Mayday Group

For the next several months, this feature of the website will reprint the collection of short articles that first appeared 10 years ago in Ecclectica. The collection was edited by Wayne Bowman, and published online by Brandon University; this particular issue explored the topic, “The Future of Music Study in Canada.” Contributing authors to this collection represent a diverse range of music scholarship and interests. The MayDay Group obtained permission to reprint these articles from Ecclectica and the various authors for the purpose of discussing the ways music in higher ed has changed since these articles were written ten years ago. The original publication may be viewed at http://ecclectica.brandonu.ca/issues/2006/2/Read.ecc.asp This month’s article from the above collection is by R. Murray Shafer and is the 13th installment from Ecclectica to be featured on the MayDay Group website: Discussion of the Month.

Our hope is that as you read, you will think about what has changed in the past ten years, what may not have changed at all or very much, and where there are signs of shifts in both thinking and practice. While the Ecclectica issue dealt primarily with music in higher education in Canada, the issues, we believe are common to higher music studies in other parts of the world, and this reprint seems timely given the 2014 report from the College Music Society calling for sweeping changes in the approach to undergraduate education in music. Please take a moment after you read to share your thoughts, so that we may generate the kinds of discussions that will lead to the kinds of changes the original Ecclectica authors call for.

Humility, Creativity, and the Music of the Future

R. Murray Schafer, Composer, Educator

I have no idea how the world should be educated. Each culture has its own targets for citizenship and develops a curriculum to meet those objectives. Those who disagree with the objectives will have a rough time in school. I spent years in school trying to get out. It seemed to me that too much time was devoted to answering questions that no one had asked while the real questions slid by unanswered. Plato taught that there was an answer to every question. Socrates taught that there was a question to every answer, but that was something my teachers didn’t seem to want to deal with. For that reason I never completed my education but set out to travel the world and educate myself. Unfortunately, as Ivan Illich pointed out, the effect of universal education is to make the autodidact unemployable.

It was only after many years of traveling, first as a sailor, then a journalist, a broadcaster and a composer that I began to question seriously why my life at school had been so futile. The failure of the music program concerned me in particular because I had musical talent (I played piano and sang in a choir) and had eventually adopted music as my vocation.

When the Canadian Music Centre initiated its John Adaskin Music Program, in which composers were invited to visit schools to work with children and young people, I was one of the first to apply. After visiting several schools, I could see clearly what was missing: creativity. In art classes original paintings were produced and in literature classes original stories and poems were written, but the music scene was dominated by the concert band or the jazz band playing classical arrangements of music that wasn’t even written in Canada let alone in the school.

There was during this period (the 1960s) a wave of activity internationally that was encouraging creativity in music education in music education. The Manhattanville Music Curriculum Project was active in the United States and in England composers like John Paynter, George Self and Peter Maxwell Davies had penetrated classrooms and were writing music for and with young musicians. I shared their ideas and wrote a series of little books about my own experiences. The books were descriptive, not prescriptive. You can’t tell people how to become creative but you can reveal the excitement of creative activity and hope that it may encourage them to try something on their own. Allowing people to become creative does not require genius; it requires humility.

Above my desk I wrote some maxims to keep myself in line:

The first practical step in any educational reform is to take it.
In education, failures are more important than successes. There is nothing so dismal as a success story.
Teach on the verge of peril.
There are no more teachers. There is just a community of learners.
Do not design a philosophy of education for others. Design one for yourself. A few others may wish to share it with you.
For the 5-year-old, art is life and life is art. For the 6-year-old, life is life and art is art. The first year in school is a watershed in the child’s history: a trauma.
The old approach: Teacher has information; student has empty head. Teacher’s objective: to push information into student’s empty head. Observation: at outset teacher is a fathead; at conclusion student is a fathead.
On the contrary a class should be an hour of a thousand discoveries. For this to happen, the teacher and the student should first discover one another.
Why is it that the only people who never matriculate from their own courses are teachers?
Always teach provisionally: only God knows for sure.
At the time of these thoughts and activities (1970s), it seemed that a revolution was just around the corner, but it didn’t happen. Instead music education programs in Canada and the USA pioneered backwards. My own work in music education moved into other countries and cultures: South America and Japan. In South America there was no money for music so teachers had to use their imaginations. “Tomorrow I want each of you to bring an interesting sound to class,” I would say, and the next day a whole flood of sound and noise-makers would fill the room. This became our orchestra and we could produce free improvisations or create rondos and fugues with what we had just as with violins and clarinets – better probably, because we were unconcerned about the safety of expensive instruments.

In Japan the word for music is ongaku, and it means simply “beautiful sounds”. Not only music but the singing of birds, the splashing of water and the chirping of crickets can be ongaku, which opens the subject out to include the soundscape, giving our ears a completely new field to investigate.

Sometimes I think that music programs in Canada are crippled by affluence. How many times have I entered a classroom and the proud teacher points out all the instruments lined up against the wall, the loudspeakers, the amplifiers, the CD players… But the problem with flutes and trumpets and violins is that all you can do is to learn how to play them, and that takes years. A very expensive music education program has been erected in the form of a triangle in which the base line is all those enrolled in the program and the apex is the professional performer/teacher, or, in a very few cases, the genius who will make the school famous.

“Show Uncle Murray your flute,” my brother’s wife said to her daughter, just entering high school. She brought it out and took it out of the box. “Can you play it?” I asked. “Not yet.” And she left the music program a year later. Too many people have been fooled into believing that if it is expensive, the music program must be good. Those who don’t learn to master those expensive tools will slip down to the category of consumers to help the recording industries get richer. That, I think, is the problem music education faces in Canada today.

Can we learn to do more with less? I think so, and there are many people in various countries who are demonstrating how this might be accomplished through new approaches to music making, music teaching, and music learning.

In one of my little pieces for young players (Minimusic), I included this line: “MUSIC IS NOT TO BE LISTENED TO. MUSIC IS LISTENING TO US.” That is, the perfect world is listening to the imperfect world and is inviting us to go further, delve deeper and reach higher in creating the music of the future.

For the next several months, this feature of the website will reprint the collection of short articles that first appeared 10 years ago in Ecclectica. The collection was edited by Wayne Bowman, and published online by Brandon University; this particular issue explored the topic, “The Future of Music Study in Canada.” Contributing authors to this collection represent a diverse range of music scholarship and interests. The MayDay Group obtained permission to reprint these articles from Ecclectica and the various authors for the purpose of discussing the ways music in higher ed has changed since these articles were written ten years ago. The original publication may be viewed at http://ecclectica.brandonu.ca/issues/2006/2/Read.ecc.asp This month’s article from the above collection is by Gary Kulesha and is the 12th installment from Ecclectica to be featured on the MayDay Group website: Discussion of the Month.

Our hope is that as you read, you will think about what has changed in the past ten years, what may not have changed at all or very much, and where there are signs of shifts in both thinking and practice. While the Ecclectica issue dealt primarily with music in higher education in Canada, the issues, we believe are common to higher music studies in other parts of the world, and this reprint seems timely given the 2014 report from the College Music Society calling for sweeping changes in the approach to undergraduate education in music. Please take a moment after you read to share your thoughts, so that we may generate the kinds of discussions that will lead to the kinds of changes the original Ecclectica authors call for.

