VoE - Danielle Fosler-Lussier === Danielle Fosler-Lussier: [00:00:00] Sometimes in undergraduate instruction we treat each sort of tradition as if it's a separate silo, you know, Korean music sounds like this, or American music sounds like that, and in fact most of them have been blended right along; having a vocabulary for that helps us address issues that come up in our world today. Jen Farmer: From the heart of the Ohio State University on the Oval, this is Voices of Excellence from the College of Arts and Sciences, with your host David Staley. Voices focuses on the innovative work of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff. With departments as wide ranging as art, astronomy, chemistry and biochemistry, physics, emergent materials and mathematics, and languages, among many others, the college always has something exciting happening. Join us to find out what's new, now. David Staley: I am pleased to be joined today by Danielle Fosler-Lussier, Professor of Musicology at the Ohio State University College of the Arts and Sciences. Her [00:01:00] interests include global mobility, the politics of music and women's roles in musical life, as well as how we teach and learn music history. She's serving as Director of the Imagine Futures Graduate Professional Development Initiative of the Global Arts and Humanities Discovery Theme, and serves on the Community Advisory Board of "Path to Open", a pilot initiative of the American Council of Learned Societies that increases the reach of open access scholarly publishing. In 2025, she was named a University Distinguished Scholar. Congratulations, Dr. Fassler Lucier, and welcome to Voices. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Thank you. I'm happy to be with you. David Staley: Well, and I would like to begin, first of all, with some definitions. So, I introduce you as a Professor of Musicology, and you have to tell us what is, what is musicology? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Musicology encompasses all kinds of inquiry about music that might be historical inquiry about music of the past, it might be asking [00:02:00] questions about the social roles and uses of music in the present, in various places, various styles. We are very curious about how music does its work in the world. David Staley: Well, so I have to ask this: how did you end up, then, as a musicologist? Did you know when you were four years old you were going to be a musicologist? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: I did not. I was an orchestra kid in elementary school and an orchestra and band kid in high school. David Staley: Sound like me so far. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: And I played in the marching band, in the jazz band. David Staley: I did all that. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: All that while I was noticing things that mattered to my peers about music. In my little social circle, one could get more social status by knowing certain things, by hearing a piece of music and say, ah, that's Miles Davis. David Staley: Ah. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: So, social things were happening around the music that interested me, that people were valuing music differently and valuing each [00:03:00] other differently because of music. All of that sort of stuff sort of stuck with me, and I went to college and I changed my major a lot of times, but I kept coming back to those kinds of questions. David Staley: Hmm, what instrument did you play? I just have to ask, what instrument did you play? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: I was first a violinist. David Staley: Oh, interesting. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: And then, I became a percussionist in high school. David Staley: Oh, okay. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Which was then, still... David Staley: That's a shift. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Still a strange thing for a girl to do. I'm glad to say that's no longer the case. David Staley: Yes. I was a trumpeter, by the way, so when you mentioned Miles Davis, that gets my attention every time. Well, I want to talk about some of your research in musicology, and I wanna first begin by talking about the book _Music on the Move,_ and before we get into the meat of the book, the argument of the book, I should note this is an open access book, and I introduced you as someone who has a real interest in this. First of all, tell us, tell us what we mean by an open access book. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: An open access book is a book that's available for free [00:04:00] to people who want it, which means it's not behind a paywall. You don't have to pay either an online retailer or, you know, you don't have to check it out of your public library. It's not behind any kind of a paywall, which means that people can hand it around. David Staley: The actual book, not just an electronic version. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Well, mostly, this is the electronic version, right? Mm-hmm. Because paper books do cost money. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: My _Music on the Move_ exists both as a paper book and as an electronic book, but the electronic book is the official one, in part because it's got all kinds of media embedded in it, and it's actually a better book online. David Staley: Why does this, and again, I want, I wanna get into the details about the book, but why does open access matter so much to you? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: This book, which is my third book. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Circulated very differently than the books I wrote before it. My first book was a book for specialists, my second book was trying to be [00:05:00] less specialized, but it was still a hardcover book with lots of footnotes in it and still a really addressing an audience of scholars in history, musicology related fields, and then secondarily a wider public. And those kinds of books don't sell very, very well. David Staley: No. