Mayday Group

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.

Canadian Music Schools: Toward a Somewhat Radical Mission

David J. Elliott, New York University
Kari K. Veblen, University of Western Ontario

Consider some of the major forces sweeping and dividing today’s world: terrorism; world poverty and disease; hopeless migrant populations; collapsing educational systems; cultural appropriation, colonialization, and exploitation; global warming; high-speed computer communications; vast corporate wealth; mass image exchange; struggle for gender equality/ equal rights; unprecedented international research.

Against this backdrop of monumental societal issues, university music schools in Canada and elsewhere seem quaint, if not largely irrelevant. We focus our energies on training performers and composers for a tiny and declining market of art music, new music, and jazz, with the most token of nods to world musics. We prepare theorists and musicologists for a miniscule need. Music education programs prepare students to teach bands, choirs, and, sometimes, pop and rock groups that “cover” past hits by the Beatles, or create new pop material with recent computer technologies.

Notwithstanding the deep healing values of experiencing and producing musical “beauty,” it seems fair to ask, What are we doing? Why continue to focus on producing hundreds of musicians each year for an unsympathetic society and economy? Do we want to do more? Can we do more? We believe it is possible. How?

Our suggestion is that we as a profession gradually rethink and reorganize our institutions to prepare students for broader social and political missions. Put another way, it is in their best interests, and ours (as citizens), that we enable our students to conceive themselves as artists and artist-educators in a radical or, at least, in an alternative sense: as public intellectuals for world citizenship. We need to impart a commitment to the “life goals”1 of developing creative musical approaches to conceiving social-political complexities and expressing musical solutions for the public arena.

But should our schools abandon traditions altogether? This would be foolish. Being a musician in the broadest sense and for expansive goals requires all the myriad skills, understandings, and dispositions that make up musical artistry. What we are suggesting is that instead of limiting our institutions’ missions to educating classical violinists, jazz bass players, and choral music educators (to list a few conservative examples), we ought to expand our institutional themes. Consider this: although Canada is officially bilingual and perhaps trilingual with the advent of Nunavut, for the most part the university curriculum continues as a hegemonic euro-centric canon. We have a golden opportunity here to re-negotiate, to open fissures in the façade and connect more with this country’s musical mosaic.

In addition to expanding the musics learned and performed, we need to pay attention to the students who populate our universities. Who are these students? They are young, eager, promising performers and able to pass theory exams. All these things are good, but they also mean that, for the most part, our students are from the dominant class and privileged socio-economic circumstances. There are excellent young musicians who never apply to music programs because their choice of instrument, their genre or their training (be it in jazz, rock, South Indian tabla or Ottawa Valley fiddling) is not acknowledged. And yet, these students are fully capable of growing musically and contributing. In order to create more elastic and creative environments, music schools need to recognize a variety of musics expressed through multiple mediums. Furthermore, more emphasis needs to be placed on cultivating students’ abilities to problematize cultural issues and create sonic-performative solutions. In short, let us continue to teach our music students to do what has been done before; however, and much more importantly, let us enable them to do what has never been done before.

For the sake of argument, let us suppose that there is a critical mass of music professors who have the wills and the skills to take our institutions on a slow “left turn.” If so, then we would need to create new curricula that would allow our music students more freedom to cross intellectual and creative borders (e.g., to integrate studies in ethnomusicology, performance, and music education) and, next, to make partnerships with other students and professors outside our music schools such as visual artists, dancers, film producers, and poets. At the same time, we would need to further this “turn” by making rich connections between our music schools and many other areas of the university and the surrounding community

Related to these moves, we would need to relax some of the demands we place on students to produce finished products such as recitals; lesson plans and supervised teaching performances; and written examinations. Some of these requirements could be replaced with credit/no-credit evaluations of students’ ongoing commitment to involvements with others in the sense of interdisciplinary projects, or community music projects. Such an open, freewheeling approach has the potential to produce new art forms, or new teaching processes, and, in doing so, teach our students that music transforms and evolves in relation to the problems of society.

Although many Canadian schools require liberal arts courses, we do too little to integrate these studies with music courses in any critically reflective ways. If we did, then we might enable students to deeply consider their responsibilities and discover their potentials to create music that reflects and leads audiences to “hear” the sounds of AIDS, or urban violence, or degenerating cities. Instead, we perpetuate hoary notions of “the aesthetic” and “art for arts sake.” By separating “beauty” from “reality” we encourage students’ idealized, romantic images of what it will be (or should be) like to work as a musician after graduation: admired for their so-called talent, but not their public service; mysteriously skilled and gifted, but temperamental; musically expressive and creative, but not to be trusted off stage; and so forth. In fact, many university music professors and students relish these stereotypes, largely because they have been passed down to us, like genes, from our early piano lessons.

