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• 1 2022-05-20T07:29:42-07:00 Challenging Embedded Coloniality in Music History Curricula 16 plain 2022-10-11T13:06:11-07:00 50.57637083132156, -86.50971067843268

  Organizer

  Margaret E. Walker (Queen's University at Kingston Ontario)

  Moderator

  Margaret E. Walker

  Language

  English/French

  Presenters

  Margaret E. Walker
  D. Linda Pearse (Mount Allison University / McGill University)
  Sandria P. Bouliane (Université Laval)

  Challenging Embedded Coloniality in Music History Curricula

  As Canada, located on the lands known to Indigenous peoples as Turtle Island, becomes increasingly diverse and globalized, educational institutions have a duty to reform curricula to account for and include the stories and voices of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC). Exposing and addressing the colonial histories that have led to the whiteness of the academy is part of this responsibility. Yet, since university music education is still built around a history of music that is rooted in narratives of European essentialism and the "normative" sounds of Western European music, it remains particularly resistant to change. Developing both a pedagogy and a curriculum that would challenge these embedded narratives theoretically and broaden the practical canon of music practices beyond elite European music, however, is a challenge that must be met! One must ask what the obstacles are to integrating a decolonial perspective into music history? What types of educational resources need to be implemented to move toward an inclusive and global music history? How can existing resources be made more accessible to instructors who wish to revise and ideally decolonize their undergraduate music history courses?

  This session aims to contribute to the crucial process of decolonizing knowledge production and dissemination in university music programs through sharing research and reflections from within the Canadian post-secondary context. The Canadian context is a relevant starting point because its position in the Americas includes its ongoing colonial reality, its institutional bilingualism despite an English-speaking dominance, its predominantly white but also multicultural population, and its recent political moves toward improving recognition of Indigenous culture and heritage. These are, however, moves that do not transfer easily to the practical realm of the music history classroom due to the embedded and enduring colonial and hegemonic structures of the post-secondary education system. In an effort to reveal and challenge the operative structural frameworks of post-secondary music programs, the speakers share their practical experiences from within the academy, creating spaces for dialogue, and opening up room for the debate.

  The presenters in this ICTM Dialogues session are all musicologists speaking from positions of privilege within the academy, teaching required music history survey courses, and also experimenting with curricular and pedagogical redesign. They present three 15-minute papers in both French and English followed by 45 minutes for questions and dialogue. The first paper sets the scene by putting curriculum, decolonial theory, and emergent work on global music history in dialogue. The second paper digs deep into practical experience, sharing curricular experiments undertaken in an undergraduate early European music survey course. The third paper presents a collaborative case study with particular attention to the pedagogical modalities of learning and assessment activities.

  Défier le récit colonial dans les cours d’histoire de la musique

  Situé sur les terres que les peuples autochtones appelaient Île de la Tortue, le Canada est un pays de plus en plus multiculturel et diversifié. Les établissements d’enseignement qui s’inscrivent dans ce contexte ont le devoir de réformer leurs programmes d’études afin de prendre en compte et d’inclure les histoires et les voix des personnes autochtones, noires et de couleur (PANC). Ils ont la responsabilité d’aborder l’histoire coloniale ayant conduit au système hégémonique européocentrique que l’on connaît . Pourtant, une histoire de la musique tributaire d’une idéologie européocentriste et des “sons normatifs” de la musique d’Europe occidentale dominent encore l’enseignement universitaire de la musique. Le développement d’approches pédagogiques et de syllabus de cours qui remettraient en question les fondements théoriques de ces récits normatifs, tout en élargissant le canon au-delà des pratiques musicales de l’élite européenne, demeure néanmoins un défi qui doit être relevé. Cependant, quels sont les obstacles à l’intégration d’une perspective décoloniale dans l’histoire de la musique? Quels types de ressources pédagogiques doivent être mis en place pour tendre vers une histoire inclusive et globale de la musique? Comment rendre plus accessibles les ressources existantes aux enseignants·es des milieux postsecondaires qui souhaitent réviser ou décoloniser leurs cours d’histoire de la musique?

  Ce panel vise à contribuer au processus crucial de décolonisation de la production et de la diffusion des connaissances en partageant les recherches et les réflexions menées dans les milieux postsecondaires canadiens. Le contexte canadien est un point de départ pertinent en raison de sa position dans les Amériques, de sa réalité coloniale effective, de son bilinguisme institutionnel malgré une dominance anglophone, de sa population majoritairement blanche, mais aussi multiculturelle, ainsi que des récentes mesures politiques visant à améliorer la reconnaissance de la culture et du patrimoine autochtone . Ces mesures ne se transfèrent pas facilement au domaine pratique de l’enseignement de l’histoire de la musique en raison notamment des structures coloniales et hégémoniques du système d’éducation postsecondaire. Dans le but de révéler et de remettre en question les cadres structurels opérationnels des programmes de musique, les chercheuses partagent leurs expériences pratiques vécues au sein de leurs établissements pour créer des espaces de dialogues et pour ouvrir la voie au débat.

