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Dr. Mike Boyd might be the coolest politician in Pittsburgh. With experience as a composer, performer, educator and critic, the assistant professor of music just added something new to his resume: Wilkins Township Commissioner. “I started going to township meetings a little over a year ago, partially to find out what was going on in the township with regard to Marcellus Shale development,” he says. “I decided that I didn’t want to be a one-issue citizen in terms of attending meetings, so I just kept attending meetings and got to know things that are going on in the township…. I decided to run because I thought it was important for some younger people to be in office and bring new ideas to work in counterpoint with people that have a lot of experience in the job.” Boyd is dedicated to thinking “about new and innovative ways [to] benefit township residents.”
That forward-thinking approach is definitely to be expected from such an innovative artist; Dr. Boyd worked in experimental music long before he started teaching at Chatham. “As an undergraduate student…I was first exposed to that type of music, initially especially John Cage, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff,” he says. “I find the openness in that music to be very interesting. There’s a variety of different interpretations that can be appropriate for a single piece, so rather than striving for a sort of idealized, perfect version of something, instead one can bring their own creativity to the table and their kind of multiple valid realizations of a single work.” Though he got his musical start playing the trombone in his fourth grade band, he eventually deviated from traditional forms. “The idea of striving to create new things, to do new things, rather than sort of refining or perfecting things, for me is a very attractive way of working.”
While he recognizes a shift in preference among young people away from concert music, he doesn’t see it as an inevitable end to the orchestra. “There are ways to make standard, kind of common practice classical music more attractive to a younger audience: performing it in different places, using slightly more informal settings, finding new ways of talking about it. I think probably a lot of young people, younger than me, find the kind of standard concert hall to be a bit stodgy, but moving [a performance], say, to an art gallery or something like that could be a nice thing to do.” He notes that the challenges for symphonies extend beyond location to perception. “Thinking about the function of the music, we think of the classical repertoire as a bunch of interchangeable great works…Originally the pieces were done in different settings, so something might be dinner music, something else might be opera….I think bringing the social aspect back to that music might be a way to attract a younger audience.”
Dr. Boyd is a strong supporter of majoring in music. “If you take the broad swathe of what you’re studying seriously and come out of school with good written and oral communication skills, you can be qualified to do a number of different things both in and out of music,” he says. “I think musicians also work well in a lot of jobs because we’re able to think about on-the-spot performance, we’re good at multitasking and we work really hard. To sit in a practice room for 4 to 8 hours a day takes determination and that translates to a lot of different areas.”?Dr. Boyd’s classes at Chatham certainly instill dedication, but he commits himself to making the classes fun; some of the most challenging courses are the ones he is most fond of teaching. “I really like Music Theory IV because it’s a 20th century analysis class and that’s an area that I’m particularly interested in as a scholar,” he says. “I also taught Music and the Natural World a couple years ago and I really liked…the bridging up of music and environmental issues.”
Environmentalism is extremely important to Dr. Boyd; part of what influenced him to take the job at Chatham was the university’s dedication to sustainability. Since starting as a professor, he’s helped to make bicycle advocacy a priority on campus. “I got started with bicycle advocacy at Chatham because there is a tax credit for bicycle commuters, and so I was interested in seeing if we would implement that as part of our sustainability initiative,” he says. “Chatham was very receptive to that; we got it up and running very quickly. I joined the Climate Committee and started working with the Office of Sustainability…and then some students from Green Horizons also on expanding our bicycle infrastructure.” One of the biggest successes to date is the reestablishment of Chatham’s Bike Works. “We have a work-study student in there ten hours a week, we’ve got a full array of tools, and people can go in and learn how to fix their own bikes, or they can go in and make some quick repairs that they need to get home.”
As someone who commutes seven miles to work each day, Boyd hopes to apply what he’s learned at Chatham to supporting alternative transportation in Wilkins Township. “I’ve talked a lot with the Bike Pittsburgh people, and they’re very upbeat about doing things in municipalities east of Pittsburgh,” he says. “We founded the group Share the Road East, a group that is made up of elected officials and citizens that live in municipalities east of Pittsburgh, and we’re hoping to collaborate, discuss common goals, and find ways collectively of working on this because we want to connect our municipalities to each other with safe and attractive bike routes.” His focus is not limited to bicycling. “We’re also looking at pedestrian issues as well, because I think having walkable and bikeable communities is good for business and good for quality of life.”
As a cyclist, Dr. Boyd already has plenty to love about his home. “It’s pretty close to Boyce Park, which has great mountain biking. It’s kind of a nice distance between the Monroeville business district and the city of Pittsburgh and it’s the near the highway so you can get Downtown relatively quickly when the tunnel’s moving, so there are a lot of great things about living there.” Now, Dr. Boyd is dedicated to making life in Wilkins Township even better.
Photos Courtesy of Lisa Boyd