Lisbeth Ahlgren Jensen (Independent Scholar, Copenhagen), Hortense Panum in Search of Missing Links: A Danish Musicologist with a Global View

Unlike her male colleagues, Hortense Panum (1856–1933) did not have a nationalistic agenda, but a global one. She claimed that the early history of string instruments renders itself in two separates: one focused on instruments in the Middle East in antiquity, the other rooted in North Western Europe around the eighth century CE. Panum refused to accept that instruments had occurred at random in two distinct times and places, and in a Darwinian inspired way she decided to find the missing links between these two seemingly unrelated parts of string instruments’ history. As few instruments or fragments of instruments had been preserved, her research relied on iconographic and literary sources. Since she worked in a pre-RIdIM and pre-RILM era, it difficult to locate sources and literature, and she had to visit many libraries and collections in European countries to gather material. With the outbreak of World War I, communication and travel became more difficult, and the publication of her research was delayed for some time. Middelalderens strenginstrumenter og deres forlovøbere I oldtiden was published in three volumes over a period of 16 years (1915, 1928, 1931); an English translation appeared in 1939 (R/1970). The long publication process meant that Panum also had to consider newly published literature on the subject, which gave her an opportunity to enter into dialogue with colleagues who held different opinions, among them Curt Sachs and Francis Galpin. Despite shortcomings, Panum´s opus presents an impressive amount of images depicting stringed instrument of the Middle Ages, and the section on specific Nordic instruments is a particularly pioneering work.

Paula Andrade Callegari (Universidade Federal de Uberlândia), GReCo’s Rhetorical Decorum

An important characteristic of the Renaissance is the rediscovery and imitation of models from antiquity and the use of rhetoric as a basis for learning to develop eloquence in communication. Many musicological studies attest to the use of rhetoric during the sixteenth century as a guide for musical composition. The central principle of all rhetoric is decorum, which is concerned with the capacity to evaluate the circumstances that create the proper balance between “what is to be said” with “how it is to be said,” or, in the case of oratory, finding equilibrium between the subject matter and words. This paper argues that, although music has no concrete meaning as opposed to spoken language, rationalizing contents and forms that are going to be expressed through sound require adapting our rhetorical choices of action. In this sense, efforts have been made since the sixteenth century to apply principles and strategies derived from rhetoric in music. If the pragmatic side of rhetoric was applied in building musical discourses, the education of the orator could also have been a concern in the education of the musician. In this case, the performer, besides his role as a music orator, in which he needs to create a balanced discourse, had to develop social and ethical properties as well. The repertoire prepared at GReCo, being mostly polyphonic, does not have a hierarchical division between the voices. The ongoing research at GReCo is inherently social in which the collective learning processes are plural and decisions are made within the community. We think of this approach not only as a way of building a holistic decorum but also as a manner to cultivate good qualities of performers that would eventually become virtuous persons to help build a better world.

Antonio Baldassarre (Hochschule Luzern), History, Memory, and Identity: “Ostalgia” in Germany

The successful release of the movie Good Bye Lenin! in 2003, marks the beginning of a special nostalgia for the former GDR in reunified Germany, transmitted by a plethora of media, including television shows. These shows shaped a colorful image of the former GDR with no hint of irony, such as one would not even have dared to create in productions from East German television. As this paper explores, these TV shows, including references to GDR’s popular music and visual culture, primarily functioned within a matrix of a highly commercialized and predominantly Western popular culture, and satisfied the needs of a modern consumer society, by triggering a twisted fabrication of history, memory, and identity. 

Barbara R. Barry (Hebrew University, Jerusalem), At Home in the Universe: Musical Works and Multiple Worlds

In his writing on modernism, Peter Gay observes how chasing the latest of its fractional movements be “the latest” results in chasing the train after it has already left the station. In contemporary postglobal society, social media and the image-making of advertising have, if anything, exacerbated this divisive trend of pluralism, in what Adorno scornfully called “the culture industry.” If anything goes, what is musicology meant to be doing today? Musicology’s tasks of differential problem-solving remain its fundamental rationale. The tasks in today’s world, though, are repositioned by new tools—in particular, high-level theories both within music and outside it as meaningful models, as in the scientific theory of multiple worlds—how, in the multiverse (the mega-universe), worlds as patterns of creation repeat, sometimes in similar ways, sometimes transformed or deformed. This model enables us to describe musical works as worlds, as both meaningful structures, and, as discoveries and journeys, as powerful analogues of human experience. Philosophers in the medieval world drew the connection between the macrocosm, as divine number and ratio in the heavens, and microcosms of number and order in painting, architecture, and music. Renaissance scholars drew analogues between divine creativity and human creativity. With the discovery of multiple galaxies, multiple worlds have become part of the contemporary mindset of popular culture, in movies and science fiction; but such models also provide conceptual frameworks to enable discourse to take place between disciplines. In this sense of connective frameworks, applied musicology does not refer to performance so much as using the paradigms of multiple worlds as models and problem-solving tools to reinterpret musical works in the contemporary, postglobal world.

Juliana Carla Bastos (Universidade Federal do Piauí), Towards a Sonorous Ethics: Perspectives for Ethnomusicology in the Twenty-first Century

Rooted in the epistemological conceptions of ethnomusicology and related fields, this paper discusses perspectives on sonorous ethics in Brazil. An analysis of recent scholarship reveals a lacuna in the understanding of sound as an environmental factor, specifically the relationship between sound and power, ethical responsibility of the musician, and ethnomusicologists’ methods facing these aspects. Preliminary reflections on how ethnomusicology has dealt with ethical dilemmas in society vis-à-vis sound shows that researchers’ intellectual efforts need to increase—in Brazil, they strive to understand public policy transformations and occasionally confront the classic models of the area. Although sound in its sensorial nature exerts great influence on our lives, the awareness of it has generated only a shallow understanding on what to think and do with the sounds that we want to create, maintain, modify, or extinguish. The work of ethnomusicologists is paramount to understanding sonorous ethics and to bringing conceptions and actions to the forefront of the discussion. Intellectual efforts must not only extent to specific groups but also to recurrent and legitimized situations that many people clearly consider considered unacceptable but that keep perpetuating themselves. Ethnomusicologist need to investigate where ethics, listening, and emission meet each other. This would allow for a more effective inclusion of the discussion on how sonorous ethics encompass sound and music both in academic contexts and in informal, everyday life. 

Alexander Binns (University of Hull), Musical Tensions: The Position of Musicology in Modern Japan

Musicology in Japan has occupied, especially since 1945, a position of both outward and inward focus. This binary, which is manifest in many other characterizations of the “observation” of Japanese culture, has afforded musicology a critical fluidity that it so often lacked elsewhere. The renewal and reshaping of Tokyo as a global metropolis after World War II licensed a range of architectural styles many of which looked outwards taking inspiration from modernist and postmodernist approaches in the West. So too, though arguably more recently, did musicology embrace both the musical and critical past of Japan as well as that of Europe and the U.S. This pull, between a form of traditional musicology that situated Japanese theatrical musical contexts at its heart, and an interest in academic approaches in Europe and America can be seen, in some ways, as a form of proto-globalization, but one whose methodologies remain circumscribed by previous critical practice. To a certain extent, this also remains the case today and musicology retains both strains of the earlier critical approaches to and ideas of music, as fundamentally understood in philosophical and spiritual terms, but also attempts to claim that, as such, it espouses a form of overarching Gesamtkunst-werk and thereby references the European musical canon. This paper examines some of the approaches in musicology in the last 25 years in Japan which have sought both to contest this “blended” position, but also to reconstitute some of the concerns of earlier musicological practices. In this way, the musicological scene in (post)globalized Japan demonstrates a rich but critically variable context. 

David Blake (State University of New York, Potsdam), Omnivorous Values and Disciplinary Critiques of Musicology

Recent criticisms of musicology in journal colloquies and social media have foregrounded values of inclusivity. The rhetorical evocations of inclusion are intended to advocate for a disciplinary form unencumbered by the methodological divisions, highbrow tastes, and structural exclusions associated with present-day musicology and higher education more broadly. Rather than rejecting the values of U.S. higher education, though, musicological inclusivity directly reflects twenty-first-century multicultural and neoliberal reforms to American universities. These changes have reshaped rhetorical expressions of taste around what sociologists call omnivore theory, a paradigm correlating educational attainment with a disposition for multicultural appreciation and a rejection of highbrow modes of exclusion. Applying theories linking omnivory and higher education by Michèle Ollivier, Bethany Bryson, and Shamus Khan, my paper propose a threefold conception of how musicological omnivory responds to the multicultural and neoliberal reforms of higher education: an interest in studying diverse music; a predilection for inter- or transdisciplinary methodologies; and the rejection of musicology as exclusionary and highbrow. These rhetorical values are explored in recent contentious discussions over disciplinary identity: the 2012 JAMS colloquy “Musicology without Borders”; the 2017 colloquy on Ibero-American repertoire in music history surveys in Journal of Music History Pedagogy; and the response to Pierpaolo Polzonetti’s 2016 Musicology Now post “Don Giovanni Goes to Prison.” The values of diversity and interdisciplinarity mirror the politics of multiculturalism, giving voice to the increased cultural diversity of university study while exposing and challenging the historical racism and sexism at the heart of U.S. higher education. Rejecting musicology reaffirms the neoliberal devaluation of organizations and specializations, as well as the humanities and arts, casting musicology through a straw man that bears scant resemblance to the intellectual work currently central to the discipline. Through this discussion, my paper emphasizes how shifts in musicology’s institutional bases can transform its discursive values.

