Journal of Music History Pedagogy

Towards a Decolonized Music History Curriculum

Margaret E. Walker — 2020-04-09

Although musicological scholarship has expanded in recent decades to include critical theories and diverse repertoire, post-secondary music history curricula largely continue to disseminate a Eurocentric canon of composers and works presented within an evolutionary historical narrative. This article places questions of curricular revision in the current context of calls for educational reform through decolonization initiatives. Beginning with an exploration of what decolonizing education might mean, I then investigate the impact that the European colonial project might have had on the standard music history curriculum, uncovering an embedded teleological progression that supports European exceptionalism and culture superiority. A first step in decolonizing music history teaching, therefore, must be to make the historiographical foundations of what we are teaching transparent through contextualizing Western art music history within a critical, global framework.

Narratives of Musical Resilience and the Perpetuation of Whiteness in the Music History Classroom

Travis D. Stimeling — 2020-04-09

Situated in departments and schools of music that have been designed to preserve, promote, and replicate the musical traditions of western Europe, the music history classroom is often deeply implicated in a project that centers whiteness and celebrates proximity to whiteness as an admirable goal for persons of color. Our textbooks overwhelmingly feature the creative work of European and European American men, occasionally attempting to remedy these biases by including a person of color or a woman as a token. Although music histories often nod toward the oppression, exploitation, and death of musical African Americans, they seldom point to the individual choices that whites have made to create and sustain oppressive structures of white supremacy. We suggest that a closer look at the 1740 Negro Code of South Carolina and its subsequent ban on the drumming of enslaved Africans offers a useful opportunity to introduce students to concepts of power and to begin important antiracist work in schools of music and music departments in the United States and elsewhere.

Decolonizing “Intro to World Music?”

Michael A Figueroa — 2020-04-09

Where does “Intro to World Music” stand in an era of political crisis, globalization, and technological (post)modernity, when relations between self and other are in constant flux? In this article, I critique the colonial underpinnings of “Intro to World Music” while arguing that a recuperated curricular framework can engage students in decolonial praxis via a focus on conversations about self and other. Within such a framework, students can develop a resistance to Eurocentric thinking, and instructors can facilitate encounters with “others” in the context of experiential learning projects. In this way, the teaching strategies I describe may help students move beyond a cultivation of oppositional or analogous thinking about culture (here is how “they” are different from or similar to “us”) to an aspiration toward relational thinking about cultural difference that is other-centered, rather than self-centered.

Evidence-based Pedagogical Innovations: a Review of Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel, and Small Teaching by James M. Lang

Kimberly Beck Hieb — 2020-04-09

Review of Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel, and Small Teaching by James M. Lang

Problem-Based Learning in the College Music Classroom, edited by Natalie R. Sarrazin

Reba Wissner — 2020-04-09

Review of Problem-Based Learning in the College Music Classroom, edited by Natalie R. Sarrazin.

Information Literacy in Music: An Instructor’s Companion, edited by Beth Christensen, Erin Conor, and Marian Ritter

S. Andrew Granade — 2020-04-09

Review of Information Literacy in Music: An Instructor’s Companion, edited by Beth Christensen, Erin Conor, and Marian Ritter.