  Les conférencières de cette séance de la série Dialogues de l’ICTM sont toutes trois musicologues, qui s’expriment depuis leur position privilégiée d’universitaire . Elles donnent des cours obligatoires d’histoire de la musique et travaillent activement à la refonte de leurs cours et de leur pédagogie. Cette séance comprend trois présentations de 15 minutes, suivie d’une période de questions et d’échanges de 45 minutes, en anglais et en français. La première intervention plante le décor en mettant en dialogue les cours d’histoire de la musique, la théorie décoloniale et les travaux émergents sur l'histoire globale. Le deuxième article se penche sur l'expérience pratique de la révision des contenus et de la matière dans le contexte d’un cours de premier cycle sur la musique ancienne européenne. Le troisième article présente une étude de cas sur la refonte d'un cours d'histoire de la musique en portant plus particulièrement attention aux modalités pédagogiques des activités d’apprentissage et d’évaluation.

   
  

  Reflections

  Our presentation for ICTM Dialogues provided a dynamic and interactive opportunity to launch our team project on Changing Colonial Narratives in Eurocentric Music History (supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada). Although we were building on earlier conversations between the three of us, we were all struck by the robust and helpful dialogue in the session. Chief among the ideas that stay with us and shape our continued project are the need for vigilance regarding research and teaching in different places, languages, and contexts. Decolonization itself means something different depending on where one is situated, as the international group of participants in the session constantly reminded us. Discussants from Zimbabwe, Austria, Singapore, Canada and more shared their experiences and thoughts about learning and teaching music history from their own space and place. The idea of discomfort arose several times reminding us that discomfort can be both a challenge to embrace and a warning to heed. Finally, a point made by several participants was that it is not necessary to reinvent history, but rather we need to open ourselves to multiple perspectives, resources, and approaches. Although never perfect, strategies and approaches to teaching music, and music history, beyond the colonial narrative may be more obvious than we think.

   
  

  Questions to Consider

  What secondary sources, including musical, musicological, historical, and pedagogical, already exist that can be drawn on to facilitate research on and teaching of anti-colonial music history?

  What challenges need to be met in order to create music histories that truly reach across geographical, linguistic, and disciplinary barriers without becoming superficial or inaccurate?

  How can scholars and teachers continuously learn from feelings of discomfort in order to productively question received knowledge while remaining open to multiple types of expertise and ways of knowing?

   
  

  Further References

  Bhambra, Gurminder K., Dalia Gebrial, and Kerem Nişancıoğlu (eds). 2018. Decolonizing the University. London: Pluto Press.
  Bohlman, Philip V. (ed). 2013. Cambridge History of World Music. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
  Douki, Caroline, et Philippe Minard. 2007. “Histoire globale, histoires connectées : un changement d'échelle historiographique? Introduction” [Global History, Connected Stories: a Change of Historiographical Scale? Introduction]. Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine 54 (5): 7-21. DOI : 10.3917/rhmc.545.0007 
  Figueroa, Michael A. 2020. “Decolonizing ‘Intro to World Music?’” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 10 (1): 39-57.
  Guye, Jean-Philippe et Poirier, Alain, eds. 2014. L’enseignement de la culture musicale : pratiques et innovations [The Teaching of Musical Culture: Practices and Innovations]. Paris: Éditions Delatour.
  Kajikawa, Loren. 2019. “The Possessive Investment in Classical Music: Confronting Legacies of White Supremacy in U.S. Schools and Departments of Music. Seeing Race Again: Countering Colourblindness Across the Disciplines, eds. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, Luke Charles Harris, Daniel Martinez HoSang, and George Lipsitz. 155-175. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  Karnes, Kevin C. 2008. Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History. New York: Oxford University Press.
  Morrison, Matthew D. 2012. “(De)Constructing Musicology’s Borders along the Color Line.” In “Musicology Beyond Borders?” Tamara Levitz, convenor. Journal of the American Musicological Society 65 (3): 849-61.
  Ndlovu-Gatshemi, Sabelo J. and Sephamandla Zondi (eds). 2016. Decolonizing the University, Knowledge Systems and Disciplines in Africa. Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press.
  Olstein, Diego. 2015. Thinking History Globally. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
  Robinson, Dylan. 2019. “To All Who Should Be Concerned.” Intersections: Canadian Journal of Music / Intersections: Revue Canadienne de Musique 39 (1): 138–141, https://doi.org/10.7202/1075347ar.
  Stimeling, Travis D., and Kayla Tokar. 2020. “Narratives of Musical Resilience and the Perpetuation of Whiteness in the Music History Classroom.” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 10 (1): 20–38.
  Theissen, Anna Loep. 2021. “Examining Whiteness in the Royal Conservatory of Music History Curricula. https://www.cfmta.org › docs › essays › Loepp_Thiessen.pdf.
  Walker, Margaret E. 2020. “Towards a Decolonized Music History Curriculum.” Journal of Music History Pedagogy 10 (1): 1-19.
  Werner, Michael and Bénédicte Zimmermann. 2006. “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity.” History and Theory 45 (1): 30-50
  Werner, Michael and Bénédicte Zimmermann. 2003. “Penser l'histoire croisée: entre empirie et réflexivité [Thinking Cross History: Between Empiricism and Reflexivity]. “Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 58: 7-36.
  Wilder, Craig Stephen. 2013. Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. New York: Bloomsbury Press.
  Willinsky, John. 1998. Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  Websites:

  Beyond Tokenism: Dismantling, Rethinking & Reframing Narratives in Music History Pedagogy https://musichistoryredo.wordpress.com
  Inclusive Early Music https://inclusiveearlymusic.org
  The Inclusive Historian’s Handbook https://inclusivehistorian.com