(gentle music) - Students have often joked that I ruin music one song at a time, and they always say that with love.

And it's because we talk about, Okay, what created this piece?

What's in this piece?

What information do we have about how it depicts people?

And they often find, wow, that's really hard.

What I thought we might do is watch this first scene.

There's a temptation when we experience that discomfort about uncomfortable images of race in the past, or ability, or gender, or sexuality.

It's like, well, I don't wanna deal with that.

And what I found is that students, once they get past that initial discomfort, they see, okay, those images of the past have legacies today, and we need to deal with them.

(upbeat music) One of the things that I've experienced as a music historian is that, music is this unique place where we can do that, and so we allow that kind of flexibility in a way that we don't with other things like party politics.

The stakes feel really high in those situations, but with music, the stakes are a little bit lower.

We have this thing that's not me versus you, it's this thing between us that we can talk about.

And I feel like teaching is just trusting that this hard work, these hard conversations, creating that sense of community, something of that seed is gonna pop up in some meaningful way at some later time.

- Sharing these performances creates education, it creates awareness.

- I love seeing how a seed that we planted as a class comes to create something really beautiful later.

Students send me an email and they're like, "I remember this conversation, "and this is how it showed up in my life."

Or they write books, or they become changed agents in their field.

It's that conversation, that community building, that commitment to finding a way out of a big problem through the shared love of music, that would be one of my purposes of teaching.

(upbeat music)