High Art or Trend and Trade? Some Thoughts on Future Music Studies in Canada

Gary Kulesha, University of Toronto

It is impossible to speculate on the future of music education at Canadian Universities without offering observations on the future of music itself. A cursory glance at the history of music in Canadian schools (and at universities throughout the world) reveals a close relationship between the prevailing musical concerns of the time and the content of the offerings at the schools. In the early 20th century, the inherited aesthetics of the French and English strands of our heritage dominated composition training at schools in Quebec and English Canada, while by the 1950s, serialism and modernism were the dominant concerns at most schools. The creation of regional orchestras in Canada created a clear need for properly schooled performers. The recognition of education itself as a separate discipline, and the growing demand for well-trained teachers, led to the creation of Music Education divisions within virtually every Canadian university.

The second part of the 20th century, however, changed many of the inherited paradigms. In particular, the sudden rise of commercial music caused a complicated ripple which has not yet subsided. The trendiness of world music in the popular and film worlds moved musical anthropology from a purely academic concern into a practical study. Even the study of History and Literature grew to include the rather nebulous area of “culture,” and the traditional focus of study broadened dramatically.

The voracious demands of the commercial world led to the rise of the community colleges, where music programmes were designed openly to be “trade school” programmes. Universities, long the bastion of “pure” research, were pressured by newly-elected capitalist provincial governments, to demonstrate “real world viability” in their programmes, and the lines between community college and university music programmes blurred. The abrupt cessation of generous funding for ensembles, combined with a sudden spurt of growth in musical theatre, called traditional performance training into question. The unpredictable ebb and flow of educational funding rendered many students who had chosen to pursue music education as a path uncertain whether or not they would be able to find jobs. Even History/Literature/Culture divisions had trouble keeping up with the demands of an increasingly multi-cultural society in which political (and therefore financial) necessity dictated a shift in focus. And to add to the confusion, the new areas of music therapy and bioacoustics crossed lines not just within the discipline, but with other areas of study as well.

However the future of musical study evolves, there is one question that no school of music can ignore: have the fundamental elements of music-making changed? A second part of this question is: how far should schools of music, and in particular universities, go towards adapting to what seem to be changing demands in the “real world”?

Traditionally, since the beginnings of Western Art Music, music has been taught as a sequential mastering of technique. Every area of the study of Western Art Music has been shaped by a platform-based approach—each new level of mastery opens the door to the next. The dramatic impact of computer-based music has threatened this tradition. Computer software can now leap-frog many of the basic elements of fundamental training. Anyone with access to relatively powerful computers (that is, virtually everyone) can compose music, orchestrate it, perform it, record it, and even distribute it. There are many people on staff at many schools who believe that this renders traditional training obsolete. They argue that, given the success of musicians who cannot even read music in the pop and film worlds, it is unnecessary for students to master traditional methods first. In a very real sense, this attitude represents a fallout from the explosion of creativity in the 1960s, when, driven first by the philosophical teaching of John Cage, and then by the undeniably vibrant creativity of the then-new pop world, creativity was celebrated as an end in itself. Where such conditions prevail, knowledge of traditional methods and standard repertoire become irrelevant. Discovery and raw creativity become paramount, replacing traditional approaches to music making.

There may be some interesting lessons to be learned from the field of jazz. Jazz began in exactly this way at the beginning of the 20th century. Originally a discipline learned by rote and apprenticeship (much in the manner of many forms of world music), jazz emerged as a major commercial force in the 1930s and 1940s. By the time of its commercial viability, its nature as an indigenous art form had been expanded, and it had become a mainstream activity, largely as a result of a combination of its commercial exposure and of the interest many Western Art Music composers took in it. By the 1950s, it had become a discipline, demanding serious training for both performers and composers, as well as commanding respect as an area for research. Within 20 years, it had become a degree course of study in many of the major universities in North America.

Jazz, however, is still not universally accepted as an academic discipline, and encounters considerable resistance in many schools. The reasons are manifold and complex. Is jazz, as is argued by many of its academic critics, simply too narrow a field to be acceptable as a course of study at a university? Is jazz obsolete? Is the primary purpose of jazz study to create commercial performers? Is jazz more suitably taught as a “trade”? Should jazz be taught at all? Should it not revert to being learned in its performance environment?

Many of these same questions bedevil the future of all music. Is pop too narrow a field for serious study? Is classical music obsolete? Is the primary purpose of study at a university to create teachers to fill jobs? Is historical and cultural research more suitably taught as an academic pursuit within the departments of history, culture, and anthropology? Should world music be taught at all? Should it not revert to being learned in its performance (and social) environment?

Why do students come to study music at a university music school at all? Before changes are made to the academic structure based upon assumptions and prejudices, it is worthwhile reviewing the motivation of incoming students. It is also incumbent upon staff teachers to reflect upon their own reasons for becoming musicians, and, perhaps more to the point, the path they took to their own success (assuming that teaching at a university is in some measure an indication of success.)

Performers come to school to learn to play their instrument, and to learn its repertoire. This has not changed in several hundred years. A violinist, for example, comes to a school to work with a specific teacher, a time-honoured approach to apprenticeship. They are drawn to this activity and the university environment not by bluegrass fiddle music or Acadian fiddling, but by the repertoire that has shaped their instrument in the Western Art Music tradition. They may well have interests in other musics, but their primary focus is to learn the established canon for their instrument. Taking part in jazz or world music ensembles enriches their experience, but for most, it is an addendum to their main course of study. Any performer seriously interested in studying genuine world music would certainly not chose to do so at a Canadian university; he or she would go to the sources of these musics. Pop remains a largely rote-learned style, and can be learned only in a performance situation. Pop musicians often enroll in classical institutions, generally in the interest of expanding their abilities in their own field through the study of Western Art Music.

Perhaps most telling, students from all over the world, from a vast number of different cultural backgrounds, continue to compete for places in Canadian universities to study Western Art Music. These are often students who have already completed study in their own traditional practices who are nevertheless committed to acquiring the skills of Western Art Music. These students are not interested in pop music or world music: They come for a clear and strict background in traditional classical music. Students are often amused (although they rarely speak out) at the ignorance of the professors who are attempting to teach them pop or world music. There is something to be learned from a student from Tehran giving a piano recital which includes impeccably played Brahms, Mozart, and their own compositions, which sound far more like Shostakovich than Iranian music.

It is urgent that teachers, sometimes misled by excitement at new discoveries, or, more bleakly, by simple boredom, recognize that ignorance is not freedom. Their own path unquestionably included strict inculcation into the traditions of Western Art Music, and they were free to embrace or reject these traditions in later life. Denying students this same right is arrogant, shortsighted, and self-indulgent. Intimidating as it may seem, the manifold basic elements of music making remain the same, and the study of these basic skills is arduous and long. But all students want these skills. Students universally want to know what their teachers know. However they choose to use their skills, they are shaped first and foremost by a passion for music, and the basic elements of music remain constant. The expansion of music’s horizons will bring new layers of study, and will imply exciting new possibilities, but training in the fundamental historical skills must remain central to any university’s music programme. The future of music study at Canadian universities will encompass more and more new areas, but, if teachers continue to respect the needs of their students and remain inspired by their own activities, the threat of music study becoming simple trade–schooling can be abated.

