A day in the life of:

Dr. Mark Henderson is the choral teacher  of Weber State University who is not only musical, but  self described as pathologically curious.
SP: Did you always want to do music?
MH: I was pre-med for a year; I don’t know what I was thinking. I considered psychology as well; I’m really interested in it even today, especially the human potential side of psychology. I just found myself in the music hall all the time and I figured, duh, this is what I really want to do. It was more finally giving in than finding something to do.
SP: What is your favorite musical piece?
MH: Maybe my all-time favorite song that is not “Danny Boy” — ‘cause that’s everybody’s favorite, and they’re right — is probably “Beauty and the Beast,” from the cartoon. There is something deeply profound about it, I just really enjoy it. But only in the Ms. Potts version, not the R&B later version.
SP: How musical are you and your family away from Weber State University?
MH: All of our kids have done a little bit of music, but we haven’t pushed them into it. Our second oldest son is the only one that has gone into music professionally. The others have done musical things, been in groups, bands and choirs, but there is probably shockingly little music at home. Since my wife is a music teacher also, people often assume that we talk about music all the time, and that we make music, and that is really rarely the case, ‘cause that’s work. We talk about the arts, and we are always throwing around ideas, but there is, I’m sure, far less music-making around our house than people would expect.

SP: Do you have any specific teaching methods to use on your music students?
MH: I am constantly stealing ideas from psychology, especially the psychology of the arts, cognitive kinds of things, but ways that we learn to be creative and how we balance being spontaneous and creative with being disciplined and structured. Out of that tension comes the most interesting stuff. The hallmark of my teaching is having certain standards and guidelines that I will hold people to, but also allowing for quite a lot of freedom and input by the students. One of my ideas, turning over music-making to chamber choir, makes them a better ensemble, I’m convinced. Technically, it could be tighter if I were constantly in charge, but I think the art that’s made has more input from the individuals and they make sort of an Aristotle thing — they make something more together than they would do if they were just individually fitting like a cog into the framework. With the tension between freedom and discipline I’m always intrigued to see what is going to arise, and the music that will come that I can then take and use, ideas that may arise from the group and so on.  In addition to choir, I teach a class I designed called Music, the Arts and Civilization. The idea is ‘how do all the other arts relate to music?’ For example, by far the most popular kind of music everywhere in the world and throughout history has been song, which is by definition a combination of music and poetry. We look into how music relates to all the other arts; I’m always asking how things connect rather than how they are different. That’s more interesting to me.
SP:What does music mean to you?
MH: I’m pretty sure I can’t really answer that question. I have thought about it a lot. One of the reasons I think music is such a powerful art for so many people — many people find it to be the most emotional of the arts — is that it has its own meaning that isn’t expressible in any other way. As hard as we try, we can’t use terms that will grasp it in the context of something else. One of the principles or models of Harvard, actually, which I really believe is the best way to understand a thing, is in the context of another discipline. One of the ways to understand what music is and means, you can see it in the ways other arts operate, but each of them has an internal meaning that isn’t explainable in outside terms. It’s almost automatically oxymoronic to try to describe the meaning of music in words, because you are automatically using a different medium.
SP: What do you have to say to students thinking about going into music or the arts?
MH: Stop it. I’m being partly kidding, but partly not. I often give students advice when they are wondering whether should go into music or not. I encourage them to do something else, because unless they have to do music, or any of the arts, they may be happier doing something else as a vocation, and keeping arts as an avocation. Once they answer the question that they can’t picture themselves doing anything else, then they might as well give in and do the arts. That was part of my own question. I realized I’m not going to make much money, (but) I just finally had to face the fact that I couldn’t even imagine doing something else. Actually, now I can more even than at the beginning, I can imagine myself doing a number of different things. Who knows, I may suddenly go into some other career, probably not because I already have tenure and a retirement, but I could be out doing many other kinds of things. There is a lot of interesting stuff to me.