“You always have to be looking for different ways of making it happen” with Emily Doolittle

Emily Doolittle is a lecturer and research fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow. She is also an independent composer, working on commissions and personal projects alongside her academic work.

Emily shares how she combines these different roles including:

• Why she identifies as stubborn rather than entrepreneurial
• The ways that her academic and freelance work are intertwined
• How coming to the UK has allowed her to have a more varied career
• Her goal of getting 100 rejections a year

Hear some of Emily’s compositions on her website
Connect to Emily via her Royal Conservatoire profile
Find out about Emily’s interdisciplinary collaborations via SHARE

Follow the Academic Adventures podcast on LinkedIn

Transcript

Emily Doolittle

I would say probably a mix of both is probably the story of everything in my life.

Since moving to the UK and especially being at the Royal Conservatoire as a research fellow, it's been amazing that I feel like I can bring all the parts of who I am as a musician and as a researcher together

I would say I don't identify with the word entrepreneurial, but I will identify with the word very stubborn.

Podcast intro

Welcome to the Academic Adventures podcast. This podcast is all about people who have embraced the opportunity to combine their academic work with entrepreneurial ventures. You’ll hear about the highs and lows, balancing responsibilities and grabbing opportunities, plus advice for anyone thinking about following a similar path.

Sarah McLusky

Hello. I’m your host Sarah McLusky and my Academic Adventurer for the final episode of this series is Emily Doolittle. Emily is a lecturer and research fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow. She is also an independent composer, working on commissions and personal projects alongside her academic work. 

Emily has a special interest in the relationship between animal songs and human music which has led to amazing collaborations and compositions, some of which you can hear on her website – you’ll find a link in the show notes.

Over her career Emily has been a full-time academic and a full-time composer, but her current role allows her to intertwine these different strands of her work. In marked contrast to other podcast guests Emily doesn’t label her collaborations as knowledge exchange or her freelance work as entrepreneurial – even though others might. She simply sees them as a channel for doing interesting work and getting it out into the world. 

Sarah McLusky 

Welcome along to the podcast, Emily. Lovely to have you here. I wonder if you could tell us a bit about how you combine academic work with other freelance work.

Emily Doolittle 

Yeah, great question. It's always a sort of a constant juggling act, but I work at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland four days a week as an Athenaeum research fellow. And then about half a day a week as a lecturer in composition. And then besides that, I have quite a lot of commissions and collaborations, you know, things I'm writing music for either just myself or in collaboration with other people.

But even things don't quite divide as neatly as that because a lot of my composition is actually also part of my academic research. So I think one of the things I really love about my position as a part -time research fellow at the Royal Conservatoire is that I do sort of have the flexibility. 

If I have some idea I'm wanting to find out more about, I can do traditional academic research about that idea. I can write music, you know, exploring that idea is part of my practice -based research at the conservatoire. But I can also look for outside partners to work with, whether there are other people at, you know, at academic institutions or, you know, film producers or people in non -academic positions, but who might have relevant artistic or practical expertise to collaborate with.

Sarah McLusky 

Yeah, excellent. It's a really interesting mixture. And just to help the listeners understand how that all fits together, these projects that you're doing, are they through the university? Do you do them completely independently as a freelancer? Is it a bit of a mix of both?

Emily Doolittle 

It's, I would say probably a mix of both is probably the story of everything in my life really. Yeah, certainly I collaborate with other academics at my institution and at other institutions, you know, in the UK and abroad as well. I'm from Canada originally and I lived in the States for a number of years and also in the Netherlands. So I have a number of friends and collaborators sort of all over the place. 

So, yeah, and I, you know, just thinking about, say, a project I'm working on right now, it's a chamber opera based on a Shetlandic folk tale, which I started writing actually in 2012 and finished in 2018. It was sort of a project that went through many incarnations. And I first started working on the project with a non-academic amateur group in Shetland called Ffancy Tunes. 

And then, after I wrote the piece, we workshopped it there. We had it performed in Glasgow with a friend, with an ensemble run by a friend who is an academic friend, sort of a music friend outside of the Conservatoire as well. But it's the ensemble thing, which is co -directed by John DeSimone, who used to work at the Conservatoire with me. So we had a live performance, but many of the performers we were working with were not from academic contexts, they were freelancers or performers with various companies. 

And we also worked with friends of mine, Greenlight Creative, who are a film production company, but they also do costuming and things like that. So they're not in academic contact, but had exactly the right artistic expertise to compliment the production. And then the stage director was somebody else who works at the conservatoire. So, Stacey Schaeffer. 