For the next several months, this feature of the website will reprint the collection of short articles that first appeared 10 years ago in Ecclectica. The collection was edited by Wayne Bowman, and published online by Brandon University; this particular issue explored the topic, “The Future of Music Study in Canada.” Contributing authors to this collection represent a diverse range of music scholarship and interests. The MayDay Group obtained permission to reprint these articles from Ecclectica and the various authors for the purpose of discussing the ways music in higher ed has changed since these articles were written ten years ago. The original publication may be viewed at http://ecclectica.brandonu.ca/issues/2006/2/Read.ecc.asp This month’s article from the above collection is by Canadian freelance composer/musician Tim Brady and is the 11th installment from Ecclectica to be featured on the MayDay Group website: Discussion of the Month.

Our hope is that as you read, you will think about what has changed in the past ten years, what may not have changed at all or very much, and where there are signs of shifts in both thinking and practice. While the Ecclectica issue dealt primarily with music in higher education in Canada, the issues, we believe are common to higher music studies in other parts of the world, and this reprint seems timely given the 2014 report from the College Music Society calling for sweeping changes in the approach to undergraduate education in music. Please take a moment after you read to share your thoughts, so that we may generate the kinds of discussions that will lead to the kinds of changes the original Ecclectica authors call for.

Ask more and better questions

Tim Brady, Freelance Composer/Performer/Producer in Montreal

Twenty-six years ago, when I finished my formal music education (a Master of Music in jazz and composition from New England Conservatory of Music, Boston) I said, “That’s it, no more music schools for me! I’m out of here!”

Twenty-six years later I am still a freelance composer/performer/producer with no teaching activities and no links to academia.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit I had a great time in music school, both at the undergraduate level (Concordia University, Montreal) and later at graduate school. I was an absolutely insatiable student, always doing more work than necessary, asking teachers for extra information on different composers and different music, pushing myself to my musical and academic limits. I was, as they say, a “suck,” a best-marks-in-the-class kind of guy. But not too annoying, I hope. Music school was one the of the most influential experiences of my life, because I spent four years doing nothing but eating, thinking, sleeping, dreaming, playing, composing and listening to music.

So why would I make such a determined effort to leave the environment that had given me so much? I can see several reasons. The two most obvious to me at the time were:

1. I wanted to be famous. University professors aren’t famous.
2. I wanted to play and compose music all the time. University professors have to fit these activities around their teaching schedule.

A quarter of a century later, I would add the following reasons to my list:

3. I have a fierce independent streak, which is probably poorly suited to the necessary requirements of “fitting in” to the university structure.
4. I have a strong belief that music, especially creative concert music of all forms, must establish a direct connection to society. A university composer is, first and foremost a teacher, in terms of his/her social role (how people and the government classify him/her). A freelance concert music composer, though admittedly a very obscure social position, is nonetheless 100% a creative artist in terms of social function. This feels like a considerable difference to me.
5. I have a strong organisational/entrepreneurial streak which the freelance milieu has allowed me (in fact, forced me) to develop. I love organising things – recording, tours, festivals, concerts, associations, whatever. But (relating to point three, above) they have to be MY things: it is all about bringing my vision of music (both in terms of notes on the page and larger social perspective) into being. Quite frankly, I’ve never been able to get excited about anything else than doing what I want to do.

So, unlike the other musicians writing for this issue of Ecclectica, my relationship to music studies is somewhat removed. I do, on occasion, give workshops in universities when I am on tour. And I also work with high school students every once in a while on creative music projects.

But I am always there in a capacity of creative artist, never teacher. So I do not know the intimate details of the day to day organising and running a music school, or even what it is like to teach a regular studio of students. From what I have seen, it can be very stimulating and exciting, and lots of hard work. It can also be annoying and boring and endlessly tedious. But the same can be said of the life of a freelancer: ah, the joys of doing twenty-five different grants applications a year!!

So my comments should be viewed from this perspective.

As I see it, music schools have two functions: technical training and creative training.

There is no hard and fast border between the two, but most of us can understand that learning your scales and species counterpoint is part of technical training, while trying to understand the formal and emotional complexities of a Beethoven symphony or a South Indian Raga are part of creative training.

Technical training issues are somewhat easier to grapple with (at least on the surface). If we want good violinists in the Western classical tradition, we need to focus on good violin technique in the Western classical tradition. As the joke goes:

Young violinist on the streets of New York asks policeman for directions:
“How do I get to Carnegie Hall?”
Policeman: “Practice, practice, practice!”

The question is: what technical training do universities want to give? Do we want more violinists in the Western classical tradition? Do weneed them? Do we want more orchestral composers? Do we need them? Do we need more film composers? More jazz piano players? More improvising viola players? More concert sitar and tabla players?

I believe that the university milieu should try to offer the absolute best technical training in as many areas as possible. Young artists need the tools to develop. But universities cannot, collectively, decide what tools artists need or don’t need. So there should be no question of limiting what is considered “necessary” or not. All serious, intensive, focused music study is of great value.

But not all universities can offer all studies. I think a key to creating a balanced and dynamic music education system in Canada is for universities to be in constant communication. Who offers what programme? What is our strength? What are our weaknesses?

Here in Montreal, we have four university-based music schools, plus the Conservatoire du Québec. They have each developed very different characters and specialties, which gives young musicians in Montreal an enviable choice. It also creates a healthy, balanced musical and educational ecosystem.

Some schools are more traditional and academic, some are more open and experimental, but young artists can find the training they need. It is not uncommon for a young student to move from one school to another over the course of studies, before finding an appropriate match between her or his own artistic “voice” and the school that best supports it.

So I would strongly urge all Canadian music schools to work together, to understand that the country needs a scope of serious, artistic training to be available to young artists. Serious, concentrated, in-depth music study is what we need.

A related point: Ignore market forces as much as possible. Market forces are always “after the fact”: By the time we feel them, the shift is always on to the next trend. It’s a mug’s game. This week they say “film music is the future,” and “the orchestra is dead.” Next week it’s something else. Attempt to build serious music studies around market forces and you are dead (or soon will be). Art follows its own rhythm, generally slower and a bit ahead of society.

In fact, there are an increasing number of two-year technical programmes for music-industry related studies. This is a very positive development: exactly what we need. These institutions can focus on “market-force” driven, industrial-arts needs. Society needs this music and commercial art to be properly taught. But universities are not the place for it: they are too heavy, too ponderous, too reflective.

I think the university should be about the intense, serious study of art and art techniques. The commercially driven world will always take care of itself, just as it always has.

But if we are going to ignore the outside forces, what are we studying? This brings me to my second concern: creative training.

The point of a good university education should be to leave with more, and better, questions than you came in with; and, yes, some good technical training as well. But a good education means that you start asking serious questions about your art, your society and yourself. And, eventually, you start finding your own answers.

This is a long process, and far more difficult to quantify or control than technical studies. But I believe this approach to creative music making needs to be part of the overall vision of university music training.

Most great teachers have an instinct for this. They realise they are not there to grind out cookie-cutter copies of this violinist or this composer, but rather to nurture the unique strengths of each student.

