Associate Professor Jennifer Iverson, from the Department of Music, is a twentieth-century music scholar specializing in electronic music, avant-gardism, sound studies, and disability studies. As a FirstGen, Professor Iverson is drawn to supporting students in finding their belonging in the world through music. Listen to her share her career path to becoming a University of Chicago professor and her aspirations as an educator.
Associate Professor Jennifer Iverson, from the Department of Music, is a twentieth-century music scholar specializing in electronic music, avant-gardism, sound studies, and disability studies. As a FirstGen, Professor Iverson is drawn to supporting students in finding their belonging in the world through music. Listen to her share her career path to becoming a University of Chicago professor and her aspirations as an educator.
Lee 00:01
Hello and welcome to The Course. I'm your host today, Lee, and I'm speaking with Associate Professor Jennifer Iverson from the Department of Music. She is a scholar of 20th century music with a special emphasis on electronic music, avantgarde, sound studies, and disability studies. Professor Iverson is here to talk to us about her career path and how she became a University of Chicago professor.
Welcome to The Course, Professor Jennifer Iverson. It is great to have you with us today.
Jennifer Iverson 00:32
Thank you. I'm excited.
Lee 00:34
So let's start off with an overview of your career. Take me from your undergraduate years all the way to your current role at the university.
Jennifer Iverson 00:45
I grew up in a small farming town in southern Minnesota, and I'm a first generation college student. So, I went to college at a place that was pretty nearby a regional university called University of Wisconsin Lacrosse. I got an undergraduate degree there in piano, switching from a science major over to a music major about halfway through, when I realized I really wanted to do music for my career.
I went on to a master's degree at also a regional institution, University of Northern Iowa, where I continued to improve my playing, but where I realized that I was really never going to be a concert pianist. And it's then that I pivoted into PhD studies in music theory.
Music theory is about the structure of music, it's about how it's put together. And once I got to studying music in this scholarly fashion at the University of Texas at Austin, I really felt that I had found my real home. I felt finally like I was swimming with the stream. I loved being able to talk and write about music. And I finished my PhD in about 6 years.
My first job was at the University of Iowa, which was a wonderful first job. I then got a fellowship at Stanford where I wrote the majority of my first book and that was a big turning point in my career where I got into higher prestige institutions. And I, my work began to be recognized a little more during that fellowship year.
There was a job opening at University of Chicago. I applied for it and I got it. And then I transitioned to University of Chicago. I got my tenure here, and now I'm an associate professor, and we live in Chicago.
Lee 02:20
And Jennifer, can you talk to me about your particular expertise in music? And if you could kind of break it down for me, like, I'm a high school sophomore, that would be awesome.
Jennifer Iverson 02:31
Right now I'm writing a book about synthesizers. I like to think about electronic sound, and I like to think about how all of us encounter electronic sound in different ways and from different places. We might hear it in advertisements, we might be going to raves and dance clubs and dancing to, we might be listening to avant garde, electronic music produced in university electronic music studios.
We might be listening to horror film soundtracks loaded up with all kinds of electronic and synthesized sound really pervades our lives, and I'm very interested in these questions of circulation and cultural value that get attached to electronic sound. I came at this project from more of the avant garde 20th century music end of things.
I wrote my first book about the immediate post World War II era. When West Germany looked to improve its national image by creating an electronic music studio and repurposing wartime technologies, moving their nation ahead, starting to reclaim cultural progress through electronic music. But I wasn't entirely satisfied with how narrow this project was. It focused a lot on institutions and a lot of the white men that occupied them, and I wanted to speak more broadly about how electronic music touches many of our lives in many different genres. So, hence the current project about synthesizers.
Lee 03:57
That's fascinating. So Jennifer, when you were a kid, you were growing up in what sounds like a rural area, and it sounds like you've had an interest in music for a long time, but did you always know you wanted to be a music professor? Or were there other things that you were interested in being when you grew up?
Jennifer Iverson 04:15
I was interested in music from a very young age. I begged to play the piano and I'm grateful that my parents did things like put a piano in our house and allow me to take dance lessons. Those were things that a lot of my friends didn't have a chance to do. So I was lucky in that regard.
I would also say, though, that my sense of what was possible was really limited by growing up in a very small, very rural, very working class and blue collar town. And I was coached and encouraged and pointed toward like really pragmatic professions like nursing and teaching. I thought that I would be an occupational therapist when I was younger and I was interested in autism in particular. And that's an area actually in which I still work. So some of these interests that I have professionally now do feel organic.
