, the six months I spent at Foseco proved to be one of the most intellectually alive periods in my life. To this day, I appreciate the luxury of long uninterrupted periods of time when one can think about anything at all. I fully understand how highly intelligent people can end up working as janitors.
Undergraduate Years
By the time I was ready for university study, I was quite focussed about what I wanted to do. I wanted to study recording engineering -- but with a thorough background in both the musical sides and technical sides. I wanted to attend the Tonmeister program at the University of Surrey in England. But I discovered that the program only admitted half a dozen students per year, and that foreign applicants weren't considered.
I was unhappy that I couldn't find a reasonable alternative. I had heard of a program at the University of Waterloo that allowed students to study whatever they wanted. So in September of 1975, I enrolled as an undergraduate in the "Integrated Studies Program" at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario.
Many universities claim to offer "open curriculum" or "interdisciplinary" studies programs. But few are as radical as the program at Waterloo. At Waterloo, there was no requirement to take any courses whatsoever. A student could graduate by simply reading books. Moreover, the students controlled the non-evaluative operation of the program, including the hiring and firing of program faculty.
Integrated Studies students were left to their own devices. In their final year, students seeking a degree would make an application to the program's Academic Board -- proposing a final year of study supervised by two or three faculty from outside the program. Typically, a thesis or final project would be produced.
The Integrated Studies program was my last educational choice, but it proved to be an invaluable experience. I spent my entire freshman year reading books from the ML and MT sections of the library. I read more books that year than I had read throughout my life to that point. I recall being surprised to learn that most music professors weren't as broadly read as I was. As a freshman student, I discovered that most music professors were conversant only with books published prior to the completion of their PhDs.
I attended relatively few classes. The few classes I attended were in music, psychology, physics, and computer science. I thought these would be the most helpful in pursuing a career in sound recording. However, I soon abandoned that ambition and became interested in more fundamental questions related to music. At the same time I was becoming more and more involved in music composition -- something I had done since my early teens. I wrote a thesis entitled "Computer Applications in Music, Musicology, and Audio Signal Processing".
Gad-fly Years
Following graduation in 1978, I spent two years involved in music-making with my pals Bentley Jarvis and Robin Aulis. To make ends meet I worked part-time as a bibliographer's assistant doing music and science documentation. The rest of the time I spent composing and performing. Between 1978 and 1984 I was involved in roughly 40 concerts. I worked a lot with dancers. Choreographers have a voracious appetite for specially-composed music, and it was this demand that helped me to develop as a composer.
In September of 1980, I enrolled as a graduate student at York University, Toronto. Again my ambition was to study music, but from a different point of view. I enrolled in the Interdisiplinary Studies program and took courses in what might be called history of ideas. I took courses in music history, philosophy of science, history of neurophysiology, and value framework of decision-making. Most of my reading was in history of ideas, concentrating on the idea of progress -- which is the most developed area in history of ideas.
I wrote my thesis on a history of the idea of musical progress. Unfortunately, I made the political error of criticizing Theodor Adorno's approach to the subject, which very nearly caused me to fail my thesis defense. It took two years to make revisions that would satisfy an outraged committee member. I knew that I was much more knowledgeable about Adorno's work than the committee member, but this person was not interested in seeing how Adorno's own writings didn't make sense. In the end, I wrote things I knew were wrong, simply to finish my MA degree.
Doctoral Studies
By the end of my master's studies I had become much more interested in the psychology of music. Compared with acoustical and historical approaches, psychology seemed to place musical experience in the center of things. It seemed like an area that would be more likely to offer fundamental insights into the nature of music
In the mid 1980's, most of the best scholars in music psychology were in psychology departments. Unfortunately, neither of my existing degrees were in "music". I knew that if I wanted to get a job in music academia some sort of music degree would be essential. Studying with a psychologist would be out of the question, so where would I study?
I decided that the best alternative would be to find a well respected music scholar who had eclectic interests, and who might be sympathetic to my interests in the psychology of music. I decided that Professor Ian Bent was someone with a promising background and favorable attitude. I found out that Bent was head of the Music Department at Nottingham University in England. In October of 1986, I went to Nottingham.