In fact, as digital technology pushes our society to seemingly greater heights of duplication and conformity, it is this creative training which will become of even great value to students.

Digital machinery has already replaced hundreds of thousands of musicians, from a technical and commercial perspective. So why do we keep training musicians, when machines can do most of their work?

The answer lies in the creative nature of human music making. And I think we need to constantly reinforce that music making is a creative, not just a technical pursuit. Machines can now do it better, faster, cheaper. We have already lost that one.

But we have also won. Machines can do it better, faster, cheaper, but young artists are still drawn to live music making with humans. Why? Because making music with other humans has a history of over 50,000 years in our collective experience, and machines cannot replace this. Music creates a special bond of time and place among humans that can only be created by humans.

The creative nature of human interaction that is the act of music making is our strength. It is what we are good at. It is why it still matters. Technology has made its point: machines can now make music. But we still prefer humans, because it is not just about playing the notes, or about making the right noises at the right time. Machines can do that.

We need to understand and approach music studies as a truly human expression of our creative potential. This spirit of human creativity should be at the forefront of music education: not just for composers or improvisers but for all fields. Western classical repertoire, ethnomusicology, whatever. Ask questions. Ask some more. If we follow the basic principle that serious music studies are a doorway to human potential, then the other issues fall into place. Ask questions. Ask some more.

Hello and welcome! For the next several months, this feature of the website will reprint the collection of short articles that first appeared 10 years ago in Ecclectica. The collection was edited by Wayne Bowman, and published online by Brandon University; this particular issue explored the topic, “The Future of Music Study in Canada.” Contributing authors to this collection represent a diverse range of music scholarship and interests. The MayDay Group obtained permission to reprint these articles from Ecclectica and the various authors for the purpose of discussing the ways music in higher ed has changed since these articles were written ten years ago. The original publication may be viewed at http://ecclectica.brandonu.ca/issues/2006/2/Read.ecc.asp This month’s article from the above collection is by Canadian music educator Paul Woodford, and is the tenth installment from Ecclectica to be featured on the MayDay Group website: Discussion of the Month.

Our hope is that as you read, you will think about what has changed in the past ten years, what may not have changed at all or very much, and where there are signs of shifts in both thinking and practice. While the Ecclectica issue dealt primarily with music in higher education in Canada, the issues, we believe are common to higher music studies in other parts of the world, and this reprint seems timely given the 2014 report from the College Music Society calling for sweeping changes in the approach to undergraduate education in music. Please take a moment after you read to share your thoughts, so that we may generate the kinds of discussions that will lead to the kinds of changes the original Ecclectica authors call for.

Toward Revisioning Music Studies in Canada’s Universities

Paul Woodford, The University of Western Ontario

As Wayne Bowman observed in his invitation to participate in this special edition of Ecclectica on the future of university music studies in Canada, “In an era of rupture variously characterized as postmodern, poststructural, postcolonial, and postclassical, what often appears most striking about university music schools is their uninterrupted continuity with their pasts.” Some important strides have been made of late in diversifying undergraduate programs and curricula, but for the most part our university schools of music look much the same today as they did when I was an undergraduate in the 1970s. Bands, orchestras and choirs continue to be a mainstay of undergraduate performance and music education programs, endlessly replicating the same or similar repertoire, while traditional music theory and history courses based on the western musical canon and related practices (such as ear training and harmonic analysis) remain privileged in undergraduate programs. Jazz, popular, and world music courses are now more available to students than was the case in my youth (if they were available at all). However, those courses are sometimes restricted to history majors or relegated to the status of elective for other majors. For most students there probably isn’t time or opportunity to take more than a smattering of those courses, which means that they eventually graduate knowing relatively little about the remarkable breadth and diversity of musical culture.

And as for music teacher education, those programs continue to emphasize performance-based methods over all else. There is little room in the typical music teacher education program, or indeed in most undergraduate music programs, for the study of philosophy, sociology, politics, popular culture, history, world religions, or the other arts, all of which can help undergraduates become informed and thoughtful musicians and teachers who can relate what they learn about music and education to the wider world. But then, the goal of the typical honours Bachelor of Music program is the training of skilled professionals and not the preparation of broadly educated citizen-musicians who can cope with real world problems and situations involving uncertainty, uniqueness, and value conflict. The emphasis in undergraduate programs continues to be on passive acceptance and reproduction of expert knowledge and not intellectual engagement with the social world of music.

This continued narrowness of purpose and vision is apparent not just in our curricula but also in the self-imposed physical and social isolation of university schools of music from other faculties and disciplines and in our teaching styles. There usually isn’t much social intercourse at Canadian universities between music faculty and representatives from other disciplines. In consequence, music faculty and students are often ill-informed about (or perhaps just uninterested in) current issues and wider academic debates within the university (such as, for example, corporate funding of research and programs that many fear will undermine the very idea of public education). Further, and while academics in other disciplines sometimes engage in wider artistic debates within the public sphere, music academics tend to have little to say to the public, this despite music’s “commercial primacy…among the arts” (Adorno, 1949/2006, p. xiv; see also Barber, 1996). Nor are music faculty generally known for their involvement in university governance, a fact that leaves them vulnerable in times of government fiscal retrenchment and educational reform. Music faculty prefer to keep their heads down, avoiding politics.

In all too many respects university schools of music operate like medieval monasteries or convents in which peace and tranquility reigned but dissent was seldom tolerated. Undergraduate music students are seldom expected to express informed opinions in their classes, to respectfully question the authority of their teachers and of tradition, or to publicly participate in and evaluate arguments. It is thus no wonder that graduates of our programs are often ill-equipped and disinclined to participate in public and professional debates about, for example, social and educational policy affecting them (Woodford, 2005). Faculty are similarly discouraged from questioning administrative decisions (although individual faculty are by no means always paragons of virtue either). In this respect, though, schools of music are perhaps not so different from their counterparts in other disciplines and fields. Western universities are often thought to be places in which reason and democracy prevail; but in reality, at least at the administrative level, they can be positively feudal in nature.

Although one might think that music undergraduates would resent their social isolation and perceived lack of freedom to question and challenge authority, many probably prefer the status quo because it affords them escape from the messiness and unpleasantness of reality. High school music teachers should shoulder some of the blame for this escapist attitude because their grades are often unrealistically high compared to teachers of other school subjects, thus contributing to the belief that music is something that doesn’t require much study and hard work to achieve success, and because they encourage students to view music performance classes as a pleasant diversion from the drudgery of academic courses (Colwell, 2005). Ask first-year students why they chose music studies in university and you’re bound to get the responses “because it’s fun” or “job preparation” rather than the suggestion that it is something that really matters to society or is intellectually challenging. This is a troubling observation because, if correct, it suggests that many undergraduates fail to see university schools of music as places in which they should seek intellectual engagement (for more on this point see my chapter in The New Handbook of Research on Music Teaching and Learning, Colwell & Richardson, 2002). Fortunately, there are always undergraduates who do possess the right kind of attitude while others rise to the challenge as they mature and gain experience. And of course music undergraduates are not the only ones who view their university experience as mere vocational training. As Emberley (1996) observes, many university students only want “the practical information to acquire jobs” (p. 22). Intellectual passivity and conservatism are commonplace in universities.

