Journal of Music History Pedagogy

Centering Capitalism in Music History Pedagogy

2024-06-27T07:31:22-06:00

The past several years have seen increased calls to center issues of race, gender, and colonialization in music history pedagogy. This article builds on such calls by placing capitalism at the center of music history in the United States. Adopting an intersectional frame can appear daunting. I show, however, that a Marxist approach to colonialism provides a strong framework that can focus historical cases in useful ways. I draw on my experiences teaching Chicago’s musical histories through Marx’s notion of “primitive accumulation,” which places processes of dispossession and disciplining of workers at the heart of major historical changes. I update Marx’s original argument with more recent scholarship by Beverly Skeggs, Sylvia Federici, and Vanessa Wills to demonstrate how accumulation informs subjectivity, in part through racist, sexist, and classist constructions. I connect Marxist theory with the musical histories of Chicago through course readings and assignments. I also reflect on how this approach lays the groundwork for critical inquiry and hope. In sum, I contribute to the drive toward naming and critiquing issues of power, exploitation, and resilience in music within a capitalist hegemony.

Code-Meshing in the Music History Classroom

2024-06-27T07:31:22-06:00

Musical works that demonstrate varied modes of expression can be used to teach students not just about music and its cultural context, but also about how their choices as writers can cross or conform to existing linguistic boundaries. In this article, I argue that examining works like the stylistically hybrid jazz-classical ballet The River by composer Duke Ellington and choreographer Alvin Ailey and its mixed, racially coded reception encourages students to think critically about how the language they use to express themselves leverages, upholds, or challenges established power structures in the academy and the broader world in which they live. To give students the opportunity to investigate and experiment with the modes of written expression they choose to employ, I also advocate for the adoption of antiracist assessment strategies developed by writing instructors in which grades are determined based on the completion of work rather than an (ultimately subjective) assessment of quality as traditional academic writing.

Introduction by the Guest Editor

2024-06-27T07:31:22-06:00

With an aim to providing practical assistance to educators with ready-to-use material, this special issue offers syllabi and bibliographies of global music history, demonstrating varied possibilities of designing a course—whether defined by era, geography, topic, or case studies across the entirety of global music history. This introduction addresses thorny theoretical issues, with an eye to avoiding simplistic reductions that have tended to influence the field. Unresolved questions include: What does the principle of interconnectivity in global music history include, and what does it exclude? Which term does or does not denote the countering of Euro North American cultural colonialism in the form of Western music history that is not only taught but is pedagogically hegemonic on a global scale far beyond Euro North America? What kind of oppressions are hidden within global music history? In what ways are current efforts at a critical global music history inclusive or exclusive?

Towards a Global Baroque

2024-06-27T07:31:22-06:00

In this article I explore how the field of global music history can facilitate pedagogical spaces of decolonial praxis in higher education. Structured as a series of conceptual, curricular, and personal “unbindings,” I reflect on my own experiences with and modeling of a syllabus that works against the chronological conventions of the baroque. Sitting with Gary Tomlinson’s earlier call for “revisionist alternatives” to canonical histories of Western art music, I ask what is at stake, and especially for whom, in conceptualizing a global baroque that is transcultural, transregional, and transhistorical. Pushing against stylistic and periodizing universals, I argue that we must make room for a multiplicity of “baroques” that relink Indigenous agencies across and between time and space. This is arguably less about nominal inclusion in our classrooms and more about a restorative historiography that centers the peoples, practices, and places who have largely been un(der)represented as orchestrators (both literally and figuratively) of the baroque in music history curricula to date. Interfacing with an accompanying syllabus, I advocate for the utility of teaching through “keyholes” (be they people, musical “works,” or practices) that reveal global processes of (dis)integration, entanglement, and friction in individual lives both past and present. By approaching such regions as Beijing, Kolkata, Nagasaki, and San Ignacio de Moxos as baroque epicenters, the global baroque that emerges not only foregrounds Indigenous contributions to and ownership of its diverse musical traditions, but also invites students to understand their own relationship to the connected histories of these musics.

