Julia Grella O'Connell Interview
Dr. Julia Grella O’Connell is an adjunct instructor in the Department of Music and Theater Arts at SUNY Broome. She’s the author of Sound, Sin, and Conversion in Victorian England and the founder of the Risorgimento Project, a research-driven performance initiative.
How did you get to where you are today, professionally?
It’s been a circuitous journey. I started out as a singer. I have two older brothers who played jazz, and they introduced me to the music. I fell in love with it. I spent my teen years listening to Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and, later, the greatest of them all in my opinion, Betty Carter, and I just assumed that I would go that route. However, a jazz musician I dated in college suggested that, because of the quality of my voice, I should sing opera. I began to focus on the classical repertoire, and it was art song that deeply compelled me—the beautiful marriage of music and poetry, the smallness and intimacy of the musical forces, the miniaturization of entire, profound worlds into a short self-contained work.
Because no one can have a career as a Lieder singer, I spent a few years freelancing in opera, and then began working on a really fascinating repertoire with my friend and colleague Francesco Izzo, who’s now the artistic director of the Accademia Verdiana in Parma and the Córdoba Opera Lab in Spain—nineteenth-century Italian song, written for semi-private venues by the century’s great opera composers. Italian opera was heavily censored, and the textual freedom of the song repertoire is striking—sexual, political, religious themes could be sung about freely in the drawing room. Francesco and I formed an ensemble that we called The Risorgimento Project and took this repertoire on the road.
The result of all this is that I started doing research, and I discovered the thrill of combing through archives, of finding crumbling sheet music published in the mid-nineteenth century or still in manuscript, and of being the first person to see and touch, let alone sing, this music for more than 100 years. I wanted to learn to do research better, so I entered graduate school at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Although my doctorate was a D.M.A. in voice performance, the program was very research-intensive, and D.M.A. candidates had to write full-length scholarly dissertations. Doing scholarly research became a great source of joy for me. I wrote about the pictorial symbolism of music in nineteenth-century British painting and literature, and later got a book contract from Routledge to turn the dissertation into a book.
A family move brought me to Upstate New York, and I now teach in the music department of SUNY Broome Community College. Again, this is a great source of joy for me. I love my students! I created the college’s only course in Black American music history, and I’ve been teaching it for five years now. It’s my department’s only D.E.I. class. I’m interested in bridging the gap between college and community, and so I create capstone projects every semester that draw on a wide range of abilities and involve institutions outside the college. We’ve put on gallery shows, made picture books for fourth graders, and done full-scale reenactments of local events in Abolitionist history.
Did you have any mentors along the way? What did they teach you?
I had many mentors, without whom I would probably barely be a human being. My greatest musical mentors were my voice teachers, Alan Bowers and the late Barbara Smith Conrad. In grad school, I was privileged to study with the musicologist Allan Atlas, from whom I learned everything I know about writing and research. Allan is not only an esteemed scholar, but also one of the world’s greatest English concertina players, and together he and I spent a few years performing parlor songs as the New York Victorian Consort. It was a blast. Allan is one of the greatest people I’ve ever known, truly a humane scholar. The world needs more like him.
My first mentor, however, was my third-grade art teacher, Ingrid Hall. The art classroom was a refuge from the chaos of my big inner-city school. Mrs. Hall kept shoeboxes full of art postcards in her supply closet, and I would pore over them, asking her about the various artists. She set up a corner of her classroom as a “Writers’ Workshop” where I could go to write books. She taught me what beauty is, and how important it is to remember it even in the most mundane moments of life.
All of these people taught me how to live, how to think, and how not to despair.
Walk me through a typical day-to-day.
