One of my commentators turned up an article on music education with the title
Can Music Theory Education Overcome its Whiteness Problem? I don't think it is worthwhile examining the whole of this long article, but I found the assumptions contained in the subhead to be revealing of some fundamental problems, so let's have a look at them. Here is the claim:
White European classical music dominates music education in the U.S. at all levels. Achieving racial justice in the field means diversifying personnel, curricula, and repertoires. Only then will students be able to enjoy and create the rich array of music created by the world’s people.
Three sentences with three different problems. Before I tackle them I want to make a couple of procedural points. One of the most valuable classes I had as an undergraduate was Philosophy 100. I have mentioned this before, as it made a real impression. The professor was a new hire with all the fresh enthusiastic competence that promises. And best of all, the class only contained a few over twenty students. I was lucky with other philosophy classes as well. In the early 70s I was enrolled in second and third year philosophy classes with just a handful of students. Nowadays to get this kind of attention you would need to be in a graduate seminar. Just for your information, the other classes were Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Mind. The basic attitude and skills I took away from these classes were very influential in my understanding of how to argue a case.
To this day I remember the body language of my Philosophy 100 professor who would assign us troubling texts by philosophers like Thomas Aquinas and Bishop Berkeley and then, as we tried to tear down the absurd things they were saying, he would pace back and forth in front of the class until we ran down. Casting a glance our way he would ask, "may I rephrase?" Then he would edit our intemperate remarks into a concise and coherent statement and adroitly counter all of our points. As soon as he said "may I rephrase?" we knew we were lost! Relatedly, my Philosophy of History professor once counseled me to never argue with a Jesuit because they are so well-educated in debate that you will likely lose.
What I took away from all this was not the Sophist view that through tricky rhetoric you can win any debate, but rather a few basic principles:
- the basic elements of logic and common sense do not change with every intellectual fashion
- it doesn't matter who is right and who is wrong so much as where the most truth is
- what does matter is the means by which you arrive at the truth
Keeping this in mind, let's look at those three sentences. The first one is what we would call an empirical claim. The content of most music education comes from the traditions of Western European classical music. The implication is that this is racist because it is white and because it dominates music education. Even though this is obviously true to some extent the content of the claim needs examination. There are empirical facts that must be taken into account. For example, music notation defined as the use of a five-line staff with clefs, key signatures and time signatures was developed by various composers and theorists over centuries in Western Europe. More specifically it was developed by Italian and French composers, theorists and scholars all of whom also happened to be Christians of the Catholic faith. This system of notation is used across the whole globe at this point. Should we condemn it or stop using it because it is not only white, but Christian? The same points could be made about the other key elements of music education such as harmony and counterpoint.
Now for the second sentence. The problem with this is that justice is not a question of statistics though there are certainly trends in modern legal systems that tend to suggest that it is. I will just offer a couple of counter examples. While there has been a great deal of talk about making sure that women and racial minorities are given a proportionate share of good jobs in music like orchestral conductors, there seems to be no effort to eliminate disparities in, for example, orchestral harp positions which are nearly all held by women. More widely, no-one ever seems to mention that the proportion of dangerous jobs in fields such as mining and forestry is hugely biased towards men. Not to mention casualties in war. Justice is not a statistic because mathematics and morality operate under different principles.
The last sentence I already commented on in the Friday Miscellanea thread, I just want to add that it is an astonishing claim to think that music students will only begin to appreciate non-white and non-European music after they are told to by their progressive music professor.
23 comments:
since given journalistic and editorial practices it's not a foregone conclusion the author even wrote that subheader I think you might have to engage with the actual text of the article itself. I habitually skip subheaders and pull quotes because I know those tend to be created by editors, whether copy editors or section editors, and that if I want the core of the author's argument I read the text.
I don't think the argument is that students won't appreciate non-European music until they are told to by their teachers. It is more common to see an argument that students in the United States being taught European music should learn about American music that is just as worthy of attention as European music (or more). The way I've put it colloquially is there is an undercurrent that doesn't come up consciously in progressive or Americanist education and it can read roughly like this:
We kicked Germany's ass in two world wars so why is the canon of music education so German!?
Attempting to field that question in historical terms would seem like the way to go but along the way arguments get made that education should have something to do with the kinds of music (not just classical) students might be realistically expected to make and/or make a living at in the here and now. As Bruce Haynes put it in his books, the idea of music students learning a musical style that was even a mere forty years old who were not going to be employed by churches was considered bad educational policy in the 17th and 18th centuries. Or as Taruskin put it in the Ox, all of the styles had clear, explicit and real-world social functions so there wasn't an "aesthetic" crisis about which style was best because musicians and patrons and audiences knew which style served what purpose.
