The idea for Exploring Diasporic Perspectives in Music Education grew out of my discussions with public school music teachers, university colleagues, and graduate students in music education who are seeking a way to teach without dividing music into categories of national, racial, and ethnic belonging. With over twenty-three years teaching music at all levels of education, I have noted that multiculturalism, cultural diversity, and internationalism have failed to recognize the constant churning of the identities of performers and listeners who have become, in the words of Paul Theroux, âworld class practitioners of self-sufficiencyâ (1997). Or, as Aiwha Ong develops this thought, many participants in a global society find ways to maintain flexible identities created in âspecific power contextsâ (1999: 5, 19, 68). Music also exhibits flexibility in its identity over time. Change reflects the specific power contexts in which an origin for music becomes a pragmatic way to underline national, ethnic, and racial belonging.
The aim of this book is to upend fixed notions of origin and belonging. From this point of view, so-called origins become unknowns, even while they have been taken for granted as authentically belonging to a particular ethnic group, space on the globe, or racial lineage. By doing so, Exploring Diasporic Perspectives in Music Education departs from the standard multicultural guides. It avoids, as much as possible, the fragmentation of music by categories of presumed origins whether racial, ethnic, or national. The bookâs fundamental breakthrough is to illuminate the global web of musical contributions submerged in history and to recognize the high dimensionality of their creation. Central to the diasporic perspective are the questions of how and why particular selections have become multicultural prototypes that purportedly represent African American, Latino, Hispanic, or European music.
Throughout this book I have had to articulate the concept of diaspora in English. This language harbors a system of knowledge or a way of looking at the world through the use of racial, ethnic and national terms. These categories foster racial distinctions and hierarchies, displacing a vast lexicon of words that lead to the historic memories of conquered peoples and the diasporic travels of music. A prominent concern in this book is to reveal how a âstrange game of wordsâ created the power of distinction among bodies and music that set them along the paths we now recognize as ârealityâ (Rancière 2004: 3): e.g., racial, ethnic, and national trajectories. The formation of rhetoric around multiculturalism gives music education considerable, but not total power over the intermixture of flesh and culture that produces music. Music education, like its academic siblings, undergoes continual revision of theories and methods. Change occurs through research and publication, but most notably, through the classroom practices of more than 13,000 school districts in the United States. When it comes to the general music curriculum, the terms âmulticulturalism,â âcultural diversity,â âinternationality,â and âsuperdiversityâ boil down to distinguishing musical types by racial, ethnic, and national/geographical âorigins.â The word game and the system of knowledge it represents prove more enduring than the reforms we attempt to make.
Today, multiculturalism, the term most commonly used in music education, dominates all levels of music teaching, including instruction and research at the post-secondary level. While multiculturalism has promised to be a theoretical framework that puts classical, folk, and popular music on an equal footing with Euro-American music, it perpetuates Western attitudes of aesthetics and historical development. For example, approaches to music teaching represented in the professional literature have, by and large, established the domain of folk music, especially of the Southern Hemisphere. This category sequesters the folk in past times and pre-modern societies. Exploring Diasporic Perspectives argues that recognition of the historical process of fabricating origins, whether racial, ethnic, regional, folkloric, or hybrids of these categories, allows consideration of the idea of unfinished identities for musical creations.
One of the aims of this book is to investigate the emergence of multiculturalism in music education. This requires an analysis of the field from the early 1800s to public music instruction as it now stands. Throughout the following chapters, I argue that multiculturalism derived from the overarching social and governmental principle of the whiteness of the nation and the type of culture understood to be consistent with a civilized society. Caught up with the rhetoric of civilization, musicians and audiences engage with music as a racially inflected entity (Radano 2003). Race has been a major consideration in the design of the music curriculum from its earliest days to the present (Gustafson 2009).