But it took me quite a while to understand that the job that I now have was even a thing and would be available to me. Took a long time of being in college and in higher education, talking to people and exploring for me to understand how to take next steps and end up where I was right now.
Lee 05:25
And when you look back on your time in secondary school, and just what you were like as a kid and an adolescent, does it make sense to you that you wound up where you did?
Jennifer Iverson 05:36
I think it does, looking back. I think that I was someone who was very curious, someone who loved to write and someone who loved to read. And I think those things are really essential qualities of being a scholar. And I think it's clear to me in retrospect that those were always organic strengths of mine.
I also feel so lucky that I got to have a career in music. It was always a dream of mine and something that, again, never felt really possible to say out loud when I was younger, I wasn't surrounded by people who were professional musicians. There wasn't really a slot for that. And nevertheless, I loved being in music.
I loved playing the piano. I loved being in sound. I loved listening to music. I loved dancing. And it was really a blessing to find a way to put together music with these other strengths I had in language and writing and communication.
Lee 06:33
Yeah, can you tell me a little bit about your decision to pursue academia as a career, and also if you knew that going into your graduate studies, or was that something that still was kind of up in the air for you?
Jennifer Iverson 06:50
At the point of my master's degree, it was very much up in the air. I started the master's degree thinking, let me just work on being a better pianist. And honestly, like you know, I'm never sorry for the time spent doing that. We can always play our instruments better, sing better, make more art, so I'm grateful that I took the time to really explore and build my playing technique.
I really struggled during that period with intense memory slips. Playing on stage was kind of a terrifying experience for me. My mind would go blank. I would shake. I would just have these like blackout experiences actually. And it was really unsustainable, you know, there was like no amount of meditation that was going to get me over the hump.
And I think I realized pretty quickly that playing on stage was not going to be a positive experience. On the other hand, I really loved playing with others, and I really loved talking about music with others. I was doing a lot of piano accompanying. I was doing a lot of collaborating with vocalists and instrumentalists where we would be talking about how we wanted to shape a phrase or how we wanted to take a, you know, tempo change.
And it was really fun to talk about music with others. So I think becoming a scholar gave me a chance to focus on talking about music, knowing the history of music, being able to understand myself and guide others in thinking about how music is put together and shaped. And all of that was enormously fun and gratifying.
Lee 08:22
And what kind of support did you receive on your academic journey?
Jennifer Iverson 08:27
I think I've received a lot of support. Broadly speaking, my family has been very supportive, including my kids now, who, you know, are huge cheerleaders and really are very supportive of my career. In addition to the faculty and my graduate program, I had a couple of important mentors from outside the university, or from outside my University of Texas.
Joseph Straus was one, he was a professor in New York City. And he took me under his wing from early on and encouraged me. And it really gave me a feeling that I could do this and that I was valued, and that was super important. I also have a best friend who's a music theorist, her name is Jennifer Beavers.
And that relationship has been crucial for me as well. Being able to go through the ups and downs of graduate school and jobs and motherhood, with someone who was also walking in that same track has been incredibly meaningful.
Lee 09:23
And Jennifer, what kind of obstacles did you encounter along the way? And how did you overcome those?
Jennifer Iverson 09:29
Well, I remember a few really bad rejections that really set me back. I remember when I was workshopping my first book, I submitted a proposal to a press and the reader reports came back vicious. They didn't just say, we think this book needs some adjustments or there are some problems here.
They said, we don't think this person has what it takes to be a scholar and that was like a gut punch that was that felt below the belts and that really felt like a real challenge to my self-confidence and my self-esteem. And those kinds of rejections are rare, but I've received a couple of them throughout my career.
And I have to say, when I've encountered those challenges, I've shared them immediately with close friends and with close colleagues who I know I can rely upon and it's been enormously helpful to get perspective right off from others who can set the record straight on your ability and who can help put your feedback on the ground with regard to your talent and your skill, your preparation. And then who can, at the appropriate time, help you strategize about the way forward with the project, you know, but I've really, I think, found the right people to help me move through moments of self-doubt and put community and conversation around those moments of failure and I've, yeah, I really appreciated what my friends and colleagues have been able to offer in those moments of intense rejection.
Lee 11:00
Do you think being a first generation college student has given you insight or perspective on role or the journey to becoming a professor in a way that maybe others who have family members, who've experienced higher education may not have?