In my reading and listening I've heard it said that George Berkeley has been one of the more easily misunderstood and misrepresented philosophers in the Western tradition. I haven't gotten around to actually reading Berkeley, though.
That's a good point, but honestly, using my methodology, it would take a week or two to engage with the whole text of the article and I just don't have that much time available. Plus, I think that the subhead nicely encapsulates a lot of the assumptions, which is what I wanted to critique anyway. This is an interesting point:
"We kicked Germany's ass in two world wars so why is the canon of music education so German!?"
But remember I'm Canadian, not American, and even though we also fought Germany in WWII and won, I don't think too many Canadians think that we should ignore the work of German musicologists.
There is always the argument for relevancy, which is why more and more schools are providing classes in ethnomusicology, jazz and popular music. McGill has had a very prominent jazz band for decades. But universities and conservatories are mostly institutions built around the classical repertoire--with exceptions like Berklee.
yeah, the whole commonwealth was involved in the war effort but I'm trying, as a United States citizen, to try to get at what I've found to be the Americanist weakness of the advocacy. My brother is into military history and so he's shared some about Canadian involvement in both the world wars and how it's thanks to a Canadian we have air conditioning and refridgeration.
And didn't we invent basketball and Superman too?!?
Shuster yes! Siegel no. So Superman was "half Canadian" if we go by the birthplaces of the co-creators. But Shuster was definitely in the US at the time the iconic character was invented so on the basis he's an all-American invention geographically even if a Canadian-born artist played an irreplaceable role in the character's creation. I'm more a fan of Spider-man and Batman but the early original creator runs on Superman and Wonder Woman make for fun reading, more fun, honestly, than Kane's early stories.
As I don't tend to be a sports/athletics fan I can't really speak to the basketball part.
Yes, sorry, half Canadian. But basketball, while invented in the US, was done by a Candian. Wikipedia:
"In December 1891, James Naismith, a Canadian professor of physical education and instructor at the International Young Men's Christian Association Training School (now Springfield College) in Springfield, Massachusetts,[4] was trying to keep his gym class active on a rainy day.[5] He sought a vigorous indoor game to keep his students occupied and at proper levels of fitness during the long New England winters. After rejecting other ideas as either too rough or poorly suited to walled-in gymnasiums, he invented a new game in which players would pass a ball to teammates and try to score points by tossing the ball into a basket mounted on a wall. Naismith wrote the basic rules and nailed a peach basket onto an elevated track. Naismith initially set up the peach basket with its bottom intact, which meant that the ball had to be retrieved manually after each "basket" or point scored. This quickly proved tedious, so Naismith removed the bottom of the basket to allow the balls to be poked out with a long dowel after each scored basket."
Is it that Canadians hate it when someone does something out of the ordinary so these people had to go to the US to invent something?
All 18 of us men who install solar electric systems at my job attended a diversity training (year before covid). Every day on the roof, I wait for that diversity bus of 18 female installers to show up. I'm sure they'd get hired immediately, but none ever apply.
Hanna Rosin may have touched on an element in vocational feminist writing in which if your paycheck literally comes from finding the sins of the patriarchy everywhere you look then, of course, that's what you find. She had a couple of articles years ago on Slate, I think, with titles such as "The patriarchy is dead, long live the patriarchy" and "The patriarchy is not responsible for your juice cleanse". With offense intended to fellow white lady writers in New York, Rosin pointed out that for many women the patriarchy is a meaningless abstraction compared to whether that cute boy a girl met waiting tables might be available. Writers who can afford POC housekeepers and nannies are particularly ill-suited to understand, Rosin argued, that "the patriarchy" can at times be a figment of activist imagination. Not that Rosin isn't still a feminist but one who has argued that the writerly cadres in the scene need to remember they can read a lot of "patriarchy" into dynamics that can be explicable on other grounds.
For the jobs Will, that reminds me of Jeffrey Baumeister pointing out that men disproportionally participate in jobs with high fatality rates. He made a long-form case that there are explicable millennium-spanning reasons for that and it's because male social systems favor hierarchy, redundancy and disposability precisely because those social systems have been wielded across human history on very-high-risk-with-very-high-payoff returns. By contrast, Baumeister proposed, women have a history of developing social systems in which no one is an interchangeable cog in the same way that soldiers are in an army across the ages.
