An excerpt from a project I’m working on about teaching writing through critical empathy, which, I argue, is not putting oneself in another’s position to feel what they feel and assume experiences that are not one’s own, but learning to investigate, research, and prioritize another’s point of view to objectively consider it before assessing it:
Point of view is a lesson that translates from closings readings of visual art to film and literature as well as work by choreographers, lyricists, composers, and musicians. Julius Eastman’s Femenine, a chamber work relatively new even to musicologists, offers students a way to practice critical empathy from a position of experiential expertise. Premiered in 1974, Femenine most closely resembles the minimalist movement in late 20th-century music; an opening motif, “Prime,” circles and folds back on itself in stacks that open with 12 quick E-flats through 10 numbered movements ranging from “No. 1, Prime” through “No. 4, Hold and Return” to land at “No. 10, Pianist Will Interrupt Must Return.”
Before class, students read a 2021 album review by Alex Ross in The New Yorker. In class, we discuss the album review and listen to about half the album, which runs just over an hour total. My students tend to focus on the sleigh bells, which twinkle underneath the persistent repeating phrase, more than any other sound. In part, it’s because it’s the first sound they recognize and can name. It’s their point of entry into something that feels foreign and, by extension, exclusionary. When discussing Ross’ review of the album, students appreciate the objective, historical context he provides about who Eastman was but criticize the actual criticism (even though the review is favorable). One class in particular argued that the rhetorical choices—words like “ebullient” and broader references to post-modernism, the avant-garde, as well as Liszt and Mao—make its reader feel ignorant, as if each word most liberal arts educations should cover is instead pitted against them. It’s beautiful writing, it’s public writing, and these kinds of references are a prerequisite for any review, so what’s going on?
Students identified with Eastman; they didn’t identify with criticism. Wells College, where I taught until it closed in May, 2024, was a small academic community in Aurora, NY (population 641), where the student to faculty ratio was 8 to 1, where 340 of the 357 enrolled students in AY 2023-2024 received federal financial aid, and where 54% of the student population identified as a minority or person of color. Many of its students were first-generation, and it had one of the highest social mobility rankings in the country.
Eastman, a Black gay man whose life creating masterworks ended in bankrupt anonymity, spent many years living in Ithaca, 30 minutes from where these students attended college. The fearlessness of work like “Gay Guerrilla,” which unapologetically illuminates racism and homophobia, is something my students aspired to have the confidence to create and promote. But putting that work into its historical, cultural, philosophical, and artistic context brings in the unfamiliar—many students had never been to a museum or to a Classical concert let alone studied those archives before they arrived at Wells. Assessing something like Femenine requires recognizing the ongoing conversation they join when they comment on it: it is a sense of critical belonging.