Laura Montanari uses music to center unheard voices
By Zyheim Bell
Almost no one can claim to be a stranger to the events of World War II, as the topic has been explored countless times through books and films. Adjunct music education professor Laura Montanari, however, takes a new approach to the subject matter.
Montanari’s dissertation,“Songwriting Oral History Interviews: Archival Songs as Critical-Creative Pedagogy in Dialogue with Women of the Italian Resistance,” and coinciding research-based album, was awarded the 2025 Mason Multimedia Award by the Oral History Associate during their annual conference meeting.
Montanari took an artistic approach to her doctoral dissertation. Rather than report on collected data, she instead used audio recordings from Italian women who resisted fascism during the Mussolini regime, giving them the chance to “literally speak for themselves.”
“Their voices being kept at the margins for too long. I put them center stage by collaging them thematically, so you can hear a choir of women who took part in their resistance,” she said.
The chorale of voices were accompanied by subtle musical arrangements composed by Montanari, an effort to avoid instrumentation detracting from the importance of the story and the result of poor audio quality.
Montanari presented her work in a collaborative concert where the audience peers within similar fields as Montanari, such as social justice movements and collective history were invited to give recorded feedback of the tracks.
“What happens if we uncover these voices through music?” Montanari asked the workshop’s listeners.
She used their feedback to help her answer two of her research questions, “How the stories of the women could be moved beyond paper and academics,” and “How could access to their stories be expanded beyond the confines of the archive?”
Montanari merged the audience’s opinion with her own, to create her “Archival songs,” a collection of tracks that feature both Montanari’s own entirely original works and her musical interpretation of the interviews.
Her dissertation stems from the pedagogical techniques she has developed throughout her career teaching in New York City. When teaching her middle school course, Montanari played a WhatsApp interview where the students heard a story from her grandmother discussing life in Italy and Montanari would translate for them after.
Despite the language barrier, Motanari said it was the quietest and most engaged her students had been from her entire time knowing them.
“I’ve been knowing you for nine years, from kindergarten to eighth grade. I never heard you be this quiet, and you don’t even understand what she’s saying,” Montanari jokingly told her class. The students shocked her with the response that her grandmother was sharing a “real” story.
Using first-hand experiences such as her grandmothers, Montanari saw that she was giving students an understanding of history beyond the “big” dates, facts and names and instead uncovering the layers that were harder to communicate to 13 to 14-year-old students, exploring the lives of people who experienced the events.
“With such a diverse world, I think that this is an approach that can help us listen to each other’s voice differently rather than just a written document,” she said.
As a professor here at Rider, Montanari teaches the “The Art of Teaching Music II,” a course designed to prepare sophomore music education majors, where for Casey Decker, Montanari helps her students “bring fun to the classroom.”