Jennifer Iverson 11:21
Yeah, I often struggle with feeling like an outsider and feeling like I'm in spaces that I don't know very much about how they operate, or I'm still learning, or I have to figure it out. There's a feeling of self-reliance that I think a lot of First Gen students that motivates us to do it for ourselves and for our family and for those who are coming behind us.
And that gives us a feeling of must or have to, that's a kind of driving energy inside. I feel that I also sometimes feel, like I said, on the outside and like I have to figure out the puzzle on my own. I feel underprepared often, you know, like I wish I would have had a better education in this and I wish I would have had more exposure to that and I wish I would have had a higher quality this and that. And it can be difficult sometimes to let go of your feelings of inadequacy and stand on your feet and say, I belong. I'm okay. I'm here.
Lee 12:20
And can you tell me a little bit about how you found your particular expertise and in why that has been so interesting to you and has kept your interest for so long.
Jennifer Iverson 12:33
Music theory is like looking inside at how the musical machine works, how the melodies and harmonies and rhythms fit together to make something magical. It's kind of puzzly. It's a lot about systems thinking. It's a lot about the way in which we're set up in, you know, a certain set of expectations and then maybe the music does something unusual or unexpected that really captures our imagination.
So I think I'm just as an intellect really set up to as a systems thinker and as someone who can see parts and whole. So all of those facets of my particular brain and intellect work really well with my discipline and are some of the reasons that I'm attracted to studying music in terms of how it's constructed.
The question of how music makes meaning is also very interesting to me and a lot of music theorists might stop simply at describing the structure, the internal construction. I always wanted to reach out from that. To begin with the internal construction, but then to really speak about how music is touching us, how it's doing something magical, how it's overturning our expectations, how it's in circulation in a cultural system, how it's playing out to historical narrative and so on.
So I really always like to move outward from the musical work itself to the question of meaning.
Lee 13:57
And can you tell me a little bit more about the work that you do with students who are on the autism spectrum and how you got involved in that?
Jennifer Iverson 14:05
When I moved to Chicago, I learned about a remarkable school called City Elementary started by a group of parents who wanted to provide a more affirming school for their neurodivergent kids. It's a K through 8 school. And as I got to know the head of school, he floated an idea that we start a music program there, but that it'd be based on friendship and bonding.
He reminded me of what it was like to be a teenager and to be in a bedroom with your friends, trading albums, or taping songs off the radio. That would have been my generation. Now, our students might be playing video games together or watching YouTube, right? But nevertheless, we were focused on this feeling of bonding over music and together we created a program called Music Sociality. And it's an outreach program that brings UChicago undergrads to City Elementary to hang out with the middle schoolers and to listen to music together to watch videos together to improvise together and to have bonding and friendship experiences around music.
I've been, you know, delighted to teach in this program and to recruit volunteers and to mentor undergrads in teaching autistic students in this program. We all learn a lot when we're interacting with neurodivergent students. We learn about how to bring more structure and clarity to what we're doing. We learn how to meet students where they are, and adapt to their needs, and we learn about their very special intelligence that we don't possess ourselves.
So it's an enormously rich exchange. That's very much a 2-way street and I'm really happy to facilitate it and to get to know these kids. I'm also the board chair at this school, and I'm really excited to grow this school and to, I hope bring it into a permanent location and a state of the art new building, to really have this school be a model for what's possible in educating neurodivergent children.
Lee 15:59
Amazing. So I'm also curious about your job as a professor and what you find to be most fun about it?
Jennifer Iverson 16:09
I think some of the most fun parts of my job are teaching. Every time I cross the threshold to teach, I'm so excited that I get to spend the next 90 minutes. Surrounded by smart students. I'm really focused on getting to know the students in my classroom and engaging them in conversation in a way that allows us all to move forward from where we began at the beginning of the class.
My style of teaching is very relational. It's very focused on building something together. And so, I'm very excited by teaching by the students that I meet and by the intelligence that I'm surrounded by every day. It's absolutely one of the best parts of my job.
Writing my own research is also a really, really fun part of my job. I love that I get to listen to music, that I get to dig into how it works, that I get to visit archives, that I get to learn histories, that I get to talk about others and talk to others who have made music and produced music. It's really an enormously fun activity to be engaged in and it's really fun to write stories about music and why it matters.
Lee 17:19
And I'm also curious about what your professional goals are for yourself. Like, where do you, what do you want to accomplish in the future?
