What is the place today of music in a liberal arts curriculum? A teacher such as myself--versed in the Western musical canon but also aware of the world's many musical voices and the varied ways in which music comes into peoples' lives--faces a major challenge in deciding how to tool my students for musical encounters after their Grinnell years. This lecture explores one strategy that I pursue in an introductory course (Music, Culture, Context) at the College.

Roger Vetter joined the Grinnell College Department of Music in 1986. His teaching responsibilities include courses in ethnomusicology, the cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary team-taught introductory course Music, Culture, Context (Music 116), and directing, along with his wife Valerie Vetter, the Grinnell College Javanese Music and Dance Ensemble. Vetter's teaching is informed not only by his formal education at the University of Hawaii (B.Ed. and M.M.) and the University of Wisconsin (Ph.D.), but also through extended field experiences in Indonesia (Java), Ghana and Zimbabwe. Over his years at Grinnell he has endeavored to develop a teaching collection of musical instruments from around the world; the fruits of this labor are on permanent display in the Cornell World Music Room and also documented in an online searchable database that includes hundreds of audio and video clips in addition to photographs of and information about the instruments.