Susan McClary

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Professor Susan McClary, more than anyone else, has changed musicology from an isolated study to a cooperative venture. Her tenacity, the merit of her scholarship, the breadth and magnitude of her spirit and the undeniable creativity of her social/cultural/feminist readings have brought the discipline to new heights.

McClary encourages students to think for themselves, to make links between disciplines and to forumulate opinions. She responds to every paper with extensive comments, engaging with the students’ work, paragraph by paragraph. Through carefully and thoughtfully designed readings, extensive discussion, selective listening and manuscript study, she introduces many of her students to the scholarly process for the first time.

McClary approaches teaching, and critical thought in general, with humor, energy and courage, opening up to others the desire for intellectual life and the possibilities of cultural participation and production. Instead of using her thorough knowledge of the topic to dominate the classroom setting, she skillfully uses her preparation as a means of opening up the topic to students’ input and interventions. McClary presents herself as interruptiple, but her thinking and analyses are so interesting and so provocative that there is a very high premium set on that interruption. Therefore, the quality of discussion in her seminars is always very high. Her scholarship is world class, and her research is connected to all aspects of her teaching. She is the leading feminist musicologist and feminist music critic in the West.

A valued colleague to faculty from many units across the campus, McClary chose not to take the time off which the MacArthur Fellowship afforded her, and instead she accepted the heavy responsibility of chairing the musicology department. Her leadership in revisions of graduate and undergraduate programs reflect her concern for the training and welfare of students.

When McClary’s impact on late-twentieth century musicology is assessed 20 years from now, her influence will be discernable not only in the work of scholars who have extended the methodological approaches she first developed in feminine endings to other musical repertories, but also in the innovative and prolific scholarship her years of classroom teaching have directly inspired. Her tireless dedication to her students both in and out of the classroom has already produced a generation of teacher-scholars who hold her in awe and seek to model their own pedagogical lives after her example. By an definition, Susan McClary is a distinguished teacher.