Journal of Music History Pedagogy

Musicking across Hemispheres

Andrés R. Amado — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 14:02:14 -0600

Advocates for music curricula reform call for programs of study that better address the concerns of professional musicians, engage the musical traditions of local communities, increase global awareness, and advance social justice. While global approaches to music history studies can address these goals, finding ways to broaden the scope of music history courses beyond the Western canon while also fulfilling curricular expectations that require knowledge of the canon is a challenge for many instructors. When considering how to expand courses to meet the goals above, I propose instructors prioritize the needs of the students and communities their institutions serve. In this article, I share my experience teaching music history at a large Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI) in the United States. I employ a transatlantic perspective to broaden the historical context in which the canonic repertoires of Western Europe developed and include a wider diversity of musical practices, all while highlighting content relevant to the backgrounds and aspirations of local students. This article presents examples from graduate and undergraduate courses initially designed to survey the music of Western Europe as part of a traditional conservatory-style curriculum. My recent iterations of these courses explore intersections of European musical traditions with music in the Western Hemisphere to advance the aforementioned goals of curricular reform in an environment where completely redesigning the music history sequence is not a practical option at present.

On Musicology’s Responsibility to Music Education

Allison Robbins, Vilde Aaslid — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 14:03:17 -0600

Recent years have seen significant changes in the pedagogy of music history including a general broadening of what music is taught in core music history courses and a shift towards skills-based approaches to the field. In these discussions, however, there has been little dialogue with the field of music education even though at many universities, a significant proportion of the students taking music history coursework are studying to become K-12 music teachers. This article considers one place where music history pedagogy has material consequences for music education students: the Praxis II Music Content Knowledge exam, a two-hour, multiple-choice exam that pre-service teachers in many states must pass before they are certified to teach music in public schools. The exam is, by design, a barrier and like many standardized exams has unintended consequences for equity. Successful Praxis outcomes are significantly correlated with race and gender, with white students scoring higher than Black students, and men higher than women.

In this article we introduce the structure and content of the Praxis exam to begin a conversation about musicologists’ responsibilities for preparing students for the certification exam. We argue that music history curricular revision must attend to repercussions for adjacent disciplines, especially in the case of barrier exams. To revise without this attention is to risk undermining efforts to increase diversity among music educators. Further, we see the divide between the Praxis content and our field’s current state as evidence of a disciplinary history in which elite musicology retreated from the practical concerns of music education. We suggest possible paths forward that begin to bridge our disciplines in order to serve the needs of our shared students and support the broader goals that underpin our curricular revisions.

Introduction by the Guest Editors: Global Music History in the Classroom

Hyun Kyong Hannah Chang, Daniel F. Castro Pantoja, Hedy Law — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 14:28:34 -0600

As indicated by conferences, symposiums, and panels organized by study groups in the American Musicological Society and International Musicological Society, global music history has become an emerging subfield since the 2010s. Monographs, scholarly articles, and collections of essays identify field-defining concepts that enable scholars to design new courses on global music history. However, insufficient scholarly literature assesses approaches to teaching music history from global perspectives. This special issue is intended to address this gap. The guest editors have invited scholars to share their experiences teaching or designing courses on this topic for various curricula. Rather than assuming a one-size-fits-all approach to teaching global music history, contributors critically examine their pedagogical practices and identify challenges that some may find difficult to overcome. A key finding is that effective teaching of global music history courses appears more heavily contingent upon contextual factors such as student demographics and institutional support than some might think.

Threshold Concepts for Music Studies from Global Music Histories

Danielle Fosler-Lussier — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 19:17:54 -0600

An account of how approaches from global music histories have changed the author's teaching and how the author has translated these appraches into her recent book, Music on the Move—an accessible, open-source resource. The author uses the notion of "threshold concepts," that is, a set of interpretive approaches that define a discipline in order to aid decisions about both course content and skill development. Music on the Move works through a collection of threshold concepts from the author's global music studies course: colonialism, migration, diaspora, mediation, propaganda, copyright, heritage, and mixing.

