January 2026
Steven Savage is the Executive Director of Blue Bear School of Music and holds a Ph.D. in musicology. An active record producer and recording engineer, he has worked on seven Grammy-nominated recordings. Steve taught musicology at San Francisco State University for more than a decade.
Let’s start with the biggest question of all: what is music?
That’s the most fun — and the hardest — question to answer. It may even be impossible, because music is profoundly individual. For many people, music is deeply impactful; for others, less so. What moves one person may leave another completely cold. That variability is part of what makes music unique.
Music has the power to induce brain states, emotions, and experiences that nothing else can replicate. It can feel transcendent. At the same time, the way we experience it varies wildly depending on who we are, where we’re from, and what we bring to it. One of the central ideas of this course is learning to notice those differences — both in ourselves and in others.
So when we ask “what is music,” we’re really asking something very personal.
Exactly. In class, we'll spend time exploring how difficult it is to define music at all. What one person calls music, another might call noise — or not music at all. I'll play examples that spark strong disagreement, and that’s where the best discussions happen. One of my favorite questions is whether birdsong is music. About half the room usually says yes, half says no. So I’ll ask you: Is birdsong music?
Yes. Maybe? What do you think?
I personally don’t consider it music, but I completely understand why others do. It has pitch, rhythm, repetition — many musical elements. Then the question becomes: does music require human intention? Or does listening itself count as human intervention? Suddenly, something that seems simple opens up into a fascinating philosophical conversation.
Your course is grounded in cultural musicology. What does that mean, exactly?
Musicology simply means the study of music, but there are different branches. Historical musicology looks at music through time — specific composers, eras, and styles. Cultural musicology, which is my field, focuses on the relationship between music and culture.
We ask questions like: How does culture shape music? And just as importantly, how does music shape culture? Music doesn’t just reflect the world around us — it can actively change how people think, feel and act.
Can you give an example of music actually changing culture?
A classic example is “We Shall Overcome” during the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. That song didn’t just reflect what people were feeling — it helped bring people together, gave them courage and shaped the movement itself. Another powerful example is the song that became part of South Africa’s struggle against apartheid, “Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika" (God Bless Africa). These are moments when music becomes a driver of change, not just a mirror of society.
In a world that’s increasingly siloed, does music still function as a shared cultural experience?
It does, but not in the same way it once did. Music played a much more central role in cultural life in the 1960s. Today, it competes with countless other forms of media — social media, gaming, streaming video.
Music hasn’t disappeared, but its role has shifted. That change itself is something worth understanding, especially when we think about how music once unified people — and how it still can.
You write about authenticity in music. What does it mean to say something feels “authentic”?
That’s one of my favorite topics, because authenticity feels obvious until you really start thinking about it. There’s a musicologist who once argued that if music doesn’t feel authentic to someone, it doesn’t even feel like music anymore. I’m not sure I fully agree — but it shows how powerful the idea is.
Authenticity is deeply tied to culture and history. What sounds authentic to us today may have sounded terrible — or sublime — to people in another era. I like to play very different examples in class and ask people to react.
I might play early blues recordings by Robert Johnson, which many people today hear as raw and deeply authentic. Then I’ll play Beethoven, which some people find profoundly meaningful and others find distant or irrelevant. Then I’ll play something like the Spice Girls — often seen as the definition of manufactured, inauthentic pop. And yet, for someone who was 14 when that music came out, it may feel incredibly authentic.
The point is that authenticity isn’t fixed. It lives in the listener. What may be authentic for one person isn’t necessarily authentic for someone else. Our judgments are shaped by culture, memory, identity and experience.
Perfection seems to be a recurring theme in your thinking about music. Why does it matter so much?
Recording technology—and now tools like Auto-Tune—have pushed music toward being technically flawless. But perfection often comes at the expense of emotion.
I’ve seen this countless times in the studio. A musician delivers a performance that’s slightly imperfect but incredibly moving. Then they redo it to make it “better,” and something essential disappears. What made it human gets shaved away.
Many people feel that popular music today is over-processed — too perfect. The imperfections are often what make music feel alive.
And now AI enters the picture.
Yes, AI is the next step in this trajectory. I recently heard an AI-generated blues track that sounded completely convincing — deeply authentic, even. And yet, it was entirely fabricated.
That raises huge questions. If something sounds authentic but has no lived human experience behind it, what are we responding to? How do we evaluate meaning, labor, and creativity? These are exactly the kinds of questions we wrestle with in the course.
You started out as a musician. How did you find your way into teaching?
I became obsessed with music as a teenager and spent years as a professional drummer. I worked as a recording engineer and producer for a long time, and I was also involved in music education through the Blue Bear School of Music in San Francisco.
Eventually, I went back to school and discovered cultural musicology almost by accident. I read an article about how recording technology changed music — how the ability to do repeated takes pushed music toward perfection. It was a revelation. I realized there was an academic field devoted to thinking critically about the very work I’d been doing for decades.
That led me to pursue graduate work, and eventually a PhD in London. It felt like discovering a language for questions I’d been carrying around my whole life.
And now you’re getting students to mull those questions, too.
Yes, and looking forward to it. This is going to be a discussion-driven course. I’ll introduce ideas from cultural musicology, but the heart of the class is listening together and talking about what we hear.
I usually play three or four pieces of music each session and use them to spark conversation. People bring their own perspectives, memories, and reactions, and those differences make the class richer.
I hope that after taking this course people will experience music differently — more consciously, more reflectively. I want people to recognize the attitudes they bring to music: ideas about authenticity, originality, perfection and meaning.
Maybe music will not just be something you enjoy in the background, but become something you listen to with new curiosity — aware of how it operates in culture and how it operates in you.