Peabody’s Arthur Friedheim Library Director Kathleen DeLaurenti has witnessed musicians’ research questions evolve during her career. Where students once approached music librarians simply looking for contextual information, now they come into the library with a project in mind.
That shift from finding information to creating entrepreneurial music research projects broadly informs Unlocking the Digital Age: The Musician’s Guide to Research, Copyright, and Publishing, Peabody’s second open educational resource (OER). Written by DeLaurenti and Andrea I. Copland (MM ’19, Oboe & Musicology), research coordinator at the Répertoire International de la Press Musicale (RIPM), this freely available online textbook clarifies the relationship between scholarly research and creative practice.
With this OER, “we’re trying to make sure the decisions musicians are making help them achieve the artistic mission that they have developed for themselves,” DeLaurenti says. “How does research advance your mission and help you communicate that mission to funders? How do you tie in copyright, publishing, and dissemination in a way that also aligns with that mission?”
Peabody’s Arthur Friedheim Library Director Kathleen DeLaurenti has witnessed musicians’ research questions evolve during her career. Where students once approached music librarians simply looking for contextual information, now they come into the library with a project in mind.
That shift from finding information to creating entrepreneurial music research projects broadly informs Unlocking the Digital Age: The Musician’s Guide to Research, Copyright, and Publishing, Peabody’s second open educational resource (OER). Written by DeLaurenti and Andrea I. Copland (MM ’19, Oboe & Musicology), research coordinator at the Répertoire International de la Press Musicale (RIPM), this freely available online textbook clarifies the relationship between scholarly research and creative practice.
With this OER, “we’re trying to make sure the decisions musicians are making help them achieve the artistic mission that they have developed for themselves,” DeLaurenti says. “How does research advance your mission and help you communicate that mission to funders? How do you tie in copyright, publishing, and dissemination in a way that also aligns with that mission?”
This OER compliments The Path to Funding: The Artist’s Guide to Building Your Audience, Generating Income, and Realizing Career Sustainability, Peabody’s debut OER released in 2022. Where it covers the tools and strategies artists need to develop their missions and projects, Unlocking the Digital Age provides the research and publishing skill sets required to navigate those careers.
Both OERs grew out of the Breakthrough Curriculum and were created in partnership with Peabody’s Learning Innovation team. Joseph Montcalmo, Valerie Hartman, and Chartae’ Anderson adapted their instructional design expertise into a streamlined OER production process. These OERs reinforce Peabody’s commitment to providing high-quality resources for students and alumni to use beyond their time in school.
Demystifying research is one way the OER achieves that long reach. The early chapters help musicians begin to think of themselves as musician-scholars. They provide a framework for viewing creative work as research and help novice musician-scholars build skills to incorporate research into their performance, recording, and teaching projects.
Such results may not resemble a laboratory’s data and conclusions published in peer-reviewed journals, but Unlocking the Digital Age shows how creative labor and intellectual labor are part of the same knowledge-creation systems that scholars access. “Musicians doing research is about understanding the value of their practice and training and translating that for a wider community,” Copland says, adding that Peabody students acquire research and publishing foundations in DeLaurenti’s class that serve their artistic and professional lives. “Research is a means to interact more with the world and not be siloed in the academy, and I think Peabody is uniquely committed to that [effort].”
Interviews with experts such as ethnomusicologist Lauron Kehrer and composer and improviser Kyoko Kitamura drive that point home. It’s one thing to have a textbook emphasize research; it’s another to read Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Music Director Jonathon Heyward confess that research is “one of the things that I sort of wish someone would’ve nudged me about—the deeper meaning of what you’re trying to achieve as a musician.”
These perspectives reinforce the OER’s practical guidance for transforming scholarly inquiry into creative expression. “This book not only equips artists with the knowledge and best practices to navigate the current landscape of research and information,” says Learning Innovations’ Montcalmo, “but also prepares them to adapt as change in the field continues to accelerate.”
DeLaurenti’s copyright and publishing chapters touch on the ethical and legal use and reuse of copyrighted material, robustly covering licensing, publishing/self-publishing, and distribution basics. “Every musician will need a lawyer during their career,” DeLaurenti says. “But musicians can best plan with their counsel when they have a solid education and understanding of how the basics of music copyright work.”
The OER model allows Peabody to share its curriculum’s best practices: The Path to Funding is in 84 libraries worldwide; Unlocking the Digital Age 68. Together they’ve been viewed more than 18,000 times online. DeLaurenti “is a fierce advocate for access to information and the removal of barriers for artists,” says Chair of Professional Studies and LAUNCHPad Director Zane Forshee, adding that Unlocking outlines the how and why of reproducible research while helping all artists “search for information, discern sources, and protect their own creative work.”