There is nobody on this planet who thinks we should stop teaching music notation, or that the mere existence of music notation in a class is racist. The problem is the *exclusive reliance* on notation at all levels of formal music education. We all know that notation is very useful for conveying some dimensions of music and not others. You can't notate swing, for example. So in all the music schools I teach in, student after student after student can effortlessly sight-read, and hardly any of them can swing. Few of them even know what swing is. The jazz majors can do it, but they can barely articulate what they're doing. And it just so happens that this over-reliance on notated aspects of music means that the kids are coming out of the program severely underdeveloped in the non-notated aspects. Which, in our culture, are the ones that don't come from Western Europe. That is not a coincidence.
I didn't originally get radicalized by the white supremacist history of formal music education. I didn't even know about it until fairly recently. I got radicalized because the curriculum was just so bad, so narrow, so irrelevant to the culture in which I was living. Once I found out *why* the curriculum was so narrow, it added to my motivation to fix it. But even if you don't care about racism at all, you should care about the Eurocentrism of music education, because it makes people bad at music.
It is easy to criticize current institutional and corporate diversity initiatives as so much window dressing. These things have certainly not done much for the engineering recruitment pipeline; the gender imbalance in STEM starts in early childhood, so by the time the company or department is doing diversity training, it's too little too late. That said, simply sneering at the ineffectual nature of these things is a bad look without offering some constructive ideas to do it better.
Last thing. Some students do take their teachers seriously as authority figures. More than you would think! I have met uncountably many excellent musicians in the rock, blues, hip-hop, country etc idioms who don't think they are "real musicians" because they washed out of formal music ed. I meet uncountably many people who unreflectively parrot back ignorant things their music teachers told them (looking at you, Ben Shapiro.) Not everyone takes their teachers seriously, but plenty of young people do, and it would be a good idea not to keep filling the kids' heads with 1930s ideology.
THANK YOU! We have forgotten how to think.
Thanks, all. Yes, Ethan, I have always been puzzled by jazz musicians who refer to classical musicians as "legit" as if jazz were not perfectlly "legit" in its own tradition.
There's nothing to be puzzled about. Jazz has been treated as illegitimate by racists in the music academy for 100 years, overtly for 60 of those years, and then more covertly through passivity and exnomination since then.
Oh Ethan, I don't think you read my comment correctly. If there were racist attitudes about jazz, that was not what I was talking about. What puzzled me was jazz musicians not thinking of themselves as 'legit'.
We are talking about the same thing. Jazz musicians not considering themselves "legit" comes from invidious comparisons made by the music academy, and by other cultural institutions, critics, etc. So until 1940 the classical music establishment didn't consider jazz to be music at all; then they thought it was amusing but intrinsically lacking in merit; then as possibly having merit but obviously less than classical music does; and now as having merit but still not deserving of being in the core curriculum. How difficult is it to see the causal relationship there?
Ethan, what you say about too exclusively literate approach to music retarding the development of swing skills in the students...but isn't that the job of the specialist teacher, to teach what cannot be conveyed on paper? My baroque-specialist violin teacher is always reminding me the sheet is just a sketch, the musician is an artist who knows how and when to add ornamentation, unequalize note values, etc. In the same way, regarding jazz not being let into the academy...could similar complaints be made by all the popular and non-literate genres? Personally, I don't want a music school that teaches jazz or rock or hiphop, etc. I want one that teaches early European music, so I find those schools and teachers where it is (not very many). Ultimately I don't think the non-literate musics have the same need of institutions because they don't seem to rely on scholarship and history of forms the way that literate traditions do. Obviously there are histories and scholars of these musics (probably including you), but I don't think the great artists in these genres are coming out of schools and probably don't much want to, statistically speaking.
Same with the lack of women electricians. It's not really a "problem" at all, no need to remedy it just because they aren't applying. Isn't it enough that any who want to do it would be welcome?
Re-reading my comment just above, I didn't mean to say the non-literate musical traditions shouldn't have schools, just that different musics belong in different schools. To truly attempt a universal and comprehensive history and study of human music would be to forget that most people approach music not as big-picture philosophers of history but rather as musicians and dancers and listeners who have relatively narrow and primarily sensory-based and peer-sociality values at root. So most of us go where we we find what we want, it doesn't all have to be at the same place.
