Tiffany Ng on Diversifying Carillon Repertoire
Dr. Tiffany Ng, BCNM alum and Associate Professor of Carillon at the University of Michigan, has devoted her time and energy to addressing the challenge of reclaiming the instrument to better represent and speak to diverse communities. In this interview, Tiffany discusses diversifying carillon repertoire.
From the interview:
My interest in carillon and inequality began when I accepted my position at the University of Michigan. Before [taking this position] I had maybe played carillon kind of once a week or so as part of wherever I was living and playing. Once I got here, the job was actually to play up to ten times a week. There are daily recitals at Burton Tower and daily recitals at Lurie Tower; we have alumni guests and students who play some of them, but people cancel, and sometimes I really do find myself playing almost ten recitals a week. So, just relying on my usual repertoire—the repertoire that I had been trained with and that I had heard everyone else playing—led to my taking a look back by the end of my first year and realizing that I had played pretty much almost all music by white men. When I thought about it in the public context of my job as university carillonist, I realized that I had inadvertently served for the entire year as a mouthpiece, essentially, for white patriarchy on campus.
Read the full interview here.