If university schools of music are to realize their mandate to educate and not merely train students then they will have to confront these ideologies of fun and vocational training from the beginning, and especially in introductory history and theory courses wherein the teaching approach has traditionally been to stuff students’ heads with facts. From their first course, university students should be challenged to think of music as an evolving and open concept that is influenced by politics, religion, science, and the other humanities, and not as an isolated collection of facts, figures, practices, or methods to be passively accepted, memorized, and then regurgitated. Students should also be reminded constantly that methods and technique are only means to certain ends (there should be a reciprocal relation between them); that those ends are not necessarily always or only musical; and, further, that those ends should themselves be objects of considerable reflection, discussion, and debate, not just about their validity but also about our effectiveness in accomplishing them (Bowman, 2002).

Unfortunately, and for some of the reasons outlined above, this kind of reflection, discussion, and debate over means and ends rarely occurs in higher music education except perhaps at the level of narrow professional, technical, and sometimes musical goals. I thus welcome this special edition of Ecclectica as a stimulus to much needed reflection and debate about the purposes and roles of schools of music in contemporary society. Readers interested in learning more about my own contributions to this larger debate should consult my book Democracy and Music Education: Liberalism, Ethics and the Politics of Practice (Indiana University Press, 2005). As already suggested in this brief paper, one way of reinvigorating undergraduate music education is by reconceptualizing it as part of an inclusive, liberal music education in which moral, ethical, cultural, and political concerns come to the fore and in which students are challenged to realize their potential to contribute to the betterment of society. This involves introducing them to the diversity of music that exists while helping them to develop their own critical voices so that they can participate intelligently in the shaping of humane musical and other values. Viewed thusly, music academics and graduates of our programs are public servants and democratic leaders, not elite guardians of the classics.

Those guardians of righteousness among us who believe unequivocally in the superiority of the classics and who regard the inclusion of popular and so-called world music as a dumbing down of the curriculum won’t like my book. Perhaps the single greatest impediment to the broadening and deepening of university music curricula during the past decade was a lack of faculty renewal that left many universities populated by an aging and worn out professoriate that was often resistant to change. Long tenured and secure in their employment, too many older scholars were content to concentrate their resources on an elite few while ignoring the masses. In the current political context in which government is often swayed by public opinion, however, that is an increasingly dangerous strategy to pursue. Happily, Canadian universities are now hiring new and younger faculty who are invested in the future and who are already beginning to reinvigorate higher music education with their ideas, and particularly in the areas of popular music and media studies. I relish the prospect of working with them as we attempt to reshape university music programs while breaking down some of the barriers between school and society.

References

Adorno, T. W. (2006). Philosophy of new music (R. Hullot-Kentor, Trans. & Ed.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1949)

Barber, B. R. (1996). Jihad vs. mcworld: How globalism and tribalism are reshaping the world. New York: Ballantine Books.

Bowman, W. (2002). Educating musically. In Colwell, R., & Richardson, C. P. (Eds), The new handbook of research on music teaching and learning. New York: Oxford University Press.

Colwell, R. (2005). Can we be friends? Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 166, 75-91.

Emberley, P. C. (1996). Zero tolerance: Hot button politics in Canada’s universities. Toronto: Penguin Books.

Woodford, P. (2002). The social construction of music teacher identity in undergraduate music education majors. In Colwell, R., & Richardson, C. P. (Eds), The new handbook of research on music teaching and learning. New York: Oxford University Press.

———(2005). Democracy and music education: Liberalism, ethics, and the politics of practice. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Hello and welcome! For the next several months, this feature of the website will reprint the collection of short articles that first appeared 10 years ago in Ecclectica. The collection was edited by Wayne Bowman, and published online by Brandon University; this particular issue explored the topic, “The Future of Music Study in Canada.” Contributing authors to this collection represent a diverse range of music scholarship and interests. The MayDay Group obtained permission to reprint these articles from Ecclectica and the various authors for the purpose of discussing the ways music in higher ed has changed since these articles were written ten years ago. The original publication may be viewed at http://ecclectica.brandonu.ca/issues/2006/2/Read.ecc.asp This month’s article from the above collection is by Canadian jazz educator Paul Read, and is the eighth installment from Ecclectica to be featured on the MayDay Group website: Discussion of the Month.

Our hope is that as you read, you will think about what has changed in the past ten years, what may not have changed at all or very much, and where there are signs of shifts in both thinking and practice. While the Ecclectica issue dealt primarily with music in higher education in Canada, the issues, we believe are common to higher music studies in other parts of the world, and this reprint seems timely given the 2014 report from the College Music Society calling for sweeping changes in the approach to undergraduate education in music. Please take a moment after you read to share your thoughts, so that we may generate the kinds of discussions that will lead to the kinds of changes the original Ecclectica authors call for.

Music Studies in Canada: The Rob Bowman variations

Rob Bowman, Associate Professor of Music, York University

To my way of thinking, the ultimate goal of university education is to open up new ways to think about, understand and consequently interact with phenomena in the world, both natural and man made. For music, that means providing students with the cognitive and auditory skills to enrich their experience of music, both as listeners and players. The future I am going to describe is the one I envision to be desirable, not necessarily the one that I am confident will come to pass.

In the future, the best university music education will treat all musics on an even playing field. While there may be survey courses that look at various traditions such as jazz, rhythm and blues, Western art music, Eastern Art music, etc. as separate streams, there will also be courses that specifically engage with the interaction between these musics and that will look at commonalities across time and space. So, when discussing additive meters, examples will be drawn from South Asian classical music, Bartok, and Metallica. Similarly, a discussion of the use of timbre in the construction of musical meaning would ideally look at examples as diverse as Janis Joplin, John Cage, and Peking Opera singers and analyses of counterpoint will discuss not only Western species counterpoint but will also investigate contrapuntal activity in Balinese and Javanese gamelan ensembles, the Jefferson Airplane, and the Jimmy Giuffre 3. Whenever possible, small scale connections will also be made. In a class that is looking at a Bach oratorio, when the organ part ends with a sustained open 5th, a discussion should naturally note the affect that such a sound would have had in Bach’s day. Before pneumatic drills and airplanes existed, that open 5th would have sounded astonishingly loud, evoking the hammer of the Gods in the same way that amplified open 5th power chords do in heavy metal today.

Further, in an ideal university music curriculum all musical gestures should be grounded in both historical and social contexts, which means, essentially, the study of all musics will be taught from an ethnomusicological perspective. Issues such as class, race, gender, political economy, identity, space, place, and the body will be given equal time with the discussion of the sonic phenomena of music. Wherever possible, sound will be connected to social meaning.

The net effect of this kind of teaching will be to demystify music making as much as possible.

Where does all this leave performance? It is hard to imagine a music department where students don’t actually play music. The questions become: (1) What music should be played? and (2) How should it be taught (and by whom)?

At the moment, most music departments have performance courses in various styles and periods of Western Art Music although repertoire tends to be rooted in the musics of the 18th and 19th centuries. Many universities also have performance courses in jazz with repertoire concentrated on the styles of jazz that originated between 1940 and the mid-1960s. A few departments also offer various “world” music courses, providing the opportunity for music majors and sometimes non-majors to develop rudimentary knowledge and performing skills in one or another non-Western music traditions.