Teaching Music Colonialism in Global History

Roe-Min Kok — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 19:29:03 -0600

This article focuses on the author's interdisciplinary course “Music and Colonialism in Global History,” offered at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and directed at both music and arts students. In addition to describing how this course uses a global framework to explore the impact of Western art music on former colonies, the article revolves around the students’ experiences and observations of the course, its effectiveness, and areas for improvement.

Teaching Cantonese Music in a Canadian University

Hedy Law — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 19:35:39 -0600

Reflecting on her “Cantonese Music” course at the University of British Columbia in Canada, Hedy Law describes how teaching Cantonese music to an Asian-dominated student body in Vancouver decenters Eurocentric epistemologies entrenched in Western art music. Her experience invites us to consider the wider global Sinophone sphere and the distinct geopolitics that have traversed different periods, including those that pertain to the Hong Kong diaspora in recent years.

Global Music History as Teaching Framework

Alecia D. Barbour — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 19:44:13 -0600

This article discusses how the author incorporates concepts from the developing scholarship of global music history into the general education music course that she teaches as the only full-time music faculty at an institute of technology, and as a scholar identifying with historical ethnomusicology. She describes how embracing Michael Dylan Foster’s concept of defamiliarization has helped to broaden the non-major students’ perspectives on seemingly local music cultures and the notion of music itself.

Archives, Objects, and the Global History of Music

Nancy Yunhwa Rao — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 19:53:43 -0600

This article addresses the importance of developing archival approaches and perspectives that could have democratizing implications for the research and teaching of global music history. This work suggests that the politics of the traditional music archive necessitate broader considerations of what might serve as evidence when conducting global music research. Rao’s reflections are based on a workshop on archival objects related to Chinese theaters and the life of Chinese Americans in early twentieth-century America that she conducted at the University of British Columbia and her research for the book Chinatown Opera Theater in North America. This article suggests how bringing students to the archives, showing them objects directly related to narratives that shape our understanding of the globality of the past, and asking them to examine the materiality of these objects can help them understand historically peripheralized communities that should nevertheless be included in the scope of global music history today.

Why I Don’t Teach Global Music History

Tamara Levitz — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 20:01:23 -0600

This article warns against facile or celebratory applications of global music history in teaching. Levitz critiques the treatment of global music history as a “heuristic, concept, method, or pedagogical approach,” positioning it instead as “a decentering perspective.” The article addresses the difficulty of having a shared concept of the world within musicology and unpacks this limitation through a genealogical comparison of comparative literature and musicology. Levitz then uses Shu-mei Shih’s idea of relational comparison to outline pedagogical ideas that could be applied to music or music history courses, in place of using “global music history” as a framework.

“African Music is Global Music”

Michael Birenbaum Quintero, Samuel Ajose — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 20:13:29 -0600

This conversation is between Samuel Ajose, who teaches at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and Michael Birenbaum Quintero, who teaches at Boston University, United States. The interlocutors parse “global” and “global music history” from their own perspectives within different institutional and regional contexts as ethnomusicologists and teachers. Ajose and Birenbaum Quintero discuss how they apply global and historical dimensions to teaching in their respective positions and how they have come to include community music-making outside the university to fulfil their pedagogical commitment.

“Offer Less Variety and Teach Longer Focused Units”

Bonnie Gordon, Olivia Bloechl — Thu, 02 Nov 2023 20:24:28 -0600

In this conversation between Olivia Bloechl and Bonnie Gordon, Bloechl addresses her “Introduction to Global Music History” undergraduate course, while Gordon speaks of global moments and frameworks that inform how she teaches the early music courses that she offers at her institution. They discuss the usefulness of a global frame in challenging assumptions of local or national history and the Eurocentric narratives that have long shaped music history survey courses while noting that the term “global” itself might be intimidating for some students. They also offer pragmatic advice on selecting the teaching documents and delimiting the scope of the course based on their experience of what has and what has not worked in the past.