How can I help my students see that what they do as classical violinists is already aligned with the University’s new approach to educating undergraduates? Nicholas DiEugenio asked himself.
The answer, the associate professor of music found, was to ask students to choose and perform one piece of solo-violin music written in the past 10 years. “That prompt could sound easy or obvious, but for students who had primarily engaged with music written 150 to 300 years ago, it was an aha! moment,” DiEugenio said. The students introduced each other to music of composers identifying as female, South Asian, Black, Latino, Asian and Asian American.
“They were also able to hear, feel and see connections between these various voices and the other ‘traditional’ voices like Bach’s or Beethoven’s that they already knew,” he said.
That experience was a foretaste of the learning that the…