As someone who has devoted his life to the study of “popular” music, I get frightened when I hear people suggesting that we should develop performance courses in this area. The way performance has tended to be taught at the university level tends to turn whatever music is being studied into a mummified tradition with codified rules that often drains the style of much of its life, vitality, and relevance. I would hope for a future where instead of performance courses devoted to one or another historic repertoire, we develop performance courses that approach aspects of music making such as rhythm, improvisation, timbre, counterpoint, etc. in general. The concepts “learned” in these courses could then be applied by a given student to the performance of any kind of music. These courses would be in addition to first, and perhaps, second year, “musicianship” classes, which would also not be tradition-specific but instead would work on developing the student’s ear, time, pitch, and vocal facilities in ways that could be applicable to the performance of any kind of music. I would also encourage the continuation of introductory “world music” performance courses which allow students to explore traditions that are essentially foreign to them, the idea being that few if any of these students will become masters of these traditions but that they could, if they desire, use various aspects of these musics in whatever tradition in which they do perform.

Outside of classes where one or another aspect of music making that is theoretically relevant to any musical tradition is being studied, or where students are introduced to “foreign” traditions and ways of making music, rehearsal and performance spaces should be available for students to use for student-generated performance ensembles. These ensembles should be actively encouraged as a vital and essential but ungraded part of the life of a student in a university music program.

Linkages need to be made with the wider community outside of the university and, where possible, the introductory courses to various “world” musics referred to above could be taught by community-based practitioners. Perhaps the student-generated ensembles referred to above could also be encouraged to link up in various ways with community-based musicians outside of the university.

It is hard to know what to do with the idea of “composition” as part of the university music curriculum. I would think that practical courses should exist which teach students the mechanics of composing music for film, television, and commercials, and I am not against student-based composition workshops that would treat the writing of a fugue, a piece for a jazz quartet, or a pop song as having equal value. Such courses would probably have to be “supervised” by various faculty members who have expertise in different traditions.

I think that the ideal music department of the future will also have courses that actually prepare people for lives as professionals working with music. Such a curriculum would include courses that offer a thorough grounding in the practices of the music business and teach students how “the business” works differently for musicians performing within different traditions. It would also include courses that address the needs and skills of studio session musicians and would include courses that address such pragmatic skills as grant writing, touring, and cobbling together a living from various kinds of music-related activities helping to develop alternative and parallel careers to music performance (via radio work, DJing, writing about music, working for record companies, teaching, music therapy, etc.). I also think all music departments should have a professional level recording studio and all students should at least be exposed to the recording arts with a variety of courses being offered to allow students to develop the skills necessary to become professional engineers and/or producers. Perhaps music programs should actively attempt to place students each summer in apprentice-like work situations that would allow them to gain experience and make connections that might prove useful upon graduation.

Finally, in the future, music education courses will essentially provide the student with the skill sets necessary to develop and offer music programs for students in Grades K-12 that are modeled on the same values as the university curriculum outlined above.

Hello and welcome! For the next several months, this feature of the website will reprint the collection of short articles that first appeared 10 years ago in Ecclectica. The collection was edited by Wayne Bowman, and published online by Brandon University; this particular issue explored the topic, “The Future of Music Study in Canada.” Contributing authors to this collection represent a diverse range of music scholarship and interests. The MayDay Group obtained permission to reprint these articles from Ecclectica and the various authors for the purpose of discussing the ways music in higher ed has changed since these articles were written ten years ago. The original publication may be viewed at http://ecclectica.brandonu.ca/issues/2006/2/Read.ecc.asp This month’s article from the above collection is by Canadian jazz educator Paul Read, and is the eighth installment from Ecclectica to be featured on the MayDay Group website: Discussion of the Month.

Our hope is that as you read, you will think about what has changed in the past ten years, what may not have changed at all or very much, and where there are signs of shifts in both thinking and practice. While the Ecclectica issue dealt primarily with music in higher education in Canada, the issues, we believe are common to higher music studies in other parts of the world, and this reprint seems timely given the 2014 report from the College Music Society calling for sweeping changes in the approach to undergraduate education in music. Please take a moment after you read to share your thoughts, so that we may generate the kinds of discussions that will lead to the kinds of changes the original Ecclectica authors call for.

Trivializing Music Studies

James Deaville, Carlton University

Put bluntly, we need to trivialize music studies in Canada. By the word “trivialize,” I don’t mean adopting a belittling attitude towards those studies, but rather changing their content to embrace music that has traditionally been determined to be below consideration in serious music programs: aesthetically unworthy, trivial, bad. In the recent book Bad Music: The Music We Love to Hate, noted popular-music scholar Simon Frith identifies three critical arguments in defining “bad music”: it isn’t worthy of enjoyment; musicians involved in it are betraying their talent; and it corrupts music’s original integrity.1 While whole genres like country music have been dismissed historically as bad or trivial, such designations can cut cross styles as well, so that a subgenre like bubblegum pop or an artist like Dido might be deemed unworthy of inclusion in a “canonic” popular music course. Even more problematic within such a course would be entertainers like Lawrence Welk (http://www.welkmusicalfamily.com) or Kenny G (http://www.kennyg.com), who occupy terrain so foreign to elite canons that justifying their study at a job interview will almost certainly not get you hired (I didn’t get the job). Yet these are the very artists whose sounds form the “soundtrack” of our lives and the lives of our parents.

Consumers of “live” media are bombarded daily by music and its messages that fly below the radar of our “high art” colleagues, whether in television news (see http://www.southernmedia-nmsa.com/ for a complete listing of current and historical network news music) or video games (see http://www.vgmusic.com/ for a comprehensive sound archive), just to mention two examples. This is the music that surrounds us, envelopes us on a daily basis, even though we may not notice it. Often created by nameless composers working for music production companies, these powerful sounds in broadcast media remain all but unknown to us. In a recent article about music in time-based media in American Music, Claudia Gorbman argues that we need to develop an aesthetics of television music2 – how much more should we attempt to understand musical phenomena like Liberace (http://www.liberace.com/), soccer audience anthems (http://home.wanadoo.nl/maarten.geluk/), the music for film trailers (http://www.movie-list.com/), and yes, the music of ice cream trucks (http://www.thesession.org/discussions/display/7284). Indeed, Nicholas Cook made a significant splash in the scholarly community with his groundbreaking study of commercial music in 1994.3

My own career has focused on music that has been considered trivial at one time or another, whether the virtuosic creations of Franz Liszt, the cakewalks of itinerant African-American entertainers in turn-of-the-century Vienna, or television news music of today. One benefit of dealing with such repertories is that you can’t be accused of besmirching works of genius, as I was when I suggested that Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor has the air of the carnevalesque about it. In my case, sensitivity to such music arose in part from my middle-class background, which didn’t know better than to take seriously “bad” music – i.e., the music that surrounded a typical suburban family of the 1960s (and continues to do so in the first decade of the 21st century).

