TCC 32. Key Constellations - Professor Táhirih Motazedian

[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 graduate music theory student at Florida State University. Today I'll be talking with Professor Táhirih Motazedian alongside her award-winning book, Key Constellations: Interpreting Tonality in Film. So, without further ado, Professor Motazedian, welcome to the podcast.

[Táhirih] Thanks. It's great to be here.

[Aaron] Yes. Thank you for coming on. And sometimes I say, oh, such a busy academic season. The more time I spend in it, the more that I realize that's somewhat of a silly phrase because it's always busy.

[Táhirih] They all are. Yep.

[Aaron] It's odd for me to say this necessarily, but because you're quite accomplished in what you do, but for listeners uninitiated, can you please introduce yourself personally, professionally, academically, whatever you choose?

[Táhirih] Okay. Well, my name is Táhirih Motazedian. I'm a professor of music theory at Vassar College, and my area of specialty is film music.

[Aaron] Yes, certainly from the book that we'll be doing today. And man, you have quite the resume. Something that I would parse to say is a little bit not so much normal for a lot of music theorists, necessarily. I mean, for one, how does one move from a NASA planetary scientist, and mission’s operations specialist, all the way to music theorist? How does that happen?

[Táhirih] Well, I was originally a music major in college and I was kind of headed towards performance, but then I injured my hands and had to... pick a different career for myself. At the time, I didn't really realize that music theory was a career. All the people who taught me music theory in college were composers or performers. And so, I thought my career in music was over. So, I found something else. I went into geophysics and planetary science. But my heart was definitely left behind in music. One day, I just kind of realized that I was too young to live with regret for the rest of my life. So, I just, I handed in my resignation and went back to school, became a music theorist.

[Aaron] That's wild. What was your primary instrument that you were going to go into performance with?

[Táhirih] Piano and violin.

[Aaron] Piano, violin. I'm a violinist myself. Which one was your primary, in quotes?

[Táhirih] They were both equally, you know, my... primary instrument, which is why I was practicing way too much and why I injured my hands.

[Aaron] Oh, my goodness. Yeah. I would imagine I only had violin and I started to develop tendinitis.

[Táhirih] yeah, yeah. Our bodies aren't designed for eight hours a day of repetitive motion.

[Aaron] No, they're certainly not. They're certainly not. And so it sounds like the music theory draw has always been a little bit there inside of you, even if you weren't fully aware. Also, my undergraduate was mostly taught by composers. as well and my perception of the music theory field was just pedagogy, essentially that you would just become a teacher. I put, I wrote this in my in my notes to you, and I just find it fascinating, you know okay so… Let me talk a little about, for anyone unfamiliar, insecurity in the music theory field sometimes, and maybe this is just my insecurity being projected out, but a lot of times in music theory there are debates of smallness or bigness in terms of what we do. You know, is what we're doing purposeful? Is what we're doing... you know, impactful in any way and so on and so forth. Some don't care whatsoever which, you know, good for them in that case, but for yourself and so I wonder this quite a lot, for yourself were there any qualms in your mind, any retrospection about going from something that is in all accounts bigger than all of us, planetary science, to something that might at times feel smaller in the grand scheme of life?

[Táhirih] It's interesting that you say that because in the field of planetary exploration, people have the same kinds of insecurities because, you know, people say, well, why are we spending millions or billions of dollars to explore other planets when we have so many problems on our own planet? You know, how is this helping the common person? And then, of course, you know, with the arts, that criticism can be ramped up even further. But what I would say is humans, you know, one of the things that sets humans apart from the other animals is that we need more than just survival. in our lives. And as long as humans have existed, they've been making art. You can look back, like the earliest records we have of humans are the art they left behind on rocks. Whatever items they could find that have survived. So this is clearly something that's really innate to humans and really necessary for our thriving, not just surviving. So, you know, every... Every person has something different that they contribute to human existence, and art is definitely one of those important things. Exploration is another one of those important things. We're just not happy sitting where we are and being content with what's in front of us. We always have to be pushing the boundaries to learn more. We're just innately curious. So, you know, exploration, whether it's exploration of planets or exploration of art, are just kind of fundamental to human life.

[Aaron] Sure, I suppose it's comforting to know that existential imposter syndrome is across many different fields. Fascinating. So it sounds like the bridge wasn't... At least in that aspect, too bad. And I love your explanation or your rationalization of the place that we have and everything. You don't have to say anything so much if you don't want about this. This is just my own perspective. I'm personally not a hardcore math and theory person. And I deal with more hermeneutic ideas. Maybe not. Hermeneutics themselves, but emotions and so on?

[Táhirih] The way I look at it, there are just so many different ways to explore and approach music. And it's exciting to me that there are so many modalities for doing so. And not every single modality has to appeal to every single person. But for some people, it really speaks to them to explore music from that particular facet. And so I say, power to everyone in everything they want to pursue.

