Uncovering a Diverse Early Music

Abstract

Many musicologists have worked to expand the undergraduate survey beyond its traditional boundaries by incorporating more voices from women and people of color, but this task is easier to do toward the end of the historical survey than at the beginning. In the middle ages and early modern period, access to the technologies of written music was limited, and most musical institutions were strongly suited for those with societal power—mostly European men. A wealth of visual, literary, and material evidence documents the activities of Africans and women in early modern Europe, but women musicians left a meagre trace, and musicians of non-European origin even less. This article summarizes recent efforts to diversify the first half of a one-year survey for music majors, covering antiquity through the baroque.  In addition to expanding the visibility of women—as composers, performers, patrons, and scholars—I show the presence of musicians of non-European origin living in Europe, as well as encounters between Europeans and Latin Americans and Asians.  This effort to highlight the diversity that exists, sometimes below the radar, within the Western art tradition does not “decolonize†that tradition, but it may facilitate that process by making visible its colonialist past.