Master’s candidate in Music Education
The term fieldwork, due to its name, often calls to mind a geologist hunting for rock samples or a researcher monitoring a field of crops. For master’s candidate Zach Holden, fieldwork looks like this:
Local people come together in a room, bringing their own musical instrument like a guitar or ukulele. There are also some instruments provided like a xylophone and bucket drums – “anything that you could think of that comes out of an elementary teacher’s closet,” as Zach said. The people sit in a circle and use the prompt of “social justice” to talk about their dreams. Then, they improvise music that reflects those dreams.
Zach’s research as a music education master’s student uses experiences like this one to reflect on how individuals develop agency in a collective musical environment, as well as how they bring that agency back to their own communities. The people who participated in the improvisational music circle he hosted for his fieldwork took surveys to reflect on their experiences, and Zach’s thesis uses their reflections to ground its narrative about the power of music.
“People come out of the workshop and workshops like this feeling joyful, feeling a sense of improved wellbeing, they overcome anxiety through this type of process,” Zach said. “There were moments where they still found limitations of confronting power dynamics, but it showed promise that in an improvisational style that’s based on community engagement, working co-constructively with people, that you can rewrite power dynamics and then envision a world where that is also rewritten.”
Prior to returning to graduate school, Zach worked in New York as a performer and professional actor. He moved back to his hometown of Plymouth, Wisconsin, during the COVID-19 pandemic. His curiosity about how music relates to community-engaged practices had him reaching out to professors, including Dr. Amy Lewis at the Mead Witter School of Music. Dr. Lewis helped Zach find ways to pursue what he was looking to do in graduate school, and the university’s Morgridge Center for Public Service brought the focus on community-based work.
In addition to research, Zach coaches a local show choir, runs improvisational music workshops, and visits elementary schools through the Wayword Ensemble, where he and his bandmates play music and sing while telling stories with the students. He said community-engaged work feels like it makes the world a better place, even if that impact isn’t very visible right away.
“I feel very lucky that when I came to the university, there were all of these opportunities I didn’t even know were there. I stumbled into them,” Zach said. “But I’ve really found what I think I might do for the rest of my life, here.”