[Aaron] Yes, and to tease later in our conversation, we'll be talking about the society for music theory as a whole, I think that's one of the most exciting parts of it is the diversity of thought and approach, yes. But before we get into that, let's talk about the other thing that we're talking about today, other than yourself, Key Constellations: Interpreting Tonality in Film, a wonderful book and piece of work. But before we get into the contents of itself, so can you set the stage for listeners on how this project, this book came about, and just the context for yourself that you were working on it?

[Táhirih] Great. Well, I was in grad school. I was preparing for my comprehensive exams and we were supposed to, for two of the exams, we would pick kind of a broad subject area in which we would do a deep dive and become an expert. And then two of our exams would be on those given topics. So, I picked transformational harmony, you know, transformational approach to film music because, you know, I was a big fan of the work that Frank Lehman and Scott Murphy were doing. And I thought this would be a really cool. thing to learn about. And then I would just, you know, move on with my life after comps and go into the topic I thought I was going to do for my dissertation, which was Rachmaninoff. So, I spent the whole summer... reading up on film music it was new to me at the time and, you know, what theorists were doing with film music. And so I went into my comprehensive exam and the faculty had picked a film for me to analyze it turned out to be a film that had zero transformational harmony in it. So, I immediately had to scramble and figure out some sort of approach for being able to analyze and talk about this film and write a 20 -page paper within a two -day period. And so I just started taking notes on everything that was happening musically. And I kept this spreadsheet where I was just kind of logging all the information, not having any idea what I was going to do with it or what, you know, what was going to be the end kind of point of what I was going to write about. But then it started to get to the point where I noticed that I could predict the key that musical cues would be based on what was happening in the narrative. And I got to the midpoint of the film where this really important event happened. And I thought, I know that that cue should be in D minor. And when I checked it on my keyboard, it was. And I don't have perfect pitch or anything. So it was just purely based on what had been happening in the soundtrack. So that was the moment that I realized, wow, okay, so I'm onto something here. Keys have meaning in this film. And so the paper I ended up writing ended up being much longer than 20 pages. And it just kind of poured out of me. And that was it. After my comprehensive exams, I thought long and hard about it and decided that I was going to make this my dissertation topic. Haven't looked back, that was that was a wonderful, wonderful choice.

[Aaron] Man the phrase pressure makes diamonds really is something that I’ve thought about. That, oh man, isn't that the optimal experience for a crunch is that it ends up being the book idea?

[Táhirih] Yeah.

[Aaron] That is hopefully so relatable. I mean, just the aspect of, that's like everyone's greatest fear when you get either a comprehensive exam or you're working on a paper where you pick a methodology, you pick the work, and it's just not effing working.

[Táhirih] Yeah. Yeah, it was sheer panic as I started realizing that, wow, there is nothing in here that I was prepared for. But it ended up, as you said, it ended up yielding something really fantastic that I never would have planned or anticipated on my own. So, yeah. Serendipity.

[Aaron] That is crazy. That's really cool. Yeah. Man. You know, this podcast has focused a fair amount on composition and this interview is shifting more to focusing on music theory. So just to give context to everybody who may not be super attuned you know multimedia studies things that look at the visual element alongside and its connections with the musical and aural element is something that is so trendy to the point where it's superficial to say that it's trendy. It's just like a part of the field now in music theory, multimedia studies, and has been for a good time now at this point. And I'm pretty sure that, you know, around the time that you would be conceptualizing and thinking about and writing all of this is really when the iron was getting hot with how many conferences and interest groups and so on with multimedia studies. And so what was it like? Not just, you know, getting through that comprehensive exam aside, but furthering the work to codify it into a full book while this, in the grand scheme of theory, newer codified element was coming to form.

[Táhirih] You know, it was the film music in music theory was still just starting to become a thing when I got into it. So Scott and Frank were doing this, you know, new and exciting work. And the film music interest group at SMT was just formed like, you know, soon after I started in. It was very exciting. It felt like something kind of new that we were doing. A lot of musicologists have been looking at film music for, you know, for decades now, but music theorists were a little bit later to it. And so it was exciting to be part of something that felt like we were kind of building up. And the interest group in the beginning was, you know, a little bit smaller, but, you know, it's grown and it's become a really exciting part of every conference for me to go and be part of that group. It's still, you know, at SMT, there's still usually just a few talks about film music. And so I feel like we still could get more people involved and interested. But there are a lot of people who show up to the interest meeting and are part of the part of the like, you know, kind of online community. So yeah, it's, it's great.

[Aaron] Certainly. And I'll say as an anecdotal, you probably see that as a professor, anecdotally interacting with people, my age, people coming up and applying for different things, film studies and anything that has to do with media is. One of the most common things that people my age talk about, whether that be video games, films, music videos, it could be so many different things, but it might honestly be the top one or two most common things I hear from people.

