The Music of Teachers

Jonathan C. Wright, associate professor of biology, has a not-so-secret second life as a violinist. Ami Radunskaya, before becoming a mathematician, was a professional cellist and composer pushing the boundaries of electronic music. And when she's not using Very Long Baseline Interferometry to study blazars (a subgroup of quasars), Professor of Physics Alma C. Zook might be found boning up on Mozart's Oboe Quartet.

Jonathan Wright finds music balances his academic life.

At Pomona, where non-music majors often delve deeply into the music curriculum, faculty expertise in music likewise flourishes both inside and outside the Music Department. Despite the pressures inherent in staying at the forefront as teachers in their own demanding fields, some non-music faculty also find, or make, the time to maintain high-level skills as musicians.

"Some of the greatest satisfaction I get in college life is playing chamber music with students and colleagues," says Wright, who as a biologist has concentrated on the comparative physiology of isopod crustaceans, and as a musician plays in the Pomona College Symphony Orchestra and in ad-hoc orchestras and chamber groups.

Directly or indirectly, faculty members' musical inclinations often find expression in their teaching.

Ami Radunskaya finds relationships between music and math.

Radunskaya, associate professor of mathematics and a former cellist in the Oakland Symphony Orchestra, says there is "a fruitful interface for scholarship between mathematics and music." One of her math research interests is dynamical systems--abstract structures that evolve over time--something she considers akin to making music. Radunskaya was a member of professional electronic music ensembles before entering academia , and has taught classes that explore the relationship between music and mathematics. Her dual interests are reflected in compositions such as Voodoo Cricket--her score for a video about a Berkeley neurobiology professor's experiments that involved inserting pins into crickets' brains to study the electrical impulses generated by their nervous systems. "It sounds kind of strange," she says with a laugh, "but it was Berkeley, after all."

Zook, who has played the oboe or its cousin, the English horn, in the Pomona College Concert Band and in the College orchestra for nearly 20 years, has taught a class on the physics of music since her second year on the faculty at Pomona. Like most other faculty members accomplished in music, she began studying and playing in childhood. "My father was a pretty good clarinet player in his youth, and there was sort of an unstated expectation that my siblings and I would play instruments," she says. One of her research interests deals with the physical nature of "good" musical tone quality in wood instruments. In the mid-1990s, she and student William Giammona '97 collaborated on a research project that found statistical correlations between tonal qualities considered good or wanting by subjective listeners.

Alma Zook uses her musical talent in the classroom and lab.

There might appear to be few direct links between playing the violin and teaching about the colonization of land by marine crustaceans, but biologist Wright says his music informs his classroom work in subtle ways.

"I think we all have some creative urge," he says, "and I believe that personal happiness and intellectual growth depend on this being fulfilled. Teaching and physiology research are creative processes as well, of course, and doing either at a high level demands a never-ending quest to find ways to do things better. But the creative arts plumb the depths of human emotion in a way that the sciences do not. They also provide perhaps our most sensitive window into other cultures," which touches on another advantage of his avocation. "Music-making also enriches college life by allowing me to interact with a circle of students and colleagues that I otherwise would not get to meet regularly," he says.

Paul Saint-Amour relates to students through an interest in music.

After a recent visit to The Glass House, a popular nightclub in the city of Pomona, Paul Saint-Amour, assistant professor of English, agrees that his musical interests make it easier to identify with students. "I think I was the oldest person in the club, but I had a great time," says Saint-Amour, an accomplished pianist who also plays guitar and who sang with the world-touring Whiffenpoofs a cappella group while an undergraduate at Yale University.

Saint-Amour, like others at Pomona, often finds ways to employ music in his teaching.

"I do try to make links between literature and music with my classes," he says. "I teach James Joyce and will often play musical work based on Joyce's writing. I recently used a tape in which someone was reading Joyce and using elaborate electronic distortion. And John Cage, who was a Pomona student before dropping out, did a piece based on Finnegans Wake, which has been an inspiration for a lot of composers."

Although faculty members' musical interests may contribute to their academic pursuits, the enduring motivation to stay in practice comes from something deeper.

"The technical demands of playing to a reasonable level of proficiency demand a finely honed technique," Wright says, "but ultimately one must be able to dissociate oneself from the technical process, and be moved by the music itself."

Zook says that playing the oboe in the band and orchestra "is something very different from doing science. It's a way of expressing myself in a way that isn't possible through physics or astronomy."

As Saint-Amour says, "I can't imagine a life without music."

--Michael Balchunas