Research and Scholarly Work

Students and audiences will experience the composer’s complex musical range.

Kurt Weill is one of the most influential American composers of the twentieth century. He also happened to be an immigrant to the U.S., fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933 after riots broke out at his performances and propaganda campaigns warned against attending his productions.

The University of Maryland (UMD) School of Music (SOM) will highlight the complex history of Weill’s life and works in a yearlong festival launching this fall. The SOM received a Collaborative Performance Initiative grant from the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, chartered to preserve the legacies of Weill and his wife actress-singer Lotte Lenya, to support the Kurt Weill Festival. The grant will help fund performances of Weill’s concert and staged works, including “The Road of Promise,” “Zaubernacht,” "Mahagonny Songspiel" and "Street Scene,” throughout the year as well as bring scholars and guest lecturers to campus to give insight on Weill as both an immigrant and a composer. The festival will engage nearly all of the 450 undergraduate and graduate music students through the study and performance of Weill’s works for the concert stage and theater.

“This festival offers a unique opportunity for our faculty and students to explore works that are infrequently heard and that provide insight into the development of a composer whose output touches on so many important aspects of the twentieth century,” says Jason Geary, director of the SOM.

The Kurt Weill Festival is part of UMD’s campus-wide “Year of Immigration,” which aims to transform dialogue into impact on urgent issues related to immigration, and to foster open conversation and greater connection with the university’s large and diverse international community. The festival will examine Weill’s work in both Europe and America, where he composed for Hollywood and Broadway, and the rise of a musical theatre style that combines elements of popular and classical music. Festival participants and attendees will also learn about his collaborations with artists such as Bertolt Brecht, Ira Gershwin and Langston Hughes, and about the social issues found in Weill’s work, such as racism, religion and domestic violence.

“Weill created works that responded to and addressed the society in which he lived,” says Craig Kier, artistic director of the Weill Festival and director of the Maryland Opera Studio. “The issues he explored in his compositions some 75 years ago continue to resonate in today’s world.”  

This grant builds on an existing relationship between the foundation and the SOM. In 2016, the Maryland Opera Studio received funding for its production of “Regina,” by Marc Blitzstein, whose musical and literary estate is administered by the foundation.

“Collaborating with the SOM on the shaping of this festival has yielded exciting results thus far,” says Brady Sansone, director of programs and business affairs at the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music. “We look forward to the continued partnership, to some excellent performances of Weill's music and to the opportunities afforded by this festival to illuminate facets of his life and work.”

Image of Kurt Weil Courtesy of the Weill-Lenya Research Center, Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, New York

UMD professors are researching how studying the arts impacts academic achievement.

An interdisciplinary team of scholars from the University of Maryland (UMD) is exploring the relationship between the arts and academic achievement. Led by Kenneth Elpus, associate professor of music education in UMD's School of Music, the team is using newly available data sets and innovative statistical methods to compare the academic achievement of K-12 students who voluntarily enroll in arts courses with those who do not. The research is supported by a two-year, $600,000 Arts in Education research grant from the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education.

“Our research is asking important questions,” said Elpus. “What happens when students study arts in high school?  Are they more engaged? Does that engagement yield benefits during and after the transition to college?”

Two other UMD professors are collaborating with Elpus on the project: Stephanie Prichard, assistant professor of music education, and Laura M. Stapleton, professor of measurement, statistics and evaluation in UMD's College of Education.

The research builds on Elpus’ previous work, which focuses on the demographics of students enrolled in arts courses and the social and academic impact of those courses on students.

There is already some research which suggests that students who study the arts are more likely to get into college and complete a degree, but Elpus says that these studies do not account for the variety of arts courses available to students or the differing types of curricula that count as “arts education.” His own past research, for example, looks at the relationship between music education and academic achievement. This current study looks at participation in arts education more holistically by analyzing data from students studying not only music, but also dance, film, theater and studio art, all of whom are following the specific arts curricula developed by the International Baccalaureate (IB) Organization as part of its IB Diploma Programme.

Elpus also cautions that past research does not always account for the clear link between arts education and socioeconomic status. Students who study the arts tend to come from families with more social and economic resources than non-arts students. Moreover, students with greater social and economic means tend to have higher academic achievement in general. They are more likely to apply to and attend college, and they are more likely to complete their degrees.  

“Adolescents who study visual art, music, theater, or dance are already a select population,” Elpus said. “In order to make a fair comparison between kids who study art and those who don’t, you need to take into account all of the interwoven social and economic variables at play.”

To do that, the team is using a statistical research method called propensity score matching, which allows them to model how different variables are connected to the likelihood that a student would study an art form. First, they examine all the demographic characteristics of each individual in the data set and determine how each characteristic influences the likelihood that a student would enroll in an IB arts course. Based on this analysis, they calculate a score for each student in the data set that represents how likely that student is to study the arts. Then, they make comparisons among students with overlapping scores.