Carmela Bongiovanni (Conservatorio Niccolò Paganini, Genova), Music Bibliography and Information Literacy: A Global Enterprise

Today more than ever, music bibliography as a global musicological discipline, relies on free or commercial digital or digitalized resources on the Internet. These resources improve and broaden means for those looking for music and writings on music. Undoubtedly, music knowledge benefitted from this, although today few scholars critically explore the teaching methods in music bibliography, that is how to select new concepts and hypertexts, and research avenues specifically (but not exclusively) for musicians. The range of musical knowledge is part of the general information literacy education. Music bibliography, in the spirit and will of Barry S. Brook, wants to be an extension of the global knowledge of world music. The great international bibliographical projects (3 of the 4 R), initiated by Brook and others in the second half of the last century, are changing their goals to face the global challenges. This paper, after a first examination of international bibliographical repertoires facing the challenge of globalization, will try to answer the question about the best music data selection strategies, and teaching methodologies of music bibliography that helps student’s music research path, keeping in mind that within enormity of access you can get lost. 

Matt Brounley (Stony Brook University), Sounding Deregulation: The Gibson Government Series and the Globalized Electric Guitar

In 2011 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service raided the Gibson Guitar Company, confiscating cords of rosewood and ebony imported from Madagascar and India. They suspected that Gibson had violated the Lacey Act—a century-old piece of legislation that regulates the importation of foreign wood. The wood was detained for four years, but, after a failed investigation and forceful lobbying from both Gibson and the TEA party movement, the government released the suspected cargo in 2014. Gibson acted quickly, announcing limited edition “Government Series” guitars that were made from the reclaimed blanks. Fitted with pickups that promise “scorched-earth tone,” shipped in “currency green” cases, and featuring a drab “government tan finish,” Gibson boasted that the Government Series “reminds us that we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights” and that they would do “whatever it takes to defend these rights.” These guitars sold out within minutes of the announcement. But only with a second run of Government Series guitars produced in 2015 did they arrive on major retailers’ shelves. In this paper, I draw from an ongoing ethnographic project at a major instrument retailer in New York City to interrogate the success of the Government Series, particularly in their reception as symbols of protectionist, libertarian ideology. The Government Series presents interesting examples of the tense, and often contradictory, values imbued in musical instruments that are produced, sold, and played in the global neoliberal capitalist era. It champions the deregulatory practices that enable the modern globalized guitar market, while simultaneously rewarding values of local authenticity and anti-globalist sentiments. Following recent work in critical organology, I consider how this case speaks more broadly to the ways discourses of authenticity and sound align with the cultural logic of neoliberalism as they permeate the musical instrument shop.

Camilla Cavicchi (Université de Tours), Musicological Strategies for a Conscious Society: A Renaissance Case Study

Since 2012, the team of the program Ricercar at the Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance (Tours, France) has been working on scientific projects focusing on the restitution of musical experiences in lost Renaissance spaces. In the last five years, we developed two types of installations: 3D renderings (the Sainte-Chapelle in Dijon, in 2014, and of the collegiate Saint Martin in Tours, in 2017) and Cubiculum musicae, which are programs written for specific events. As these installations are exhibited in attractive sites (museums, exhibitions, centenaries, etc.), they offer the opportunity to present the nature of the musicological research and to disseminate its results to a broader public. Thanks to the combination of high-tech sound and audiovisual effects, these installations offer new immersive spaces for musical experience, attracting the interest of adults and children, but also of experts such as musicians, musicologists, and scholars of other disciplines. In these spaces, listening to a piece of music—specifically chosen for its beauty—becomes a moving and unifying experience, transcending generational tastes and multiethnic boundaries that ought to be considered in France and Belgium, where these experiences were presented.

This paper aims to illustrate the processes at the base of the above-mentioned projects and show how they meet the current needs of twenty-first century musicology. In our paradoxical era, in which the reactionary and globalization tend to give culture a marginal role, musicology has to construct links with society to explain the world musical heritage and the importance of the diversities and specificities of the cultures that produced it.

Cheong Wai-ling (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), Debussy’s Music in China: Years of Condemnation and Revelation

There is a common saying that Debussy’s music is close to Chinese aesthetics. While it is not something meant to be taken seriously, it does give a glimpse of the collective consciousness shared by many art music fans and professionals in and, arguably, beyond China. In his book on Chinese pentatonic harmony (1949), the earliest of its kind in China, Wang Zhengya touches on the Chinese style in Debussy’s music. In the years leading up to the eruption of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Debussy’s music came under severe criticism as essentially anti-proletarian. With regard to music-theoretical research, the first ever nationwide conference in China took place in the post-Mao period in 1979, at a time when the implementation of Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening up” policy started to trigger new thinking on many different fronts. The conference theme centered on harmony and one common perception is that the conference was really about the so-called nationalization of harmony. A short paper on Debussy’s harmonic techniques was presented and published in the proceedings—an early sign of a drastic change in the reception of Debussy’s music in China. Years of condemnation were now succeeded by a new and freely expressed veneration. Indeed, the reception history of Debussy in China is dramatic, reflective of the socio-political and no less dramatic changes, from practicing Marxism to communist capitalism. 

Fábio Cury (Universidade de São Paulo), GReCo’s Socio‐Political Stand in the Emergence of a New Musical Thought

The idea that the government should reduce its responsibility as a sponsor of culture and the arts has been spread worldwide. Since the business community has been usually supporting projects and events that bring a direct and immediate publicity and institutional return, this policy has led to disastrous results in Brazil. The growth of classical music audiences, music education projects, and dissemination of the traditional or contemporary repertoires are goals that lie outside the scope of private funding. Besides overcoming the vulnerability and instability that result from their political and economic situation, emerging countries also struggle with the usual practice of trying to follow, with remarkable delay, imported models that can no longer be inserted with adequacy in their socio‐cultural reality. It is in this context that the Research Group on Renaissance and Contemporary Music (GReCo) emerged as an innovative initiative that embraces research, performance, and education. The project concentrates the efforts of a group of professors, researchers, undergraduate and graduate students, in the rediscovery of the Renaissance repertoire, its conception and philosophy, and its interaction with current musical production. As the peculiarities of the period instruments are being mastered, the performers are being trained in the reading of music facsimiles and, gradually, are becoming aware of the strong association between instrumental phrasing and the prosody of voices and rhetoric. GReCo has already reached national acknowledgement as a performing ensemble in a very short time. Within the Brazilian context, part of the Renaissance repertoire itself would suffice to bestow great novelty to the project. However, the purpose of the group is broader. It aims to transport the concepts of Renaissance music into the construction of new contemporary repertoire especially composed for historical instruments. A repertoire which could create a modern sense of rhetorical decorum. 

Keivan Djavadzadeh (Paris 8 University), Music and Cultural Appropriation in the Age of (Post)Globalization

This paper offers an analysis of the politics of cultural appropriation by way of studying several white artists who reclaiming a hip-hop aesthetic in their music. The concept of cultural appropriation refers to the practice whereby the dominant group “takes away” the cultural and racial signifiers from a subaltern racialized group through a process of decontextualization, so that former racial markers are no longer perceived as such. In Black Looks, cultural critic Bell Hooks refers to cultural appropriation as a desire for “eating the Other,” a metaphor that has clear sexual connotations: when “race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of specific groups, as well as the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground.” As a social practice, cultural appropriation is only possible in a society structured in (racial) dominance and therefore, it tells us a lot about the interconnections between identity and power. This paper argues that color-blind ideology is crucial for legitimizing cultural appropriation. White pop stars such as Miley Cyrus or Iggy Azalea invest in the myth of a postracial America where race is no longer an issue, especially in popular culture. I examine the ways in which racial and ethnic differences constitute a subversive resource for these pop stars as it enables them to exploit the distinctive black cultural repertoires, both artistically and commercially, while ignoring or denying the black experience from which cultural productions emerge. Despite (or maybe because of) the new cultural politics of difference, the ambiguous appearance of ethnicity in contemporary popular culture may very well be the mark of a difference “that doesn’t make a difference.”

Sabine Feisst (Arizona State University, Tempe), Fences as Sonic Bridges: Musical Activism at the U.S.-Mexico Border

In the U.S., concerns over security along the Mexican border have received much attention for more than two decades. Migrants and drug traffickers traversing this border have been blamed for economic and safety problems in the U.S. and propelled the George W. Bush administration in the early 2000s to fortify and militarize it through heavy fencing and surveillance. In 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the replacement and expansion of existing fencing through a continuous and large border wall made of concrete. The backers of this project have little concern about its dramatic consequences for the borderland and its human and non-human inhabitants—least about its effect on the land’s rich and delicate sonic ecologies marked by the sounds of migratory and endangered animals and the manifold multicultural musical practices nurtured by frequent border crossings. This paper first examines the border’s rich and complex aural space and then centers on three examples of musical activism: Tohono O’odham elder Ofelia Rivas’s songs protesting the partitioning of O’odham land, activist sound artist Glenn Weyant’s use of border fences as giant musical instruments and artist-acoustic ecologist Garth Paine’s ambisonic field recordings for scientific study, acousmatic composition and virtual reality experiences. They have listened to the borderland over long periods of time, transformed its fences into sound sources and regularly recorded its sonic environments, thus documenting the changing acoustic ecology of the U.S.-Mexico border in a series of site-specific and site-inspired performances and audio-visual installations. Building on research by such scholars as Kun, Madrid, Rivera Servera/Young, and personal interviews conducted with the artists, I will illuminate their musical practice, philosophies and planned responses to Trumpian border politics. 