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: You know, the press might expect to sell maybe 800 copies, maybe a couple thousand copies, libraries buy them. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Some individuals were interested by them, but you don't circulate a lot of books in that specialist realm. _Music on the Move_ came live in June of 2020, so it was during the pandemic, all the libraries were closed because we were all so afraid, we didn't really know yet what caused COVID. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: So, people were having a hard time getting access to materials to teach from and learn from, and that book almost instantly got adopted as course [00:06:00] material all over the place by people who were desperate to have a book to teach from, but it also circulated well in public. People would Google and be led to some chapter of it, and they would read that chapter, and then they might look at the rest of the book, they might not, but they had found their way to me through very ordinary ways of finding knowledge. And so, it's just more findable, more accessible. I also wrote it to be readable, so in all of those ways it's reaching a vast audience compared to my prior work. Hmm. David Staley: Well, let's talk about the details of the book. Mm-hmm. What is music on the move about? What's the argument you make? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: The book comes out of a course I taught. David Staley: Okay. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Also called "Music on the Move", and that course was intended for the interdisciplinary undergraduate program in Globalization Studies. So, it started with the principle that music moves. [00:07:00] It moves with the people who make the music through migration, sometimes it moves without the people who make it through media, like sound recordings or videos, and then it also moves by being mashed up, increasingly, right? We use sampling, we can, on TikTok, record over things and record over them again. So, all of these digital processes are also allowing us to move music in ways that matter to people. And so, I just wanted to draw out that theme and present cases that illuminate these different ways that music moves. Hmm. David Staley: Give us one of those cases that demonstrates what you're arguing here. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Sure. I start early on by talking about colonialism in Indonesia, and this is a case where Europeans arrived on the islands in Indonesia and took up residence, and pretty soon there were a lot of musical [00:08:00] interactions happening, some of them by force, some of them by choice. So, there were orchestras of Indonesian people who were hired or forced to make music for parties for the European people who were also living there, but also European instruments came into the possession of people who were already living on those islands, and it changed the way they made music too. David Staley: Hmm. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: So, European sounds, European tools were being circulated widely in these ways, and so you get mixtures and recombinations and adoption of music by new people across all kinds of divisions, in ways that produce interesting blends. David Staley: How did you select the cases to be included in this book? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Because this book comes out of my teaching, I had a set of concepts that I really wanted to underscore. Sometimes people talk about hybridity; I like to talk about mixing instead of [00:09:00] hybridity, 'cause hybrid sounds like you had a pure plant line at another pure plant line and you crossbred them. Music mixing is not that organized. But, I had ideas like appropriation, cultural assimilation, repurposing or remixing, right? I had a lot of ideas that I wanted people to know how to use when they talk about music. Sometimes in undergraduate instruction we treat each sort of tradition as if it's a separate silo, you know, Korean music sounds like this, or American music sounds like that, and in fact most of them have been blended right along, and having words to describe how they've been blended, why they've been blended, in what way, who moved where and took music with them, and how did it change; having a vocabulary for that helps us address issues that come up in our world today. And so, this course is also a conversation about us as human beings who move around, who come into contact with each other, and I do [00:10:00] feel that this conversation was helping our students describe the world that they live in, and that their roommate lives in, and that their neighbors live in and be able to talk about all the music in their life, which is very heterogeneous. David Staley: Mm-hmm. You describe a vocabulary or words for this kind of mixing. What are, what are some of these words? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Certainly appropriation, assimilation. There are a set of words related to migration, certainly, and sometimes people use words like survivals, talking about musical traits that have continued on after a people has moved. What things do they retain after they've moved, even generations after they've moved? That term is sort of controversial, but I still bring it up and we talk about, you know, why that term is so controversial. David Staley: Why, why is it controversial? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: It implies a kind of stasis. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Sometimes, for people that, you [00:11:00] know, say, African Americans, thinking of them as still African and they are part of an African diaspora, but imagining that their world has not changed somehow by talking about survivals. There are sort of family resemblances that are handed down in traditions that we should talk about. So, we just wanna be careful with words like that to sort of get the nuances right. David Staley: Mm-hmm. What do you mean by appropriation? