College of Fine Arts and Communications Associate Dean Jeremy Grimshaw Uses a Cabinet of Donated Instruments to Encourage Creative Learning in Music Students
Tucked away in a third-floor corner of the BYU Music Building are three glass-front cabinets of mystery filled with instruments from around the world. To passersby, the cabinets may look unassuming, but to the students in associate dean Jeremy Grimshaw’s World Music class, they hold a world of possibilities.
Grimshaw has a doctorate in musicology with a certification in world music. In his own words, his education “straddled musicology and ethnomusicology” with a stronger focus on anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. When he was hired at BYU, Grimshaw was charged with developing a curriculum focused on music from a global perspective. As a part of that new curriculum, he started Gamelan Bintang Wahyu, a Balinese music ensemble for BYU students. Over the past 15 years, many Balinese instruments have been commissioned and donated for the ensemble.
Many of the instruments in the mystery cabinets were donated to BYU from a variety of sources, many coming from former music adjunct professor Lloyd Miller. The instruments have moved around campus many times over the years — from the Museum of Art to the Harris Fine Arts Center, to the Harold B. Lee Library, now landing in the Music Building. The instruments served primarily as an exhibit, but upon closer inspection, Grimshaw noticed that many of them were still in playable condition. “I had always wanted to find a way to put them to use in a curriculum,” he said.
Grimshaw was inspired by global musicians who began teaching music classes online, during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing people anywhere in the world to learn new instruments. He came up with the idea for a 20-hour creative project for his Music 307 World Music class. While the students can choose any topic to base their project on, they are encouraged to pick an instrument from the cabinet to research and discover how to play it. The information they find is used to update the inventory for future students.
Students are not always ready to jump head first into an open-ended assignment like this, but Grimshaw believes it is important for students to “exercise different muscles” within their academics and have a designated opportunity to “indulge in rabbit holes.”
“I think that in the arts, our disciples are so demanding that we don’t give students enough free time to mess around with stuff,” he said. “Do not get me wrong, I want students to know how to do traditional research but I also want them to be able to lean into passion, curiosity and the act of going down a rabbit hole to discover something.”
Grimshaw shared an example of one student who chose to explore a Thai oboe, the “Pi Nai.” The student, well versed in double-reed instruments, discovered that this oboe uses a quadruple reed. They found and bought quadruple reeds on eBay. Through experimentation, the student learned how to create the appropriate embouchure (shape of the mouth used to play a reed instrument). Another student created a fingering chart for the “Guqin,” an ancient Chinese zither. The chart can now be used and refined by future students.
For Grimshaw, the students’ ingenuity is what this project is all about. “If you have enough curiosity and enough complexity, and you dig around long enough something interesting is going to happen.”