World Music Pedagogy, Volume VII: Teaching World Music in Higher Education

William J. Coppola, David G. Hebert, Patricia Shehan Campbell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000168716
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Hochschulausbildung

World Music Pedagogy, Volume VII: Teaching World Music in Higher Education addresses a pedagogical pathway of varied strategies for teaching world music in higher education, offering concrete means for diversifying undergraduate studies through world music culture courses. While the first six volumes in this series have detailed theoretical and applied principles of World Music Pedagogy within K-12 public schools and broader communities, this seventh volume is chiefly concerned with infusing culture-rich musical experiences through world music courses at the tertiary level, presenting a compelling argument for the growing need for such perspectives and approaches.

These chapters include discussions of the logical trajectories of the framework into world music courses, through which the authors seek to challenge the status quo of lecture-only academic courses in some college and university music programs. Unique to this series, each of these chapters illustrates practical procedures for incorporating the WMP framework into sample classes. However, this volume (like the rest of the series) is not a prescriptive "recipe book" of lesson plans. Rather, it seeks to enrich the conversation surrounding cultural diversity in music through philosophically-rooted, social justice-conscious, and practice-oriented perspectives.

1

Teaching and Learning in Context

“Music may be universal to humankind, but, contrary to the poet Longfellow, music is not the universal language of mankind but, rather, a group of discrete languages or, perhaps better stated, systems of communication, each integrated and unified, and each of them must be learned.”

—Bruno Nettl, 2010, p. 3

Brad Peterson, Assistant Professor of Percussion at a medium-sized northeastern university, is unexpectedly asked by his dean to teach a survey course called “Music in Culture.” The faculty is currently short-staffed but the dean thinks that Brad will be an effective instructor, assuming a generalist—if slightly uninformed—stance in holding that all percussionists should be proficient in plenty of world music styles. Believing strongly in the importance of teaching music as a universal human activity, Brad is enthusiastic for the opportunity but hesitates to tell the dean that he is only experienced in Afro Caribbean and jazz styles. Nor is he an ethnomusicologist, although he has already been gently advocating for one or two such scholars to be hired to the faculty. Brad realizes he will have to do some personal research to prepare for the task of teaching the several other musical traditions beyond his specialty. Identifying as an active drummer first and foremost, he seeks to make the semester-long “Music in Culture” course as engaging and interactive as possible—especially since the class will be made up of mostly science and engineering majors who have few other opportunities to make music in their daily lives.

***

As part of her graduate fellowship, Felicia Kwan, a third-year PhD student of music history, is asked to be the instructor-of-record for a freshman-level music course called “Music of the World’s Cultures.” As a budding scholar of the French Baroque period, Felicia realizes that her specialization has left her ill-equipped to teach a course featuring musical practices from outside the Western European idiom. All summer she has been studying a borrowed world music textbook, hoping to prepare herself for the new course. But as she studies the book and the previous year’s syllabus for the course, she is disappointed by the inevitable dry lecture format that the materials presume. From personal experience, Felicia understands that students develop a deeper appreciation for music through active participation, whether by singing, dancing, or playing instruments. She begins to jot down a list of deeply meaningful musical experiences she recalls from her own life and travels: attending a performance of a Cantonese opera troupe, learning tango in the city’s Latin ballroom, participating in taiko drumming with an on-campus Japanese cultural group, and observing a powwow at the local state fair. “This will be a good starting point,” she says to herself, ripping up the syllabus from last year.

***

Mark Rosenstein, Regents Professor of Ethnomusicology, brushes a thin layer of dust from his office filing cabinet. Having recently returned from a two-week trip to Morocco, he feels rejuvenated and eager to begin his 29th year of teaching in higher education. From his filing cabinet he pulls out an envelope labeled “MUSC151: Introduction to World Music,” which has become discolored with age over the decades. Recalling his visceral reaction to the Moroccan malhun music he had heard in the streets and squares of Marrakech last month, he feels a twinge of yearning as he disinterestedly reads over the syllabus of his course that he’s taught for the past 17 years now. The repetitiveness of his syllabus once gave him comfort, but now it suddenly feels stale and uninteresting, styled as a series of top-down presentational lectures with few music-making opportunities. While his passion for teaching this world music course had never waned, lately it seemed to him that students were losing interest. A pang of guilt rises in his chest. How is it, he thinks to himself, that with so much in constant flux—the identities of our students, the consistent changes in our society, and the very nature of the music we study and explore—I have continually insisted on teaching the same exact material, in the very same way, over all these years? Taking his seat at his desk, Prof. Rosenstein makes a personal vow to himself: This year will be different. He finds himself sketching out a participatory plan for the first day’s class session, replete with listening that will invite student participation, creative expression, and thoughts about the cultural meaning of malhun music of Morocco.

This book seeks to address relevant and applicable strategies for teaching world music in higher education. It is the seventh and final volume in the Routledge World Music Pedagogy Series and is geared as a guide to all who may teach a course on world music cultures. Its purpose is to reach beyond and counterbalance the study of Western European art music. It is launched from the premise that the study of world music need not get short shrift in higher education music departments and schools, nor should such courses consist of dry and impersonal lectures. While it may be the first book of its kind to guide the teaching-learning process in university-level world music courses, it is also long overdue and vital as a means of knowing how best to shape the experiences of world music study. World Music Pedagogy fixes on a dynamic pedagogical approach that requires students’ ongoing involvement through listening, thinking analytically, and “doing”—thus conceiving of music as an essential act of human expression conveyed through performative and creative acts. It considers music as both sonic and social and underscores the importance of knowing the cultural contexts of music that give it meaning.

