Ibero-American Music and the Music History Curriculum: Reform, Revolution and the Pragmatics of Change

  • Susan Thomas University of Georgia
Keywords: Latin American, Iberian, pedagogy, curriculum, politics

Abstract

In the fall of 2015, the Ibero-American Music Study Group hosted a roundtable panel at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society.  Titled “Strategies and Opportunities for Greater Inclusion of Ibero-American Music in the Curriculum†the roundtable was organized as a response to discussions about the future of the core curriculum for both the undergraduate music major and the graduate musicology student that took place at the 2014 AMS/SMT national meeting. The roundtable, and this resulting collection of essays, addresses the challenges and benefits of incorporating Latin American and Iberian musics across the undergraduate and graduate curriculum and considers best practices for their inclusion.

The introductory essay to this collection contextualizes this conversation within a longer history of advocacy for increased engagement with Ibero-American musical cultures and repertories, noting that there has been far from universal agreement on what this change would look like and what its ultimate goals would be.   This collection emerged in a period of particular political ferment, and the essay considers the individual authors’ contributions at a moment when the connections between epistemology, politics, and power seem especially relevant.

Author Biography

Susan Thomas, University of Georgia
Susan Thomas is Associate Professor of Musicology and Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia.  She is author of Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana’s Lyric Stage (University of Illinois Press, 2009) as well as many book chapters and journal articles.  She is the recipient of the Robert M. Stevenson award from the American Musicological Society and the Pauline Alderman award from the International Alliance for Women in Music and has held multiple research fellowships including the Santander Visiting Scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University and the Greenleaf Visiting Scholar at the Stone Center for Latin American Studies at Tulane University.
Published
2017-01-31
Issue
Vol 7 No 2 (2017)
Section
Roundtable

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).