Summer Bridge Spotlight: Aubrie Powell
Meet Aubrie Powell, one of five participants selected for the 2024 Summer Bridge program. A PhD student in Musicology, Aubrie worked with the Community Center for the Arts.
How have you applied your humanistic training to advance the mission of the community organization?
The Community School for the Arts (C4A) mission is to build community through music, removing barriers that lead people to believe they are unworthy participants. How many times have you heard someone say they shouldn’t ever be allowed on stage, or they can only sing in the shower? I’ve heard it a lot, and I’ve felt that way myself. In many ways my humanistic research has significant overlap with the mission of C4A to make music-making accessible. My research explores song co-writing as a way to understand and cultivate belonging in a participatory musical context.
To support C4A, I am using down-to-earth skills from my humanistic training: turning research papers into a synthesis of information with a compelling story, turning dissertation work into project management, and class planning into practices of clear consistent communication. In using my skills to help C4A compile and condense their procedures in marketing and promotions, I’m helping them reach a broader audience. This further develops audience awareness and understanding of the many cultures of Champaign-Urbana through original music programs including African drumming, country music, a youth string ensemble that learns by ear (Bow-Dacious), and an adult ensemble that performs a combination of various musics (Cretaceous Band).
How has this experience contributed to your career development? What skills have you gained or developed?
What attracted me to the Summer Bridge Experience was the opportunity to apply my humanistic skills outside the university. As a graduate student in the humanities, of course, I’m encouraged to study something very niche, to the point where I am one of the few experts on the narrowest of topics. In contrast, I’ve come to view career development as less of a focused certification and rather the ability to learn and apply skills, access information, do your best with the material given, and talk about what you do in a way that makes sense to different people.
This Bridge experience has given me the space and opportunity to think about what I want in a working culture, what I want to develop, and the tools to go about that (e.g. talk to people, ask for help, connect to resources). Through Summer Bridge, I’m learning your career does not have to be so much about your focus, but it can translate in how you think, process, and learn. Your career development is both how you translate your expertise to various contexts but also how you learn new skills, new stories, new approaches, and new ways of looking at the world.
What have you learned from working with this community organization?
C4A has many ideas and approaches to fostering community and accessibility and it has been important to see how those ideas work on the ground rather than in theory. I’ve learned how these approaches have contradictory values that somehow still exist in the same space, like excellence and accessibility, learning and expertise, or finding the local in a transient town. Articulating the definition of “excellence,” “expertise,” or “local” in the context of Champaign-Urbana is a great strength of the organization. Certainly, a lot of the work I’m doing at C4A is much more collaborative than the work I do at the university. I’ve gotten a view into the many moving parts of this nonprofit school of music where the public-facing activities and media is only the tip of the iceberg. In observing the admin meetings, I’ve learned the challenges of organizing people, delegation, and giving folks what they need with clear communication. I’m always impressed by C4A’s values and how Robin Kearton, the president of the board of directors, juggles it all. C4A is a good example to draw from that reaches an important part of the musical community here but is also separate from the university.
Is there anything else you’d like to share about your Summer Bridge program experience?
I’d like to thank the facilitators of the Summer Bridge program for providing both this bridging opportunity and the space to reflect on career development. This experience is an important aspect of the academy that is often overlooked. For the humanities to be relevant beyond the academy, theory must touch the ground and this kind of bridging work needs to be done. As the academy silos into specialization, it is also important to develop skills around thinking more broadly. The most important step is to come out of the silo and talk to people about what you know and what you don’t know. This experience has helped me see and navigate that reality. While the academy feels distant from community music schools like C4A, it is an avenue between the university and their local community where parallel and divergent ideas surface. It is a place of practice where academic discourses on genre and popular music are started and continued in practice rooms, neon-lite low-ceilinged bars, and intergenerational music-making spaces. As C4A connects youth and adults to musical resources in the community, the Bridge program has connected me to resources I had only seen in a particular light—how it pertains to my research—but now I can see also how it relates to translating my skills to various work cultures and understanding what I value the most.