Aaron Fox (Columbia University, New York), The Rise, Fall, and Rise of Native Americanist Ethnomusicology: Scholarship, Militarism, and the Ethnomusicological Archive

At the moment American ethnomusicology began a serious path to institutionalization in the academy, during the 1950s, the preeminent subject of research among the discipline’s founders was the music of American Indians. The field had grown out of the intersection of German comparative musicology (itself deeply interested in Native American music as a “primitive” idiom) and Boasian cultural anthropology (overwhelmingly focused on the “salvage” of remaining Native American cultural practices and languages in the U.S. and Canada, and largely if indirectly funded by the U.S. government’s interest in dominating Native American people). But by the late 1960s, American ethnomusicologists began abandoning Native American music and communities in favor of work in the “non-aligned” postcolonial nations of the developing world, especially in South and Southeast Asia, West Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Not coincidentally, these same years saw a boom in Cold War funding for research in these international contexts funneled to the public universities where ethnomusicology was newly thriving, and a less-noticed rise in the Native American effort to claim civil rights and cultural sovereignty. In recent decades, as activist research in Native America has once again risen to an important place in the discipline, the sound archive has emerged as a particularly important site for historical critique as well as activist practice. This paper narrates this history as reflecting an obvious intertwining of American imperialism and ethnomusicological theory and practice around sound archives in particular, which has however rarely been addressed directly in the literature.

Andrés García Molina (Columbia University, New York), East–West Encounters in Music Core Curricula

This paper focuses on results from two pedagogical experiments conducted during the 2017–2018 academic year. The first, housed at Columbia University’s Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), involves dialogue, collaboration, and collective brainstorming among graduate student instructors in the Art History Department and the Department of Music. The purpose of this working group is to experiment with teaching an apparently immobile canon in ways that push to the fore questions of gender, class, race, and ethnicity. The second experiment probes possible relationships and points of generative tension between the courses, “Masterpieces of Western Music” and “Asian Music Humanities” taught at Columbia: I will focus on moments of generative overlap between the two courses and strategies for sparking critical reflection on the charged historical relationships between the global East and West. Through both experiments, I explore questions about the stability of categories like Western, Asian, art, and music.

Nalini Ghuman (Mills College, Oakland), Insiders and Outsiders: A Tale of Two Pairs

The two “big names” in the early history of Indian Music Studies in the West are Arthur Fox-Strangways and Walter Kaufmann. But who were the real pioneers, and what is at stake in recovering and revaluating their works? Two lesser-known figures, outsiders to academic, institutional, and colonial structures, had a formative influence on these scholars: Maud MacCarthy, a performer and musicologist, and her husband, John Foulds, a composer, each studied music independently in India; MacCarthy, in 1907–1909 just prior to Fox-Strangways, and Foulds, in 1935–1939 just prior to Kaufmann. This paper draws from the fascinating correspondence between Foulds and Kaufmann, along with previously unviewed archival materials held by the granddaughter of MacCarthy and Foulds (field notes, photographs, letters, radio scripts, newspaper articles), to examine the extensive field research of MacCarthy in Chennai and Thanjavur (and in Varanasi and Agra in the north), and of Foulds in Delhi and Kashmir. MacCarthy’s work, disseminated in lecture-recitals across Britain, France, and on the BBC, represents a significant addition to the burgeoning field of ethnomusicology since few scholars had studied Carnatic music and even fewer were independent musicians. Foulds, as music director at Delhi’s All-India Radio, transcribed Indian music for an Indian orchestra he formed, arranged kritis for Western orchestra, and gave a series of broadcast talks on the interface of Indian and Western musics while being systematically denied airtime on the BBC. Finally, in the context of the ways in which class, gender, colonial structures, and disciplinary boundaries impacted the dissemination of “ethnomusicological” work during this colonial period, I discuss how, just as MacCarthy and Foulds each planned books on Indian music, each one was sought out for advice by Fox-Strangways and Kaufmann respectively.

Beatriz Goubert (Columbia University, New York), Muisca Andean Music: Indigenous Cultural Recuperation and Multicultural Politics of Recognition in Colombia

In the context of the 1991 proclamation of Colombia as a multicultural nation-state, a group of elders in Bogotá identified itself as descending from the Muiscas and started a complicated process to achieve legal recognition as an indigenous group. Although the Muisca Indians were considered officially extinct in the seventeenth century, the Colombian government has recognized five Muisca cabildos (indigenous governments). As part of the cultural recuperation effort, contemporary Muiscas perform Andean music, a cosmopolitan style inspired by indigenous Andean melodies and instruments, made internationally famous by melodies such as Paul Simon’s “El cóndor pasa” (If I Could). Started by mestizo musicians, this style is now performed by different indigenous communities in the Andes and abroad as an economic and cultural activity. The Muisca appropriation of this style, supported on the construction of an identity that takes into account the historical and sociopolitical transformations of the community and the country, apparently clashes with the state’s promotion of an essentialistic identity based on the revitalization of their own colonial past. Through an emphasis on the Andean musical practices of the Muiscas, my paper analyzes the production of a contested contemporary indigenous identity in Colombia shaped in part by multicultural politics of recognition. 

Paula Harper (Columbia University, New York), From “Pieces” to “Listening Practices”

For students, music and sound are ubiquitous parts of daily life, from elective background listening via headphones and mobile devices, to “atmospheric” music in public and commercial spaces. A music class devoted to the Western canon all too often overlooks this rich, layered form of musical acquaintance in favor of presenting a history whose intersections with contemporary lived musical experience are marginalized, or altogether absent. This paper argues that such intersections should be central to a core music course. I present two examples of assignments that I have used in previous iterations of the “Music Humanities” course: one, an essay prompting students to craft an argument about the efficacy of a beloved (or despised) piece of music, often from any number of popular traditions; the second, an exercise in close, situated listening. Stemming from my success with these projects, I propose a core music course that takes students’ contemporary listening practices into consideration. The aim of such a course would be to teach students to interrogate, denaturalize, and critique familiar experiences and technologies (earbuds, mobile devices, streaming services, YouTube, social media, the ambient music of capitalism, live performance, and others). These nodes of contemporary listening would serve as starting points for exploring how labor, race, gender, and other planes of experience, identity, and difference are knit into our constructions of canon, genre, technology, and platform design. In such a course, the Western canon would be one of many implicated “traditions.”

Ana Hofman (Znanstvenoraziskovalni center Slovenske akademije znanosti in umetnosti, Ljubljana), Toward the Utopian Ethno/Musicology: Researching Self/Emancipatory Musical Alliances after Yugoslavia

Beginning in 2000, the emergence of the “self-organized” choir movement has greatly influenced practices of music activism in the territory of the former Yugoslavia. In this paper, selected aspects of the choirs’ activities demonstrate how a rich sonority of mass performance shows their potential for political mobilization. By theorizing the potential limits and dead ends in discussing the political capacity of music and sound in ethno/musicological scholarship affected by current crisis of neoliberalism, my analysis goes beyond presenting a case study. My paper proposes two strategies in which sensory experience contributes to our interpretation of political potentialities. The first focuses on the role of music and sound in shaping political imagination and the politics of hope in highly uncertain and precarious neoliberal moment. By analyzing activist choirs’ performances, I unveil the rediscovery of utopia and future-oriented idealism as politicized action. The second is what I call “radical amateurism,” emerging from politicizing a field of leisure as a response to the contemporary reconstitution of work-leisure relationship through practices of commodification and precarization. 

Sharon Kanach (Centre Iannis Xenakis, Université de Rouen), From the “End of the World” to the Heart of the Subject: Music Research in the Digital Age

This paper addresses the possibilities and limitations of conducting research from remote places in the digital age. Due to international protocols of digital collections and the momentum of the Digital Humanities, Open Knowledge, Creative Commons, the promises appear endless. Specific case studies show how previously unprecedented online access to documents (or documentation of hard copies) today have rendered entirely unexpected discoveries and carved out new areas of musicology, especially fostering a transdisciplinary approach. However, restrictive copyright legislation in certain countries sometimes overshadows this new reality, rendering the prospect of “anything is possible” an illusion. Navigating these new territories outside of the academy or even far away from actual research centers is a new and stimulating challenge. Further sharing the fruits of such inquiries also poses new considerations for the serious researcher. 

Dorit Klebe (Freie Universität Berlin), Comparative Studies in Musicology: On the “Melodic Line” in Seventeenth-Century Vocal Music of the Mediterranean in Light of Recent Global Developments

Musicological studies often rely on handwritten documents and autographs, some of which contain performance instructions essential for analysis. Ethnomusicology, which mostly explores orally transmitted traditions, relies on reports and transcriptions. In transcultural music research, comparative studies taking both approaches is essential. In order to demonstrate this, my paper discusses examples from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century occidental and oriental musical cultures, which display the importance of the melodic line in the context of poetry settings as well as related aspects of performance practice in the Turkish beste and the Italian opera aria. Both genres display similarities in their solo singing with instrumental or partly choral accompaniment, in their range of passionate expressions of incantation and lamentation, and the singer’s utmost intensity in order to raise the listener’s emotions. Differences pertain to structure and ornamentation. Recent global developments in performance practice show the range and significance of comparative studies in poetry-driven music and specifically its melodic line.