Setting the Scene for Courses in World Music Studies

On most any college campus, when approaching the façade of the music building, one is greeted warmly by a gradual crescendo of melody and harmony. Eclectic music from a range of European art music composers, styles, and historical eras mix together, reverberating from within the walls and bursting from the windows like the impetuous whistling of a tea kettle. Music of the great European masters is typically the steady diet for students in studios, ensembles, and academic courses, while at the periphery there may lie an opportunity to sample jazz, popular, and folk music beyond the core studies. Within this campus environment of a school or department of music, art is living, creative expression is encouraged, and doing is expected. Among both music majors and students from other fields and disciplines, those enrolled in music courses usually find themselves working closely with a music professional—a seasoned performer, a gifted intellectual, or a thoughtful educator. Music is social, after all, and cannot be taught impersonally.

While the description of the campus music building may appear inviting, it also reflects a myopic view of musical study that has changed little since the birth of the Conservatoire de Paris in 1795. This Western European model of music, so pervasive among colleges, conservatories, and universities, should give us pause today, knowing what we do about the wider world of which we are a part, with its numerous cultural, artistic, and musical practices. One of the world’s great practices, consisting of multiple sub-practices, is Western European Art Music (WEAM). It is referred to as “art music” or “classical music,” sometimes even “serious music”—as opposed to the music that is called “folk,” “vernacular,” or even “light.” Not only are WEAM repertoires and techniques emphasized in studio-applied study, ensembles, and academic courses in music history and theory, but in many four-year programs, music majors typically give full focus to WEAM with little to no study of music beyond the West. For students of majors other than music, the focus of their elective studies tends to be music appreciation courses centered on WEAM practices, as well as upper-level seminars on “The Orchestra,” “The Opera,” and “Chamber Music.” These courses are surely valuable, and yet they do not open their reach to the musical realities of a global and intercultural era.

There is rich potential for tertiary-level music programs to serve as welcoming environments for students to learn music in a wide-span way, to learn to listen analytically to the music of people across the globe, to join in with music (live or with recordings) in a participatory and performative manner. Students deserve to know why music is necessary for people everywhere in the world and to understand music for its culture-specific and cross-cultural functions. Spanning courses such as “World Music Cultures,” “Music in Africa,” “Music and Migration,” “Latin American Music,” “Music and Protest,” “Music of Multicultural America,” “Music and Ritual,” “Music in Asia,” and “American Popular Music,” the territory for teaching music of the world’s cultures is ripe for meaningful and active musical participation, regardless of students’ prior experience, ability, or so-called talent. In these times, tertiary music classrooms are wide open for learning more of the world’s musical cultures through recordings, videos, and online sites. Facilitated by their professors, students can come to make sense of the wide array of musical possibilities, to explore themes, to experience ways of delving deeply into listening until it beckons their participation, performance, and even creativity in the shaping of new music. Whether they major in piano performance or music education, or history or bioengineering, students can study in earnest music and its cultural meaning through explorations of its roles, functions, and sonic styles in the world’s cultures.

The three opening vignettes illustrate real-life attitudes and challenges among teaching faculty, from first-time lecturers who are assigned a world music course without prior study or experience, to veteran professors who seek imaginative ways to recapture student interest. On campuses where faculty are seeking to fulfill diversity initiatives and globalize their reach of topical studies, music faculty charged with teaching world music courses are finding that they require time to educate themselves about developing relevant lectures, discussions, and experiences to meet these needs. They study topical areas of interest and review available textbooks, recordings, videos, online sites, and various ancillary materials in order to renew and redo their teaching approaches, be it for their students’ in-person or remote learning. For novices and experts alike, there is a learning curve among tertiary-level teaching faculty in coming into the preparation and delivery of courses that spark the musical thinking—and musical doing—of their students.

The philosophical position of providing students with a broad view of music as a pan-human phenomenon should surely be one that is shared by faculty of music, and yet there is discernable variance across institutions. Some universities, colleges, and conservatories have courses in place, or action plans in development, for the design and delivery of courses in world music cultures for music majors and students of various fields of study. Yet in some university programs, world music courses are scheduled as elective offerings for students of every major except music, thus asserting the importance for music majors to continue the practice of four solid years toward the concentrated and uninterrupted study of Western European art music. In yet other programs, world music is stuffed into a mix of music history courses, with two or three courses dedicated to WEAM history and merely one relegated to “all the rest of the music”—including world, jazz, folk, and popular styles.

On many faculties, courses in world music are appropriately—and logically—taught by ethnomusicologists. However, in many programs it falls to faculty without ethnomusicological training to provide world music courses. In fact, it is not uncommon that in tertiary-level institutions, it is the specialists in subfields such as music theory, music education, composition, and instrumental and vocal performance who are assigned the responsibility of teaching world music courses. Depending upon the faculty member, such an assignment may feel energizing, or daunting, or both.

For ethnomusicologists who may prefer not to claim expertise in all the world’s musical cultures, it is sometimes their challenge to broaden course content beyond specialized fieldwork study in order to address styles, traditions, and/or geographic locations of the musical world. After all, just as it would seem reasonable for a musicologist to specialize in music of the Italian Renaissance or the Viennese school of the early 20th century, ethnomusicologists typically specialize in a specific genre and region, thus identifying as an “Asianist” or “Africanist” with lesser experience in music elsewhere in the world. Just as a Bach scholar might need to stretch to teach 19th-century music, so would a scholar of Near Eastern music need to stretch to teach music of the Caribbean. Thus, ethnomusicologists may join with other music faculty in probing pedagogical ways to extend music course content to areas beyond their research expertise and to search for ways of teaching all the world’s musical cultures. Ethnomusicologists may seek to creatively feature avenues that infuse interdisciplinary perspectives and mix musicological and anthropological ideals together. Moreover, professors within and beyond ethnomusico...