Patrick Warfield, Storyteller

Patrick Warfield
Assistant Professor, Musicology
UMD School of Music

How can the arts enhance the lives of non-arts major students at the University of Maryland?

A thousand different ways but I’ll tell you a story. When I was in my very early years of teaching, it was probably my second or third class by myself. I was teaching just a general music class. I thought I’ll give this assignment: I’ll have students write short papers where they interview a parent or aunt or uncle, some generation older than they are, about a piece of music that affected that person when they were in college.We can get students to think about art as something that really speaks to a moment of time to their life, not just as a universal language.

We can get students to think about art as something that really speaks to a moment of time to their life, not just as a universal language.

What I got was incredible. I got stuff like “I became so much closer to my father because he talked to me about the piece of music that gave him the confidence to go propose.” Or “I became so much closer to my mother because she talked about the song she was listening to when she was going through an eating disorder and I’m doing the same thing.” All these really personal and really vulnerable sort of discoveries they made. And it changed the way I thought about music, too. You realize these songs take on a special meaning when presented to the right person at the right time in their life. We can get students to think about art as something that really speaks to a moment of time to their life, not just as a universal language. I think we talk about music too much as a universal language. It’s different for every person and it’s different for every person at different points of their experience. That’s one of the things I think arts can do.