The Vernacular Music Center at the Quarter Century 

Summary

The Vernacular Music Center was founded in 2000 by Dr. Christopher J. Smith upon his hire as Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Texas Tech University School of Music.[1] Over the past 27 years the Center has provided a locus for in-depth interdisciplinary research, teaching, and advocacy on behalf of the world's vernacular musics and–that is, performance arts which are learned, taught, and passed-on by ear and in the memory, in all cultures and time periods. The Center engages locally, regionally, and internationally with university organizations and NGOs, advocating for participatory arts as a means of educational excellence and community empowerment.

Activities and teaching practice

The Center sponsors ensembles, certificates, guest artists, special productions, and teaching in all areas. Its core practice is collaborative team-based learning, with a particular emphasis upon Arts Practice-Based creation of original artworks. VMC staff direct School of Music students in registered vernacular-based ensemble courses in historical performance practice, Balkan and eastern Mediterranean repertoires, bagpiping, and folkloric approaches to orchestral music, as well as student-directed ensembles in folk fiddling, East African folkloric musics, and—in past iterations depending upon staff expertise and available resources—cross-cultural improvisation, tango, Americana music, and Zimbabwean folkloric music.

Study Abroad

Since its inception, and especially since 2006, the VMC has been a leader in TTU’s efforts to expand students’ opportunity for study abroad: in addition to 11 years service on the Study Abroad Competitive Scholarship committee, between 2007-19 VMC staff Christopher Smith and Angela Mariani developed and co-led an annual spring-semester seminar (“Music, Folklore, and Tradition in Irish Cultural History”), with a Maymester field trip to the West of Ireland. Though the COVID lockdown and sharply-increased travel costs limit the return of this course, the model of seminar + overseas experience epitomizes the VMC’s commitment to innovative teaching, transformative undergraduate experience, and international student study and exchange. Click here for a sample tour diary and Google map.

The 2010s: Flagship Productions

In considering the VMC, its mission, and its impacts, it is useful to survey the flagship productions which, over nearly three decades, have been a focus of VMC creative research and teaching and simultaneously an opportunity for retrospective reflection and strategic planning for the future.

These flagship productions are staged variously as single, biennial, and annual events. In all cases we seek to unite our research, creative practice, and teaching in creations which enable developing young artists to discover both the collaborative artistic skills and the professional acuity to engage in meaningful art-making and -teaching in the 21st century.

On an annual level, the Solstice Concert, which typically occurs in the first week of December, is a focus for VMC visibility and for a wide range of collaborative creative work between our ensembles, other School of Music organizations, and leading artists from the community. The Lubbock GuitarSlingers concert, an annual celebration of the vernacular guitar music of the American Southwest, occurs each October, and provides an opportunity for the VMC to engage in public facing programming which is deeply saturated with the artistic history of the Llano Estacado, reaching back as far as the Spanish colonial period. The biennial Electric Guitar in American Culture conference is a scholarly corollary to the Guitarslingers concert, and brings participating scholars, both face to face and virtually, from around the world.

The TTU Arts Practice Research Conference, founded in 2015, is a focus for this interdisciplinary field, which at the time of the Conference’s inception was, and still remains, under-represented on North American university campuses. In its biennial iterations, the APR Conference brings together scholars from around the country and the world in order to share insights, best practices, and teaching methods for research which focuses upon the creative processes of art making, across different media. In this fashion, Arts Practice Based Research as advocated by the VMC and we are a worldwide leader in this area (see Dr. Smith's, Dr. Landes’s, and Dr. Mariani’s publications in this area).

The VMC’s Dancing with Mr. Darcy events in the late 2010s celebrated both Regency literature and the participatory art of English country dance, providing a gala setting which encouraged participation from the community. The VMC Outreach Scholars Program, which was funded by a combination of grants and donations, particularly in partnership with the Country Dance and Song Society, was an opportunity to send developing young arts professionals from TTU to national and international learning experiences in vernacular music and dance, which were not at that time available on the South Plains.