My experience supervising future music educators and classroom observations brought me to investigate music educationâs racial foundations. By no means do I understand this foundation to be unique to our field. One of several key incidents that piqued my curiosity took place in a high school general music class. The class had viewed the movie âShowboat.â After the film, the teacher asked a sophomore student to identify an âAfrican Americanâ song he had heard in the performance. He picked out âOlâ Man River.â The teacher concurred with his choice. Another student, however, raised her hand to comment, âBefore the movie you [the teacher] said that the songs were written by famous composers.â âYes,â the teacher answered, âthe words and music were written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein who were white. It was sort of their view of black singing at the time.â This was as far as the class went into the fraught history of the creation of âOlâ Man River.â
The incident left me wondering if a different point of view with a more persistent focus on the social exchanges between so-called African American music and European music within the entertainment industry would better explain the source(s) of âOlâ Man River.â A more complex view would consider how popular interest in minstrel performances and Negro Spirituals circulated throughout the concert and entertainment world in the first half of the twentieth century. Both genres added to the fanciful link between black music and notions of enslaved peoplesâ innate spiritual loftiness. As Ronald Radano writes of black music, it is, among other things, an object with the power to mirror race relations in the United States (2003). The point is that a fuller account of sources for âOlâ Man Riverâ would include the common, yet imaginary, idea of slavery as an ennobling experience. It would also include the inextricable but little-known musical ties forged over centuries of African and European migrations to North America as well as the racial stereotypes generated from Broadway, concert stage, and film imported into music classrooms. Similar dynamics have compelled Latino, Spirituals, Gospel, Reggae, Mariachi, Gaucho, and European classical music to assume the mythic origin of representing nations, races, and ethnic groups in music teahing. Thus, I have allotted a large portion of this book to understanding the fabrication of musicâs origins. Among the subjects covered are Sub-Saharan tribal and popular music and gypsy/flamenco entertainment in modern Spain.
The process of fabricating origins has lent âauthenticityâ to the already-heated narratives around national, racial, and ethnic conflicts. By focusing on the historical construction of the lineages of the genres mentioned above, Exploring Diasporic Perspectives investigates how racial and national identities emerge from particular political and social conditions and not from inherited dispositions. Thus, I recognize that there is an inherent tension between a multicultural approach that assigns a kind of âownershipâ to music and a diasporic perspective which complicates ties between music and particular demographic groups. In this book, I hope to answer the questions of how music education arrived at this point and how a diasporic perspective will help navigate this dilemma.
The first chapters of the book establish how it came to be that music educators are inheritors of the Enlightenment of the Sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. From this point of view, whether we locate music in the West, the Global North, South, or Euro-America, music is identified as the product of human types. The Enlightenment spawned a comparative logic in which the rubrics of race, nation, and ethnicity were persuasive ways of understanding differences in music, knowledge, religion, and culture in general. This book urges music educators to explore diaspora as a paradigm that rejects comparative scales based on race, nation, and ethnicity on the grounds that these categories are philosophically and historically inaccurate and that they perpetuate inequality. One caveat: diaspora does not fully solve the problem. As a proposal for change it is subject to the uncertainty of the very reason it projects for the future (Popkewitz 2008: iâxv).
Curriculum guides (local or national), generally products of academic music education, have bolstered notions of fixed and comparable music origins. For example, a foundational principle in college music study recommends knowledge of significant musical links between two or more pieces from distinct musical cultures to indicate competence in music appreciation and history (College Music Society 2017). Exploring Diasporic Perspectives in Music Education argues that the concept of distinct cultures overlooks the formation of music on a global scale. By asking how institutions came to see links between distinct musical cultures as a mark of competence, I hope to shed light on the global economic and political forces that made race, ethnicity, and nation a cornerstone of musical knowledge.
An article from the late twentieth century on urban music education published by the Music Educators Journal typifies thinking in the early decades of multiculturalism when race and cultural background imply innate differences in taste and social context. In âMusic for the Black Ghetto Child,â Bennet Reimer, noted author of music textbooks and several books on the philosophy of music education stated, âWithin the general goal of making a great diversity of music available for freedom of choice, the actual music used will...