Juliane Larsen (Universidade Federal da Integração Latino-Americana, Foz do Iguaçu), Writing History of Art Music in Postcolonial Countries: Directions for the Decoloniality of Latin American Musicology

This paper addresses the possibility of epistemological transformations of musicology from a reflection on decoloniality, understood as the overcoming of coloniality in musicological knowledge. It starts from the assumption that coloniality is ag given and that Latin American musicology reproduced the colonial discourse by addressing issues involving local musical practices, especially in the elaboration of historical narratives. The use of concepts of European musicology (originally pertaining to the study of the so-called Western art music) in Latin American writings on music history has led to the reproduction of an ethnocentric discourse. In Brazilian musical historiography, for example, categories such as musical work, creative genius, authenticity, and originality, are associated with sociological interpretations about the formation of the Brazilian people and culture, which emerged in the nineteenth century on a varied theoretical basis that included racial theories, social evolutionism, and geographic determinism. In this way, a version of the history of music, based on race and class prejudices, has been consolidated in Brazil, which has obscured, rather than explained, the dynamics of the country’s musical life. Undoubtedly, there is a need for transforming the musicological discourse. To this extent, possible alternatives for writing the history of music are proposed, considering that the development of each narrative is a response to concerns of the present. The role of the researcher and teacher of musical historiography is discussed, as are the democratization of knowledge production (in the sense of expanding the places for enunciating discourses on music), the relation between local histories within a music production of global reach, and the cultural identities that emerge from music historical narratives and which they legitimize. 

Teona Lomsadze (Tbilisi State Conservatoire), Ethno/Musicology in Post-Soviet Georgia: Towards Western Approaches

Scientific research of Georgian folk music started at the beginning of the twentieth century and the first Georgian musicological research appeared in 1919. Ethno/musicology was established in Georgia on the basis of the Russian analogue and shared the same research approaches, with major differences to Western scholarship–here, composers and musicologists were the first to become interested in folk music. The musical language of Georgian composers derived from a synthesis of national and European musical elements. Due to this, one of the criteria for musicologists in the assessment of Georgian composers’ works was their connection to traditional music. In this way Georgian historical musicology has intersected with ethnomusicology, but neither was this a conscious process nor a reflection of Frank Harrison’s position that “it is the function of all musicology to be in fact ethnomusicology.” The 1990s saw a disciplinary shift from folklore to ethnomusicology. The Western research approach, informed by Merriam’s concept of “music in culture,” was imported to Georgia by participants of the International Symposia for Traditional Polyphony. Recently, new areas in Georgian ethno/musicology emerged, such as research on popular music, the music of ethnic minorities, Georgian folk music revival, gender issues in Georgian folk music and so on. The developments in Georgian ethno/musicology mirror political and social change of the country. This paper discusses the development of Georgian ethno/musicology at the turn of the twentieth century. It demonstrates the main practices of twentieth-century Georgian musical scholarship and presents contemporary development that occurred in post-Soviet Georgian ethno/musicology. It also addresses challenges and tensions in modern Georgian musical scholarship.

Jay Loomis (Stony Brook University), Salvage Ethnology, Repatriation & The Frances Densmore Dilemma

As one of several early–twentieth-century American ethnologists, Frances Densmore (1867–1957) stands out for her prolific writing, her tireless fieldwork, her pioneering ethnographic audio recording practices, and her overall successful career as an anthropologist in an age when it was difficult for women to be accepted into male dominated scientific fields. At the same time, as a consummate practitioner of salvage ethnography, Densmore perpetuated racist and colonial perspectives in her interactions with the Native peoples whom she researched. Discourse on authenticity and salvage are at the heart of understanding the contradictions embodied in Densmore and her scholarship. The concept of “real Native culture” is deeply problematic and perpetuated stereotypes, racism, and social inequality. The dilemma of how to interpret Densmore becomes especially clear in my discussion on repatriation and archives: even though Frances Densmore clearly acted from a colonial perspective as a salvage ethnologist, thanks to her diligence, individuals in Native communities today cherish the fact that they can hear the recorded voices of their ancestors and pass on old songs that otherwise, most likely would have been forgotten. I consider repatriation as a practice that runs both together with and contrary to globalization, and can be a corrective measure for situations when global institutions have benefitted from the exploitation of indigenous communities. When a museum or other institution repatriates tangible and intangible artifacts to an indigenous community, the marginalized group takes center stage and the local takes priority over the global.

Sky Macklay (Columbia University, New York), Student-Created Content in the Core Music Class

In today’s globalized university, one powerful way to ensure that all students are represented in the classroom is to build a creativity-based curriculum in which students of all musical skill levels are empowered to compose their own music. To this end, I will share techniques for teaching composition in the core music classroom. Drawing on Bell Hooks’ argument for collectively-created course content, my course puts equal emphasis on works by established musicians and students’ own creative work. In the process of creating music, students gain facility with music fundamentals and terminology, and they consider their work within larger musical and historical contexts. I will reflect on three specific assignments/projects: a piece of musique concrète, a text-based or graphic score piece for performance by members of the class, and a solo piece for a specific instrument performed by a guest artist. The third project is framed as a close reading of a specific instrument and can be notated in any conceivable way (traditional notation, choreographic notation, text or graphic notation, aural transmission of recorded material, etc.). My project-based approach invites the study of electronic pieces, sound-based performance art pieces, and pieces that focus on the particularities of a specific instrument. Such project-based approach opens up opportunities to study many different genres and cultures not typically covered in a Western-centric curriculum.

Tatjana Marković (Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien), Post-Yugoslav National Music Historiographies between Nostalgia and Denying the Past

The dissolution of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia was a long process that began with the establishment of the independent Republic of Slovenia in 1991 and ended with the foundation of the Republic of Serbia in 2006. As Yugoslavia was a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multilingual, multireligious country, the split internally triggered civil wars, ethnic cleansing, fights based on religious differences, and externally led to international sanctions, political demonization, complete isolation, and the NATO bombing known as Operation Allied Forces. The subsequent fall of the economy of the entire region, marked by hyperinflation, extensive migrations, and brain-drain had disastrous consequences for almost all parts of former Yugoslavia. All this resulted in a stark change of national self-understanding as also evident in scholarship in the arts and sciences. The distancing from the Yugoslav past, especially in Croatia, ranged from the construction of a new language to a new history of cultural institutions, redefining (music) historiography to such an extent, that research results from the 1990s are largely unreliable. Such constructed self-glorification is rooted in the imperial (Habsburg) past in Slovenia and Croatia, and in the Nazi era and World War II, when Croatia proclaimed itself an independent state. It is also connected to the bitter disappointment with post-Yugoslav political life, specifically its problematic economy and corruption. The radical political, social, cultural radical changes, and shifts in national identities also extend to Bosnia and Herzegovina. The newly established countries and their diasporas are at the center of this paper and are discussed in the context of new music historiographies, with their new languages, new national(istic) discourses, and partially new national music representatives. 

Wolfgang Marx (University College Dublin), Critiquing Oneself Back into Business? Post-Factual Narcissism in Musicology

Musicology has always consisted of a broad range of methodological approaches. This includes a range of polarizing dichotomies, with the dialectics between what has been distinguished as text and context, object and process, or “music itself” and its cultural surroundings chief among them. The way musicology engages with this dichotomy represents a crucial disciplinary challenge. This is not a new insight, but today a combination of epistemological, sociological, and political developments lets it appear in a new light. Recent critical approaches to postmodern thinking (Maurizio Ferraris, Manifesto of New Realism, 2015) as well as to critical theory (Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique, 2015) question whether the focus that the humanities (here new/critical musicology) have placed on self-reflexivity and the subjective element of perception may have gone too far, and whether in an age of a perceived post-factual relativity it is possible to expand the frame again beyond the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” But would this not just be another ultimately pointless move in what Rob C. Wegman has described as a continuing “narcissistic” merry-go-round, “this perpetual relapse, alternated by the perpetual rediscovery of our subjectivity, that keeps this debate going round in circles?” I will argue against this view, given that— together with academics of other disciplines—musicologists can no longer hide in purely intradisciplinary discourses: as teachers addressing students, as administrators engaging with higher-education managers, and as public intellectuals engaging with society at large we now have to address a new and amoral relativism that has arisen in part through how postmodernist anti-objectivity has been perceived and is utilized by our societies. If this fight is not joined, the future of the university as we know it—and with it musicology—will be in question. 

Panayotis Mavromatis (New York University), Exploring Musical Schemata: Opportunities for Global and Interdisciplinary Encounters

The need for specialization in academic music disciplines has occasionally resulted in parallel and often disconnected studies of musical phenomena across cultures and historical periods that nevertheless bear strong family re-semblances to each other. A striking example in recent years is the study of musical structures and processes involving similarity and varied repetition. These topics have received increasing attention in music theory, historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and music information retrieval. For example, Treitler (1974, 1975), Hucke (1980), and Nowacki (1985, 1986) have studied formulaic structure in plainchant and have related it to questions of oral transmission. Gjerdingen (1988, 2007) has demonstrated the pedagogical and communicative significance of schematic patterns in the galant style of eighteenth-century Europe. Seeger (1966), Shapiro (1972, 1975), and Cowdery (1984, 1990) have studied melodic families in Western folk song, and more recently Volk and collaborators (2012, 2016) have explored similar questions in a computational framework. Richard Widdess (2011) has identified schematic patterns in orally transmitted devotional songs of Nepal. And the presenter has developed a computational model of formulaic structure in modern Greek church chant (2005, 2009). I suggest that diverse manifestations of schema-based variability in music can be accommodated within a common formal and computational framework of musical schema theory that draws on general cognitive schema theory (Rumelhart 1980, Schank and Abel-son 1977) and on various aspects of previous music studies. Thus, behind the diversity of musical practices and attitudes, one can glean patterns of structure and behavior that could in principle be traced to a common origin, namely proper-ties of memory and learning. The latter, though diverse in their cultural manifestations, nevertheless rely on the common biological underpinning of the human brain with its very specific capabilities and limitations. I argue that the outcome of such analysis must first and foremost resonate with the carriers of the musical culture being analyzed. I report preliminary positive results in the context of my Greek church chant analysis. Once this requirement is satisfied, a common language naturally develops that allows practitioners from different traditions to share their creative experiences and perhaps draw inspirations from each other.