Given the above, it is not surprising that society tends to view music academics as uninterested in or incapable of contributing in meaningful ways as (say) members of parliament, union organizers, or government advisors. The general assumption (based on the roles we act out and instill in our students) is that we are too preoccupied preparing performers to please wealthy patrons, or play in small clubs, or compose exotic music for other music students and professors. Although it may be an overgeneralization, it’s worth pointing our that in comparison to our schools’ missions, and the ambitions of most of our graduates, the ideals of many rock, country, and so-called folk musicians include a commitment to creating music for, and speaking on behalf of, social issues.

If our institutions gradually evolved to the point of dedicating some of their philosophical, ethical, and practical efforts toward achieving the aims suggested here, the result (one day) might be that more of our students would take up their professions with greater self-esteem, energy, and inventiveness. Were we able to help them attain the abilities they need to re-vision themselves as artists-for-society, they could (if they wish) remain “on the margins” for the strategic social purpose of creating music, musical spaces, and musical communities that pose, create, and embody musical solutions to intractable social problems, resist today’s political commonsense, or care for people of all kinds. If so, then our music students would grow to become what Edward Said2 calls “organic intellectuals,” or “amateur intellectuals,” or “fluid intellectuals,” by whom he means people who use their minds, vocations and arts to speak for people and issues that are routinely ignored.

No doubt skeptical readers will be thinking, rightly, that only certain students are likely to adopt this identity and link their life’s purpose to serving the public good through the artistic integrity and innovativeness of their work. Most will probably see themselves as conservative professional musicians and music educators committed to perpetuating traditional musical conventions.

This is true, of course. Lacking the kinds of models and understandings our institutions could (should?) provide, who could expect them to traverse artistic or educational silos, create alliances with artists and organic intellectuals in other fields and worlds, or create inclusive musical process for the public arena. But does this mean we should not try? Should we accept the expectations of our incoming students? After all, we are supposed to be centers of creativity, and our institutions are often embedded in research universities or liberal arts colleges that place a premium on forwarding knowledge and preparing young people for new worlds, as much as preserving the status quo. Perhaps it is time to emphasize forwardingour efforts in relation to some of the themes outlined here.

To take one example, during the last fifteen years we have focused our own efforts on investigating and developing community music programs (e.g., designing a community music MA degree at the University of Limerick), and, in David Elliott’s case, designing an MA in community music at NYU; together, we also founded an online journal in 2002 to encourage and disseminate research in community music: The International Journal of Community Music.3 Indeed, there is an enormous need for musicians who can serve the public sector in a vast number of ways. Thus, our institutions have a major opportunity and responsibility to serve the public good by awakening new visions and providing new avenues of preparation for our students as community music workers.

In conclusion, as Howard Gardner suggests, committed professionals usually want to work in a well-aligned domain, meaning one in which a profession’s aspirations, practitioners and institutions are consistent with the needs of the public stakeholders that it serves4. If a profession’s aspirations, institutions and public contributions are in harmony, its members will lead satisfying and socially rewarded lives; if not, either the practitioner or the profession will fragment or collapse from misalignment.

Considered in relation to the needs of today’s world, it is our fear that music schools in Canada and abroad are becoming one of the most poorly aligned of all fields, internally and externally. The bottom line is that unless Canadian university music schools can redevelop their missions, strengthen their alignment with today’s social needs, and persuade Canadian society that we represent a valuable and progressive domain, we will become more and more marginalized socially, economically, morally, ethically, and globally. We can change; we have the abilities to do so; but do we have the will?

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.

Musical Dialectics

Stephen McClatchie, Huron University College at Western University (previously at Mount Alison University)

Thesis (The Old Synthesis)

As is well known, Musikwissenschaft as a discipline is a creature of the nineteenth century. In German-speaking lands, men like Eduard Hanslick, Guido Adler, and Hugo Riemann worked tirelessly to promote the advanced study of music as part of the Geisteswissenschaften. Adler, famously, drew up the first taxonomy of the young discipline, dividing musicology into two branches, historical and systemic, which encompassed all that we now call historical musicology, music theory, acoustics, music aesthetics, ethnomusicology, and so on. While the work of scholars like François Fétis in France and Edmund Fellowes in Great Britain also contributed to the development of the nascent discipline, it was the post-Humboldt German research university that first housed musicology (used in its broadest, most-encompassing sense) as an academic discipline. Eduard Hanslick held the first professorship in musicology in Europe, at the University of Vienna.

