CATHRYN CLAYTON

As a professor of harp performance, I see my role as a both mentor and as a guide. I encourage students to find compositions for performance that accomplish specific technical and interpretive objectives. Through lessons, masterclasses, and concert performances, I work with students to reach their highest potential as harpists. I encourage a sharing of ideas among my undergraduate and graduate harp students, and I ask them to research the history and the performance practices of the different works that they are performing. Through the harp ensemble, I teach not only chamber music performance, but also the skill of arranging for multiple harps. This gives the harpists opportunities to create arrangements and then have their own arrangements performed and recorded. Through the creation of music videos and recordings, students enrich their performance practice with the skills needed in the audio and visual realm. My overall goal with harp students is to teach them to become independent and professional harpists and help them to develop the skills that they might need in any orchestral, solo, or ensemble performance.
As a teacher of the general education courses of Jazz, Music History, World Music, and of the Music of Latin America, I empower students to understand and thereby to more fully appreciate the various peoples of the world and their musics. In these courses, we examine many of the different ways that composers and performers express themselves through their music. I make it possible for students hear sounds and ideas that they may have never before experienced. Further, by placing these various kinds of music within their cultural contexts, I enable students to see that music can create dialogue and understanding, foster social change, and promote peace. It is my goal that students will discover music that is new and exciting to them and that this discovery will induce them to esteem musicians from all over the world and understand key roles that music plays in their lives.
In the courses that I teach, I utilize research papers, class discussions, music journals, and primary sources to deepen students’ comprehension. I pose discussion questions to the class as a whole and ask all students to post their ideas online in a blog format, so that they can share their insights with each other. I ask students to analyze music that the various peoples of the world experience in their everyday lives and in times of crisis. In addition, I help students find links between music, tradition, and beliefs, and see how the peoples of the world document their histories and their human experiences through music. Whenever possible, I invite performers from many cultures to demonstrate their art and to engage in discussion with the students. It is my hope that students realize that there are many people of diverse cultures who live right here in Salt Lake City and surrounding areas with whom they can interact culturally both in and out of class.