By advocating serious engagement with what has historically been called “trivial” or “bad” music, I am suggesting that we reconsider what is worthy of study and research. Let the genre’s popularity, “reach,” effectiveness, and impact determine its suitability for academic work, rather than the opinions of elitists. In terms of university and college music curricula, that might mean offering courses in television music (an undergraduate seminar I offered in the fall of 2003 was the first such course in Canada) and smooth jazz, just to mention two disparaged types of music. Another course might explore music in everyday life, past and present. Of course, such curricular offerings would go beyond introducing musical repertoires familiar to us from various contexts in our lives. They would probe deeply and broadly what and how the musics in question mean, and how they help construct personal and collective identity. For example, a general course on music in everyday life might explore Muzak (“bad music”) and how it achieves its purposes, drawing upon scientific studies and empirical data as well as ethnographic research.4 For courses like these, we would need to introduce elements of sociology, psychology, and communication theory, since it is through such disciplines that we can determine the factors behind the effectiveness and importance of the music under consideration. The study of music in such courses would be as rigorous as that encountered in traditional music pedagogy, only the emphasis would shift from uncovering abstract manifestations of genius to establishing specific markers of impact and success. I hope that this direction of inquiry would enable us to arrive at a new, function-based aesthetics of music, one that might ultimately replace traditional measures of value.

I propose we take the “trivializing” one step further by working these musics into theory, music appreciation and ear-training courses, as part of the core curriculum. The individual selections would be generation-specific, so that students would be working with music they recognize from their personal “soundtracks,” even as baby boomers would know the ballad from “Gilligan’s Island” (http://home.comcast.net/~millenniumbiz3/tv/Gilligans_Island.mp3), the theme from “Mission Impossible” (http://www.televisiontunes.com/m-theme-songs.html), or the Armour hot dog commercial (http://www.digitaltimes.com/kids/lyrics_for_kids/armourhotdog.html), for example.5 The more we engage with these repertoires, the better students can appreciate how they, like the classical canon, accomplish their goals. For example, in the case of Zamfir’s “covers” of favourite songs (http://www.gheorghe-zamfir.com/), students might work with notions of transcription and timbre as affective devices.

This rethinking of musical valuation would assist the instructor in breaking out of the elitist classism that is so prevalent in the North American music classroom. Not that I am advocating replacing one canon with another in the search for the “great” television news music or for the “masterpieces” of carousel music. No, I am suggesting that we look at the peripheries of music and try to determine why that music is or has been important. Instead of dismissing Mantovani (http://www.hallowquest.com/mantiindex.htm), Minnie Pearl (http://www.cmt.com/artists/az/pearl_minnie/bio.jhtml), or Neil Diamond (http://www.neildiamondhomepage.com/) as self-evidently trite or valueless, if we explore the past and present with open ears and minds, we will find music in a number of unexpected places, which will assist our efforts to understand a given culture and musical influences upon it. Take for example the music performed at sporting events, where millions of people participate in rituals that prominently feature musical anthems, chants, choruses, etc. Such music is clearly “trivial” according to the standards of musical canons (whether those of art or popular music); but it is a powerful force in shaping identity. By studying only “high” art, whether in classical or popular realms, we and our students fail to question what (and who) constitutes musical value, mistakenly concluding that the public’s tastes are misguided and malformed (à la Theodor Adorno) by the agents of capitalism. Under a new, non-elitist regime, we may discover that the musical experience is bigger and richer than ever suspected.

Social identity lies in difference, and difference is asserted against what is closest, which represents the greatest threat…
—Pierre Bourdieu6
1 Simon Frith, “What is Bad Music?,” in Bad Music: The Music We Love, ed. by Christopher J. Washburne and Maiken Derno (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 31.

2 Claudia Gorbman, “Rhetoric and Aesthetics,” American Music, 22 (2004), 14-26. I should note that even though this special issue of American Music is entitled “Music and Moving Image,” virtually all of the articles primarily deal with film music – television music is again relegated to the periphery, just this side of “bad” music.

3 Nicholas Cook, “Music and Meaning in the Commercials,” Popular Music, 13 (1994), 27-40.

4 Muzak has already been the subject of several scholarly studies, including monographs by Stephen Barnes, Muzak, the Hidden Messages in Music: A Social Psychology of Culture (Lewiston: Mellen, 1988) and Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). For fans of the sound, the corporate website provides samples: http://www.muzak.com/

5In the 1993 film Demolition Man, residents of the future southern Californian megalopolis San Angeles hear and sing product jingles as the popular music of their day. Thus we see and hear Sandra Bullock and her police associate intoning the Armour hot dog jingle from the 1970s. While this humorous vision of a dystopian future might be an indictment of the corporatization of current musical life, at the same time it offers insights into our perceptions of musical value. If these musical products of corporate branding run the risk of becoming the popular music of tomorrow in the minds of film makers, what does that tell us about the role of “corporate” music like jingles and theme songs in today’s society?

6 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 479.

Open Mic / Discussion of the Month / eCOLUMNS Archive

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• eCOLUMNS: Archives of reports and posts on a number of topics, such as Community Music in Action, Curriculum and Assessment, Digital Media in Music Education, Music, Equity, and Social Justice, Music Education in Urban Contexts, Policy in Music Education, Rural Music Education, Students for a Change

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My name is Deejay Robinson and I write this through the tears in my eyes. I want to scream. I want to throw something; however, I am too tired to. Too tired because I have seen the same scene on the television over and over and over again. It is the scene of Black men being murdered by police officers, and a civilian murdering police officers at a peaceful protest. My eyes welled up with tears and my heart sank while watching MSNBC’s airing of the video of a White police officer holding a gun over Philando Castile while he lay dying. His girlfriend is screaming and her four year-old daughter in an angelic voice says, “It’s ok, I am here with you.”

I thought about the riots in Baltimore and Ferguson. I wept over the brazen murder of nine innocent Black men and women praying at a Bible study in Charleston, South Carolina. I screamed for Alton Sterling, Trayvon Martin and Michael Gray, Eric Gardner, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, and a host of other names too numerous to list. I agonized over the 8 cops ambushed and murdered in Dallas and Baton Rouge. Then, I remembered that I had seen a similar scene before. The year was 1963 and the picture was in black and white. Black students were being attacked by White police officers who whipped their backs with the powerful sting of water pressure out of a fire hose and unleashed dogs on them.

The two juxtaposed images of Blacks being dehumanized are equal because, in 2016, there is still racism in the United States of America. Racism in America is so deeply embedded in the fabric of America’s society that even our field of music education is designed to protect and perpetuate White hegemonic privileges and power (Bradley, 2006, 2016; Bradley et al., 2007; Butler et al., 2007; Koza, 2008; McLaren, 2007; McKoy, 2013). I also cried that night because somewhere deep inside, I knew that I too, perpetuated white supremacy by bolstering the music of dead White men as superior. And so, I write for those like me who have been steeped in Western European classical music traditions and have imposed Western European classical music on students, on the assumption that their training deemed classical music superior.

I write for pre-service, novice, and veteran Black and Brown teachers who have combed through music education literature desperately searching for pieces by Black and Brown authors that describe many of our experiences in American music teaching and learning. I write for us who have been and are marginalized, isolated, and feel inferior in music education because of conscious and unconscious biases about our dark skin. I write to give voice to our young Black and Brown music learners who will come into the field with questions about acceptance and legitimacy.