So we had that live performance. Now we're working on an animated version of the chamber opera. So again, that involves a whole new array of contacts and funding sources who are all sort of intermingled between people at the conservatory, people at other institutions and people completely outside of academia but with relevant expertise.

Sarah McLusky 

Yeah, that's a really lovely example of how intertwined these parts of your life are. And is this always the way that you've worked through your career? Was this a particular path that you chose?

Emily Doolittle 

Yeah, I mean, I think it's always been how my, you know, my mind and my interests have worked. But I think I feel like I've had more possibility to work in that way since moving to the UK eight years ago. I'm from Canada originally and then lived in the States for a number of years. 

And in this, my previous employment was in the States and in the States, generally speaking, most good academic positions are full time. So you're either working full time and probably not having a lot of time for projects outside of that. Or you might have a very, very part-time adjunct position, which doesn't really give you enough to live. So then you're probably also working somewhere else to try to make a living. 

And then in the States, they also don't really have the concept of artistic research or practice -based research. So in the position I had teaching composition at an arts college in the States, when I wanted to do academic research, I had to take unpaid time off my academic position. 

So since moving to the UK and especially being at the Royal Conservatoire as a research fellow, it's been amazing that I feel like I can bring all the parts of who I am as a musician and as a researcher together and if there's an idea I'm interested in exploring, you know, for another example, I do a lot of research in the relationship between animal songs and human music. And that's something that I explore, you know, through writing music, but also through writing musicology papers sort of about the history of how people hear and interpret animal songs and also in collaborative research with scientists. 

And I really love the fact that I can think, okay, I'm interested in an idea, but I don't even have to know exactly how I want to explore it before I've started. So, you know, I'll have, say, the song of a particular bird, maybe by the time I'm done thinking about it, I'll have written a scientific paper together with some other people and a musicology paper by myself, and also maybe a traditionally notated piece of music and maybe also something that's a little bit more theatrical and performative that has a lot of input from the performer as well, all exploring one particular animal song. And for me, it's great that, yeah, that I don't have to define what I'm interested in before I know where it's going to lead. 

And I think, you know, sort of connecting with the topic of you know, working both inside and outside of academia as well. Say some of these ideas might work really well. You know, maybe I'll collaborate with a scientist in academia, but I could also collaborate with a botanic garden or, you know, a charity that benefits nature or something like that. So it's great to feel like I don't have to cut off connections, cut off possible connections before I've even made them. It's great to feel like everything's possible.

Sarah McLusky 

That sounds like a really rich way of approaching the research. And I imagine that for you, the term knowledge exchange perhaps has a slightly different nuance to what it does to other people.

Emily Doolittle 

Yeah, I mean, I guess, I don't know, when I think of knowledge exchange, I think of our Knowledge Exchange officer, Deborah Keough, who is just brilliant at finding opportunities that as an academic and an artist, I might look at the call for proposals and think, well, that's for people in business. That's not for me. And Deborah is incredibly brilliant at helping me and other people at the conservatory recognize how actually this is relevant and maybe we have to use slightly different terms to explain our work, but actually the funding and the infrastructure and the support can be there to help us develop what we're doing.

Sarah McLusky 

Yeah, fantastic. Great to have that support there. So I wonder if with this path that you've taken now, it sounds very integrated with who you are as a person. Was there a point where you chose this as a route, this combining academic work and then the freelance work? Or is it something that sort of evolved over time?

Emily Doolittle 

Well, yeah, I mean, I definitely feel like it's, I'm not very good at doing things I don't want to do, or I'm not interested in doing. So in that sense, it's sort of inevitable, like, you know, with my job that I had in the States, which, you know, I love many aspects of it. And of course, I love teaching composition, but I ended up because I didn't have time to pursue the academic research I wanted to do as well. And it's actually an essential part of my composition. And who I am as a teacher too, I ended up working three quarters time or half time a lot of the time, just so I could, yeah, so I could sort of do all the things that are important to me, but in a US context, that's not really sustainable. Like they don't really encourage you or necessarily even allow you to work half time or full time. 

So, you know, I was lucky to make things work for a few years there, but it wouldn't have been really sustainable as an academic career. So it's been, but you know, there's always the option of being a freelancer, which of course, you know, is very difficult, especially in the current climate when so much arts funding is being cut. But also that's not my ideal at all because I really like working as part of a team. I love the inspiration and support that comes from having colleagues. 

