By: Patricia Harden & Tino Karkousis
On November 14, the Youth Advocacy Council (YAC) held our first Music in Color event of the 2022-23 school year! The topic was social media’s influence on musicians. The guest speaker was Kate Warren, a French hornist known for her Instagram music account, @katewarrenmusic, and studies on gender and brass.
Kate is relatively new to using social media, only starting an Instagram account in 2019 after making a New Year’s resolution to create a music account to listen back to her playing. The year afterward, while locked down in New York, she found her account as an incubator to listen to her practice. With one video per post, she saw improvement in herself and discovered a fulfilling outlet for her teaching practice.
Kate sees social media as a “double-edged sword.” On one hand, it is a timely environment for mindful creativity, creating networks both professionally and personally. Teachers can find their students, communities can bond efficiently and rapidly; in fact, Kate says that her career wouldn’t be so without social media. On the contrary, social media is designed to take as much attention and time as possible. To deal with this, Kate sets several guidelines for herself to prevent the excessive expense of time on her social media: no scrolling before 9 am, no evening computer work, setting a time limit for scrolling, etc. Most importantly, she tries not to be an ‘influencer’ and believes that published content should be valuable in some form. She also recommends being honest, truthful, and kind; after all, the world can be a pretty brutal place, especially online!
When remarking on her gender and brass studies, Kate noted the role models and experiences in her life. There are currently few musical fields that are led principally by women, this unfortunate phenomenon also expanding to race and ethnicity. First studying with Michele Stebelton at Florida State (having a female brass teacher was extremely uncommon), Kate strives towards equal representation in concert programs and believes that we must all see ourselves as role models for the future generation. Other examples of her role models included members of the Philly Orchestra Jennifer Montone (who gave a concert 9 months pregnant) and Carol Jantsch (who coached and taught Kate while having a child).
YAC members lead a discussion about social media with guest, Kate Warren.
Overall, the discussions with Kate were an enlightening way to start the Music in Color season. Her comments on repurposing musical content into formats people commonly read nowadays generate ideas on how to adapt music education to the current student generation. To bring the conversation closer to home, they demonstrate what it means to ask the hard questions that we at YAC get guest speakers and our own mentors to ask: the importance of equal representation and voice across the musical diaspora and the existence of platforms such as YAC that aim to cultivate this notion.
This event was an inspiring discussion on all fronts. Seeing how social media affects musicians from the perspective of one in the field was appealing, interesting, and enjoyable, given how some of us may have our own music accounts on social media. Most importantly, understanding the connection and correlation between these two realms is eye-opening. And this is only one of many other enlightening discussions YAC will have this year in Music in Color!