[Táhirih] Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, it makes sense. We're constantly immersed in media in its various forms. And so to try and to try and silo that off as something that's just separate from what we do in the music theory classroom just feels so artificial. I really love bringing film music into my classes because, you know, everyone has such diverse musical tastes, but you can be, you can pretty much count on the fact that most people in the room have watched the big popular films of the last few years. So it's a great way to be able to connect everybody together on shared repertoire.

[Aaron] Certainly, certainly. And so going back to the book itself. You know, finishing a published book is a massive achievement, regardless of whatever happens afterwards. But by all accounts, it's been successful in its recognition. You just won at the 2024 SMT Society for Music Theory Conference in Jacksonville, Florida. Of course, I was there. And the moment that this award was announced, it was actually the first time I ever heard about the book, frankly, with the Emerging Scholar Book Award at the conference. And I just want to know, what was that moment like?

[Táhirih] It was so... thrilling for me. It felt to me like that, like I had officially made it. Because since I've been coming to SMT, I've been attending the meeting and the awards ceremony. And it's always so excited to see the awards being handed out and watch people go up and collect their awards and hearing about their incredible books being described. And so to have that, that moment now where I was suddenly the person going up and receiving the award was just surreal. It was so exciting. And when I first entered the field of music theory, I just didn't imagine that that would be me one day. So it was a pretty wonderful moment.

[Aaron] And all of that from an, oh, s***, comprehensive example. Not all of it.

[Táhirih] Yep.

[Aaron] And you know what's funny? I actually, a couple, like, I mean, 30 seconds after you won that award, I ordered the book on Amazon. And the reason why is the, I don't remember the name of the person who was verbally presenting the awards, but when they were describing it, talking about transformational. perspective of tonality and keys and film and attaching so on so on I've I don't think I've, I've talked about this on the podcast, but I talked to you about my own personal research at the time I was writing a paper on the recent Eminem album, The Death of Slim Shady, and connecting the tonality of the tracks on a large scale aspect to the different characters of Marshall Mathers and Slim Shady and so on. I won't go too much further into that, but when I heard that, I was like, oh my God, that's perfect. And so, I like, impulse bought your book immediately after it was announced. So, let's get into the content. of Key Constellations, you look at a wide variety of film. It's not just, you know, action movies from the 2010s or something. You've got movies from the 50s, the 60s, the 90s, I believe, and even as recent as 2015, 2016 or something of that sort. I know that you have Baby Driver in there. And so how did you go about collecting your corpus when it came to this?

[Táhirih] It was, you know, they're just films that I watched on my own time and films that I loved. And so, you know, I was curious to explore in those films, so that that was the main the main body of my corpus is are just films that I love and then occasionally you know somebody would tell me like oh you should check out this film I think that there might be something interesting in it so you know I, I had a lot of different films that I tried out. And there are various levels of, of interesting things happening in, in films. And, you know, once I found a director or a composer who's soundtrack was kind of doing something tonally interesting, I would check out their other works to see if there were, you know, if I could find similar sorts of techniques and stuff. So yeah, I didn't have any sort of specific methodology for the types of films I was approaching, because I just wanted to see if... if you could find this sort of thing everywhere. And yeah, you, you certainly can. It's not, it's not like a, something that is restricted to a certain genre of film or a certain composer or a certain era. It's just kind of omnipresent.

[Aaron] And so one methodology that you use periodically and you come back to it back and forth in the book is the idea of a tonal score. And this is something that when I was dealing with The Death of Slim Shady paper that I was having some mild difficulty with on how to like codify, how to look at broad tonality through like something that is a quite decent amount of time. You know, in the case of a movie, maybe two and a half hours or something of that sort. And so, can you talk a bit about the idea of a tonal score? And what you were trying to accomplish with that kind of representation.

[Táhirih] Yeah, it's hard to keep track of large scale key relationships across something that's, you know, that's a large scale. So, you know, across the course of like a 10 minute long piano sonata or something, it's easy to keep track of keys. But when you're looking at something that is, you know, two hours long, like you said, it's... starts to, it's not something that your, you know, your ear won't, won't pick up on these relationships. And so you have to employ some sort of system for being able to lay it out for yourself and, and see the connections rather than hear them. So for me, it was, it was about kind of keeping track of what's happening in the soundtrack and what's happening in the narrative and being able to sync up the two to see what, what sort of things are tonally important according to what's happening in the narrative. So, you know, I keep really careful notes of everything that I hear in a film soundtrack and the keys and the pitches involved. And then some of it might not end up being important later on, but I need to have it all there so that I can look at the entire thing and see what sorts of patterns start to present themselves.