So although I had considered the possibility of becoming a freelancer again, this is really, I feel like the current position that I'm in really offers the best of all worlds where I get to pursue these artistic ideas that I'm really interested in, but I also get to have great colleagues and I learn so much from seeing what other people are doing. Sometimes we give each other feedback on work or grant proposals or whatever, but sometimes even if somebody's doing something totally different from me and there's maybe nothing that, you know, it'd be very hard for us to talk directly, you know, to apply ideas directly from one idea to another. I just am so inspired by seeing people who work really differently from me or have really different kinds of ideas. So, yeah, I think it's really the best of all worlds being able to pursue artistic research, but in a collaborative, collegial context.

Sarah McLusky 

Yeah, that sounds fantastic. You've mentioned there the challenges that you had working in the US system and the academic system and the way that the current system works much better for you. Are there any other things that you found particularly challenging about following this path?

Emily Doolittle 

So I think one thing that's challenging in terms of getting things funded that are, say, artistic projects that have funding needs beyond what an academic institution could provide, it's challenging in a circumstance where artistic organizations are having their budgets cut right and left. So, and I mean, that's true in Canada where I'm from and in the States, which never had good funding to begin with and here. So, you know, say if I wanted to put something on, say, restaging my chamber opera or doing this animation of the chamber opera that I'm really hoping to do, it's increasingly difficult to find large amounts of funding.

It's also increasingly competitive to get small amounts of funding. So you spend more and more time writing grant applications and you get less and less for them. So, you know, I'm very, very stubborn. So I feel quite optimistic that we will eventually do a full scale, you know, 20, probably 25 minute animated version of my chamber opera, but we need to raise about £200,000 for that because animation is very expensive if it's undone.

And I suspect we're going to probably end up putting that £200 ,000 together out of £10 ,000 here and £5 ,000 there. It's going to be a very labour-intensive process. So I think maybe we'll get lucky and we'll find something that funds more of it. But I think for me, that's one of the biggest challenges that you have to spend more and more time applying for less and less.

And I guess sort of hand in hand with that problem is that I see a lot of arts funders are asking more and more questions as well. So maybe I think there's a situation where, you know, perhaps there's an arts funding organization that they recognize that funding has not been distributed entirely equally in the past. So then they do, you know, genuinely want to be more equitable, which is fair, but they do that by asking another question and then they realize it's still inequitable in some way. And so then they add another question and then suddenly you're writing like 8 ,000 words for having a one in 25 chance of getting £3,000. And you know, that's not good. So I think the general funding situation is the biggest challenge right now.

Sarah McLusky

Funding is always a bit of a challenge, for whatever it is that you're doing. You've mentioned there, though, these practical things that make things better. So one of them is funding. You've mentioned Deborah, who's been really supportive of you. Are there any other practical things that you've found have helped you to combine these different parts of your life?

Emily Doolittle 

Yeah, you know, I think one thing that I've really gotten a lot of energy and inspiration from, again, is working with people, you know, in different fields, whether they're, you know, different arts fields in the conservatoire or different academic fields or people working in industry or in nonprofit organizations or whatever, but just seeing different ways people work and seeing different things people feel like they can do or feel would be easy or difficult. 

I feel like it's in a sense given me a lot of courage that if I have an idea, there's probably a way it makes sense and a way we can make it work. I feel like this has helped me feel braver about trying things and seeing what happens and talking to different people and seeing how they would approach it and seeing what ideas they've tried and so on.

Sarah McLusky 

I recognize that you don't particularly resonate with the word entrepreneurial, but you do seem to have quite an entrepreneurial mindset. This sort of, you know, we'll get a bit of funding from here, a bit of funding from there. If you've got an idea, you want to make it happen. Do you think that's something that was in you or do you think it's something that's developed over time or that you've done training to help anything like that?

Emily Doolittle 

Yeah, I feel like anybody who survives as an artist into, you know, middle age is going to be, you know, have that spirit of making things happen no matter what, because there are, there's always going to be so many setbacks along the way. So you always have to, you know, have, keep your mind focused on what you want to do while also being open to going in different directions. 

You know, like if I'm planning on making a 25 minute animated film of my chamber opera, but there is funding out there for a 28 minute film, then of course it can be, you have to, you have to not be so focused that you don't take opportunities that would actually be really great for you. But you do have to keep focused in the core of what you want to do and always look for different ways of making it happen.