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: When someone uses someone else's musical style or adopts it for their own, so appropriation is really taking something and making it their own. That can be theft, it can be homage, it can be taking away a resource that's important to someone for monetary reasons, or it can be generous in a way that also helps the person the music was taken from. But again, we wanna talk about those issues with our students, and I wanted to sort of pick out some of that in the book and show [00:12:00] why we might wanna be careful before just taking somebody's stuff. David Staley: So, appropriation is neither good nor bad? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: It has the potential to be good or bad. Like most tools, you can use it for good or for ill, and I wanted students to have both of those ideas at their disposal as they analyze the world. David Staley: Hmm. How about assimilation? What does that mean in the context of your book? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: So, oftentimes when people move somewhere, they're under a lot of pressure to change their language, to change how they dress, to change customs, behaviors, ways of being, and sometimes they have to make challenging choices about those things. Some of those changes might be easy, some of them might be hard, some of them might be truly made by choice, optionally, and some of them might be more forced. And so, again, it's a very situation dependent analytical tool. All of these words are words that could be used with care to think about the [00:13:00] world and describe the world in ways that show us something. David Staley: Hmm. One of the terms in the book is the mediated self. Could you tell us a little more about this concept? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Sure. This is an idea of Thomas de Zengotita, who's an anthropologist. He talks about the ways in which media and especially social media have encouraged us to present ourselves. In some ways, we're always on stage now, in certain regards, and those tools can be, again, very valuable for people to feel connected and they can also sort of change who we think we are in certain regards. David Staley: What does that mean in the context of _Music on the __Move_? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: There are quite a number of examples in the book of musicians who adopt music from somewhere else and try to sort of absorb it into their own compositional identity in ways that, again, are pretty complicated. [00:14:00] So, Paul Simon's _Graceland_ is a famous historical example. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Where he collaborated with South African musicians. There are interviews with the musicians where they talk about how good this was for their career, right? The, the group Lady Smith Black Mambazo had a terrific career, partly because Simon made them well known outside of South Africa. And at the same time, some people are also uncomfortable with the way Simon composed using Lady Smith Black Mambazo's music. That music is absorbed into his vision, it's not left as their vision, and so there's sort of issues of authorship, who gets the credit, who's the leading voice in how those musics get fused together? David Staley: Hmm. You had said that the electronic version of this book maybe was the principle form. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Yes. David Staley: Because it's multimodal. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Yes. David Staley: Tell us a little bit about the multimodality of the book. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: [00:15:00] So, _Music__ on the Move_ appeared, like I said, both in print and online. It's hosted on the Fulcrum platform of the University of Michigan Press, and this platform has all sorts of interesting technological capabilities, and we worked closely with the press to sort of figure out what we could build into this book. When I teach, I play music all the time, and we listen, we talk about it, we listen again, we notice things. So, a plain paper book doesn't let me do that with my reader, right? A plain paper book is just quiet. I could build audio into the book. In some cases, I also made little videos that ran along with the audio that would say, here, listen to this. Mm-hmm. This spot right here, pointing like with my finger to that spot in the music, notice this, which is a thing I'd, again, I do that in class, but it's very hard to do in a paper book unless you put sort of printed music notation, which not everybody can read. The book also has [00:16:00] maps in it that have sliders. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: So, I can show historical development over time, and I feel like all of those things help the readers see things more immediately, hear things more immediately in ways that make it feel more like an in-person experience. David Staley: One wonders why all scholarly books in musicology aren't multimodal like this? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Well, it's still a new thing. I will say that getting the rights and permissions to all those materials took about one extra year. David Staley: Oh boy. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Of work. Because of course, you know, the rights to songs, the rights to media are all owned by someone, and I needed to be respectful of those rights. So it's quite complicated. So, some people, if they're on a clock to get their book out, might not have the leisure to do that. I will say that for me, the rewards have been fantastic. I gave up a teeny bit of royalties, those royalties never amount to very much on a [00:17:00] scholarly book, but this book is also downloadable as a PDF, it can be printed out again and again. So, it's being used in prison education programs, it's being used by people who need it to be free and need it to be reproducible. So it's, it's sort of has a life out there in its circulation because it's free. That part feels important to me too. David Staley: Well, you, so you've anticipated my next question. So, given its open access nature, what do you hope the real world impact of this book is going to be? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Oh, I think there are several things. First of all, this broad circulation. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: People on all continents have access to this book, except I believe Antarctica. David Staley: Well, Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Yeah. There are not too many people there. David Staley: There are emperor penguins. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: And scientists. But, I think aside from the circulation, it's also a funny book in another way. It is a book that is based on research, but it's not telling one big [00:18:00] story. You know, we call a book of a particularly scholarly kind a monograph. Yeah, so it's written by one person and it makes one argument in some detail. This book is on the edge of being that kind of book, but it's on the edge of being a teachable book, and it's written in a language that, say, a first year student in college can also understand. I wanted it to be readable by a public, and that means it's almost neither fish nor fowl. I am not sure if a lot of other scholars or interested in publishing books of this kind, but I do think that it's accessibility, both in terms of, it's the logistics of it being free, but also the language the ease of reading, the reach out conceptually to people who aren't used to reading books with lots of footnotes, that might also expand our audience in an interesting way. So, I'm quite pleased with it being a book that's on the edge between [00:19:00] different kinds of books. David Staley: I'd like to discuss an earlier work of yours: _Music__ in America's Cold War Diplomacy_. Tell us what this book's about. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: This book is about the US State Department and its use of music during the Cold War. So starting in, really this program gets going in 1954. President Eisenhower wanted the United States to make a case to the world that we were not just a people who cared about money, we also cared about culture and religion and spiritual things, and we started exporting our musicians to give tours all over the world, in person. This program was really complicated because there's so many people involved, and because music does not communicate in a straightforward way. So, many interesting things happened over the course of this program, and I just wanted to capture the complexity of those interactions in this book. David Staley: What was the name of the program? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: The [00:20:00] Cultural Presentations Program, which was run by the State Department in consultation with a lot of other government agencies. David Staley: Hmm. You show in this book that cultural diplomacy was often contested, improvised. How would you sum up the relationship between, say, the official policy and the on the ground musical practice? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: It was complicated. If you asked people who worked in US embassies all over the world, they would tell you that this works. Sending musicians to perform in various places works. Not necessarily because of the content of the music, but because it gets people into a room together. David Staley: Mm. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: It's an attractor. David Staley: Mm. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Mm-hmm. And it, especially if you were having an important concert with a famous musician, you could invite dignitaries from that country, you can invite politically important people as well as musically important people, and get them to come into the same room with your embassy officials and have [00:21:00] some social contact, which might yield nothing or it might yield something, but sometimes that was the first time they had gotten in a room together. The people in Washington who were more distant from the actual events, sometimes thought of it as simple propaganda, right? We need to convince people of things. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: And these programs interacted with a lot of other propaganda agendas from this time period. So, trying to show the United States as a place where Black artists could thrive, as a place where people who had grown up, maybe, in rural places like folk, musicians could have meaningful careers, you know, there were efforts to make it inclusive in terms of having women artists represented. So, trying to present a very happy vision of the United States. David Staley: Were there any instances where this musical [00:22:00] diplomacy had an unintended consequence, either positive or negative? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Oh, sure. Sometimes it just didn't work. David Staley: Oh. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: And I mean, if you think about it, if you're encountering music that's familiar to you, it's pretty easy to get engaged, but if you encounter music that's nothing like anything you've ever heard before, you might like it, you might not like it. You might find it too loud, you might find it irritating, and that sometimes happened where jazz bands were flown to remote places and played for people for whom jazz was not the principal music they cared about, and sometimes people would just stand there and look at them like, who are these people, what are they doing? There were also times when people got into delicate political situations just because they were traveling during a time when there were a lot of conflicts. David Staley: Hmm. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: There is a film called, _What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?;_ Blood, Sweat & Tears toured for the State Department. David Staley: The rock band. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: The Rock band, yes. They toured [00:23:00] to Eastern Europe, and they took that opportunity with somewhat mixed feelings. The music was very controversial in Eastern Europe, and then when they got home, they found that their fans didn't like them anymore because they had sold out to the State Department, so they kind of lost both ways. You know, it's this, the tours abroad could also affect, affect the artist's reputation at home. David Staley: What does the book tell us about how universities and arts institutions today should be thinking about cultural diplomacy? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Today, I think people have accumulated a lot of lessons from all of these experiences. The State Department until quite recently had a hip hop diplomacy program called Next Level, and the goal there was not for us to export hip hop to people around the world, they already have hip hop, but to send artists who could have shared artistic experiences, that is two-way exchange, a kind of mutual [00:24:00] building together so that it's not an imposition but rather a sense of collaboration that might help to build community in ways that could matter. David Staley: Hmm. What drew you to this topic, initially? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Oh, I've been interested in this for a long time. I was in college when the Berlin Wall fell. David Staley: Oh, okay. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: So I immediately started learning German, and I had a wonderful teaching associate in German who told me that you could get a scholarship from the German government to go live there for a year, and I applied and I got it. So, the year after college, I was in very newly reunified Germany, and I spent a lot of time in youth hostels on the east, former East German side, talking to people my age who felt like their world was ending. They were really anxious about what would happen to their economy, what would happen to their musical institutions. They told me a lot about things they cared about, that they thought [00:25:00] were about to disappear. David Staley: Hmm. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: And then, I went on to graduate school and just held those questions in my head and thought about them some more and read some more. And those questions of musical value from high school kept coming back up, because all of these political issues also affect how people were thinking about musical style, what they thought was important or valuable. So, it all sort of started to come together as I studied that period more seriously in grad school. David Staley: So the, the people you were talking to in the East were presumably young people, and they were concerned about what was gonna happen to their musical traditions. My understanding was always that part of the reason the wall fell was that they were listening and clamoring for Western music. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Some of them were, and there's a great article called "Did Rock Smash the Wall?", and the author's answer is no, not really. David Staley: Was it blue jeans then? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: It wasn't blue jeans, it was politics and the economy. But, some people were really attached to Western music, there was a thriving punk scene in [00:26:00] Berlin, but some people were thriving in traditional genres of music that had been well supported by the East German government. Children's choirs, puppetry: there were all of these art forms that were quite specific, and they were afraid that these traditions were going to disappear as their state dissolved and became part of a bigger entity, and they weren't wrong. David Staley: Yeah. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: I mean, the state support for the art really did change. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: For me, it was a very bittersweet kind of a conversation that I was undergoing, 'cause I was so young, I didn't really know a lot, but I was listening and reflecting on what a big deal it was for the world to change in these ways. David Staley: Hmm. I introduced you as the Director of the Imagine Futures Graduate Professional Development Initiative. Tell us, tell us about this initiative. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: Sure. Imagined Futures encourages faculty and staff and students, specifically in the graduate [00:27:00] education space, to find new ways of thinking about what kinds of careers could follow a graduate education, and how both disciplinary and cross-disciplinary skills that people get during graduate education can be applied, not just in the role of a professor or faculty member, but in many other kinds of careers, lines of work. David Staley: What are you working on next? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: I am working on a project. I thought when I started that it would be about the United States Information Agency, which is a companion agency to the State Department. David Staley: Mm-hmm. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: It's sort of the propaganda arm. But as I worked on it, I realized that the real story there was a large number of volunteers who were involved in the projects of presenting the United States abroad, specifically volunteers from women's organizations, women's music clubs, [00:28:00] who had international projects and were willing to put their labor behind the project of making the United States look good abroad through its music. And they had started way back at the turn of the 20th century, so this, this work took me out of the 1950s, made me go back further in time to, really, during women's suffrage when women started forming gigantic national organizations, and looking at their international music projects and how those projects gradually came into contact with the government and became partnerships that mattered for the way music was built in the United States and the way it was communicated abroad. David Staley: Hmm. Will this be an open access publication? Danielle Fosler-Lussier: I sure hope so. David Staley: Danielle Fosler-Lussier. Thank you. Danielle Fosler-Lussier: You are most welcome. Jen Farmer: Voices of Excellence is produced and recorded at The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Marketing and [00:29:00] Communications Studio. More information about the podcast and our guests can be found at go.osu.edu/voices. Voices of Excellence is produced by Doug Dangler. I'm Jen Farmer.