[Aaron] Certainly, certainly. And I have to say one of the patterns or ideas that was so immediately compelling, you know, as a music theorist, love patterns, obviously, because then that means, you know, something to write about. And one of them is the tonally symmetrical. films that is really neat and just to you know this is a this is a visual element but just to describe to everyone it's that on this tonal score you can see that there's a looping around from beginning middle and end of the tonal, of the tracks of the score you know like a big standard deviation curve almost where the journey starts and ends in a symmetrical fashion in terms of what keys are used. And I'm interested in your opinion on whether you believe that is a, now, you chose two films in particular, and we were just talking about corpus selection. Your opinion of seeing that, just tangentially, in other films that you have in your mind, and also the idea of filmmaker and composer intentionality?

[Táhirih] Yeah. I mean, to some degree, when there's something that is symmetrical at that large of a scale, it's hard to imagine that that happens purely by accident. It seems like there probably has to be some level of intentionality involved. And, you know, like in the cases of the two films that I talked about with respect to tonally symmetrical soundtracks, these were both films where the directors are musical auteurs. They were very, very involved in the music selection and the whole music process in their films. And so they were having, you know, a lot of input. And they're also both films where symmetry was kind of paramount to the narrative itself. So it kind of makes sense then that with both of those elements in play, that the soundtrack would end up having some symmetry as well. And of course, if it was just a matter of the same music showing up at the beginning and at the end, then you wouldn't really be able to separate out. Music themes from keys because they would be conflated. But that's not the case in these films. There are different pieces of music in those keys. And so, yeah, it really seems like there has to have been at least some level of conscious design on the part of the composer and the music supervisor and the director.

[Aaron] Certainly, it sounds like it. And again, it is one of those things in music theory or just, I guess, analysis period where you see such a large trend. You're like, oh, come on, there has to be more to this. And obviously, it sounds like that there is. Now, this is something that I'm pondering when you're talking about that. One of the most easily connected with the just the general public with what's happening in a movie and the music is Star Wars of course and the leitmotifs throughout in the thematic elements connecting characters and ideas so I think it's reasonable to anticipate a correlation of key relation and leitmotif relation like, of course, the Force theme in the first Star Wars where Luke's looking out on the binary sunset and then you hear the theme for the first time and then at the end of the movie when he's using the Force, you know, you hear the theme coming and that happens throughout most of all the movies in a different way. I guess what I'm asking is, did you actually see a separation of leitmotif idea and key where actually it's not one to one, key comes back, leitmotif comes back?

[Táhirih] Yeah. So, you know, in some films. You know, every time you hear a particular theme, it's in a particular key. And so in those cases, you cannot separate the theme from the key and make specific claims about the key just on the basis of that theme. There are a lot of films where a certain theme will appear in multiple different keys throughout the film. So that's where you can really talk about something interesting that is specific to the tonality. And so, you know, I have a number of films in my book that I cite where, you know, a particular theme shows up in multiple different keys. And those are the most interesting for me because. it takes some amount of like intentional work to transpose a piece of music from one key to another. If it's, you know, it could just be that a sound engineer is, you know, just taking the recording and just plopping it into a new key with a DAW or something. But if it's like live recorded, you know, music, then... It's something that somebody had to have, you know, given score copies to musicians in different keys and they had to practice those and perform those in different keys. And so that becomes really interesting to me because any amount of work means extra money. And so there really have to be some like choices being made to do something like that. So, for instance, like the film Persuasion. Film adaptation of Persuasion that I talk about in my book, all of the piano works in that movie are recorded in different keys than the original scores. So, there's these like Bach and Chopin works, and none of them are in the right keys. And so that's a very interesting case. That movie was, I think, made in 1990. And so, I have to find myself wondering at that stage, was a pianist actually learning those pieces in different keys? Whether that was the case or whether a recording engineer was transposing them, that was some labor that went into selecting those specific keys.

[Aaron] I love the, you know, the not necessarily counter argument, but justification of intentionality. They spent time and money on this. You can't get much more intentional than that.

[Táhirih] Yeah, exactly.

[Aaron] And so I want to ask about, and let me introduce a word to some people who may not be familiar, diegetic. Diegetic refers to in a film, in a visual medium, where if the music being heard is purely in the soundtrack for the audience, or if the people in the film, the characters, are actually experiencing the music too. Easiest thing is like at the introduction of a film, especially in the 80s and 90s, you've got music blaring in the soundtrack, but then it cuts to someone inside of a car, and they turn off the radio. And then the music stops, which means that the music was diegetic. They could hear the music alongside the audience and so on. And so my question is, is what did you see in all of your different mappings, connections or incongruencies when it came to diegetic or non -diegetic keys or music in the films?

[Táhirih] Yeah, I treat the soundtrack very democratically. So, I don't separate out the original underscoring that was composed for the film from the diegetic pre -existing music that's part of the... part of the filmic world that the characters are listening to. I don't separate out musical sound effects either. Anything that has pitch is fair game for tonal analysis. So, from what I have found, there's not really too much difference between how you can interpret the tonality of diegetic versus non-diegetic. It all kind of fits together in the same tonal score, if you will. And, you know, it's all stuff that we hear that has pitch and that, you know, to which we can assign some sort of sense of tonic. Yeah, I really enjoy kind of flattening out the hierarchies of the components of the soundtrack for my type of analysis.