I am completely in favor of music schools and their students being able to specialize! Right now, however, everybody in every American school aside from Berklee has to spend a substantial amount of course time on the Western European canon. Everybody has to do the history of the music, they have to harmonize chorales according to 18th century voice leading rules, they have to read figured bass. At NYU, that includes the music technology students, the jazz majors, everybody. There is no reciprocal expectation that the classical specialists have to know anything about anything else.
If we are going to have a universal core curriculum, then having that core consist only of Western European historical music is atavistic. It's especially crazy to do this to music education majors, whose careers are going to put them into contact with all kinds of Black American music. It is insane to me that American music teachers have to know so much about historical European musics while remaining ignorant of their own musical culture.
Well Ethan I'm sure we're all looking forward to Philip Ewell's upcoming inclusive music theory textbook, The Engaged Musician, due in 2023. I imagine his success (and I don't mean he as an individual but rather as a leading representative of the "removing the White frame" school), might lead in one of 2 possible effects: a melange of examples and references that results in only a fraction being familiar or aesthetically appealing to the student, or else a launching point for arbitrating what elements of music are really universally relevant (honest question as an example: how interested in chord theory are the hip hop musicians?), perhaps reducing that set significantly by removing classical assumptions. If this latter slimmer set of core curriculum ends up the result of Ewell's direction (I don't mean him exclusively, but rather as a leading example of the "removing the white frame" school of thought), then specialized Vol. 2 textbooks would scaffold upon Ewell's "elemental-universal" platform and then take the more advanced studies into their relevant concepts and terms. But how many genres would even bother with their Vol 2 or, especially, Vol 3? In fact, as I ponder that scenario with rock guitarists in mind, don't they already have innumerable theory books on scales and chords and improvisation etc that have nary a reference to European classical music? Of course, you're talking about textbooks and curricula for students at formal music schools. Except for Jazz, I wonder how many non-classical genres even have enough history and material and enduring public interest on which to build academic departments and careers and curricula?
Will, at the risk of venturing into the questions you asked, I think that ragtime works as a fulcrum style from which we can see influences it had as a popular style (of song more so than as dance music) on later trends in pop. Ethan and I have briefly compared thoughts on how ragtime shows up as an influence in jazz and country over the years. Prior to the consolidation of the commercial recorded music industry there may be more points of convergence and correspondence then specialists in jazz or classical might always agree on.
Some of Robert Gjerdingen's work on Neapolitan partimento traditions seems like a promising direction to keep exploring, especially his observations on the role that improvisation over stock bass lines and partimento fugal composition played in training musicians. It may be risky to propose this to jazz fans who are purists but jazz can seem like a style of "figured treble" that has similar practical traditions to the style of figured bass from the 17th through 18th centuries. There are important differences, of course, but it seems as though if we take a more flexible conceptually based approach to categorization there's more room for conceptual overlap.
Within the "Baroque" era there was the old church style and techniques tradition of pedagogy and the more modern style of techniques and forms connected to dance styles. Maybe we could make a case that such a two-styles pedagogy already existed in Western European music and "simply" (if possible) develop a comparable two-traditions approach in the United States. From some of the stuff I've read at Ethan's blog European music education seems to have already done things like that--may be continuity of tradition and differences in arts patronage and funding explain that ... I think we should try to remember the big idea Taruskin introduced in the Ox about how we need to understand North American musical history on the literate tradition in relationship to the Cold War, but I digress.
Philip Ewell has certainly been the subject of a lot of discussion, and I'm sure his book will be great, but so far hardly anything has changed in terms of music teacher licensure requirements, accreditation standards, university admission standards, etc. I do imagine that Ewell is going to manage to effect some real change in the long term, but it is still a long ways off.
There is no doubt that a broad-based music education is going to be partial, fragmentary, biased and problematic. However, that is no excuse not to try to do better than we are doing now. Some attempt to introduce music majors to, say, the harmonic conventions of the blues and how those conventions differ from those of Western European is better than the current approach of making no attempt at all.
By de-Europeanizing, I expect the curriculum to grow rather than shrink. There is a vast world of rhythm that music theory classes neglect completely. There are all the myriad ways that that rhythm interacts with harmony. (In most of the music I listen to, the tonic is established by metrical placement and emphasis rather than voice leading.) There is an entire universe of pitches lying between the piano keys - hip-hop musicians are deep in the microtones. I would love to see the music curriculum expand to try to get its arms around all the music widely made and listened to in the actual world. And it has been my experience teaching that if you offer material to the students that is useful and relevant to them, they tend to learn it eagerly and ask for more.
what you're calling microtones is just speech. It doesn't need a fancy academic term...
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