Grant Olwage (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg), Border Thinking in Musicology: The Example of Paul Robeson’s “Thoughts”

Paul Robeson was celebrated and reviled as a political activist and organizer, and far more celebrated as a performer. His musicological endeavours, however, remain all but unknown. An amateur musicologist and linguistic for much of his life, the singer’s musicological musings culminated in an unpublished manuscript of 1956, “Paul Robeson: Thoughts about His Music,” offered as a theory of universal music. Borne out of the anthropological comparative method to which Robeson had been introduced in the early 1930s, “Thoughts” was a late-career justification for the singer’s own performance practices as well as a cosmopolitan critique of global politics; it was penned during Robeson’s incarceration in the U.S.; he was blacklisted and denied the right to travel. My interest in “Thoughts” proceeds along several lines of inquiry: What does a close reading of the manuscript reveal; and which of its features and idea(l)s, and those of the comparative method (not so fashionable of late), might we consider retrieving for a contemporary musicology. Specifically, how might this serve the ends of a “pluriversal” musicology, to borrow a term from Walter Mignolo? More broadly, I am exploring aspects of Mignolo’s decolonial philosophy—grounded in border thinking and diversality—in an attempt to think about the conditions of and possibilities for a decolonial musicology. 

Ira Prodanov Krajisnik and Nataša Crnjanski (Univerzitet u Novom Sadu), Archiving in the Age of (Post)Globalization: Toward a Method of Microhistory

In the age of information flood, preservation in the field of music is ever more important since music is “mirror of the world,” which prophetically gazes into the future better than any other art (Attali, 1998). But the collection of all documents concerning musical practice in a given town or region exceeds the capacities of national institutions. Therefore, the creation of “mini” archives that focus on distinct areas of cultural history is ever more important. A case in point is the digital open-access archive of all data related to musical practices of the symphony orchestra and the choir of the Academy of Arts at the University of Novi Sad, among them concert booklets, video and audio tapes, reviews, photos, etc. (https://kulturoloski-identiteti.uns.ac.rs). The archive emerged as part of the project Cultural Identities in the Artistic Production of the Academy of Arts, University of Novi Sad: Archiving and the Analytical Presentation of Material and Tradition, which focused on archiving all performances and concerts, as well as exhibitions in a database. The symphony orchestra and the choir made important contributions to this, as during the four decades of their existence, they have put forth a rich artistic production which became highly appreciated and acknowledged among critics and the public of the municipality and the whole region. Aside from canonic repertoires from the Baroque to the Romantic era, the ensembles premiered recent works by Giya Cancelli, Aleksandra Vrebalov, Gene Koshinski, and others. They also cooperated with distinguished international artists such as bass Željko Lučić, violinist Stefan Milenković, and pianist Kemal Gekić. The online archive with its unique collection has the potential to serve not only musicologists, but also artists and sociologists. An analysis of archived material suggests that it represent a microhistory in the sense of Szijártó’s definition of the term (Szijártó and Magnuson, 2013). Indeed, in the era of postglobalization, the content of the archive fulfils the objective of cultural preservation, represents the history of Serbian music in the twentieth century, and thus offers a reflection of a complex past. This paper further elucidates microhistory as a legitimate approach in maintaining and researching an archive in the age of postglobalization. 

Ana Petrov (Univerzitet Singidunum, Belgrade), Society without Territory: Dealing with Yugoslav Popular Music after the Dissolution of Yugoslavia

This paper discusses the role and the importance of the audience as a means for producing collectivities in contemporary post-Yugoslav musicological research of popular music. Indeed, the act of listening to popular music has shaped new post-Yugoslav collectivities among diverse social, generational, and ethnic groups. The research of this reception, particularly of Yugoslav popular music, has primarily focused on the ways this music has served as a means for (re)connecting with the past and the lost homeland, thus connecting the reception to a nostalgic narrative of the past. This paper considers the supposedly anostalgic and apolitical reception of the music by a later generation: those not born during the existence of Yugoslavia and who argue that they are apolitical and not interested in the concomitants of the music they consume. They learned about Yugoslavia second hand, inheriting both positive memories and an ignorance of the past. In this way is the audience experience a relevant and appropriate part of music research. More so, recent research has acknowledged that the audience also contributes to the production of performance contexts and to the meaning of a given event. Taking Yugoslav popular music as a point of departure, this paper elaborates on the political implications of the “pure” enjoyment of the second-hand generations in two kinds of music: the first originated during the time of Yugoslavia and is still officially recognized as “Yugoslav popular music”; the second emerged after the dissolution of the country and achieved great popularity in the territory of former Yugoslavia, thus showing that there has been a continuity of the Yugoslav market in the post-Yugoslav era. 

Rima Povilioniene (Lietuvos muzikos ir teatro akademija, Vilnius), Baltic Musicological Conferences, 1967 to Present: Contextualizing the Musicological Research in Lithuania after the Soviet Collapse and Lithuanian Independence Restoration

In 1941, a Lithuanian Composers’ Union was established in Kaunas which later relocated to Vilnius. The musicological section of this union, formed soon thereafter. Currently the section brings together around 70 Lithuanian musicologists, music critics, and ethnomusicologists. Since 1967, has been cooperating with Latvian and Estonian musicologists, initiating the Baltic Musicological Conferences that had great impact on the musical situation after the fall of the Iron Curtain. In the 1960s, when the political climate thawed, the music of the Baltic countries experienced a sudden leap of modernization, due to contacts with musical communities in other Eastern bloc countries. Young composers focused on the ideas of the avant-garde. At the beginning of the 1970s a more profound renewal entered the music of Lithuania and other countries of the Baltic region, with the increasing importance of the ideas of cultural resistance, national identity, and creative freedom. The Baltic Musicological Conferences were marked by this search for national identity, which was distinct for each Baltic country. This paper presents the course of the , analyzing the tendencies of chosen topics and the musicological research in Lithuania after the Soviet collapse. 

Federica Riva (Conservatorio di musica “A. Boito”, Parma), “World Music Documentation System: A Phantasy”: Reading Barry S. Brook Forty Years Later

Given the fast development of e-technologies, one of the central question for music librarians is, how music documentation grafts into the field of international studies in music bibliography. This paper compares the views of Barry S. Brook (U.S.) and of Claudio Sartori (Italy) on music bibliography and cataloguing in the 1970s and 1980s. It does so by analyzing Brook’s article and Sartori’s correspondence with RISM. The two bibliographers saw the role and use of technologies quite differently, each representing the societal context in which they lived and work. Both had an extraordinarily clear vision of the future, which is now our time. Both underlined the value of human networking as crucial factor to meet the discipline’s aim: the worldwide dissemination of accurate information. Comparing their vision with the actualities of our present provides an opportunity to reflect on current challenges: how does the fast development of e-technologies improve differences between those who easily have access to electronic tools and others who cannot afford them, and how does this affect research? How can we improve accessibility to information contained in e-documents and ascertain the accuracy of the information itself? How do research methods, abilities, and habits need to change in order to bridge the human and binary language of the digital world? Was Barry S. Brook’s “World Music Documentation System” a fantasy or a prophecy? 

Katy Romanou (European University Cyprus, Nicosia), Musicology and the Common Man

Since the end of the twentieth century, musicology, rather than music, has become increasingly a subject of musicological research and study. This implies concern about the significance of the discipline in our times, when so many other academic fields and professions are in the process of being eliminated and/or radically changed through digital global communication and reverse globalization, i.e., the multicultural immigration flow and cramming into the West, which has succeeded the expansion of the Western culture towards other cultural environments (in parallel with the disqualification of the idea of any hierarchy in culture and the arts). From the perspective of a person involved in musicology of a culture marginal to the West, current developments in musicology are discussed. The slowly vanishing division of musicology into historical musicology and ethnomusicology in “marginal” countries, such as Cyprus or Greece often translates into the duality “traditional” and “imported/imposed.” The perpetuation of the notion of “common man” through social networking is much in line with what has changed the route of musicology in the second half of the twentieth century, i.e., the study of the music of the common man and not only canonic works of the “great composers.” What is now being questioned is the hierarchy and the methodology established in musicology to study and discuss music—these are governed by authoritarianism. Up to the end of the twentieth century, this authoritarianism has been firmly rooted in the equation: “What is transmitted in written documents is literate and what is orally transmitted is illiterate”—an equation that questions the place of Socrates, as well as Arabic and Indian music.