[Aaron] Wonderful, wonderful. Hierarchy is certainly something that... we all discuss quite a lot in music theory.

[Táhirih] Yeah.

[Aaron] Good and bad reasons, certainly. And so before we move on to the final part of the podcast where we just talk about the field broadly. It's weird to, at least in the context of this podcast, close the page on an entire book of work. But is there anything else that you want to say about Key Constellations?

[Táhirih] I guess one of my favorite things is the title and how I ended up coming to that title. The term key constellations, and I write about this in the middle of chapter one of my book, but that term key constellations was something that I read in Ronald Rodman's work where he was exploring key in films in a paperback in the 90s, and he had borrowed the term from somebody who was exploring keys in operas. And so there's this nice kind of lineage to that term of key constellations. And then it ended up really nicely summarizing my whole approach to interpreting film tonality, in which it doesn't really matter whether the tonal the tonal phenomenon you're observing in a film were intentionally created that way or not. What matters is what you are observing as the observer of this artwork. And so, I liken it to constellations that we see in the sky where, you know, we look at a collection of celestial bodies and we say, oh, there's Orion, you know, the... in the sky. And in reality, there's nothing that's actually connecting those pieces of light to one another. They're all located in very different... And over time, they will, you know, over a long scale of time, everything is shifting. And so those constellations will no longer look exactly the same way they do. But we look at them and interpret them based on our position from our little spot on the planet. And so that's really interesting to me, that things can have meaning even if they weren't intended to have that particular meaning. So, the idea of intentionality is very intriguing in film, especially since we're so accustomed to always having access to filmmaker commentaries and stuff. So, we always want to know, what did they intend? In the end, it doesn't actually matter because the moment a piece of artwork is released into the world, it belongs to every observer to interpret. So, yeah, the term key constellations really kind of sums up my whole approach.

[Aaron] That's really beautiful. I don't know if I have much to say other than that. That's really beautiful. After I learned that you were a former NASA planetary scientist, I'm sure that also was a little like a little bonus to the roundaboutness of that.

[Táhirih] Absolutely.

[Aaron] And so, Key Constellations is available for purchase on Amazon. The link will be in the description of this episode, wherever you're listening, whether that be on the website or streaming platform. So, I encourage you to take a look. It's a wonderful book. And yeah, support Professor Motazedian with that. So, we're coming to the final third of this podcast where we talk about broader things. And so, this is a question I like to give guests just to play around with because it's so wonderfully simple. But a lot of people have a lot of different things to say. Just generally, what does music mean to you?

[Táhirih] It's just a fundamental expression of the human condition. I feel like it's perhaps the most universal art form. It's something that every human society in every time period has engaged in, and it doesn't require any sort of... our own bodies are capable of producing it. So even if you don't have access to outside materials, you can still create music with your body. And it's so incredibly powerful. I have this paper that I've written where I'm talking about kind of the history of the human relationship with music. as this thing that we revere that is so powerful that it can heal us and it's so powerful that it can harm us. And there's thousands of years of tradition in all the different countries in the world of people being afraid of music and people revering music. And it just all goes to speak to the immense power that music has over us. It's just something that is very primal somehow. I think most people have had some experience in their life where music has caused them to become emotional and maybe, you know, maybe cry or get kind of choked up in their throat. And I don't feel like that's necessarily the case with every other type of art form. And so, there's just something very innate about our relationship with music.

[Aaron] There certainly is. There certainly is. I can, even though my primary research is in popular music and rap music, which of course has words, there have been plenty of times where symphonies just have a certain effect, especially sometimes the slow movements just are, you know, I have specific moments in my head from either being in orchestra or being in the audience where I just remember it. Out of an hour and a half symphony or hour symphony, I can remember it. So, certainly something innate and special. So on a more specific lens, in that context then, what does music theory mean to you as a person?

[Táhirih] Yeah, music theory is human beings' fervent attempt to try and understand why music has so much... power over us. I feel like maybe at its very core, that's what music theory is about, just trying to understand why this art form is so powerful and so compelling. So, you know, whether people are kind of delving into a score to try and explore what a composer did or exploring the cognitive effects of it, you know, it all comes down to, wow, this art is so incredible, we have to try and understand more about it. And that kind of goes back to what I was saying earlier about human exploration. And we want to get to the very... highest peaks of our planet. We want to get to the very lowest depths of the ocean. We want to explore the furthest reaches of our solar system. Everything that feels bigger than us and that inspires us with awe, we feel compelled to try and understand. So that's what science is all about and exploration and music theory just fits right in. It does fit just right in.

