I believe music education is the process of sharing the act of listening with students, thereby awakening the abilities present but heretofore unrealized within their mind and body to interpret, perform and create music. I believe music is a choice each listener-musician makes to focus their listening towards guided flows of time expressed by sound. These beliefs come from my own journey as a composer to find the purpose of music. At first believing that the purpose of music was limited to my own self-expression, I drove myself toward creative music without identifying my purpose for doing so, or finding a real purpose to music-making of any kind. But as I established my own practice as a teacher and musical improviser, I came to define music by the psychological experience of listening, which need not be delineated as different experiences to the performer, composer, or audience member.
Any listener is a musican. The composers Pauline Oliveros (1932 - 2016) and R. Murray Schafer (1933 - 2021) centered listening in their practice and pedagogy. Oliveros proclaimed “listening is survival!” and defined musicianship as the developed ability to listen and respond to sounds, or what a layperson may call an ability to improvise sounds. Schafer had a conviction to “open ears” and to “listen like mad to the sounds sounds of their own environment.” This constitutes a redefinition of teaching music as “teaching the act and art of listening.”
Teaching from this position makes music a vehicle by which every participant (listener, performer, composer, etc) can explore their own nervous system and modulate its sensations by complex responses to the sounds that captivate each listener-musician the most. Oliveros’s prioritization of the act of listening and of improvisation as a foundational musical skill regardless of “talent” or knowledge level allow a student to recognize very early on that music is a place they can go where they are listened to. This primal response within all of us when influenced by sound and music is a feeling that will change and shape to their needs as well-rounded human beings throughout their entire lives.
When the priority is first to listen before other aspects of experiencing music are explored, school-aged students will engage with the material and often produce results that far and away exceed state or program-based standards. Through a listening-based pedagogy, the music class becomes a nexus where all the relevant subjects and sources of inquiry in the student’s life are drawn together into an imaginative, espressive whole. Creation and improvisation simultaneously become the entry point and the metacognitive goal of the class. I believe that the very act of listening deeply can create that metacognitive awareness by exposure alone.
Biography
Nick Fagnilli is a composer (Ithaca College BM 2019) and educator (Carnegie Mellon University MM 2026) living in Pittsburgh, PA. He considers his music making and teaching as having a symbiotic relationship. Nick believes to teach is to collaborate artistically with students and discover new possibilities together. Outside of the classroom, Nick creates new compositions in a similar manner, allowing his friendships and connections in his life to inform and inspire him towards unique creative works. His music draws from a dizzying array of styles and performance practices, but is unified by his unique approach to the creative decision-making process, using mind and body to interpret a logic after the fact of making choices. Nick believes that anyone who listens is a musician, and the listener-musician creates reality by listening and making choices that give rise to the governing logic of that reality.
He studied piano at Ithaca College with Greg DeTurck and Dmitri Novgorodsky, and composition with Dana Wilson, Evis Sammoutis, Louise Mygatt, and Jorge Villavicencio Grossmann. He also studied harpsichord with Jean Clay Radice and Mary Holzhauer and conducted independent musicological research advised by Dr. Sara Haefeli. In 2019, he won the Paul Smadbeck Compsoiton prize for Naphtha, for clarinet, cello, and piano, and the Best Music award at the Ithaca Student Film Festival.
After leaving Ithaca, Nick began private studies with Cambodian-American composer Chinary Ung, eventually becoming his assistant. He also became a regular attendee at Pittsburgh Sound Preserve’s Open Improvisation Lab, where anyone is open to attend and make sound together. This regular diet of improvising with randomized groups of participants inspired him to synthesize his creative and pedagogical practice.
At Carnegie Mellon University, Nick continues to compose new works and teach new and innovative classes in the Preparatory Division. He has given presentations as a piano teacher and analyst on the music of György Kúrtag, Pauline Oliveros, Vincent Persichetti, Chick Corea, Erik Satie, John Cage, Bela Bartók and Chinary Ung.