Sarah McLusky

Yeah, I think that, and as I say, I think whatever you call it, that sense of doing what you need to do to make things happen, I think is at the core of any venture, isn't it? Any successful project.

Emily Doolittle 

Absolutely. Yeah, right. Yeah, I would say I don't identify with the word entrepreneurial, but I will identify with the word very stubborn. Yeah.

Sarah McLusky 

Absolutely fair enough. And so it sounds like you've got a lot of different things going on. You've got the teaching, you've got the research, you've got these other projects you've got on the go as well. How do you manage to balance all those different responsibilities? I'm sure you've got home responsibilities as well.

Emily Doolittle 

Absolutely, yeah. That is a really good question and I'm always sort of wondering that. One thing I've, you know, I sort of alluded to this a little bit earlier, where, you know, when I had an academic position that was all teaching composition, that didn't feel balanced. I mean, teaching is great. I love teaching, but I didn't have enough time for composing. I didn't have enough time for my academic research. And after my first child was born, I didn't have enough time for my child. Now I have two children. So things felt quite unbalanced. 

But during the period when I was a freelancer, I also, you know, I felt too isolated. Like it seems like it's going to be this great freedom to just be able to write music all the time. But actually, very quickly you learn that you need structure in your life. And actually, I missed, in a sense, doing things other people wanted me to do or contributing to a team or something. So I think it's always, for me at least, it's always about keeping those things in balance. Like when are you, you know, you need enough time to pursue your own ideas. You need enough time to give things to other people where you're really thinking about what they need or their learning. 

You need time to get absorbed in other people's ideas. So, you know, I love it when somebody invites me to be part of a project but it's their vision and I get to participate in that. I just recently co -authored a paper with four other people, Pralle Kriengwatana, Ruedi Nager, Alex South and Martin Ullrich. And the paper is actually on music and animal welfare context, which is not my area of expertise at all, but we just sort of started a discussion group and then Pralle, who's a biologist, that is her area of research. She sort of led the creation of this paper. And I just loved that I got to use my knowledge and ideas, but towards something that I never would have thought of doing on my own. So I think for me, I need that balance of my own work teaching or giving things to other people and then being absorbed in other people's ideas sometimes.

Sarah McLusky 

Oh, that's fantastic. And it sounds like, yeah, to some people it might look from the outside very busy and complicated, but actually that's what you enjoy.

Emily Doolittle 

I do enjoy having a balance of things. Sometimes it gets, the thing I struggle with, I think, when there's a deadline coming up for something, then I love the clarity of knowing what's coming next. And in fact, I recently wrote my first ever music for media for an audible audio book of Anne of Green Gables, which was a totally new way of working for me. There was a huge amount of music to write in a very short period of time. And I was given, you know, a list of cues to write for. And so in a way, it seemed, you know, very busy and difficult, but actually, in a sense, those two months were quite easy. The two months I was writing the music were quite easy for me, if not for the rest of my family. But, you know, I just knew every morning when I woke up what I had to do is woke up and wrote music until it was done. 

And I've actually found it more difficult since finishing that and trying to figure out, okay, what do I catch up on next? Like I think not knowing what I need to do next when there's a lot of things that should be done, but not in a particular timeline, I find that harder than when I know what I need to do.

Sarah McLusky 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's a challenge, certainly something I find challenging as well. And it sounds like perhaps when you've talked as well about your journey that you've gone through, that perhaps what feels like success to you now is different to perhaps what you thought it was in the past.

Emily Doolittle 

Yeah, that's a really good question. I've just been thinking about this recently because I feel like since, you know, I turned 50 last year, now I'm 51, and there was the pandemic and coming out of the pandemic, there's moving to Scotland, you know, kids getting a bit older, so I have more time to think. 

And I do feel like I've sort of gone through a shift in maybe what my goals are or what I'm interested in. And I think, I think part of that shift is like, you know, when I was younger and sort of more, you know, more early-career as a composer, I was maybe thinking more about who am I, what kind of music do I write, what truly represents me? And I think that was the same in my research. Like, you know, I've, I've been really interested in the relationship between animal songs and human music for about 25 years. And I'm always looking for new ways to explore that.

And I think that's always gonna be a really important part of who I am. I'm not looking at all to change what I already do, but I have in the past few years been thinking more about, okay, what are things that I think are not what I do, but they could actually become part of what I do. 