[Aaron] That was a beautiful explanation. And so now let's talk about the field. Well, it's all kind of in the abstract, but let's talk about the field. You know, we have been seeing, especially with the age of internet being a rock solid part of every single part of our lives, increased accessibility to not only the materials that we work on, but the ones that we seek to find. The fact that IMSLP exists, that anyone can just find any score, and YouTube exists, and there's a hundred different resources to get your foot into either the research yourself or reading what people write and so on. And so, a lot has happened with that. There's also been some grand... You don't have to speak on these if you don't want. There's also been some grand controversies and shifts. You know, the most obvious and often cited is 2019 with the inflection point of Professor Phillip Ewell with what he spoke about the white racial frame of music theory and then the turbulent and awful response from the Journal of Schenkerian Studies and then all of the, let's say unpleasant things, that came from that, but also a pleasantness in awareness and there's good work that's done from that. And so, there's a thousand and one different angles to look at what we're at right now, but a lot has happened in a short amount of time. And what are your thoughts on that turbulent short amount of time and where we are now in music?

[Táhirih] Great question. So first of all, you know, this is not specific to music theory, but in general, humans just don't do well with change. We get comfortable with things once we are, you know, adults, like in our 30s and forward, we just want everything to remain the same, because we have figured out how everything works. And so, any kinds of shifts or changes tend to scare people. And so, you know, the incredibly important work that, that Philip Ewell did just rocked the music theory world because we were so blithely unaware. I mean, most of us were so blithely unaware of, of you know, the problematic aspects of our field. We kind of thought that, well, it's music, you know, we're immune to, you know, any kinds of social or political aspects. And so, you know, that was a huge, huge paradigm shift for people to come to terms with this. And I think that the fact that music theory academia community is a very small community, was really to our benefit because the fewer the number of people there are that are involved with making a big change, the easier it is. Like the larger the group of people, the more inertia there is for just keeping everything the same and resisting change. And so I feel like I'm pretty proud of our field for how quickly the field was able to absorb this bombshell and start to respond to it in positive ways. And of course, there were some negative ways as well, but that's to be expected when humans are challenged with change. It's not usually... something that goes entirely smoothly. But I've been really proud of how, in general, how the field has so quickly managed to start moving in a direction that is, you know, where we have our eyes open to what is actually going on. So, yeah, I feel like if our field was 10 times larger, then I don't think we would have been able to see such a difference in SMT programs, for instance, from between then and now. But you come to SMT conferences now, and the amount of diversity in the topics is just incredible. It's very inspiring.

[Aaron] It certainly is, it certainly is. This past SMT, the one that was recently in Jacksonville, was my first SMT. I've never been to any other. It was such a beautiful experience. Like at the end of the day, I would meet back up with my cohorts from Florida State and we'd be talking about what we did. And each of them had a completely different day than I did. And that's beautiful. I might be getting the timings wrong, but I had some of my friends who were sitting in on the math and music theory interest group, which I've already said I'm not necessarily keen to, but at the exact same time I was in a session that was talking about reggaeton, punk music, and K -pop, or maybe J -pop. I might be mixing that up. But point is, is the diversity of what is available is... So cool. And I want to key in on something that you said about, you know, the work that Professor Ewell highlighted was surprising to some. And I will say I was one of them. Now, 2019, though, at the same time that that all was going on, I was starting my first semester in community college, and I didn't know what the hell any of that meant. And it was many years later until I actually even interacted with any of that work and that discussion and actually gaining consciousness in the world of music theory. And one of the most surprising things about... Ewell's work is, if you look at the citations and bibliography, this discussion has been going on for quite some time. This is not necessarily some big, beautiful revelation. Now, the way he presented it certainly was.

[Táhirih] Right.

[Aaron] Now, in my last semester at Florida State, I'm in a readings and music theory course with Professor Rachel Lumsden. And one thing that's been a funny development for myself is as the class is going on and also attending SMT, I am at the same time more and more cynical about our past, but more and more hopeful about our future. It really is interesting.

[Táhirih] Yeah, I feel some of that same way myself. And certainly when I started going to SMT conferences, I think maybe 2010 or 2011 was my first conference, 2010. There was a lot of homogeneity in the types of repertoire and the types of approaches that you could find at SMT. It was very, very rare to find things that were just... far afield from the center at the time…

[Aaron] A lot of dead old white men, yeah.

[Táhirih] Yeah, and very specific methodologies, it was a very different kind of place. So, at this past SMT in Florida, it was just incredible to see the diversity and some of the topics and methodologies that had kind of dominated SMT when I first started going were barely even present at this past year's SMT. That was really interesting to me. And I feel like, And that's part of how a field stays relevant, that we don't just cling to the same repertoire and the same methodologies forever, but we're constantly updating what we think about and how we approach it. Because music did not stop with the avant -garde classical concert hall music of the 20th century. Sometimes in the music theory world, we can act that way. So yeah, if we want music theory to be interesting to new generations of people, we have to be talking about the music that they're actually listening to.

[Aaron] What a thought. In some ways, it's so damn simple.