Unfortunately, Bent was invited to Columbia University, and the following year left Nottingham permanently. I had too much work accomplished to consider following him, so I stuck it out at Nottingham. As it turned out, Robert Pascall proved a capable and encouraging mentor. In addition, I had the benefit of interacting with Mark Haggard, Director of the (British) Institute of Hearing Research -- which was also located on the Nottingham campus.
Nottingham was an incredibly stimulating experience for me. I worked at a manic pace and completed a PhD degree in musicology in two and a half years. My mind was on fire the whole time.
Professional Years
In 1989 I was hired as an Assistant Professor at Conrad Grebel College, University of Waterloo. Two years later I was promoted to Associate Professor. By 1996 I held three appointments: Associate Professor of Music, Associate Professor of Psychology, and Adjunct Professor of Engineering.
The years at Waterloo were happy and productive. I taught a full load of six semester courses per year, mostly in music theory. Because of the small faculty contingent, I taught the occasional courses in music history when colleagues went on sabbatical. The music program offered a Bachelor of Arts with a music major, but most of our students were pursuing a music minor or taking elective music courses. The fact that we weren't offering a Bachelor of Music degree made it possible to experiment more in my classes. After two years of teaching fairly conventional theory, I began experimenting in the advanced theory course with different approaches to understanding music. Much of this teaching was influenced by psychology and sociology.
In January of 1998 I was appointed Professor of Music at the Ohio State University. I've had the good fortune to teach or visit at other institutions over the years. In 1999, I was the Ernest Bloch Visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1994 and 1996 I enjoyed extended leaves at the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities at Stanford University.
Postlude
Much of my research has been motivated by questions I had as an adolescent. I recall studying harmony and voice-leading with several private teachers (notably John Goobie in Guelph). My teachers could never offer satisfactory answers to my persistent "why" questions. Much of my music education was unsatisfying: the explanations seemed either poorly formulated, authoritarian, or entirely absent. I still have trouble with the wooly-headed reasoning offered by many music scholars.
When I was an undergraduate student, I learned from my music teachers that "empirical" is a term of derision. I didn't know what the word meant, but I knew it was bad. In graduate school, my experiences reading volumes of writings by Theodor Adorno made me re-think the anti-empirical rhetoric. There was something compelling and attractive about the vehemence of Adorno's critiques, but the logic didn't hold up once the ideas were separated from the acid rhetoric. I now believe that there is an entire genre of writing that is compelling, only because of the passion of the author, not because of the strength of the ideas.
In graduate school I took two courses in epistemology. These courses left me convinced that the real philosophers are not in the English Department or the Sociology Department -- the talented philosophers are in the Philosophy Department.
At a time (circa 1983) when many scholars were discovering post-modernism, I was abandoning it as bad philosophy and dangerously misguided. Of course there were important insights in this work, primarily related to the commandeering and exercise of power. But the philosophical super-structure erected around these insights was untenable. Mainstream philosophers had long ago demolished the relativist and anti-empirical premises.
I find it especially dispiriting that many humanists and social theorists continue to be so preoccupied with what I call straw-man positivism. The hey-day of the sort of positivism criticized by post-modernists ended in the 1930s. Even in practical science (such as physics), ordinary scientists typically follow the so-called conventionalism of Pierre Duhem and the Copenhagen Interpretation (which dates from the late 1920s!). No significant philosopher or practical scientist has advocated the basic ideas of logical positivism for more than 60 years. Contemporary empirical philosophy is far more sophisticated than post-modernists are aware. Kuhn and Feyerabned are not the latest thing in philosophy of science. Unfortunately, most psychologists are altogether ignorant of the philosophical issues -- so many music psychologists simply add fuel to the fire.
I have come to believe that carefully planned and interpreted experimental research programs have a great deal to offer music scholarship. Without claiming special access to The Truth, empirical approaches have the capacity to provide considerable insight into fundamental issues in the experience of music. Regretably, few music scholars have the background or training needed to contribute to this effort.