Walton Muyumba: Bringing new meaning to reading music

	Music man — Walton Muyumba, assistant professor of English, studies the parallels between the elements of music and those of literature and poetry, such as tension and emotion.

Walton Muyumba sees the world as a collection of fantastic stories, tension and harmony.

"Everything is viewed in a cinematic way. Like it or not, we see things in a story-like fashion," he explains. As an assistant professor of English at UNT, he tries to show his students that literary themes lie everywhere, even in music.

Muyumba's love of music is obvious; he soaks up every note, analyzes it and explains it in literary terms. He specializes in African American literature and American studies, focusing on the poetry and lyrical structure of blues music.

"Langston Hughes and Shirley Ann Williams took the standard form of the blues and turned it into a high art," he says. "They took what they were hearing in jazz and blues and made it into poetic form."

Even in purely instrumental jazz, Muyumba claims there is a dialogue between the instruments.

"The horns are answering each other, complementing the rest of the song or boasting, trying to out-do one another," he says.

He describes how his love of music is related to his love — and profession — of literature.

"The same kind of tools can be used to analyze music and poetry. What creates tension? What flows? What causes the listener or reader to feel emotion?" says Muyumba.

Besides music and literature, Muyumba writes about film, specifically the work of African American filmmakers. He has a published review of one of his favorite films, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing.

He says he enjoys analyzing and seeing the connections between writing, music and art.

"I am very lucky in that the things I call 'work' are also my main interests."

His involvement in UNT goes beyond his work, as Muyumba is a contributing reader at the meetings of Ars Poetica, the on-campus literary group. According to James Tanner, professor and chair of the English department, Muyumba is an "excellent classroom teacher, scholar and departmental servant."

In his studies of literature and music, Muyumba has recognized that the true innovators of art saw what came before them.

"What the really great musicians did, like Coleman Hawkins, was see what was before them, break it apart, analyze it and make it into something totally new," he says.

By breaking apart the music and literature of the past, Muyumba hopes his students will be able to feel and hear the story, not just read it.

BY PETER HOFSTAD paiswri2@unt.edu

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• Student health center screening for SARS
• UNT receives $900,000 to fund research
• What are UNT faculty reading this summer?
• New Faculty Senate chair says he's 'still emerging' as a scholar and leader
• New Student Orientation to host close to 3,000 incoming UNT freshmen
• UNT departments on the move
• Magazine ranks UNT among top 100 universities for Hispanic students
• UNT professor seeks study participants

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