[Táhirih] Yeah.

[Aaron] On the popular music interest group, almost mildly obsolete in what it spawned because now there's also rap and hip hop interest group. There's a metal music interest group. There's all sorts of these different things that were like born from the success of the popular music interest group. And so to call it splintering? I don't want to call it splintering because it's not like the popular music interest group died.

[Táhirih] Branching out.

[Aaron] It's branching out. And here's a question, just speculation. What can you see in the next 10 years? Like what branching out of interest groups do you see becoming stronger?

[Táhirih] AI music is coming for us. It's going to be a bigger and bigger presence in the world. And so music theorists are, we're going to have to reckon with that. And so I imagine that at some point down the line, there's going to be an interest group specifically devoted to the music that's being created by AI. And I mean, there are already people who are doing that kind of work, but I imagine that'll be another like standalone interest group. And yes, it's scary to us to think of, you know, machines taking over our jobs as musicians. But, you know, that's the nature of being a human being. We're constantly creating things that put ourselves out of work. And nobody complains about the fact that there are no longer human telephone operators, you know, plugging in the connection points. Yeah, we just have to roll with whatever's coming, but, yeah, that's, that's one interesting area that is going to develop in ways that we can't really anticipate right now.

[Aaron] Yeah. I can imagine the first meeting of a hypothetical AI and music interest group would be tension filled, to say. And, what is your opinion on that? Like, you were giving a pretty diplomatic rundown of the possibilities, but what's your opinion?

[Táhirih] About AI music?

[Aaron] Yeah, sure.

[Táhirih] Yeah, I just, like I said, technology is just, it's like this firebrand that we can't really, you know, control the ramifications of the kinds of things that we invent and create. And it's terrifying sometimes when we create something that then can fundamentally change the way things work. But, you know, imagine how people felt at the time of the Industrial Revolution when suddenly, you know, a peaceful, quiet village life was replaced with these giant, loud, noisy machines that were taking everybody's jobs and replacing them with robots, essentially. You know, it's just part of being human that things are going to continually be changing. And this is the aforementioned, you know, fear of change that humans have. But we have to accept that we're no longer the only ones who can compose music. And so, I don't feel great about the idea of composers losing jobs because AI can do what they did. You know, we have to roll with the way things develop. You can't put that genie back in the bottle. It's just the nature of human development. We're just constantly trying to push boundaries and new things. And so we're always going to be doing this to ourselves. We always have been and we always will be.

[Aaron] Certainly. Certainly. And there's always going to be someone else try, even if we call out into the void saying, please slow down with this quote, unquote, progress. There's always going to be somebody pushing. There's always going to be somebody. So we just, we just have to contend with it as you're saying. Yeah.

[Táhirih] Yeah. And we can, we can either be the, you know, the cranky elders of society who say, like, no, you know, things are terrible today. Things were better back when I was young. Or we can just accept that change has... has always been a part of human existence. It's just, it's easier to handle change when you're young. And then once you get to be middle -aged, then you start to fret about all the new developments that are changing the way things work. Yes, fretting about new developments.

[Aaron] That's certainly something music theory is very good at. Looking back at the predictions of the... splintering and falling apart and disillusion of the SMT in the 80s, yeah. It's, I mean on one case it's amusing just because we didn't, but it's all it's also interesting to draw parallels to now when some more people say that.

[Táhirih] I'm a big proponent of drawing parallels from the past because as humans, we're not as unique as we like to think. We just keep doing the same things over and over again. History is just so cyclical, and it might look a little bit different in the details, but, basically, we repeat the same kinds of things over and over again.

[Aaron] We certainly do. We certainly do. So, Professor Motazedian, you are, by all accounts, and I'm going to, I know on a technical level, this may not be literally true, but let's be honest, pretty well established. I mean, you know, full professorship, I don't know, you know, your journey to that, but you're doing well. You're doing well in the field, gaining clout by the day and so on. Myself, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say my colleagues as well, we aspire to, for all intents and purposes, do what you do and to follow a path that you have taken as well. Even if in different avenue. And so, what would be your advice to myself my colleagues and anyone listening who wants to pursue a career in academia, music academia, and specifically music theory?

