Sigma Alpha Iota

Summer 2021 8 P A N P I P E S In the fall of 2020, SAI sisters Melissa Smith and Melanie Katz of the Nu Alpha chapter at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) began the chapter's first ever series of themed Spotify playlists. The goal was to further spread the joy of music and awareness over many different genres. The playlists have covered several different topics, including new beginnings, Hispanic women in music, girl power, home, and Claudia Rankine's poem Weather. Our playlist for the month of April was "Spring Days" and is a playlist made by our ten newly initiated members. Melissa and Melanie found that the "Girl Power" playlist was the most impactful due to our collaboration with the Iota Omicron Chapter of Sigma Alpha Iota at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Female empowerment is very important to our chapter, and being able to collaborate and embrace that idea with Iota Omicron was a refreshing experience. Our work with Iota Omicron began through the power of Instagram. After they commented on one of our posts about the playlists, we reached out to them about creating a playlist together. The "Girl Power" playlist was the result. In general, the song selection process typically occurs through a Google form that we distribute to our chapter. In this case, the form was also sent to Iota Omicron. Everyone's songs were added to the playlist, because we believe that everyone's musical tastes matter. Surprisingly, we rarely get multiple submissions of the same song. We love to see a wide variety of genres, so we try to include as much music as we can. Originally, the social committee would present the chapter with the theme of the month; it has now evolved to the chapter nominating and voting on themes. We purposely select broad topics, as we believe that music is powerful enough to speak for itself. A great example of this is our "Weather" playlist in collaboration with the Artivism Project (learn more at: artscomm.tcnj.edu/ the-artivism-project). This playlist was inspired by Claudia Rankine's poem of the same name. This is a great example of how, while the playlist was directly inspired by a specific work, we were able to bring together a wide variety of music. We had everything from Ariana Grande's raindrops (an angel cried) to Childish Gambino's This Is America. One of the first playlists that gained a large positive response was our "Hispanic Women in Music" playlist, in celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month. In this playlist, we highlighted many talented Hispanic women musicians and artists — including Paloma Mami, Ximena Sariñana, Jennifer Lopez, Lola Beltrán — and we received a lot of praise on social media in response. We hope to continue highlighting women of color in the music industry in our future playlists. When asked what these playlists mean to her, our 2020-2021 chapter president Kaitlyn Canneto expressed the following, "In a primarily virtual semester, continuing our mission to spread music is rather limited. A widely-used platform, like Spotify, affords us the outlet of creativity and a vehicle to share our musical interests. What I enjoy about each playlist is the ability to explore the varied musical and artistic interests of our members, to both see beyond their own repertoire and convey this to the community. They inspire me to share my interests as well as expand my own listening, too!" Our chapter hopes to continue creating these playlists to share with all of our sisters, the campus community, and other chapters. In the future we hope that our collaborations will expand to many different recognized student organizations at TCNJ. The response has been overwhelmingly positive thus far, and we are so excited to create more! For more information on all of our playlists, please visit and follow our official Instagram account: @sai_nualpha and follow our Spotify account: @Sigma Alpha Iota-Nu Alpha — Mandy Spratt, Editor, Nu Alpha Chapter Sisters Sharing Music with Spotify MUSIC NOTES

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