Secular institutions for the applied study of music performance—conservatories—are, for the most part, only slightly older. The Paris Conservatoire, generally held to be the oldest of these, was founded in 1795 (although one could certainly argue that Vivaldi’s Pietà in eighteenth-century Venice as well as the Neapolitan conservatories bore certain similarities to the modern conservatory). Conservatories in most of the major cities in central Europe (e.g., Prague, Leipzig, Berlin, Munich, and Vienna) were established by the middle of the nineteenth century. By the 1880s, there were four conservatories in London alone. The focus at all of these institutions was generally applied music in various forms: performance, conducting, and composition, for the most part. Music history and music theory, while certainly part of the curriculum, were in some senses “support” courses for the conservatory’s primary focus on the creation or re-creation of music.

In North America, these two entities—the university seminar or department and the conservatory—gradually came together in the first half of the twentieth century. For example, the Toronto Conservatory of Music (“Royal” as of 1947) was founded in 1886 and the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music began in 1919. By mid-century, the latter had taken over most of the professional training of the former. A similar trajectory was followed at the University of Western Ontario and elsewhere. Some universities established departments of music earlier in the twentieth century (Brandon, for example, in 1906), but these typically offered conservatory-type training and faculty members, at the time, generally did not have research obligations.

A synthesis of these two traditions gradually emerged in Canadian university music departments in the latter half of the twentieth century, a synthesis that lasted well into the 1980s. Behind this synthesis lay the increasing professionalisation of individual disciplines in the university—a development that was particularly significant for music, which in many respects fits uneasily into the modern research university. North American musicology as a discipline began this metamorphosis in the 1930s, with the founding of the American Musicological Society. As Suzanne Cusick has shown in an article in Rethinking Music, the AMS’s founding fathers—I use the term advisedly—many of whom were European émigrés, were particularly concerned with scientific rigour and objectivity. A second aspect of this development was the rise of postwar modernism in musical composition, which coincided with this increasing professionalisation of university music studies, giving rise to the phenomenon of the “university composer,” exemplified fairly or unfairly by Milton Babbitt at Princeton.

By the 1960s or so, university music departments in Canada had generally taken shape as follows. Music students were registered in B.Mus. programs with some performance element in the curriculum (solo and ensemble), although most institutions also offered a non-performance B.A. in Music. Within the B.Mus. curriculum, four or five streams were available: performance, music education, composition, music theory and/or (ethno)musicology. Typically students would major in one of these streams. Some schools, like the University of Western Ontario, developed holistic curricula such as a common first year. What was common to all programs, however, was a singular focus on Western art music. Students learned how to perform, analyse, contextualise, and, often, teach this music with varying degrees of professionalisation depending on their majors. Faculty members with tenure were to be found in all areas study, including performance (although most institutions supplemented their tenured performance faculty with sessional or contract instructors to teach applied music). Tenured or tenure-track faculty members were expected to be active in research and scholarship as defined by their particular area of specialisation: performance, adjudication, and workshops for the performers; monographs, articles, and editions for the musicologists and music theorists; and a combination of these for music educators. In what follows, I will refer to this as the “old synthesis.”

It may be argued that I am covering this background with brushstrokes that are much too broad to adequately portray the nuance of individual institutions and people. Doubtless some research was undertaken, even in conservatories or conservatory-type departments and doubtless some applied studies were required even in research-oriented university departments—the collegium musicum springs immediately to mind in this respect. It is certainly also true that this “old synthesis” was often less synthesised than one might expect, given the turf wars that too often have characterised Canadian departments and faculties of music. Nevertheless, something of an equilibrium was reached whereby there was a shared understanding of what a music student needed to know and be able to do.