Nico Schüler (Texas State University, San Marco), Digital Music Research as a Bridge between (Sub-)Disciplines

Barry S. Brook’s vision for computers in humanities research, which led him to the founding of RILM and RIdIM, to organize conferences on this topic, and to the researching of and publishing on music data processing, helped spurring countless research projects that transcended not only the boundaries between music theory, musicology, ethnomusicology, and music performance, but that also built bridges to (besides computer science) linguistics, psychology and cognition, anthropology, education, philosophy, politics, and many other disciplines. Transcending national and cultural boundaries, this paper will start with briefly systematizing and summarizing major current projects in the realm of digital music research: from digital music representation to computer-assisted music analysis, from databases to online archival research, and from digital music editions to music performance and performance research. It will then present the findings of two new research projects by the author of this paper. The first project, bridging historical music research and analysis with cultural studies and politics, used commercial (online) genealogy and newspaper databases as well as online archives to rediscover the African-American composer and pioneer of black minstrel music Jacob J. Sawyer (1856–1885). The second project, bridging music theory/analysis with music performance and perception, analyzed expressive timing (based on the identification of inter-onset durations with the freeware Sonic Visualiser and various VAMP plugins) in more than twenty different performances of a Bach keyboard invention to understand the perception of rubato and its relationship to tempo in music performances. The summary of these two research projects will emphasize the research methodologies. The paper will conclude with an outlook on digital music research that requires a critical review of past and current research approaches. 

Suddhaseel Sen (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay), Between “Text” and “Context”: Ethnomusicology and the Study of Non-Western Music

Ever since different disciplines within the humanities have taken a sociological turn, questions have been raised regarding the value of formalist studies of music; these, in turn, have raised counterarguments from formalists in the global musicological community. Seen as a methodological approach, ethnomusicology is valuable for examining the imbrications of music in all cultures with larger social, cultural, and historical processes; ethnomusicology, therefore, can and must co-exist with historical and formalist approaches towards the study of any given culture. In practice, however, several asymmetries exist at a ground level. Firstly, while the scholarship on Western art music shows a variety of methodological approaches, European-language scholarship on non-Western music has an overwhelmingly sociological or anthropological emphasis. Secondly, the majority of current ethnomusicology jobs require scholars to have expertise in multiple non-Western traditions and/or Western “popular” music, while Western art music job descriptions are far more specialist in nature. What are the ramifications of these asymmetries for the discipline of musicology? Are formalist and ethnomusicological approaches really opposed to each other? In my presentation, I shall argue that the study of any musical tradition, whether Western or non-Western, or art or popular, requires a balance of formalist, historical, and sociological approaches, using relevant examples from India (Rabindranath Tagore), England (Maud MacCarthy and John Foulds), and France (Maurice Delage and Jean Cras) from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Luis Ricardo Silva Queiroz (Universidade Federal da Paraíba), Ethnomusicology, Music Education, and Decoloniality: Perspectives for Rethinking Brazilian Higher Music Education

This paper discusses and analyzes characteristics of Brazilian higher music education. Based on studies about musical trajectories in this country, it considers that music education in Brazil was, for a long time, grounded and defined by Western classical music models of teaching and learning. Brazil was colonized by Portugal for approximately three centuries. Several ethnomusicologists have evidenced that in this period Brazilian music was based on standards of European music, especially those produced up until the early years of the twentieth century. Consequently, formal music education processes were rooted in exactly these standards. Brazil offers a broad variety of popular and traditional musics, and different ways of transmitting musical knowledge, but these are not incorporated into higher music education—a paradox of the cultural process of coloniality. Within this context, this paper aims to identify traits of coloniality in Brazilian higher music education and reflect on new alternatives, i.e. a decolonial music education in Brazil. Theoretically this is grounded in epistemological perspectives from several fields, especially from ethnomusicology and music education. It is supported by qualitative research that encompasses bibliographical and source studies. There are strong traits of coloniality in the trajectory of Brazilian higher music education. These traits are still present in current curricula. However, current trends in ethnomusicology and music pedagogy indicate new perspectives for music in higher education, linked with traits of decoloniality that think and work towards a music education which caters to the diversity and identity of Brazilian music.

Satoru Takaku (Nihon University, Tokorozawa), Unknown Bloom Awaiting Globalization? A History of Musicology in Late–Twentieth-Century Japan

This paper provides a brief history of musicological scholarship in Japan produced in the second half of the twentieth century in order to identify issues and perspectives. After the embracing of Western musics in the Meiji period, musicological research was highly encouraged, though did not take a stronghold until 1936 when the Tōyō Ongaku Gakkai (Society for Research in Asian Music), was founded as the first society in Japan representing the discipline of comparative musicology. In 1952, Nihon Ongaku Gakkai (Musicological Society of Japan) was established, which six years later joined the International Musicological Society (IMS.) For many scholars of this generation, musicology equaled music aesthetics and historical musicology as represented by Hugo Riemann. With the more recent generations of scholars, academic music studies diversified, both in content and method. The problem of the identity of musicology in Japan began to be discussed at the annual meetings of the Nihon Ongaku Gakkai. The ten major academic musicological societies in Japan are coping with issues of the musicology/ethnomusicology divide; the “import surplus,” that is, most Japanese musicologists tend model themselves on musicology in countries such as Germany and the U.S.; a reluctance to transmit creative outputs abroad because of language barriers, which makes the work by Japanese musicologists inconspicuous; the near absence of international collaboration, an exception being the twentieth IMS congress in 2017, which took place in Tokyo for the first time, or the American musicologist Richard Taruskin receiving the prestigious Kyoto Prize—this might be an impetus for a true globalization of musicology, involving Japan in the long term. 

Rūta Stanevičiūtė (Lietuvos muzikos ir teatro akademija, Vilnius), Postcolonialism and Post-Soviet Transition of the Lithuanian Music Historiographies

It is still unusual to see or to hear the terms “colonialism” and “postcolonialism” applied to the Soviet Union and to post-Soviet countries. As Lithuanian émigré scholar Violeta Kelertas has pointed out in 2006, “resistance to the application of these terms overlooks the facts that Russia and/or the Soviet Union were colonial empires—that Russia was a colonizer and that the Soviet Union was one as well. Soviet and post-Soviet self-descriptions have contended that both the USSR. and, later, Russia served as a liberator of workers of the world and a facilitator of emergence from other ‘real’ colonial empires … like England, Germany, Spain, France, Holland, and Portugal.” In recent years, the theory of postcolonialism has become a productive tool for the development of comparative studies of the culture of the USSR and post-Soviet countries, but it is still avoided in conjunction with Soviet and post-Soviet music cultures. Postcolonialism specifically encourages critical reflection on cultural differences and interactions, given the political, social, and economic factors of music culture transformations. That allows the reconsideration of the discourse of nationalism and internationalism, as well as the representations of authenticity and hybridity as colonial and postcolonial identities under the imperial regime and after collapse of the empire. In the 2011 discussion of the specificity of colonialism in the Russian Empire, Russian émigré scholar, Alexander Etkind suggested taking into account internal colonization as being equivalent to external colonization. Both in the Russian Empire and in the Soviet Union, the dominating colonizers realized their power through power distance, or, to quote Etkind, through dissociating themselves from “exotic natives” and simultaneously romantically enjoying them. The expression of nationalism tolerated by the official ideology in the Soviet Union vividly illustrates a hybrid colonial identity based on double optics: observing and accepting one’s own identity from outside and inside, through the eyes of the colonizers and the colonized. In parallel, as stated by Russian scholar Ilya Kukulin in 2012, as early as in the 1960s and 1970s, postcolonial motifs started taking shape in the culture of the Soviet Union that reflected a new approach to cultural differences. In Lithuanian music culture, the postcolonial motifs and identities became visible in both music creation and its musicological reflection in the late 1970s and 1980s. This paper discusses the Soviet formation and post-Soviet transformation of national history writing in Lithuania. Two different tendencies can be observed in the writings of musicologists Vytautas Landsbergis (b.1932) and Algirdas Ambrazas (1934–2016). Indeed, their articles and books provide different interpretations of works by various composers and general processes in Lithuanian music, forming more generalized conceptions that might be regarded as emblematic versions of the fluctuating construction of “other” and the national self-confidence in musicology.

Benjamin Tausig (Stony Brook University), Historical Resonance: Musical Intimacy and the Development of Bangkok during the Vietnam War

The economic development of Bangkok in the twentieth century was dependent upon sound. Between 1965 and 1975, one million U.S. soldiers descended on the city for R&R leave during the Vietnam War. This period catalyzed the city’s transformation into a cosmopolitan nexus and laid the groundwork for its participation in global capitalism. As U.S. soldiers passed through Bangkok, they brought recordings of popular music, much of which was steeped in the aesthetics of psychedelia. The timbral character of this music then became the basis for the electrification of the longstanding Thai genre called mor lam, especially the stringed instrument called the phin. This paper presents the outline of a historical ethnography of the tonality of mor lam music at the moment of its electrification. This tonality emerged from a negotiation between American psychedelia and Thai religious ritual sound, in which sonic meanings fractured and multiplied. This negotiation occurred in relation to violent conflict, but not within it. Intimate musical exchanges at the periphery of war were at the heart of how Bangkok functioned as a place of leisure, tourism, and service, which have remained the bases of the city’s economic development in the ensuing five decades. 