Five Decolonial Narratives in Global Music History

2024-06-27T07:31:22-06:00

Turning Lyotard’s little narratives on its head, this essay references the universal of Euro North American colonialism in constructing a global music history course in which macro narratives provincialize Western music. While current global music history thinking in the global North tends to favor interconnection as a guiding principle, such an approach often fails to emphasize the underlying reason for such interconnectivities—Euro North American colonialism. Contrary to that toothless approach, this essay crafts macro narratives with the specific aim of underlining Euro North American colonialism that has led to Western-leaning music education on a global scale, including in wide swathes of Asia and Africa. In countering conventional Western music history as a real form of Euro North American colonialism with real world effects, the five macro narratives of this essay, following Garba and Sorentino (2020), are decolonial. The five narratives concern multiple antiquities, the global spread of Arabic music during the Islamic Golden Age (whereas Western music was largely confined to Europe), the Euro North American colonial destruction of the music of Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans, the global spread of Western music under Euro North American colonialism, and the existence of music histories distal from Euro North America and Australasia.

Music and Empire

2024-06-27T07:31:22-06:00

Music and Empire is a graduate seminar focusing on South and Southeast Asia in the transition to and through European colonialism c. 1750–1950. The seminar is conceptually innovative, designed to remove the colonial-era split between musicology and ethnomusicology by focusing on the histories of Asian and mixed-race performing arts in the eastern Indian Ocean and South China Sea, rather than on Orientalist representations of “Asia” in Western music or European music in its Asian colonies. It aims to break down conceptual, geographical, and chronological barriers, by 1) exploring historical work on the music, dance, and sound of the region under colonialism, 2) from before European colonial rule to the point of decolonization, 3) using secondary literature that draws primarily on Asian-language sources, in parallel with European-language sources. The seminar also aims to introduce students to the powerful theoretical lens of the “paracolonial.” Paracolonial denotes “alongside” and “beyond” the colonial, and refers to systems of musical knowledge and practice that operated alongside and beyond the colonial state throughout this period. These systems were frequently facilitated by colonial infrastructures, technologies, and presence in South and Southeast Asia, but were not generally dependent upon colonial epistemologies. Rather, they coexisted in differing relations and tensions with colonial thought and action regarding music, “noise,” and their place in society. Thinking music history through a paracolonial frame opens up much more room for the autonomous agency of South and Southeast Asian music makers and listeners within the conditions of possibility they were afforded under colonial rule c.1750–1950.

An Undergraduate Syllabus for “Global Music History”

2024-06-27T07:31:22-06:00

This article presents a syllabus for an introductory undergraduate general education course entitled “Global Music History.” For teaching purposes, the syllabus frames “global music history” as the study of past societies’ sound artistry, materialities, and knowledges as they have been embedded in larger-scale connective processes. The course is organized topically and chronologically, and the focus of most class meetings is on primary sources explored through a targeted discussion question, which students explore in small peer groups. Emphasizing primary materials, representing a variety of sound materials, media, and languages in translation, gives students basic skills for doing music historical research and historically informed work of many kinds. Overall, students gain a knowledge of how musical sound has been involved in major historical processes and changes worldwide and a working understanding of key concepts in global music history and world history.

Slave Orchestras, Choirs, Bands, and Ensembles

2024-06-27T12:02:38-06:00

This bibliography collects brief references to ensembles of enslaved musicians in European colonies in the secondary literature. These are often summarized from primary sources consisting of travelogues, diary entries, news reporting, and auction lists of enslaved musicians. Understanding the global history of music should include an understanding of slave orchestras, choirs, bands, and other types of European derived ensembles and how types of forced musical labor has, for centuries, formed the backdrop of colonial music ecosystems globally. Many current music traditions in these parts of the world, including classical music, grew directly from these slave musical groups and have become an inseparable part of new hybridized musical genres, ensembles, and compositional traditions. Using the narratives told in the resources in the bibliography can help make connections to how Western classical music was used as tools of colonialism and how this was tied to musical trends in Europe and the Western world.