Music professor marches to a different beat

University professors often speak of the fascinating lives they lead in and out of academia. But only music professor Peter Jeffery GS '80 can claim to have learned his love of Gregorian chant from his former monk-in-training father, debunked a document alleging homosexuality among Jesus' disciples and sued the Smashing Pumpkins.

Jeffery also teaches both a writing seminar and a regular class on music and spiritual experience, all while earning glowing reviews from his students. "In short, I do too much," he said.

"He really is a phenomenal guy," said Jeffrey Fardink '09, who took Jeffery's writing seminar last fall. "He always had an in-depth answer and always went out of his way to help me."

Jeffery also had a very approachable and unique teaching style, Fardink said. "He wouldn't let social norms or practices get in the way of teaching. We once asked him what the etymology of f—k was, and he gladly shared that with us."

His teaching this year centers on different world civilizations and their use of music to construct spiritual experiences. Noting that spiritual experience encompasses more than just religion, Jeffery explained that "some cultures [believe] music can put you in touch with the gods or the spiritual ... [and that] music is a way to call up or create emotion."

His music course also discusses gods of music in various mythologies, from shamans to Apollo to Woody Guthrie and, yes, Elvis, "the one who didn't die and appears from time to time, lending people money," Jeffery said.

While much of the material may seem open to interpretation, Jeffery said he examines it from an academic and musically rigorous perspective. "There's all kinds of baloney out there, from pop culture and from academics that don't know a lot about music," Jeffery said.

His main scholarly interest, however, is Gregorian chant, the music of the medieval Western church. He also studies several other types of chants, including that of the Ethiopian national church.

Jeffery said he has loved the chant his whole life, explaining that his parents' taste in music greatly influenced him.

His father "tried out as a monk but didn't make it, partly because they didn't think he was good enough to sing in the choir." His parents met while rehearsing a requiem mass at the Friendship House in Harlem, an organization that aided poor urban blacks before the civil rights era. Their love for church music has stuck with him since childhood.

Jeffery is also interested in language, because "chant is the musical performance of a holy text, and that kind of music is very connected to the language, because the performance is very connected to the text," he said.

In the fall, he will publish a new book entitled, "The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex, Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery." In it, he argues that an alleged fragment of the "Secret Gospel of Mark," supposedly discovered by a Columbia professor, is fake.

"This guy in about 1973 published a text that said ... Jesus initiated his disciples through acts of homosexual intercourse," which caused a great deal of controversy but was never either refuted or proven by scholars, Jeffery said.

Jeffery, however, approached the text from his perspective as a musical historian and conclusively refuted it. Because "everything it says about the early Christian liturgy is utterly nonsensical, it can't be made to fit into the history," he said.

Jeffery said that it took more than 30 years to debunk the text because the study of rituals is complicated, involving a high degree of non-textual interpretation.

As his personal metaphor for scholarship and teaching, Jeffery said he believes in the concept of "the cloud of unknowing," first proposed by a 14th-century English monk, in which humans are enveloped in a lack of knowledge that they cannot penetrate.

In classes, Jeffery and his students "face together our lack of knowledge and look at things we don't know," he said. "What's on the other side of the cloud is truth, the ultimate knowledge, whatever it is."

His multifaceted approach to music scholarship stems from an early age, when Jeffery dreamed of becoming a composer. "By the time I was in college, though, it was clear I should be a music historian," he said.

He applied to several graduate schools and came to Princeton because he was told it was the best place to study music history. After graduating in 1980, Jeffery held a host of other jobs before returning as a professor in 1993.

In 1999, he gained notoriety for suing the Smashing Pumpkins, claiming his hearing was permanently damaged at a 1997 concert.