college news Empowering Song Professor Emilie Amrein Rethinks Music Education and Performance by Leslie Ridgeway For Associate Professor Emilie Amrein, DMA, music education and performance are expressions of body and spirit. In a recent collaboration with students on a choral opera, a July summer colloquium focused on music’s role in mobility and a new fall course based on a book that Amrein co-wrote with Boston University Professor André de Quadros, Empowering Song: Music Education from the Margins, Amrein challenges the notion of a single “right way” to compose or experience music. The Empowering Song course, especially, is an opportunity for Amrein to break music free from the typical structures of teaching and performing. “The course is a long time coming and a labor of love,” says Amrein, chair of music and director of choral studies at the University of San Diego since 2014.
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“From the experiences that my colleague André and I shared working in refugee shelters, prisons and other contexts, we realized music education has often been about productivity, obedience and conformity, where your sole utility is to show up and execute — like a cog in a wheel, a factory worker.” Drawing profound insights from their personal journey, Amrein has cultivated a more holistic avenue to teaching. “We’ve spent many years theorizing a more compassionate and just approach to music education, informed by our experiences with our collaborators in prisons, refugee shelters and hospitals. From them, we learned how creativity and imagination can be restorative, transformational and healing,” Amrein said. Empowering Song is anchored by four pillars: the body as a repository for creativity, the relationship between self and other, storytelling as a way of “wording the world” and freedomdreaming about liberation and joy. The pillars are a gateway to what people outside of the academy already know — that music-making can be a conduit for connection and building communities full of care and mutuality. Amrein set these pillars into action earlier this year with the development and a one-time performance of a sci-fi choral opera called “After the Flood.” With 25 of USD’s Choral Scholars, this project imagines an alternate ending to the true story of a doomsday cult in a
Chicago suburb in 1954. Members of the cult, who called themselves the Seekers, believed that an enormous flood would wipe out all of humanity except for the Seekers, who believed that aliens would come to their rescue. Amrein asked the students to write about what would have happened after the flood if the prophecy had come true. “I wanted to give them an opportunity to have the reins, to figure out what to say and how to say it, and how to weave together the voices,” Amrein said. “They came up with five story themes that we explored using movement and sound, and [it] was amazing. [The opera] is futuristic, but so many of the themes [were about] what it means to be alive right now.” The opera was performed at the Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park this past March. Amrein’s goals to advance music scholarship across disciplines attracted the attention of the Borchard Foundation. The foundation awarded Amrein, and collaborator Beatriz Ilari of the University of Southern California, a $35,000 grant to host a four-day international colloquium this past July at the Château de la Bretesche in France. Twelve scholars from the U.S. and Europe, including two MacArthur Genius Grant recipients, discussed how the arts can be used for improved mobility in a variety of contexts, including migration, detention and education.