Jennifer Iverson 17:27
I'm really excited about this second book, which I would like to reach a wide audience. I really want to talk to a lot of people about synthesizers and synthesized sound. I want to find a permanent home for our school, for City Elementary, and I want to establish an endowment and a great scholarship fund that will extend this education far and wide on the south side of Chicago.
I'm excited about making a third book that's focused on disability and especially focused on how families confront ableism. Through my work with the school, I've really become so much more aware of how much parents need to do to stem the gap between their children with a disability and the medical systems or the schooling systems that don't understand their child that are expecting a kind of normalcy from their child.
So I'm really interested in this parental experience of contradiction and confronting ableism. I'm interested in how families themselves find a kind of defence against what is very often a kind of punishing ableist normalizing impulse from the institutions and the social structures that they're inhabiting. So that's the 3rd book I'd like to write.
Beyond that. I want to continue to raise healthy kids and I'm not sure what my career holds in the later years, but I love having conversations and I can't wait to move forward with some of these projects in the short and medium term.
Lee 19:02
I'm interested in the intersection between ableism and your music research and your interest in music and where you see those two intersecting?
Jennifer Iverson 19:13
Yeah, I think it's a good point, Lee, and it goes back to the Music Sociality program and this idea that music could be a space where we practice maybe being in more acceptance of each other as we are. And we practice relating in a way that honors the neurodivergent mind a bit more than other normative scenarios where we're expecting a kind of neurotypical interaction.
So I'm very interested in the idea that music has a kind of potential energy and I think improvisation might be a really good place to look here. I think it kind of improvised practice of music, especially for amateurs, especially as a mode of communication and inhabiting sound together could be a really interesting way to think about how we create an interaction that doesn't rely on a normalized expectation of what should happen or how a person should be behaving.
A lot of researchers have done wonderful work already in music and disability and improvisation, creating things like the adaptive use musical instrument, so I think we don't need to think about fixing disabled people. We need to think about learning how they are and respecting them and integrating them holistically into a much larger framework of what's possible in life. I think music holds enormous potential for that.
Lee 20:37
And where do you find inspiration?
Jennifer 20:39
The work that gets me out of bed in the morning these days is City Elementary. I'm really driven to provide a better education for neurodivergent children than currently exists. And I think a lot of us, may be really driven to produce change and to try to produce a better world in our small corner.
I think it can be very difficult and I see my kids struggling with this too. We have a world filled with a lot of pain with a lot of structural inequity, with a lot of violence, with epidemics of homelessness, gun violence, with war, with catastrophic climate change that we know is coming.
And it can be very difficult to find and stay connected to a sense of purpose, when confronting these giant structural problems that are very hard to intervene in. So I think the trick maybe for all of us is to feel that we're working on some of those problems at whatever scale. We're able to do so, and we're all just one person or one family or one community or one university.
But we want to feel connected to a sense of positive change, and we want to feel that our work is making a positive impact and making our world a better place. So I try in my own work to stay connected to that feeling of purpose, that feeling of positive change, to accept that even though I know I can't change things on the highest structural levels, I can make really meaningful, positive impacts upon the people that I encounter and interact with, and I try to focus on really doing that day after day, because I know that change takes time and I know that those contributions will add up. And I know that others are making them as well.
Lee 22:21
So, Jennifer, what advice would you give to someone who is interested in following a similar path to yours?
Jennifer 22:29
I think you have to be super curious to be a scholar, and this isn't something that anybody can teach you. You really have to have a fire in the belly and feel compelled to be a scholar. You have to have an insatiable curiosity to know more. In my field, it means to know more music to listen to more music to read more things to talk to more people. And I think having some type of hunger, premised in a kind of curiosity is really the indispensable thing for a scholar.
Lee 23:01
And finally, what would you say is the most fulfilling part of the work that you do?
Jennifer Iverson 23:07
The most gratifying work that I do is to reach my students and especially to reach students who historically have been excluded from institutions like the University of Chicago. Students of color, women, first gen students. I'm very, very happy to nurture these students experience and to, I hope, give them a greater sense of belonging, as we work to iron out these structural inequities that have been so deeply built into our society.
Lee 23:40
Thank you, Professor Jennifer Iverson for your time today and course takers. If you enjoyed listening to today's interview, please check out the other ones. Leave us a comment. Subscribe, follow, and share this episode with your friends and family. You can find out more about the University of Chicago through uchicago.edu or the university's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk. Stay tuned for more and thanks for listening.