Antithesis

But around 1990 or so this synthesis began to break down as a result of internal and external factors. Within the university, the theoretical turn that had shaken up many disciplines, particularly the humanities, since the 1970s, had at last reached academic music departments. Work influenced by feminism, gender and sexuality studies, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and a host of other isms were all the rage and tended to destabilize the equilibrium of the old synthesis. I have a vivid memory of teaching the first course on women and music at the University of Western Ontario and feeling the need to look carefully around corners as I walked the halls, as I kept hearing reports from colleagues in the applied department that my students were beginning to ask pointed questions in their lessons. The increasing acceptance within the academy of social constructivism and the idea of music as a “text” was also destabilizing because it dealt a death blow to the privileging of the traditional canon of Western art music that lay at the heart of the old synthesis. Not longer did it seem quite as clear what a music student needed to know and be able to do. In fact, the whole concept of “a” music student was now rather fraught.

It soon became apparent that the interdisciplinary highway ran in both directions. Not only were musicologists and music theorists working with and refining paradigms initially developed by other disciplines, there was a heightened interest in music by non-musicologists (sociologists, historians of all stripes, including art, film, and literature, and so on). Our bonds with our colleagues in other faculties and departments grew stronger, but sometimes at the expense of our connection with our “family”: performers, educators, composers, and sometimes even music theorists.

The music department “family” was also under siege, to some extent, by the strong push in the 1990s and 2000s towards increasing research activity (and funding) at most Canadian universities, small, medium, and large. The Liberal government’s innovation agenda created a host of new programs like the Canada Research Chairs and the Indirect Costs of Research that tied institutional allocations to their Tri-Council research revenue. There was now a strong incentive for institutions to invest in research activity that would be eligible for Tri-Council funding, possibly at the expense of activities, like performance, that generally were not.

Outside the walls of the university things had changed as well. The increasing marginalisation of “classical music” and the ready availability of popular and world “musics” (note the plural) soon led to very different demands from would-be music students. Certainly, music students had long enjoyed (and often played) popular musics (rock, punk, jazz, etc.), but when the superior value of the Western art-music canon was not in question, it was less common to find a demand for practical training in popular styles like rock guitar or jazz singing in university music departments. Some schools have responded to this demand by introducing popular-music performance streams (or are actively discussing the possibility). It is not clear to me whether this is a good thing or not, and certainly many non-classical professional musicians are not in favour of such apparent colonialism on the part of university music departments in a postcolonial world. Throughout the country, music educators have responded to these events by revising music curricula in the schools to include exposure to a variety of musics. Have university music curricula kept up?

Finally, the 1990s and 2000s have seen significant changes in the economics of the music profession: many orchestras are in crisis or have disbanded and school music programs are always vulnerable.

How have these trends affected university music programs? It would be useful to have a pan-Canadian survey of trends in enrolment and majors in our departments and faculties of music.

Synthesis?

If it is true that the old synthesis has started to crumble, what would a new synthesis look like? Will the new synthesis result in the (re)fragmentation of the university music department? Certainly the success of the Glenn Gould School at the Royal Conservatory of Music could suggest this. Or might it possibly result in the migration of musical scholars (musicologists and music theorists in particular), tired of teaching only support courses, out of university music departments into cultural studies departments? Already a number of musicologists in Canada teach in Women’s Studies departments. It seems certain that other musics will continue to be integrated into Canadian university music programs and curricula—but the effect that this will have on the programs themselves in terms of recruitment and retention is not yet clear. Perhaps popular music studies will be the catalyst for the new synthesis. Another important development is the emergence of the new (inter)discipline of performance studies, which encompasses all performance disciplines and, for us, has roots for music in the historically informed performance movement.

My personal view as a musicologist is that interdisciplinarity is to be encouraged in ourselves and in our students as a means to connect music study to wider social, cultural, and ethical concerns—concerns about subject formation and identity (individual, regional, national, etc.), political and social activism (regardless of persuasion), and so on. To this end, I would welcome the further opening of our seminars to non-music students, even those not musically literate. I think that Canadian music departments should strive for the relevance and liveliness of our visual arts departments, which are intimately connected with the contemporary art scene while still engaged with the past. If only we could jettison, even to some extent, the museum culture of music in favour of an emphasis on the creation of new works alongside an engaged critical practice seen as central rather than marginal. To encourage this—and to be deliberately provocative in closing—perhaps the tenure-track should be reserved for those musicians undertaking creative, rather than re-creative, research and scholarship (of whatever stripe)?

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.