[Táhirih] Yeah, great, great, great question. So, I have a unique insight to offer. For like past 10 or maybe even 12, 15 years, I have managed the job postings for the SMT jobs website. And over that time, so you know, all of the job postings in our field, like they went through me for that period of time. And I've noticed that, that more and more jobs over time were specifying that, you know, this school wanted somebody, a music theorist, who could offer different types of repertoire or methodologies than like the standard traditional things. And so, it became pretty clear to me from looking at job postings over all those years that having some sort of some sort of new and different thing to offer is a really strong asset on the job market. So that doesn't mean that you can't make a career from having Beethoven as your as your main focus area, but just make sure you have other things that you can offer as well that are that are newer and more, you know, kind of responsive to the kinds of developments that are happening in music today. So, I think it's important for people to have multiple different things that they can offer. And so, if you know, just having some sort of at least side expertise in things that are relevant and exciting to today's college students, that's going to be something that will help you get a job teaching college students. So, you know, as schools are, as more and more baby boomers are retiring and their tenure track positions are becoming vacant, a lot of schools are choosing to close out tenure -track positions rather than just reopening them to a new hire. And so, it's becoming increasingly challenging to get those tenure-track jobs. And so, a lot of tenure -track jobs that are being opened nowadays are trying to offer things that will be appealing to college students today. And so... So that's a really important factor to consider. As a grad student, when you're thinking about what you want to choose as your focus, you know, maybe have that in the back of your mind. And I would say that colleges are... constantly struggling to make ends meet financially. And so they need to try and appeal to students as much as possible. So yeah, having some sort of area of expertise that will put asses in the seats, you know, for your music theory class. That's, you know, when I offered a senior seminar on pop and rock music theory, I had an enormous turnout for that, because the subject matter was very exciting to students. So, that's the best advice I can offer. And also just get yourself out there and go to conferences as much as you can. Collaborate with people. Be involved in interest groups and committees and just get your name out there because our field is still small enough that you can kind of know most people by name. So be one of the names that people recognize.

[Aaron] Be one of the names that people recognize. That certainly is the goal. And getting asses in seats, too. It's important.

[Táhirih] Yep.

[Aaron] So what else is on your docket you got coming up for yourself professionally?

[Táhirih] Yeah, so I've long had an interest in popular music. And so, I've been starting to devote some of my energies to that. So, I just recently wrote a chapter for an edited volume about plagal half cadences in pop music. And that's just spawning more ideas that I have. So, I am starting to enter into the... that field, that subfield. And I have this project that I'm working on with Iranian pop music from the golden age of Iranian pop music, which was kind of the 1960s and 1970s. And that was music that I grew up listening to in my household. And there's a really fascinating history, you know, especially with the... be kind of shut down of music in Iran after the Islamic Revolution. So, this is something that I've started exploring and am working up for a future conference. And I'm also working on a project involving James Bond songs. Yeah, I have a number of different projects that I'm working on right now. Those are just a few of them, and it's exciting. I wish I had more time to be able to just lock myself in a room with my research, but teaching is a big part of what we do.

[Aaron] Oh, certainly. It's what allows you to do the other part.

[Táhirih] Exactly, yep.

[Aaron] That's a wonderful slate of works. I'll be certainly looking out for all of those. I'd like to say at least right now I have my finger on the pulse of newer popular music studies, so that's very exciting. And so what would be the best way for people to contact you for any comments or questions?

[Táhirih] Email. If you Google my name, you'll find my website, either my personal website or my Vassar faculty page. My email address is listed on both. And I'm always happy to talk to people over email. I constantly get emails from total strangers and I always make a point of responding, you know, as soon as my schedule allows.

[Aaron] Yes, well. Thank you. I was one of those perfect strangers, too, so I appreciate that as well.

[Táhirih] My pleasure.

[Aaron] And so we're closing out the podcast here, and this is a familiar send-off to frequent listeners. Professor Motazedian, and if you could say anything about whether that be key constellations, music theory, music in general, advice for anyone, what would that be?

[Táhirih] Follow your instincts and your interests and your passions and don't worry about, you know, what other people are doing or thinking about things. It's, you know, we have to stay plugged into what everyone else is doing, but that doesn't mean that you have to allow your own. work to be dictated by what everyone else is doing. So don't be afraid to follow your own instincts and do something that other people don't understand because you can end up creating something new of your own.

[Aaron] Certainly. A constant struggle not worrying about what other people are doing, for sure. Regardless of field, it sounds like, too.

[Táhirih] Yeah, absolutely.

[Aaron] And so this has been a wonderful episode. Thank you, Professor Motazedian, for coming on to the Theorist Composer Collaboration. Again, the link to purchase and look at the book featured today, Key Constellations: Interpreting Tonality in Film, is in the description of anywhere you're listening to this. Professor Motazedian, and thank you incredibly much for your time and for coming on to the Theorist Composer Collaboration.

[Táhirih] Thank you so much for having me. It was a delight chatting with you, Aaron.

[Aaron] This is Aaron again, and I want to thank you for listening to this episode of the Theorist Composer Collaboration. I also want to give another big thank you to Professor Táhirih Motazedian for coming on to the podcast and for sharing her book. Key Constellations: Interpreting Tonality in Film. Professor Motazedian's contact info is listed in the description, as well as a link to purchase Key Constellations, and I would appreciate it if you could show her some support. For further updates and notifications on the Theorist Composer collaboration, make sure to follow our Instagram and Facebook pages. You can listen to future episodes through our host website, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, and YouTube, so make sure you subscribe to the platform of your choosing. But until then, this is Aaron, and thank you for joining the TCC.