Episode 141 - Paula Harper: "That's a thing you can do?"

Assistant Professor Paula Harper's participation in the choir drew her to music classes in her English major college days, and accidentally gave her a second major by the time she graduates. As she continues her journey to finding her unique path, she found her research interest by combining music, virality and social media platforms together. Join us this week on The Course, to hear Professor Harper share her story of working beyond conventional boundaries in a study field and how UChicago enabled her throughout the way. 

Transcript

Stephen 00:00
Hello and welcome to The Course. I'm your host, Stephen, and today I'm speaking with Professor Paula Harper of the Department of Music.

Professor Harper is a musicologist studying sound, music, and the internet. She's here today to speak with us about her research into virality and how her love of singing led her down the winding path to her current niche. We'll also be talking about Taylor Swift, of course, and how Professor Harper became a University of Chicago professor. 

Professor Harper, welcome to The Course. How are you this morning?

Paula Harper 00:29
I am doing well. I've got my coffee. I'm doing great.

Stephen 00:32
Can I just get you to please quickly introduce yourself to our listeners tell us your position at UChicago and just a little bit in layman's terms about like what it is that you study.

Paula Harper 00:43
I am Paula Harper. I am an assistant professor in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago, and I study music, sound, and the internet.

Stephen 00:53
Thank you. What did you think or hope you would be when you grew up, when you were like a kid? I'm talking like maybe like middle school, early high school.

Paula Harper 01:02
I think I had a very eclectic range of ideas of what I was going to be when I grew up. They changed based on a number of things, whatever, I was briefly excited about anything that was happening in the world. So I loved animals for a while. I thought I was going to be a veterinarian. When the 1996 Olympics came around, I was convinced I was going to be an Olympian, despite not having any talent for like sports or athletic ability whatsoever. Convinced I was going to be an Olympian. For a while, I wanted to be a writer. I was a big book nerd and loved writing and I guess in a way I did turn out to be something of a writer. That's probably one of the more consistent ones, but like I said, there were lots of other, think I was going to be a fashion designer for a hot minute when I learned that that was a job that one could be a visual artist really just like spanning the gamut of interests that I had and things that were happening around me in the world.

Stephen 02:13
Keeping your options open.

Paula Harper 02:14
Keeping my options open. Yeah. 

Stephen 02:16
So, I mean, I can see how you might have whittled down some of that, but say like around the time you were starting college, like, what did you think your course of study would be? And kind of if you had any thoughts on it, like, where did you expect that to take you?

Paula Harper 02:31
 Yeah. Well, I mean, even backing up a little bit, I do remember that while I was in high school, I think was the first time that I, my high school English teacher at the time was telling us about getting her master's degree in English and she talked about a paper that she had written about like the significance of trees and a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story.

And that was a, I mean, I still remember it, right? I still remember it in that level of detail. So that was formative. I, it was a real, wait, someone can do that? That's a thing you can do? It really, that really plugged into my brain. And then by the time that I went to college, I went, I did my undergraduate at the University of Chicago. So there I was sure that I was going to be an English major. That was my kind of plan. I took, well, I planned to take a bunch of English classes again, kind of pursuing that maybe, nebulous, but slightly more solid than the rest of them, plan to be a writer. 

But I wound up taking for fun a bunch of music classes, such that by the time I was in my fourth year of undergrad, I kind of had to scramble to get the rest of my English requirements done and I had accidentally gotten myself a music major while I was at it. So I wound up being a music and English double major at UChicago.

Stephen 03:59
Oh, okay. All right. So, you did the second major sort of, that was like a distraction from the other one, and you just happened to.

Paula Harper 04:06
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was, I, you know, I just kept taking all of these classes for fun, and then it turns out I got a major accidentally.

Stephen 04:15
These sort of accidental major classes that you kept taking, I mean, why, what was the appeal? What made you, what drew you to that? 

Paula Harper 04:23
 Well, I love music and I had been, I had spent a huge amount of time doing music as a young person and I was still doing a lot of music, across my college career. I had trained and was active, very active as a choral singer and I knew that I did not want to be a what I understood to be like a music specializer in college because I really wasn't interested in solo performance. I really loved the kind of collaborative like group puzzle work that was choral singing, especially the kind of choral singing that I was really into, which was especially like Renaissance polyphony. 

So I was really, really into this kind of specialized performance that wasn't well fostered by something like, say, a become a music major off the table, because I didn't really see any paths forward for that. 

So when I got to college at UChicago, I was still very interested in music and on the side I was doing a lot of choral singing. But this wasn't something that I was thinking of pursuing as a career via college education, but that it was something that I was still very passionate about, very interested in.

