The 2016 U.S presidential election was my moment of awakening. The "how did this happen" moment, or, more accurately, the "oh shit" moment. I was stunned, and this reaction revealed a lot about me, my unfamiliarity with this country's history, and the continued influence of that history in the present day. It revealed my profound lack of understanding about what power is in this country, how it is constructed, and how it is maintained. This lack of understanding tends to be inversely proportional to the amount of privilege one has, and that was certainly the case with me.
I grew up playing classical guitar. This wasn't for musical reasons but because I wanted to spend more time with my dad, whose lesson was immediately before mine. Once in high school, I switched to electric guitar and things really started to take off, meaning I started to practice. A lot. Initially, this meant a lot of rock guitar. In my junior year, I discovered Phish, who opened my ears to so many styles of music that I, for no good reason, had previously discounted. I got really into jazz and huge into Coltrane. I got into bluegrass, into hip-hop, into dance music. It was amazing.
My formal music training came at Berklee College of Music, Tufts University, and Princeton University. All three institutions are very supportive of many different styles of music, yet at the undergraduate level, all three remain firmly based in traditional music theory pedagogy.
As a student and later as a teaching assistant, I couldn't understand why there was such a disconnect between the Western art music we studied in the classroom and the music we listened to or made outside of the classroom. I still haven’t found a real answer. Textbooks all take the necessity of studying Western art music as a given. People who use the traditional model claim that it provides something along the lines of, “an essential and complete fundamental knowledge of music.” They don’t say, “of Western art music,” but instead make the grandiose claim of it being Music with a capital M.
The implicit claim of traditional pedagogy is twofold. First, the knowledge it provides is essential for understanding music. Second, it provides a complete fundamental knowledge, meaning that anything not included is not essential to know.
Faculty never bothered to explain why we were learning the material we learned. When questioned, they’d simply declare that it was "necessary," as if the bare assertion somehow made it so.
The theory of Western art music is not the same thing as the theory of music, or even the theory of Western music.
I’ve met professors who acknowledge some of the shortcomings of traditional music theory pedagogy at the start of the semester and then teach it anyway. What does that say about the value of their “critique”?
The 2016 U.S. presidential election occurred during my first semester as a professor. I was teaching music theory and composition, two subjects seemingly removed from the political upheaval taking place both on and off-campus. I had been hired to overhaul and rebuild the theory curriculum, which I’d done by developing a polystylistic approach. This meant drawing primarily from rock, pop, jazz, hip-hop, EDM, and Western art music to create the curriculum, and setting each of these styles on equal footing with the others, so that there was no hierarchy, no normalization of one at the expense of the others.
This was a good start, but it was just a start.
As educators, we're responsible both for understanding the material we teach and for understanding why we teach it. In response to the election, I took a long look at what I was doing in the classroom and what I wasn't doing in the classroom. I wasn’t talking about racism, though racism shaped the music we were studying and the lives of the people who made that music. I wasn’t talking about sexism, though sexism shaped the music we were studying and the lives of the people who made that music. I wasn’t talking about class, or sexual preference, or ableness, though these too shaped the music we were studying and the lives of the people who made that music.
I wasn’t talking about these issues, despite their profound influence on the lives of each student in the classroom, despite their profound influence on my life and the lives of my family and friends. A failure to name these issues ensures that they will continue. Nor is naming them enough—a failure to disrupt these issues only ensures that they will continue. If we want a more just society, we have to work for a more just society. Pretending that these problems don’t exist, or aren’t in effect when we’re inside the classroom ensures that they will continue outside the classroom.
The primary goal in any class that I teach is to help my students become better people by the end of the semester. Any specific musical knowledge they gain is important, but secondary. Most of the students I teach will not be professionally active in the music world, but all of them will make countless daily choices that will move us incrementally towards or away from justice. I can’t make their choices for them, but I can help to open their eyes to what’s actually at stake.