Kathleen McGowan is a musicologist-who-performs, arts journalist, writer, and pedagogue. Her approaches to music are informed by questions of how established areas and disciplines intersect. She takes special interest in concert musicking practices, archival procedures, and in the transmission of musical culture.
Her Ph.D. research investigates women making music in 19th c. British institutions of higher education. She holds an M.M. in Musicology from UIUC (2022), for which she wrote a thesis on women writing about music in the British press from 1890–1914. She also holds performance degrees in Trombone from the UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance (MM) and Western Illinois University (BM).
“But, in the end, who cares? (More than one student has asked me this.) “I listen to the music that I like because I like it and how it makes me feel, not because I’m making a moral choice every time,” they argue. “It’s not that deep.” Circular reasoning aside, it is that deep — and deeper. To be unaware of those values, to reduce music to something that signals your lifestyle and nothing more is to ignore yourself and to potentially misunderstand your own beliefs. In contemporary society, to disengage from your own beliefs is to invite someone else to decide what they are for you.”
– From “The Ethics of a Personal Canon: Resisting the Lifestyle-ification of Music“ (I Care If You Listen, Aug 2021)
The Curator's Ear 