So, you know, I’m here singing all of this Renaissance polyphony in my extracurricular life, and it was exciting for me to get a chance to learn about it in say music history classes, but it was also really exciting to get to learn about old manner of other music that I wasn't performing. So, you know, I was taking classes on South Asian music and I was taking Travis Jackson's rock class and really just like getting the opportunity to dive in an, you know, in a focused rigorous academic way to the world of music in a way that I don't think I knew had been possible prior to going to college, right? 

I thought about music majoring in college as this very particular thing that I wasn't going to do. And then what UChicago made possible was a really different breadth of possibilities.

Stephen 06:49
This is not a rhetorical question. I don't really actually know, but is the difference you're describing between, you know, like doing the, like repertory, like the coursework of like someone who's preparing to be a professional musician versus, the various other like things, studies that you're talking about. Is that the difference between like musical performance and musicology or how do you define musicology? 

Paula Harper 07:12
Ummm yeah yeah. I just watched the movie Inside Out 2 with my, with some of my nieces and nephews who were just in town. And in that there's a little running gag about becoming an ethnomusicologist, which is something that no one, none of the characters know what that is.

And it's funny because to me an ethnomusicologist is at least a more comprehensible term than a musicologist, which just, what is the musicologist? Who can say? But all of that is to say that yes, yes, exactly. What I had thought of as a pathway through college towards music as a career involved things like taking voice or instrument lessons, primarily performing as the meat and potatoes of your program, evaluating yourself and orienting, like, your college year around, you know, kind of big scary performance evaluations.

And then maybe, you know, around the edges of that peripherally, doing things like going to music history classes, right? And so, the program at UChicago, it's not a conservatory style program, right?

And so the meat and potatoes at UChicago is taking courses in the history and criticism and analysis of music, which was really, you know, brain opening to me and something that was such an exciting supplement to what I was doing on the side as a performer.

Stephen 08:52
Who, and this, you know, could be from the period we've already discussed or from further on, but like, who would you say are some of the really big influences on your trajectory?

Paula Harper 09:01
Yeah, well, I mean, there was that, English professor, shout out to Mrs. Hacker, and one of my friends at like a high school job that I had, he was in college while I was in high school and he was going to school for English and he at one point said, like, I think you could be a professor. I could see it. And I had kind of never considered that before. So shout out to Greg, Shout out to Greg from teen summer job. 

But, you know, there have also been just a number of people, you know, there were a number of UChicago faculty where I truly did not kind of understand the trajectory of academia certainly as an undergrad.

I do feel like I kind of tripped and fell into it, that I like, you know, certainly a combination of dumb luck and some amount of perseverance, but a lot of dumb luck getting to and through academia, but certainly some professors at UChicago kind of guiding me in that direction.

And then a huge one is, Ellie Hisama, who was my advisor in my PhD program, just a phenomenal, like, spectacular, legendary advisor, who really just gave me the resources to forge the kind of unorthodox path that I wound up taking.

Stephen 10:35
Well, yeah, let's talk a little bit more about that path, by the time you realized that you had gotten a degree in music, had you already decided at that point that you wanted to continue studying it, or like what, did lead you to that decision?

Paula Harper 10:46
That is a great question. Who can say what gets someone into grad school? I wound up applying for grants to go and do a research project in England, in the UK. I was a big Anglophile, going back to the, you know, imagining myself as a writer, you know, all the classics, Jane Austen, Arthur Conan, Doyle, I was a big Sherlock Holmes head.

So big, big Anglophile. I really wanted to go to the United Kingdom. And I did so by putting together a project that I could go and study this music that I was really interested in, Renaissance polyphony, specifically, English polyphony. And did so under the auspices of a research project partially funded by UChicago, it turns out that the music that one really enjoys performing and the music that one really likes studying aren't necessarily the same thing.

So I didn't really find myself kind of like coming alive in the archives of, say, the British Library or the Bodleian but it was, it did introduce me to a lot of things that, you know, sometimes you just have to find out what you want to be doing by doing some stuff you don't want to be doing and that was that particular kind of archival work.

But it, you know, it gave me a lot of, really important experience. And I enjoyed a lot of it, right? I enjoyed things like writing research papers and I enjoyed things like putting together independent research projects and following my own curiosity. And so that is something that if you have those particular interests and enthusiasms at the University of Chicago and you're in your third or your fourth year, that folks are very adept at encouraging you to go on to graduate school.

And so I did. I went and I got a master's degree in music history at the University of Washington. So there was really kind of like figuring out, right, this, I didn't really know what academia was. And that was a good kind of crash course and like, okay, let's take a little bit more time to figure out what this whole doing independent research is like, you know, how to get my bearings and my grounding in the world of academia. And there was really the place where I pivoted towards the direction that I ultimately would take, right? So I came in, I had, you know, been in these archives studying English 16th century composers, William Byrd, Thomas Tallis.