The Bassanda Project, a three-year annual iteration in the late 2010s pre COVID, was an opportunity for Dr. Smith as house composer to collaborate with former Texas Tech dance faculty member Nicole Wesley in presenting international study abroad experiences partnering new music composition and contemporary dance. These learning residencies occurred at the University of Bedford in the UK with their full partnership.

The Dancing at the Crossroads theatrical dance show was a full-length piece showcasing student performers in instrumental music, song, and dance, and celebrating the encounters of African American and Anglo Celtic dance in the New World. Entirely original in its conception and entirely based in the most traditional folkloric musics, stories, and dance, it was a first watershed in the VMC's expanding concept of its own capacities.

The newly composed improvisational orchestral score for Nosferatu, accompanying the classic silent horror film, was a collaboration between the VMC, the Flatland Film Festival, and the historic Wallace Theatre in Levelland, TX. This experience, presented in multiple performances and on SW tours, introduced students both to the craft of participatory and improvisational orchestral music making, and to the complex psychological and social connotations of the 1922 text, which was simultaneously the archetypal vampire film, and also coalesced many of the problematic elements of the era’s storytelling and ethnic portrayals.

The folk oratorio Plunder: Battling for Democracy in the New World was a full length theatrical production of music and dance based in historical texts from underrepresented voices in the story of American democracy’s aspirations. It was first sketched and workshopped in 2017, and came to fruition in 2024, in an invited co-production between the VMC and the University of Delaware School of Music, where it was staged in multiple performances, including in historical spaces.

The 2019-2020 immersive theater piece Yonder, another collaboration with the historic Wallace Theatre in Levelland TX, was an original, site-specific theatrical production, combining music, dance, mime, and installations in the style of Punchdrunk, the world's leading innovators in the field of immersive and site specific theater. This flagship production, an exercise in Devised (group-authored) theatre and mythographic storytelling, was developed over the course of eight months; its premiere was cancelled in April of 2020 due to the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown.

The 2020s: formal Center status, expanding scholarships, new partnerships

In the current era, we have sought and received formal Center status in 2023, and have developed a vastly expanded scholarships program, plus a partnership with the State University of New York Press in a series curated by the VMC and entitled Essays in Vernacular Music. The first tranche of this series’ publications, including volumes on experimental folk-based dance, fictional folklore in Ursula K. LeGuin, the dynamics of audience participation, new multimedia works of indigenous musics from pre-Columbian sources, and the folkloric roots of New England viola da gamba playing and practice, is expected in Spring of 2027. Concurrently, we continue to produce the Voices from the Vernacular Music Center podcast, and—in a collaboration between VMC staff, public radio station WFIU (Indiana University), and Early Music America—the syndicated program Harmonia to stage flagship productions, to sponsor visits and return teaching by internationally-known master teachers, and to engage regional, national, and international tours by our VMC ensembles.

Impact

In all periods of the VMC's existence, we have sought to unite research, teaching, and advocacy, and to advocate for all the ways in which vernacular art forms, their practices, and most importantly their aesthetic and ethical values, can find an organic, effective, and impactful home within American university education. In this respect, we are virtually unique amongst North American research centers housed within universities, and thus seek shared dialogue with peer institutions around the world.[2] Our reach is both worldwide, spanning decades, and day-to-day in the classrooms and rehearsal halls where we work. Students and fellow scholars passing through the VMC's orbit are empowered to realize creative, pedagogical, and research aspirations and collaborations which would not otherwise be imagined.

[1] Lister for a history of the first decade+ (2000-2012) of the Vernacular Music Center interview, linked under “History”

[2] Our closest “peer institutions” are thus the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, housed at the University of Limerick; the Sibelius Academy, housed at Uniarts Helsinki; and the Orchestra of Indigenous Instruments and New Technologies, NU Argentina. The VMC is in regular collaborative communication with all three.