IInterview with Maria Shaughnessy

by Georgia Dillane

sat down with Maria Shaughnessy on April 10th, in anticipation of our May edition of the On-Air Guide. At that time, neither of us could have anticipated what the next few weeks of our lives would look like. In this interview, Maria spends some time reflecting on the end of her undergraduate career, thinking about the future, writing her thesis, all things that may have taken on new forms due to the protests on Columbia’s campus, and Maria’s steadfast dedication to WKCR’s coverage. Though things may have looked different, Maria’s love for the station, I think, remains true.

Hi, Maria.

Hi, Georgia.

Thank you so much for sitting down with me. We are nearing one month from graduation. How are you feeling about that?

I actually feel very good about it. I think there was like a period at the beginning of the semester where it was really nerve-racking to think about college ending and uncertainty and everything like that and then now I'm at a point where I just want to get things over with, because I have so many assignments and I just want to get those done. I feel happy and fulfilled and ready and I look forward to a wonderful next couple of months.

It's difficult to ask what you've done at the station because you've done so much over the years here, but can you give a brief overview of your involvement?

I started WKCR as a remote programmer in my freshman year. I had a really good family friend, Sam Fleming, who was the American

Department Head before the pandemic […] He told me about it and I decided to join. I was a remote programmer for about a year and I programmed for the Early Music show because it was just what was assigned to me. When I got to campus, I got trained and licensed as an in-person programmer, and really soon after that—by October of 2021—I became the Classical Department Head. There were so few people at the station then. I think in total at the beginning of that semester there were probably like 12 [students] who were programming actively, other than alumni. [But] I was doing a lot more than just Classical Head because KCR was so important to me. Then, summer of 2022 Ale and I decided to restart the OnAir guide together. After that, I became the Program Director, and now I am just a programmer again.

Did you foresee the level of involvement you ended up having?

I think I felt that right off the bat. There were some things you kind of just know, and I was like, "This is a space that I want to be in, yeah." So, yes, I did.

You've overseen some very significant programming changes and special things during your time here, including the creation of Extended Technique. Can you speak about how that started?

Yeah, I would say Extended Technique is still one of my proudest accomplishments at the station—there's a couple of them. Extended Technique is a show that I created with Benji [Shapere, former New Music Head]. I really thought (and Benji too, and the rest of the programming team) that there was kind of a lack of space for this kind of music. And [the show] would benefit both the Classical department and the New Music department. It became the first cross-departmental show. I'm proud that even as a young programmer and as a young Classical Department Head, I was able to think about this change in terms of the station itself and what benefits us most. I'm really glad that that also allowed the new music department to take flight in a different direction, which has been, I think, something that was wanted by a lot of programmers, but everyone was a little confused about how to go about doing it.

You program Early Music. This is something that you did since the very beginning. What do you love about that show and why should other people care about that show?

This is my passion, my little side passion. So, as I said, the Early Music show was randomly assigned to me. [When I started programming,] I emailed them and said, "Hey, I would love to do a classical show." And they were like, "Well, early music is open." I started programming it and kind of got a little bit more into early music, just by seeing the repertoire. And then coming to college, I started taking some more music history classes, which usually start with medieval music, so I was learning more about it, and I realized I had a huge passion for medieval studies and medieval history. All of those things came together, and the Early Music show was consistently this platform that I had to put all of my academic knowledge to use in some way. This is what I love about KCR in general, but specifically with the Early Music show, it was somewhere where, every week, I could talk about the new things that I learned and connect them to the thing that I love most, which is music.

I am really really obsessed with ambiguity in music and specifically ambiguity in performance practice, and so the way that early music is this kind of little world of weirdness and no one actually knows what it’s like—you can listen to a hundred thousand recordings of early music and none of it’s “authentic,” and you can look at some of the manuscripts, and it's just—the amount of creativity and improvisation that goes into these performances of early music is like you are creating a world that doesn't exist and that never existed in the music that you're playing, and yet it's still so amazing and beautiful and we get to sort of use that as a soundtrack to history.

That segues well into the next topic. Would you like to briefly describe your thesis work? Yeah, as I said, I'm really interested in improvisation. Actually, the first class that got me interested in this was "Ear Training 4" with Peter Susser. (Which, if anyone cares, is the best class I've ever taken at Columbia.) That is the one class I would recommend taking.

Then, I took 20th century music with George Lewis, who is now my thesis advisor, and paired those two classes together (one had practice and one was theory) to really fundamentally change my understanding of music and what improvisation was and is. Ever since then, I've been interested in improvisation both in my studies and in my performance.

So, essentially, I'm looking at solo improvisation, which within the world of critical improvisation studies has not necessarily been written about very much, especially in a social context. Improvisation is very often considered a social practice because oftentimes when you're improvising, you're doing it with other people, so you're in conversation with each other as you're playing. For me—being a classically trained harpist who is very insecure about improvising—the majority of my improvisational history is alone in a practice room or actually performing, but alone because the harp is not involved in very many improvisational ensemble traditions. And so I was like, okay, well, what is the social element of solo improvisation? If improvisation is inherently social, what about when you're doing it alone? And so my thesis explores that question. Essentially, part of it is very theoryheavy—on the theory of improvisation, but also social theory. Then, we have a section that's an auto-ethnography about my own practice, and then I've been interviewing musicians who improvise about these questions. I will tell you what my conclusions are when I finish it. So hopefully that happens soon.

What do you hope that the future looks like for you after KCR?

I hope that I continue doing exactly what I've spent the majority of my conscious life doing, which is just really entrenching myself in things that I'm very passionate about and things that make me very happy—really continuing to do what I think I've been doing and what my parents want me to do, which is just to prioritize my own passions and be happy. I think that KCR has provided me with an amazing benchmark to be like, you know, how is this something I actually love? Because KCR is something that—there is no question— there's not a single bone in my body that doesn't love KCR, and no part of me doubts that this is something that I could do for the rest of my life if that opportunity presented itself (and there was a salary included with it).

What do you think you’ll miss most about WKCR?

This is such an obvious answer, but it is obviously the people. And not even just the friendships that I've made at KCR. [They are] some of the most amazing and lasting friendships that I've had, and there's something so special about about being able to have a working relationship and a very close friend relationship that is so unique. It's hard to find, even in post-grad situations where you're actually in the workforce, because those things are so separate. But it's also really hard to find in college, because there's very few places where the work that you're doing feels as consequential. So there's this really crazy bond that happens with people.

You know, I said earlier that I want to see myself end up in a place that I can feel just as passionate about as KCR, but I don't think that the social element of it—those friendships and those relationships—as much as I would love for them to kind of continue, I don't think that's something you can find anywhere else. So that's what I think I'm gonna miss most, because I don't know that I'll ever have that again.

Thank you very much, Maria. Is there anything else you want to add? You're full of multiplicities.

I just—I love KCR. I want a shirt. Can we do, can we do merch shirts? "I heart WKCR?" Yeah.

Catch Maria's final (for now) Early Music shows this summer, every Friday from 9:30AM-12PM.