Leslie Tilley (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge), Creativity Beyond Borders: On the Cross-Cultural, Cross-Disciplinary Analysis of Improvisation

Human beings are improvising creatures. It is an impulse that crosses styles, genres, and continents, used to varying degrees in almost every music culture. Yet many of the most important scholarly works on the analysis of improvised and improvising musics, from Hindustani rag to jazz, Baroque preludes and cadenzas to Balinese arja drumming, focus on single traditions. While the depth that such studies provide is invaluable, improvisation’s near ubiquity suggests rich (and relatively untapped) potential for cross-cultural analysis. The lack of terminological coherence in diverse studies by musicologists, ethnomusicologists, and music theorists, however, makes intertextual reference among researchers of these varied practices that much more challenging. The goal of this paper, then, is to provide a framework for thinking analytically about improvisation across cultures and practices. Such an undertaking requires a unified vocabulary of concepts: terminology and categories of improvisational techniques broad enough to be applicable cross-culturally and flexible enough to embrace the specificities of individual genres and practices. I begin by unpacking the overlapping array of terminology used by various scholars and musicians to describe improvisatory processes: terms like “embellishment,” “interpretation,” “variation,” and so on. I then present two musical excerpts—from a relatively freely improvised Hindustani alap and a relatively constrained Balinese paired arja drumming session—to showcase the contrasting incarnations of these techniques in performance. Through analysis we begin to define the inherent flexibility of each technique and the ways in which they might interact in improvised practice, all while exploring the diverse kinds of creativity required to achieve them. By shifting freely between the specific and the broadly applicable, this study aims to provide a springboard for scholars across music disciplines to think about the analysis of improvised forms in a more unified way, thus cultivating a space for comparative and cross-cultural research 

Bianca Ţiplea Temeş (Academia de Muzică “Gheorghe Dima”, Cluj-Napoca), From Communist Isolation to Globalized Networking: Romanian Musicology at the Crossroads

Music academies and universities constitute the “laboratories” in which musicology as a scientific discipline is molded and where the professional identity of the young musicologist is shaped. For more than four decades, institutions in the Eastern European bloc were placed under rigid state control; their curricula represented the aesthetic goals of the regime. In spite of its isolation from the West and an imposed rejection of contemporary trends, the teaching of musicologists in Romania was defined by extreme rigor and solid preparation. Each year, after an exceedingly difficult entrance exam, only one or two candidates were admitted to institutions that offered a program. Those who were accepted conducted their research with limited (re)sources and in a politically correct way, and only addressed a narrow scope of topics. Scores by many twentieth-century Western composers and foundational texts were almost impossible to obtain, unless an opportunity allowed for hand-copying materials in a clandestine operation. Such dedication to knowledge, however, carried serious risks with potential consequences. With the fall of the Ceausescu regime in 1989, selection criteria for admission relaxed significantly and musicology as a field of study has become increasingly accessible. Students can now easily obtain what were previously considered “forbidden fruits.” The aid of technology, the freedom to choose their preferred topics, and to express themselves, demonstrate the contrast between musicological study pre-and post-1989. In spite of the paradigm shifts, many students show a decreased ability to write and a lack of enthusiasm for contemporary artistic phenomena. The Romanian system of teaching musicology is facing a crossroad, from being socially isolated, yet culturally connected in the most profound way to the rest of the world until 1989, it has become part of the global network, but remains to some extent alienated. This paradox raises the question how to proceed today.

Barbara Titus (Universiteit van Amsterdam), Musical Epistemologies and Musicological Disavowals: A South African Case Study

When I first arrived in South Africa in 2007, with a doctorate in nineteenth-century German music history, embarking on a project about Zulu maskanda music, I was welcomed in a musicological society that encompassed popular music scholars, music historians, music ethnographers, music theorists and musicians, among others. The unique inclusivist configuration of this South African Society for Research in Music was consciously established after the demise of apartheid, since the infrastructural subdivisions of music research that feature academic institutions worldwide had always been exerted through racial distinctions during the apartheid era. Yet, over the years, I also witnessed the difficulties of bridging dichotomies in the study of “composed” and “oral” traditions, “popular” and “art” musics, “black” and “white” performance practices, even though we all recognized the fallacy of such constructions. In this paper, I argue that these dichotomies as well as the distinctions between various institutionalized practices of music scholarship become meaningful only through implicit and often subconscious attempts to bring our research practices in line with scholarly norms of singularity and unequivocality that are inherent to our mode of symbolic (graphic and conceptual) knowledge inscription. Interestingly, these attempts expel the epistemic operations of our object of research, music, to a domain of epistemic Otherness. Despite abundant literature about the multivocality and iridescence of musical knowing that enables the sharing of diachronous conceptions of time and space as well as experiences of immersive transubstantiation, it remains difficult to acknowledge those epistemic operations in our research practices, whereas they decidedly form part of how we make sense of our worlds. In the wake of scholars who foreground these disavowed epistemic operations (Bloechl, Hahn, Barz), I aim to work through the implications of this acknowledgement for possible ways to nourish a dialogue that looks at – and hears – music research as a whole.​

Hana Urbancová (Slovenská akadémia vied, Bratislava), An Integrated Model of Musicology and Its Applications: An Example from Slovakia

In the past, interdisciplinary collaborations involving musicology served as an important impetus both for acquiring new knowledge and towards the further evolution of the scholarly discipline as a whole. The bonds between historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and systematic musicology reinforced an integrated model of research that became established in a number of national cultures and came to be part of their research tradition. In their context it also acquired a number of specific features that characterize the study of music in particular countries, surviving alongside the continuing processes of globalization. Currently research traditions such as these may inspire to search for new approaches, which is much-discussed at the present time. Such traditions connect with ideas of renewing the identity of our scholarly discipline and strengthening its new-found inner integrity. Taking the example of Slovak musicology or musicology in Slovakia, this paper illustrate the ways in which an integrated model of research evolved in one national/regional tradition, and the extent to which it influenced the study of its own domestic musical culture. I focus particularly on those aspects that remain vital at the present day and in a transmuted form contribute to overcoming the divisions between research fields. The specific features of this integrated model evolved from the important position of ethnomusicology in the system of musicological disciplines represented in Slovakia. To a large extent this is connected to the fact that the formation of musicology as a modern scholarly discipline was closely linked with research into the musical component of folk songs. The first modern synthesis on the Slovak folk song, from the mid-twentieth century, was a work which took on founding significance for Slovak musicology. Its author Jozef Kresánek (1913–1986) later elaborated an original concept of musical thinking, based on integration of the historical, ethnomusicological, and systematic aspects. He influenced several of his students who developed collaborations between ethnomusicologists (Oskár Elschek), historical musicologists (Richard Rybarič), and music theorists (Ladislav Burlas). This research tradition contributed, among other things, to the establishment of so-called historical ethnomusicology in Slovakia and directed the attention of Slovak researchers to the historical sources of traditional music, as one of the central research problems of the present day. 

Lisa Urkevich (American University of Kuwait), Why Can’t My Country Have a Beethoven? The Need for Global Musicology in the Contemporary World

Musicology, a child of the European Romantic era, is linked to historical research and has relied heavily on documents. Early musicologists were often serious performers or thoughtful dilettantes and were spurred on by their own interest in specific works, the “objects of delight.” The musicological canon that developed excluded groups not readily connected to historical texts—e.g., women, the illiterate masses, and non-Western, especially oral societies. Later, by default, the music of these neglected peoples often fell into the purview of ethnomusicology, which has had an expansive reach, with a large focus looking at music’s broader role as human social behavior. Ethnomusicology has served the global world to such an extent that many consider it the premiere discipline under which all non-Western music rests. Into the twenty-first century and globalization, non-Western “oral” cultures that previously were not engaged in music research are beginning to branch into this milieu. In the vein of early musicologists, many new scholars are coming from performance backgrounds and are eager to examine local compositions, the “objects of delight,” regardless of whether they are orally-aurally transmitted or more recently penned on paper. The performer-scholar wants to apply musicological investigation and analysis, and contextualize works, composers, and genres within a regional music history. But when they look toward established research, they see that the music of their culture has frequently and sometimes exclusively been viewed through the lens of social theory. When they seek formal music education, they are regularly steered toward ethnomusicology programs and not musicological ones. Many remain frustrated since they feel that they do not have the same opportunities as students studying Western music who can choose to learn and/or apply a wider range of methodologies. With a focus on the study of music in the Arabian Peninsula, this paper discusses the need to stop associating cultures, societies, or geographic regions with either ethnomusicology or musicology. It is a call to rethink the place of the two disciplines in higher academe and will address theories and methods through which new goals might be obtained.

Jana Vaculíková (Univerzita Palackého, Olomouc), Ethnomusicology in the Czech Republic: History and Present State of Affairs

This paper addresses the phenomenon of ethnomusicology as a field of science in the Czech Republic—its evolution and institutional history, its scope and approaches (ethnographic-folkloric, musicological-comparative, and musical-anthropological and ethnological). A comparison of the current state of ethnomusicology in the Czech Republic with developments in other countries reveals different priorities, as well as a different institutional setting. Czech ethnomusicology is primarily devoted to the research of its own traditional musics, more concretely of Bohemia andMoravia with its unique regional manifestations and influences from Romania and the Ukraine as well as Slovakia and Lachia (the borderland of northern Moravia and Czech Silesia). 

Lucie Vágnerová (Columbia University, New York), Rethinking the Musical Museum in 2018

This paper surveys recent curricular changes at music departments across the U.S., focusing on requirements for music majors, the content of qualifying exams for PhD students, and the content of 101/introductory/core music courses. Where student opinions on curricular matters are often sidelined, often under the banner of resisting the idea of neoliberal universities catering to student-clients, I will argue that student voices should matter to us. Placing student commentary in dialogue with Lydia Goehr’s concept of the “imaginary museum of musical works” and Claire Bishop’s work on progressive museums of contemporary art, I will reflect on mission statements and strategies (of museums and music courses alike) that respond to the current geopolitical moment and the twenty-first century university.