There’s No Going Back

Beverley Diamond, Memorial University of Newfoundland

Dr. Bowman’s invitation to contemplate the future 
of music study in Canada initially evoked one 
question that remained central as I wrote this short
piece: what were the implications of the enormous
 shifts in music training and musical practices that had occurred in Canada over the last 25 years? European classical music remains vibrant but it is clearly now one of many global and glocal (i.e. local, but conditioned by the global) traditions that people need in their lives and that students seek to learn about when they approach an institution to study music. Furthermore, with exciting developments in popular music studies, the so-called (and badly named) “new musicology,” and (equally badly named) ethnomusicology, it is clear that we can no longer train students NOT to think about music in/as society, however inadvertent that training may be. Trying to figure out how people make something as abstract as music meaningful is just too interesting and too significant.

I think that the future of music might best be addressed with a series of questions rather than prognoses. If I do slip an observation or two into the following paragraphs, I intend merely to provoke one from you in response.

My questions/ideas about music study gravitate around five different topics: curriculum, clientele, social position/stage of study, inter-relationships among institutions associated with music learning, and underlying ideologies. My thinking about these topics is always “in progress.” Ten years ago, for instance, I thought (and regretted) that Canadian institutions were heading towards more separation of the artistic training and the thinking functions of musicians. I knew my European colleagues were comfortable with such a separation but I was invested in the “whole” of music study. Nonetheless, I saw that there was not enough money for sufficient one-on-one instruction. There were insufficient financial means, it seemed, to expand types of training, the diversity of the faculty, or the range of course offerings. The real energy for the study of music lay outside the university, I thought, in contexts as diverse as Native American gatherings, festival workshops, or Irish sessions.

Now, however, I see much more media savvy generally. I find more interest in the qualitative dimensions of sounds, images, movement, and space among people with backgrounds as divergent as economics, nursing, or engineering. I note the obvious explosion of musical collaborations across ethnocultural and genre boundaries. I share with my students a delight in the new means to access music in cyberspace. Yes, I love my iPod. But simultaneously, I see a larger reliance on institutions of higher learning to respond to these trends. Arguably, the easy movement of people and information in recent decades has made the Fine Arts more central than ever before and universities in particular are seen to have the resources to enable training, thinking, and research.

Lest it seems that I am just feeling “rosier” today than I was ten years ago, I want to acknowledge that the new “centrality” and “multiplicity” to which I refer has never been easily won, and sometimes not won at all. Here I turn to my own field of ethnomusicology. In her recent critique of “Ethnomusicology and Difference,” for instance, Deborah Wong (2006) uses terms such as guerilla warfare and work in the trenches to describe the experience of ethnomusicologists since the 1990s. Her interviews with several senior female ethnomusicologists reveal the toll in human well-being that accumulates after a decade of struggle to see our pedagogy reflect the socially urgent issues of our research and, more importantly, of human lives. Unlike me, a person with the privilege of “whiteness” and now a relatively senior position, professors who are multiply marginalized as visible minorities and/or women and/or junior faculty teaching “new” subjects have been particularly stressed. The progress toward change in the music academy has been slow. I agree with her assessment that:

We have tended to rely on cultural relativism in its most simplistic form, and in a way that is heavily reliant on liberal humanism. That is, we tend to resort to fairly basic relativist arguments about equal worth, when the strongest arguments focus on the political economies of uneven access to resources and the intervention of education (and performance) into those economies. At this level, we have fallen far behind; discussions around issues of canon formation and control that have gone on in English departments for twenty years, often at a level of critical sophistication that music departments only gesture towards. (2006: 263)

With Wong’s observations in mind, my first group of hard questions concerns the shape of the current Canadian music academy. The gender balance of Canadian music schools has shifted dramatically in the past few decades. The ethnocultural diversity of music departments, on the other hand, has been much slower to change. I think it would be interesting to inquire how much of the new course development has fallen on the shoulders of women or “visible minority” colleagues (who are already stigmatized by that label), how progression through the ranks has worked, and whether tenure battles have been more difficult if one has risked teaching new areas of inquiry. Similarly, it would be interesting to see if diverse role models have actually impacted on the student body. Are there more women taking technology-oriented courses or doing jazz than a decade or two ago? Are we recruiting more Aboriginal students if they have an Aboriginal professor to talk to? Are we admitting students because they have good training in a specific type of music and exceptional achievements already or enabling those with a good skill set and potential for training? The answers to these questions will tell us whether we are invested in maintaining old patterns or creating new opportunities for access and future achievement.