I had been in these archives, I went to the University of Washington, and was supported there by JoAnn Taricani, who was, an early English music scholar, and she took me in and I there was writing about 17th century British composers and entwinements of choral music and politics and I, and yet I kept writing these papers where I was interested in things like, well, how is the British choral music tradition used as part of contemporary tourism and identity building in the current United Kingdom?

And how is this being mediated on these, you know, up and coming digital platforms, right? Because this is, you know, the 20, this is the early 2010s. So all of the kind of social media spaces we know it is really coming into being. And so I kept trying to write these papers. I tried to write a paper about like the Mashup artist girl talk.

And I had the folks who were my mentors at the University of Washington saying like, what are you doing? What are these things that you're doing? JoAnn Taricani at one point said, Paula, if you keep writing these papers, people are going to think that you're not a musicologist. They're gonna think that you're a cultural theorist who just enjoy, happens to enjoy studying music.

And that was another one of those moments where I'm like, say more about that. What are you, what's that thing? So it was very clear to me that I was doing something that wasn't quite legible to the folks around me as kind of correct and proper musicology, but I was still getting the kinds of support that I needed to continue to go forward.

So I did my master's at the University of Washington, and then I, at that point, my partner was on the East Coast, so I applied to only programs on the East Coast. My goal was to get to the East Coast by hook or by crook. And I wound up getting into the historical musicology program at Columbia University to do my PhD.

Stephen 15:38
So, yeah, so given the pivot that you alluded to what did you end up studying there?

Paula Harper 15:45
 What did I end up studying there? Yeah, so I wrote this kind of bananas application there in which I was like, well, here's what I've been doing, you know, here's all this 16th and 17th century British music that I've been working on and thinking about these intersections of choral music and politics.

But I'm also really interested in things like YouTube comment sections and the contemporary archives of the digital age. So, they took me in with that kind of a vaguely wackadoo portfolio or that vaguely wackadoo plan at Columbia, and now I'm trying to decide how much I want to disclose here.

Basically, I think I was taken in with perhaps a vague plan that I would have been working with some of the early music scholars on the faculty at Columbia University, but many of them, as sometimes happens in large and fancy research institutions, the faculty that I was maybe supposed to be working with wound up getting a massive exciting grant and being on leave almost all of my coursework.

Stephen 16:56
I have heard that one before. 

Paula Harper 16:57
Okay, alright, so they really kind of weren't around, and so I wasn't getting shepherded very directly into the continuing world of early music, and instead I was left to kind of make my own path, and you know, possibly influenced by my training at UChicago, I just wound up taking a bunch of courses that appealed to me, certainly courses within the music department at Columbia, but also courses that weren't in the music department.

So I was taking media archaeology classes that were in the Anthropology department or in the English department. I was taking courses at NYU where people were talking about intersections of music and technology. And pivotally, I wrote a paper in one of my earliest seminars, which was a music and technology seminar. I wrote a paper about Beyonce and liveness and the performance of liveness and the values that people put on liveness in the contemporary moment. 

I wrote a paper about Beyonce and liveness and nobody stopped me. And so, I kept going and that's, you know, that's, there's a series of turning points, but that was certainly a turning point is, again, one of these like, oh, you can do this. And then I kept doing it.

Stephen 18:20
Are you talking about kind of taking like the very same tools and approaches that you had been to like older music, or, I mean, it seems like what you've been writing recently might be more well, I don't know, I'll let you answer.

Paula Harper 18:32
You know, I think, of course, no, not entirely, not the very same approaches, but honestly, some, I think that some of those approaches, some of that early experience just hanging out in archives and figuring out how to interpret documents and the kind of laborious, exhausting nature of going through an archive and looking through a bunch of material that isn't the thing that you need in search of the thing that you need, or looking through a bunch of material to try to get a grasp of this massive data and lift off, you know, the one or two kind of salient insights or a synthesis or summation of what's going on in this big mass of material and data.

I think that those skills are ones that I do wind up applying in my research when I'm saying okay what are people saying in this YouTube comment section or how are people responding in journalism or on Twitter or in a discord channel to something that is happening in the world of music I do wind up using skills that feel very old school archival.

Certainly there were like tools for dealing with the kinds of data that we see in social media, but I think that the skills of just being willing to kind of page through and through and through and through and keep track of what you're finding as you page through and through and through and through, those to me feel like, at the very least, updatings of close updatings of old school archival strategies and skills.

Stephen 20:20
 Right, right. I really want to know like what questions are interesting to you at the moment. Like what, you know, avenues of research or either like something that you are, looking forward to getting into in the near future?