“Many of the students will have similar background characteristics, leading to similar propensity scores, but one will be an arts student and one will not,” said Elpus. “Propensity score matching lets us tell a fuller story about who studies the arts and how it impacts them by making a statistically fairer ‘apples-to-apples’ comparison.”

Bringing a creative, humanistic approach to quantitative research allows the team to ask unexpected questions that go beyond the original intentions of existing data sets. To conduct their analysis, they are using data from several different sources, including the National Student Clearinghouse, an educational reporting and data exchange organization, even though the data were not specifically gathered to research the impact of arts education on academic achievement.

“This pioneering research embodies the bold, innovative creativity for which the School of Music has become known,” said Jason Geary, director of UMD’s School of Music. “It holds the potential to fundamentally reshape the ways in which educational leaders think about the relationship between the arts and academic achievement.”

Merle Collins combines scholarship, literature and activism in research about Louise Langdon Norton Little, the mother of Malcolm X.

By Lorraine Graham

To write about Malcolm X’s mother, Louise Langdon Norton Little, Merle Collins is helping preserve the national archives of Grenada, researching the colonial legacy of the Caribbean and tracking down Little’s descendants. As usual, Collins refuses to separate her scholarship from the work she does as a writer, teacher and activist.

Collins is professor of English in the College of Arts and Humanities at Maryland, where she has taught for more than two decades. The university recently named her a 2018 Distinguished Scholar-Teacher in recognition of her exceptional scholarship and teaching. As an esteemed figure in the field of Caribbean literature and culture, she has produced creative work and critical scholarship in a breathtaking range of genres. On November 15 she will present her work on Malcolm X’s mother during her Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Lecture.  

“Although most of the work I do now happens inside the university,” said Collins, “I never lose sight of how universities are part of local and international communities that have complex cultures and histories.”

These connections among scholarship, creativity and practice are at the heart of Collins’ work and stem from her lived experience. The 1960s and 70s were a time of political and intellectual revolution in the Caribbean. Collins grew up in Grenada when it was still a British colony, along with many other islands in the Caribbean. When she arrived in Mona, Jamaica in 1969 to study British literature at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Jamaica had only been independent for seven years and Grenada was still controlled by the British.

At UWI, artists and intellectuals discussed not only the political future of the Caribbean, but the history and possibilities of Caribbean literature. As a child, Collins listened to her mother and maternal grandmother tell stories in English-based Creole, a distinct language that grew out of the mixture of languages spoken on the island throughout history. The use of Caribbean creoles in writing was a hotly debated topic among UWI faculty and students.

“People at Mona were debating everything—What is the Caribbean? What do we do about our colonial inheritance?” said Collins. “When I heard other writers use creole-speaking voices in their work, I thought, ‘Can you really do that?’”

Her time at UWI was formative, and encouraged her to explore ways of voicing the complex stories of Caribbean people, especially women. Her work features characters that speak both Creole and English and is infused with deep attention to the violent colonial history of the region.

This concern with history and women’s stories led her to research the story of  Malcolm X’s mother, Louise Langdon Norton Little. Little was from Grenada, and her life story lays bare the brutality of slavery and colonialism. Little’s grandparents were captured off the coast of Africa, likely near what is now Nigeria, before being freed from their slave ship by the British. They were eventually taken to  Grenada. Collins believes it is important to look at the violence that gave birth to Louise Langdon Little alongside the popular narrative about Malcolm X, who is often remembered as much for his militancy as his activism.

Collins is doing archival research and speaking to some of Little’s descendants and living relatives. Although the book will incorporate elements of biography, history and fiction, she says that the final text will not fit any existing genre. As usual, Collins is challenging ideas about what literature can be in order to integrate her scholarship, creativity and activism.

“I want my readers to question their assumptions and expectations,” said Collins. “Using a variety of forms and voices is one way to do that.”

The desire to engage readers is similar to how Collins approaches teaching, where she incorporates diverse perspectives into coursework. In a course on Caribbean literature to be held in collaboration with UWI this spring, students from both universities will be able to talk through these ideas together. Funded by a 2018 UMD Global Classrooms Initiative Grant, the course, will give students at both universities an innovative, cross-cultural learning experience.

“My hope is to show how language shapes our identities and the way we think about others,” Collins said. “Literature can help us make the imaginative leap to seeing that our assumptions about culture and language cannot be universally applied to everyone.”

“The Search for the story of Louise Langdon Norton Little, mother of Malcolm X,” Collins’ talk for the 2018 “Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Lecture Series,” will take place from 4-5 p.m. Nov. 15 in the Ulrich Recital Hall, 1121 Tawes Hall. The event is free.

Image: Photo illustration by J.J. Nelson featuring undated photo of Louise Langdon Norton Little in the center. (Photo credit: Abdul Aziz Omar via PBS “American Experience”).