Towards a Decolonized Music History Curriculum

Abstract

Although musicological scholarship has expanded in recent decades to include critical theories and diverse repertoire, post-secondary music history curricula largely continue to disseminate a Eurocentric canon of composers and works presented within an evolutionary historical narrative. This article places questions of curricular revision in the current context of calls for educational reform through decolonization initiatives. Beginning with an exploration of what decolonizing education might mean, I then investigate the impact that the European colonial project might have had on the standard music history curriculum, uncovering an embedded teleological progression that supports European exceptionalism and culture superiority. A first step in decolonizing music history teaching, therefore, must be to make the historiographical foundations of what we are teaching transparent through contextualizing Western art music history within a critical, global framework.