I've really started to value just like being faced with a situation and thinking, okay, I don't really know how we would approach that, but. Could I figure it out? Maybe I can. Maybe I'll give that a try too. 

So yeah, I think I'm quite interested in seeing, even thinking about different kinds of music or you know, I'm sort of curious, you know, I think about there's kinds of music I might write, kinds of music I don't write, whether I like it or not, you know, there's kinds of music I don't like very much, or there's kinds of music I love, but I don't feel like I could write. But now I'm starting to think, well, could I write that? Could I get interested in that? And I think it's a really interesting exercise and process and super fun to find yourself connecting with, yeah, new kinds of sounds or ideas or projects that you know, maybe 10 years ago, I couldn't have imagined myself doing.

Sarah McLusky 

Yeah, and maybe that confidence and curiosity that's just come with the experience as well.

Emily Doolittle 

Yeah, yeah, and but I think also, you know, certainly the pandemic maybe, the pandemic forced us to narrow what we were doing so much during the years we had to be at home so much and we could only do things online or just didn't have a lot of possibilities. And I think the process of trying to re -expand coming out of the, not that we're totally out of the pandemic, but coming out of lockdown and how freeing it's felt to go back to doing the things I used to do and then realizing actually I don't have to just go back to that. I can go back to a lot more than that. So, yeah. Yeah.

Sarah McLusky 

Yeah, yeah, nice to feel that freedom. Well, I wonder as we come towards the end of our conversation, if there's somebody else, perhaps not necessarily just in music, maybe just in a kind of creative situation, who would be considering following a similar path to you, what advice would you give them?

Emily Doolittle

I mean, I guess my advice is to be friendly and curious and meet a lot of people and see what possibilities are there. I think, you know, it is. You know, I said earlier that it's very important to be stubborn, and I think it's very important to be stubborn, but not in the sense of if you knock on one door and it doesn't open, keep banging on that door. That's not going to help you.

It's more in the sense of like always looking for new connections and new possibilities. And I know a number of times in my life I've sort of been in a situation where, you know, maybe there were several things I wanted to do and one of them seemed to be happening quite easily and the other one, the doors seemed to be closed. And I think it's always good to like go where the current is taking you. 

There was an article written a few years ago by a poet named Kim Liao called Why You Should Aim for 100 Rejections a Year. And she was talking about her process of just sending out 100 poems to literary journals every year. And I sort of adopted that idea for my own work. And of course, different fields are different. There's no way I could write a hundred grant applications a year. And I've never aimed for that. But I do try to, I would say every year I aim for like applying for a hundred things, but I count that very broadly. So it could be just if a friend says, hey, do you have a piece for piano and just giving them a PDF of the piece I already have or whatever it is. So I count very small wins, the same as I count a big grant application.

I've never made it to 100. The most I've ever done is 67. Some years, I'm already quite busy and I don't send anything out because I don't actually want more projects. But I think the general idea that if I'm feeling isolated, instead of sitting at home feeling sorry for myself because I don't have a project, just get out there and try to make connections but don't get too hung up on any one. It's more like getting your work out there and seeing what it connects with. And maybe it won't, you know, maybe you'll send your piece to somebody and they're just not interested. That's totally fine. There's no way anybody's going to be interested in everything. And it doesn't mean there's anything wrong with that person or anything wrong with you. You're just setting up the possibilities to make the connections that, you know, that could or could not spark and lead to something in the future. 

So I think that's very important for me in my approach, but I also just want to acknowledge that we are living during really difficult times where, you know, I feel like even 10 years ago there was more funding and food was cheaper and people were maybe financially a little bit more secure. So I want to say that advice has been really important for me and I think it will be quite important for other people too, while acknowledging that it's also not going to be possible or good advice for everybody. And we need better arts funding and infrastructure for everybody.

Sarah McLusky 

Yeah, well, I think the good advice, but also as you say, with that caveat for the current situations that we're in. So I think it just remains to say thank you very much for taking the time to come along and tell us about your story.

Emily Doolittle 

Thanks so much. It's been great chatting with you.

Podcast Outro

If you’ve been inspired by this podcast head over to our LinkedIn page and tell us about your biggest takeaways. You’ll find a link in the show notes or search for Academic Adventures podcast.

This podcast was a collaboration between the University of the West of Scotland, Converge and Sarah McLusky. The podcast team includes Orla Kelly, Adam Kosterka, Jen Black and me, Sarah McLusky. The Academic Adventures Podcast is proudly supported by the Scottish Ecosystem Fund 2023-24.