Many teachers like myself become educators because we want to make a difference in our communities (Foster, 1997; Kelly, 2010; Ladson-Billings, 2005). We want to help raise children who will struggle just a little less than we did. We become teachers in order to ensure that our Black and Brown students “have opportunities to learn from role models whom they can identify with” (Kafele, 2012, p.70). We enroll in music school, pass our classes, learn theory, and pass juries just like our counterparts. Yet, we have also felt our hearts skip a beat when professors and teachers infer that our musics are interesting, exotic, or, not music at all. We have felt competing feelings of tokenization and adulation for being chosen to sing the solo during the multicultural piece or having been told that we are a “natural” at non-Western European genres of music (Hess, 2013, 2015). We have felt awkward as we wore colored sashes and ties and sang African Noels standing in the front of our peers—sometimes the entire choral department and hundreds of audience members. As participants and spectators, we have endured the whitewashing and reducing of gospel music to choreography of step-touch and jazz hands. In an effort to be better teachers, we have turned to literature and research for guidance, and have felt helpless when restructuring curricula because our voices represent a void in the music education literature that fails to address many of our concerns and experiences.

Ken Elpus (2015) put into words what we know and experience everyday: music education has a significant race gap that overwhelmingly privileges Whites and systematically excludes other minorities. In my opinion, Elpus’s research on the demographic profile of pre-service music teachers in the United States exposes how White superiority is intricately woven into America; its principle pillar for maintaining power manifests in the institution of music education. “An aspect of human nature,” wrote Michelle Alexander, “is the tendency to cling tightly to one’s advantages and privileges and to rationalize the suffering and exclusion of others” (2012, p.146-147). She continued on to echo Fredrick Douglass, who believed that power concedes nothing without a movement from the people (p.147).

On April 26, 2016, Michael Butera, the CEO of the National Association of Music Education (NAfME) said, “Blacks and Latinos lack the keyboard skills needed for this field,” and “music theory is too difficult for them as an area of study.” (McCord, 2016; Rosen, 2016). Butera’s comments angered me so much that I burned my NAfME membership card in protest (also see Zubrzycki, 2016). I thought that if there were ever going to be a movement in music education, at least in my lifetime, where the collective field rallied around issues of race, power, and privilege in music education, then, the incendiary comments made by the NAfME leader would be the moment. Therefore, I took my anger to social media.

In my Facebook post (Robinson, 2016), I wanted to make racism real for my friends, specifically my music education colleagues who engage in the work of anti-racist music education, and those who believe music education is colorblind. I sought to expose the erroneousness of such comments while the world was still in shock from two unexpected music entertainment breaking news events about two African-American artists: (1) the death of music icon and legend Prince on April 21, 2016, and (2) the April 23, 2016 surprise release of Beyoncè’s Lemonde, a political and apropos album, arguably created by the most iconic music celebrity of this decade. Furthermore, Butera’s comments directly contradict the statistical data: (a) seven of ten top Billboard artists from 2000-2010 were Black (Beyoncè was number four); (b) Prince’s album Purple Rain, for 24 consecutive weeks was the longest-running album to be number one on the Billboard Charts, and (c) Prince is the only artist, and first African American musician, to perform 21 sold-out concerts in London (Morris, 2014). I do not know Mr. Butera and cannot comment on his character or intentions; however, as a Black man, I cannot separate his bigoted comments from American history—recent and old—or from statistical data, and especially not from my personal lived experiences.

There was also a hidden message for my music education friends as well. I wanted in-service music teachers to know that learning opportunities will be missed when our students are having conversations about Prince and Beyoncè while we are lecturing about Poulenc and Beethoven. I wanted music education professors to be inspired to leave the ivory towers of their academic institutions and engage in conversations with their communities about the state of music education in America. However, my innocence gave way to fear as the 2015-2016 school year closed with no action taken; hundreds of future teachers and musicians received their diplomas, professors left for conferences and summer vacations, and secondary teachers conducted the last beats of the end of year concerts and little if anything has changed. I knew many of us would go on about our lives acknowledging the moment, but too tired to do anything about it. But, “the very time I thought I was lost, my dungeon shook and my chains fell off” (Baldwin, 1963, p.21).

You see, during difficult times my grandmother always said, “Baby, in order to understand the future, you must know your past.” I have been wrestling with trying to conceptualize the present by becoming a student of history and examining the racial upheaval and unrest of 1960s American society. I poured through writings and documentaries about racism in America and racism in U.S. music education. I was often told to root my thinking and writing in more music education scholarly literature as I submitted final papers and manuscripts for publication. I did. I read deeply and widely. Focusing on race, I read Bradley (2006, 2007, 2016), Koza (2008), and Hess (2013, 2015). These scholars among many others have made profound contributions to our field and have paved the way for us to understand how racial biases are woven into our institution. Yet, while their writings provide context and theoretical frameworks to view issues of access and racial inequality in music education, they lack the personal lived experiences of racial marginalization that only one who has endured them can tell. Therefore, I had to step outside of music education literature and find resonance and reference with Black scholars who wrote about what it is like to be Black in America.

The annals of Black history revealed to me the writings of James Baldwin (1963), Ta-Nehisi Coates (2008, 2013, 2015), W.E.B. Du Bois (1903, 1935), and Carter G. Woodson (1933). I learned how African Americans such as Paul Robeson, Nina Simone, and Roland Hayes were ostracized from American music education (Gates & Higginbotham, 20014; Goodman, 2013; Hayden, 1989; Simone et al., 2015). I read about the intersections of race, music, culture, and politics (Abrahams, 1992; Kitwana, 2002; Radano, 2003). Think about this, if we know that civilization began in Africa, could it not also be that music likely began there as well? If so, why do our music history classes begin with European polyphony? Perhaps this thought also led Cater G. Woodson in 1933, the author of The Mis-Education of the Negro to write, “in their own as in their mixed schools, Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin . . . and to despise the African” (p.1). These writings, coupled with music education literature, became my source of strength and reminded me what I already knew, but too often forget: I am not alone, and you too, are not alone.

Let me be very clear, for the heart of the matter is here. Deborah Bradley, Connie McKoy, Julia Eklund Koza, Juliet Hess, Elizabeth Gould, Louis Bergonzi, Roberta Lamb, Brent C. Talbot, and my mentors Karin S. Hendricks, Andrè de Quadros, and Kinh. T. Vu, have laid a strong foundation and continue to build the framework. It is now our responsibility to adorn the walls with personal and heartfelt experiences, just as others have done before us.

Though this letter is addressed to minority music teachers and students, it is essential that all who read this understand that the onus is on each and everyone one of us to work together to ensure that future generations of musicers do not live in a world where one’s musical worth and talent is measured by their ability to re-create whiteness. It is my hope that the following rationale for a new way of teaching music will serve to guide as a teaching model for others to eliminate the race gap in American music education (Robinson, submitted). It was Vincent C. Bates who wrote that music education must “grow from the ground up” (2013, p. 86). So let us transform music education by telling our stories and creating music classrooms that challenge and interrogate hegemony. Let us join together in building a field where each and every student, regardless of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or gender, are able to freely realize their own artistic abilities independent of the color of their skin, where they were born, the person they love, or the sex assigned at birth. My name is Deejay Robinson. I see you. I hear you. I, too, am with you. Join me!

References

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