Moving away from discrete and often isolated fields of inquiry and performance practices, scholars from across the music disciplines are seeking ways to bridge real or imagined boundaries that have hitherto curtailed the sharing of ideas in environments that are conducive for intellectual exchange. This session brings together scholars from the fields of music theory, music education, and ethnomusicology for a discussion of interdisciplinarity in the college music curriculum. In particular, we explore ways that world musics and ethnomusicology figure in the formulations of our sub-disciplines. Ranging from the practical to the philosophical, presenters will address issues ranging from pedagogy to musical praxis and examine the construction of the current college music curriculum. What does interdisciplinarity in college music teaching mean at the beginning of the 21st century and what do world musics have to do with it? Join us for what promises to be a discussion of interest to all.
World Musics in the College Curriculum: Searching for Equilibrium
C. Victor Fung, University of South Florida
The importance of studying various musical traditions at the college level is undeniable. This is true for both music majors and non-music majors. Developments in both ethnomusicology and music education support the inclusiveness of musical cultures in the college curriculum. However, numerous issues were unresolved despite vigorous attempts to search for equilibrium between Western music and other world musics. These issues are not unlike those occurring at the K-12 level school music education. Specific questions include:
• Given one semester/quarter, how many musical traditions should we include in a world music course?
• How should we select the musical traditions to be included in a world music course?
• What is the role of knowledge and skills in various musical traditions in one’s life?
• What curricular models could be considered?
This presentation will address these questions based on theories drawn mainly from the music education literature. Based on many years of research in music education and ethnomusicology, I suggest that a limited number of musical traditions be included in a one semester/quarter course. The selected musical traditions should show fundamental differences in the musical systems being studied. Moreover, I suggest that music educators and other scholars consider integrating world music content into existing music courses (music history, music theory) in addition to offering courses specifically in world music. Ultimately, the study of world music at the college level should cultivate within students, an openness to explore different musical possibilities throughout their lifetimes.
“Performing world music/ethnomusicology across fields and beyond borders”
Ricardo D. Trimillos, University of Hawai'i
Ethnomusicology as a field does have its default set of theories and its “canon” of musical data. In addition it possesses potential for interacting with and interpenetrating various fields of music as well as extending beyond the existing institutional borders that separate music from dance, from theatre, and from the named and circumscribed disciplines grouped in the social sciences and in the humanities. What does ethnomusicology tell us about other protocols of teaching or the processes of learning beyond Euro-American logical positivism? How does music theory and musical praxis operate prescriptively and descriptively in a worldwide range of performance traditions? Why is music so intimately tied to spirituality in some societies and totally bereft in others, e.g. our secularised academic music culture? What does musical practice tell us about negotiating power, reading cultural texts, or understanding agency in identity construction?
I propose to explore ways in which we can insinuate aspects of world music/ ethnomusicology into other fields and other disciplines. I further suggest that historical musicology, music theory, and music pedagogy, mutatis mutandis, possess similar potentials for crossing and interpenetrating (often imagined) borders. Music study is our collective concern. We must think not only outside our box, we need to find niches in other boxes.
World Music in the Teaching of Music Theory: Towards an Integrated Curriculum
Nico Schuler, Texas State University, San Marcos
At American universities and colleges, music is very often taught without including non-Western music, by just focusing on Western music. But in reality, Western music relates, especially since the late 1800s, quite often to certain styles and genres of non-Western music, and non-Western music also developed in new forms that include elements of Western music. Furthermore, in the electronic age, processes of musical globalization and cross-cultural exchange are part of our everyday-life and are irreversible. Finally, the development of Western popular music -- which is dominating today's musical life -- was, and is, strongly influenced by non-Western music. For these reasons, a perspective of world music should dominate and influence our teaching and understanding of music.
Based on major revisions of the music curriculum at a mid-size American university, this presentation will provide practical examples of how the inclusion of music from non-Western cultures will contribute to the study of music in a college music curriculum, in which different music disciplines are strongly related to each other ("integrated curriculum") -- for instance theory, performance, history, pedagogy, etc., and their sub-disciplines. The presentation will make suggestions, how traditional (Western-oriented) methodologies can be expanded to meet the needs of a global view on music. The presentation will furthermore show, how such a curriculum will contribute to the globalization of teaching music, and how it may eventually lead to the development of a global theory of music.
This paper will especially focus on World Music within the music theory portion of the integrated curriculum. Already starting in basic musicianship courses, taken at the high-school level or as remedial courses at colleges, one can include rhythmic structures of non-Western music -- for instance African rhythms or Korean rhythmic modes -- to broaden the horizon of traditional approaches to teaching rhythm and meter. Non-Western melodies, for instance maquam-derived melodies, can be introduced and compared to Western melodies. The study of different types of non-Western rhythms and melodies can be continued in the theory core curriculum. That includes the aural approach with rhythmic and melodic dictation and the performance of rhythms and melodies. Early on, the students' understanding of pitch organization as well as of rhythmic placing of notes in connection to specific meters or modes is enriched from a world music perspective. Such an approach to teaching provides the basis for the analysis of more complex rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic structures in the later courses of the core music theory curriculum. In these courses, students will analyze entire maquam pieces, pieces of African polyrhythmic drumming, and of Gamelan music, for example, and can relate their discoveries to the analysis of Romantic and Modern Western art music. Such an approach seems essential, since the naming of non-Western influences on Western music, as in impressionistic and in most modern musics, will otherwise remain empty phrases for our students -- empty phrases without any music-practical relevance and without the motivation for extending analytical methodology that is necessary for the study of world music.
The presentation will outline this curriculum and provide practical suggestions on handouts as well as audio examples.