Paula Harper 20:32
Oh goodness. Okay, so many things. At this point I'm at this kind of weird stage where I am towards the, I'm seeing maybe the light at the end of the tunnel on a couple of large projects. So one of those is my book project where I have been writing about music and online virality so what happens when things go viral online and what if we think about the process of going viral online as a sight of musical creativity, what happens then? What kinds of insights does that give us into music on the one hand and virality on the other? So that's a book project that is both like, delightful and exhausting and frustrating, because it, you know, it's me engaging with the realities of digital platforms and the histories of them and the fragmentary, fragile archives of the early internet, but also has me thinking a lot about the futures of all of that too, right?

So watching the rise and fall of platforms, watching platforms kind of converge and then splinter, like, you know, these big, geologic masses. You know, it's, any time, major social media platform like pushes a big software update. It's like an archival crisis for me. So that's one project that I'm getting towards the end of.

And then the other project that I'm getting towards the end of is, I am a co-editor of a book called Taylor Swift: The Star, The Songs, The Fans. So that's of course also a project that is both delightful and stressful, exhausting, right? Taylor Swift continues to be the center of so many conversations, ones that seem obviously proximate to Taylor Swift and some that seem very distant.

You know, so Taylor Swift and contemporary songwriting. Contemporary fandom. Sure. Taylor Swift in the NFLA, a surprise? Although not that much of a surprise, there is a chapter in the book, not by me, but by one of our great authors or actually a set of co-authors from Brazil who were talking about Taylor Swift's use in Brazilian soccer fandom. Also Taylor Swift in politics, Taylor Swift in AI, right? You know, all of these, all of these points of intersection with her as a figure. So that project is nearing the finish line as well. Publication date February 2025. Very excited about that.

So lots of things kind of coming to an end. And so there's the kind of beautiful but also terrifying wide open vista of what's next. I'm of course, continue to think about and look at the way that music and digital platforms and technologies interact. So what kinds of maybe new platforms emerge for people to create music or share and circulate music?

Something that I kind of can't avoid being engaged with is generative AI, what people are doing. With those technologies to create music, how people are receiving and using the music that is created by these technologies. What kind of implications it has for labor, for the way that we think about music's function in our audio-visual ecosystem, et cetera, et cetera.

And I'm also really interested in, I'm just, I'm interested in music that is on the periphery of music. So in particular, I'm really interested in the way that the internet broadly, but especially TikTok has opened up a space for a kind of new golden age of like novelty music. People who are writing music that is very particularly, you know, it's not music that you're meant to like, kind of get out on the dance floor and bop around to, it's music that has a certain kind of, you know, delivering a certain kind of political message or is a funny story about this, that, or the other.

I think that, you know, I find that shift, that kind of push towards a reorienting rethinking about what music is and what it's for, that has been enabled by this kind of constellation of platforms and performers and audiences is really fascinating to me. And putting our contemporary moment of novelty music into conversation with historical precedents for novelty music is someplace I might be going next. Thinking about novelty music, music and humor, but also thinking about musical misinformation, music and fakery, that's especially linked to the music and generative AI question too. So, a couple of different directions, and I, you know, have to anticipate that music and fandom and the digital space is going to stay on my radar, whether that's around Taylor Swift or whether it's around other topics, we shall see.

But yeah, I think that's a, I hypothesize that some of these things are going to keep going.

Stephen 24:58
What, if you had to pick, would you say you find most fulfilling about what you're doing at UChicago. 

Paula Harper 26:03
I'm going to cheat and say several, which is, you know, I think one is, of course, the teaching.

It's, I'm going to be glib and say it's playing on easy mode, in that, you know, it's such a, a joy and a privilege to teach students who are as enthusiastic and as, you know, curious and as saturated in like weird buckets of knowledge, individual buckets of knowledge as UChicago students are, right.

You never know what group of young folks are going to come into your classroom and have what absolutely wild reservoirs of experience and knowledge to draw from. And it just makes teaching such a delight at UChicago. But it's also such a delight to be in an environment where all of my colleagues are equally curious and driven and doing just like incredibly cool projects, right?

You know, I mentioned across this conversation how at many points there I was met with a lot of skepticism about like whether what I was doing was the right and proper version of my job or my field. And I think that, you know, part of the reason for that is because I got my start at UChicago and being back here where people are so much less concerned about whether something is happening within particular disciplinary boundaries and are more concerned with how like interesting and robust and multifaceted a question is and its set of potential answers might be, right?

That they're interested in just kind of diving in and seeing what they can make of any particular issue, regardless of like whether it is correctly within some set of arbitrary disciplinary boundaries. So yeah, the just kind of relentless curiosity of my colleagues is just like, it's just an absolute delight to come to work, which feels like a wild privilege here in 2024.

Stephen 28:17
Professor Harper, thank you so much for your time today. And Course Takers, if you enjoyed today's episode, please check out the others. Like, subscribe, and share this episode with your friends and family. You can find out more about the University of Chicago through uchicago.hk, or the university's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.edu. Stay tuned for more, and thanks for listening.