My day-to-day probably isn’t like those of most of my colleagues. One of my children has high-functioning autism and a severe anxiety disorder, so I homeschool him; most of my day is working one-on-one with him. He’s a high school junior and I give him space within structure to explore his interests, which include world history, singing, and Arabic language and culture. So I do what research I can around the margins of my day. On campus, I teach, meet my students, and work on my cross-disciplinary projects. Right now I’m planning three outings for last semester’s Abolitionist music project, one at a local library, one at a history museum, and one at the National Abolition Hall of Fame. I am fortunate to have a wonderful working relationship with our librarians, and they collaborate with me and my students quite often. This project is being funded by a grant from the Broome County Arts Council.
Tell me about your current research interests.
I am currently most interested in English music ostensibly written for children in the interwar period, which I see as a kind of failed Arcadian project, and also in the music of the nineteenth-century Abolitionist movement. The ways that music intersects with social and political life in every era is a constant pull for me.
How has your approach to your work changed over the past few years, if at all?
There’s no question that being a mothering scholar has shifted my perspective in ways both large and small. I left the tenure track because the needs of my family were more important. It’s a reality of life that needs to be spoken about more, and I would love to see more support for graduate students and junior scholars who are parents.
What would you like to see more of in music-related scholarship right now?
I’m greatly concerned about the failure of my discipline to create or reflect meaning in the lives of people outside of the academy. I’m hardly the only one who has noticed this, but I’m also worried that the ways this failure is being addressed will also fail. Scholarship is important to me, obviously, but we need to go outside of the academy and into the lives of our communities and use our scholarship to enhance and enrich those communities. I would like to see interdisciplinary scholarship that transcends collaboration between different departments at the university, and instead seeks to collaborate with community partners and institutions. In spite of efforts to attract scholars from historically marginalized populations, musicology is still a closed system, and it is becoming less and less relevant to the needs of ordinary people. Also, there is still an enormous class barrier in musicology. There is very little support for aspiring scholars from low-income backgrounds. This needs to change.
What’s your favorite part of the work you do in music?
All of it, but mainly teaching. It gives me great joy to share my love of music history with my students, and to see them catch my passion for it. If done right, music history can change lives.
What’s one tip that you’d give a student considering a life in music scholarship starting out right now?
Think about the ways your scholarship will help your community. Plan projects that go outside the walls of the academy. Bring your focus to public-facing musicology. Don’t think of teaching as a way to fund your scholarship: think of teaching as an end in itself. The world is starving for the beauty and meaning that music can give, so give it!
What was the best music / video or film / book you’ve enjoyed in the past 12 months?
When my students were working on their Abolitionist reenactment last semester, we found a reference to a song called “I Hear the Voice of Lovejoy on Alton’s Bloody Plain.” Elijah P. Lovejoy was an anti-slavery journalist and clergyman who was murdered by a pro-slavery mob in Alton, Illinois in 1837 (I learned all of this from my history-loving son). Most Abolitionist songs repurposed already-existing music from hymns, popular songs, and even minstrel shows, and most published anthologies mention the tunes to which each set of Abolitionist lyrics should be sung, but not this one. After looking through hundreds of nineteenth-century songs, I settled on “The Missionary Hymn” as a good possibility, because the scansion fit.
One of my students, Jacob Donlin, set the text of “Lovejoy” to this tune and arranged it for four parts, and our chamber choir at SUNY Broome sings it at every performance of my class’s Abolitionist reenactment. It is hauntingly beautiful; every time I hear it it gives me chills.
Also: the music of Black composer Julia Perry (1924-1979), which absolutely needs to be better known.
*Film: I’m probably one of very few people in my field who loved the movie “Tár.”
Books: Fiction: I read a wonderful speculative fiction series, the Small Change trilogy, by sci-fi author Jo Walton. It’s alternative history about a post-war Britain that has made a separate peace with the Nazis. It’s fascinating and compellingly readable.
Nonfiction: The Baby on the Fire Escape by Julie Phillips, a study of the struggles and conflicts faced by writers and artists who are mothers.
Anything you want to plug?
Planning on paper! I’m a planner addict. I try to get all my students hooked on paper planners, too.