Cesar Marino Villavicencio Grossmann (Universidade de São Paulo), GReCo’s Recorder Consort: Applied Philology and the Transcending of Organological Boundaries

Although many advances have been made in applied musicology, when it comes to the interpretation of compositions written before the eighteenth century, namely from the Renaissance period, many performances and most modern editions do not convey the true idea of the musical style. Scores, for instance, ignore the fact that the original clefs and lack of bar lines have a fundamental role in the interpretation of the music. This paper will show that the developments made by the recorder consort of the Research Group on Renaissance and Contemporary Music (GReCo) in preparing Renaissance polyphony using copies of sixteenth-century instruments and facsimiles of the original scores demonstrate the benefits of this multifaceted approach to music performance that combines applied philology and music interpretation. The group has also benefited from music treatises from the Renaissance, easily available today in virtual collections, which display crucial information about this kind of music and the organology of the instruments. As the initial challenges for understanding the codes of original scores and for mastering the technique of playing Renaissance recorder models have been overcome, new fascinating paths have opened with regard to tuning, articulation and phrasing and their inherent connection with prosody and rhetoric. This paper will explain how Renaissance compositions need to be guided with regard to articulation, phrasing, and intentions by the comprehension of the text of each composition, since almost all pieces were meant for voices. Unfolding from this, and as members of the project have become acquainted with the technique of these instruments, new collaborative possibilities have arisen for engaging in creative projects for the elaboration of new compositions. The process of preparing one of these new creations will be explained, putting forward the idea that the Renaissance recorder consort might have somehow started a new lifecycle in the twenty-first century.

Margaret E. Walker (Queen’s University, Kingston), Colonial Representation or Historical Authenticity? Analysis of “A Hindostanee Dance”

The third piece in the Collection of Twenty Four Hindoostanee and Other Airs, Arranged for the Pianoforte by L. Walckiers in 1817 is entitled “A Guth or Hindostanee Dance.” Its straight-forward harmonic language, alberti bass, four-bar antecedent, and consequent phrases mark it as an example of parlor music, produced for the growing market of middle-class amateurs in early–nineteenth-century Europe. There seems no connection between the simple homophonic texture supported by tonic and dominant chords, and the complex system of rag and tal used to accompany North Indian dance. Yet, earlier “Hindoostanee Airs,” as the work of Gerry Farrell, Ian Woodfield, and Nicholas Cook shows, were transcriptions drawn from the genuine presentations of North Indian performers who both sang and danced. The “guth” was not included in their work, however, as none of these scholars had any knowledge of dance, and the analytical tools they used focused on notation and sonic translation. In this paper, I use a combination of methods from Western musicology, ethnomusicology, and choreology, to show how only a blend of theoretical analysis, participant observation, embodied practice, and archival work can unpick the layers of representation and speculate about the original historical performance practice in eighteenth-century India. My conclusions, however, reach far beyond this particular example, and argue that only by embracing a variety of methodologies and combining the disciplinary fields of music study can we truly move towards an understanding of the human process of music making.

Viktoria Zora (University of London), Cultural Diplomacy and Politics in Musical Exchange between the USSR and the U.S., 1942–1948

In 1942, Soviet composers cabled their American colleagues—the League of Composers—informing them of their readiness to join in the cultural fight against fascism. In December 1942 the League of Composers sent to the Soviet Embassy in Washington a list of American military music. The cultural music exchange was fostered at a governmental level between the U.S. and the USSR, and American cultural enquiries were forwarded to The Soviet Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS). In 1944, VOKS coordinated a concert of American music in Moscow; the same year, American cultural exchange included postage to VOKS of equipment aid such as manuscript paper for Soviet composers, strings, and bows. In the 1940s, musical exchanges were also supported by various friendship organizations such as the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship (NCASF) and its music committee led by Serge Koussevitzky. In February 1946 Koussevitzky founded the American-Soviet Music Society, but despite the fact that the Union of Soviet Composers welcomed the newly founded society and corresponded with it via VOKS in the summer of 1946, the political atmosphere in the U.S. and the USSR after 1946 drastically changed. Churchill’s speech of 5 March in Fulton, Missouri, introduced the term Iron Curtain and signaled the beginning of the Cold War. Additionally, in 1946 the USSR began its anti-formalist campaign, which culminated in February 1948 with the Central Committee’s attack on Soviet composers, who according to the Soviet state composed bourgeois, formalistic, and antidemocratic music. The paper will address how political circumstances that cultivated a reciprocal cultural exchange during World War II have changed after the war’s victory, but also how the American press reacted to the formalistic attack on the “Western educated” Soviet composers in 1948. 

 

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Panel Abstracts

Methodological Masala: Dissolving Disciplinary Boundaries in the Study of Indian Music

The scholarly study of the musics of South Asia comprises thousands of years of oral and written discourse in languages ranging from Sanskrit and Persian to English and Bengali. Aesthetic treatises rub shoulders with detailed systems of theoretical classification, while yet other works focus on the artistic specializations of communities of musicians and dancers. The arrival of Europeans added yet another layer, as musics, musicians, and instruments were documented first as curiosities, then as the exotic, Orientalized “other.” Finally, the twentieth-century emergence of the field of ethnomusicology combined with growing Western interest in Indian music and culture gave rise to a more “authentic” approach as the study of music performance itself became increasingly central. Research perspectives and disciplinary approaches that are usually categorized separately have thus contributed to an ongoing stream of knowledge about performing arts in India and its surrounding countries. Thus, in spite of institutional divisions of music research into separate fields variously prioritizing notational analysis, archival examination, ethnographic study, and performance training, the study of Indian music offers, or as this panel will argue, demands, an interdisciplinary approach to methodology. We thus approach the long durée of South Asian music scholarship from a perspective that sees the combination of methodologies as key to any study of this complex culture. Central to this call for mixed methods is a recognition of the influence of the forced cultural encounter of colonialism and a century of British imperial rule. Drawing on recent and ongoing research involving musical and poetic analysis, archival work, performance study, and ethnography, the panel’s papers explore intersections of music, culture, and methodology in the study of Indian music and dance. Among other issues, we seek to assess critically the appropriateness of the terms “musicology” and “ethnomusicology” in the study of Indian, or indeed, any music.

Diversity or Survival? Sharing Traditions in the Globalized World of Music Education

Within music education, the pedagogy of world music has been heralded as a way to encourage American youth to embrace the realities of globalization. Experiencing cross-cultural musical practice is thought to cultivate a deep foundational appreciation for cultural difference while building on musical and interpersonal skills that are at the core of artistic pursuits. In New York City specifically, learning world music often serves a dual purpose: beyond simple cross-cultural engagement, these distinct artistic traditions often connect immigrant youth to their cultural heritage. Many children within immigrant families face the risk of losing their cultural identities and their connections with their communities, so learning the artistic traditions within their cultures allows them to study and celebrate their own traditions. Teaching artists of traditional music are trusted with navigating these two streams of cultural transmission and thus must balance the sometimes competing priorities of different communities. On the one hand, programs like Sharing Traditions through the Center for Traditional Music and Dance emphasize the empowerment of immigrant youth to reclaim their cultural heritage, so teaching artists are primarily teaching within their own cultural communities. On the other hand, teaching within standard school settings requires teaching artists to broaden their approach to better serve general student audiences. This panel is a forum for exploring how traditional artists approach the teaching of world music within formal and informal educational spaces. Led by scholars of world music pedagogy, three teaching artists will discuss the challenges and strategies of matching diversity education initiatives while fostering the survival of their own cultural traditions. Issues to be addressed will include audience composition (community members versus general public), measures of achievement, and pedagogical methods of musical and cultural transmission. 

The Research Group on Renaissance and Contemporary Music (GReCo): Proposals for a New World in Music Research and Practice

It is needless to affirm that music as a platform for human expression involves a much broader idea than a practice that merely concerns leisure, show-off of technical aspects, virtuosity, or merely business. This panel presents approaches by the Research Group on Renaissance and Contemporary Music (GReCo) that offer new grounds for establishing a research group which transcends the boundaries of music education today, integrating a mode of thought in which musicology, history, philosophy, music rhetoric, sociology, and psychology are incorporated in a curriculum aimed to form an entity. In the midst of the political situation in Brazil with its devastating policies towards culture and education, in which the main strategies derive from a conservative preoccupation of creating homogeneous patterns of control aimed for profit, GReCo stands as an initiative to foster the mingling of a variety of areas of thought, which may influence the elaboration of eloquent musical discourses. This panel offers a panorama of the actual status of the political situation and its relation to the development of arts and education in Brazil. It presents a proposal for setting a mode of education in music performance today that is symbiotically connected to musicology, namely the application of knowledge derived from rhetorical studies and ongoing experiences with applied philology.

The Music Survey at a (Post)Global University

This panel seeks to reflect on and experiment with the purpose and the shape of core music courses in undergraduate curricula. Surveying the landscape of pivotal changes at music departments over the past couple of years, panelists will also propose concrete alternative approaches to the common survey of Western art music. All panelists are current and recent instructors of one such course titled Music Humanities, required of all undergraduates at Columbia University. Speaking from the vantage points of ethnomusicology, historical musicology, composition, and music theory respectively, each panelist will imagine a redesign of the learning objectives, texts and contexts, and music-technical and theoretical frameworks that define Music Humanities. This panel explicitly responds to the increasing diversity, internationalization, and global thinking of many university campuses on the one hand, and to the paucity of ethical and critical thinking in the American political mainstream on the other