A strange, and particularly Canadian anomaly among music schools is the regional patterning. Since moving to Atlantic Canada, I am struck by the fact that resources flow to us in very ways different from Ontario, for instance—to name the other province whose academy I know best. There are four Canada Research Chairs in Folklore in Canada, all of them east of Quebec City. There are very few CRCs in the sciences in Atlantic Canada, however. The strange historical reluctance of Atlantic Canadian universities to include ethnomusicology in their curricula has an ironic logic. To be taken seriously within the national scene of the late 20th century, many within the universities of Eastern Canada felt they had to demonstrate the strengths of the central urban metropoli and downplay the very aspects of local culture that were unique and vibrant. That pattern is rapidly changing and I am delighted to be enabling a small bit of that change. What do we think about regional diversification? Who is served or marginalized? To whom is access denied or enabled?

With these issues in mind, I query whether we need first to think about our clientele. No longer just would-be opera stars, orchestral players, and occasional classical virtuosi. No longer more generations of educators who are unaware of their investment in whiteness (perhaps), or middle class consumption (perhaps), or exclusive taste constructs (perhaps). No longer simply the patrons of elite arts. Who do we think we are teaching in the 21st century? There was a day when accordion players needed not apply to music schools. What about er hu players or bouzouki virtuosi? Are they welcome yet? Maybe we would find that a Chinese orchestra or an Indonesian gamelan is more relevant to the lives of our students than a concert band if we re-examined our potential clientele of performers. Our clientele of “producers” now includes studio engineers, scientists, multi-media artists, and musicians of many backgrounds who create/ perform music that their teachers may know little about. Our “clientele” of consumers is anyone who has watched an advertisement or a music video or a movie, anyone who has whistled or listened to a whale, anyone with ears basically. How does our pedagogy accommodate this diversification?

The period in which music was artificially separated from the visual will, I think, be rapidly deemed a very small blip in the history of the world. Audio recording made this possible in the 20th century, and audio devices (including my iPod of course) remain central to our lives. But increasingly, these devices offer image and sound together. This is not a replication of live experience, of course, since image and sound are schizophonically separated, to use R. Murray Schafer’s widely accepted metaphor. Image and sound are now regularly separated from their sources but recombined, refiltered, and recontextualized. This is a huge experiential shift, as Baudrillard and others have discussed. How have our interpretive devices changed to engage processes such as schizophonia?

The next two topics I have listed are inter-related: Stages of study and the range of institutions that offer music study are more complexly intertwined than we currently acknowledge. It seems increasingly clear that a wider range of professional training institutions are already in the making. On one hand, this is a pattern that could reify the problems of access to resources. Will technology schools get all the dollars? Will undergraduate programs that agree to introduce a diverse range of music professions fare as well as the ones that specialize? On the other hand, the arts—arguably unlike the sciences—have always had fine systems of training within the community. Would we as a university allow that the best “specialist” training might be as a community apprenticeship or as a student in another country while the historical and sociological essentials were university based? Or vice versa? Would we look at an interlocking system of accreditation so that students could pursue what was strong within a specific university without giving up or thinking less of what was strong within their community or within a different community/country/ university? My guess is that the most successful strategies of the future will involve inter-institutional arrangements, probably more dialogue between science and the arts, inevitably more serious collaboration between artists and scholars, and a whole lot of community-university linkages. It will take us time to learn how best to build productive relationships with the communities we live in and with other institutions that overlap in their mandates. The questions will be how to design these arrangements most effectively. How to create relatively seamless opportunities for moving from one level of training to the next, from practice to theory, from art to science and back? How to create a system that guides students effectively without taking away their agency to find new directions for themselves?

Our answers to these questions will require a new ideology that drives the study of music. At one time, university music schools hoped to create an elite knowledgeable about, skilled at doing, and convinced of the superiority of European classical music (in a construct that often conflated the local and national differences as well as the many vernacular interactions within that construct of “Europe”). Perhaps our new ideology will be to create a different elite. Universities cannot do it. It will have to involve a training network. My personal hope is that we aim to produce musicians with no less knowledge and skill in one or more of the world’s thousands of musical practices; but also musicians capable of understanding/engaging critical issues across genres, disciplines, cultures, and classes; and committed to mobilizing resources for projects that enable the circulation rather than the consolidation of privilege.

Reference:

Wong, Deborah (2006). “Ethnomusicology and Difference.”

Ethnomusicology 50/2: 259-279.