Articles and Blog Posts
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Accessing the Inside of the Tent: The Optics of Inclusivity in Music Education by Christopher Mena
In this short Medium post, Mena (as a POC) unpacks comments from white panelists discussing how to diversify programming for large ensembles. He discusses optics of inclusion and how achieving DEI differs from visible diversity. -
Embracing Anti-Racist Practices in the Music Perception and Cognition Community by David John Baker
Baker writes on different practices one can take to be anti-racist within the music community and what it is like to embrace such practices. -
Envisioning Higher Education as Antiracist by Krishni Metivier
Krishni Metivier provides a checklist of key actions that colleges and universities should take. Published by Inside Higher Ed, July 2, 2020 -
If You Don't Know, Don't Assume by Mollie Spector Stone, et al.
In this article, thirteen conductors of color share their observations on the effects of European-derived training, along with their recommendations for developing stronger engagements with less familiar music and the people whom this music represents. -
Journal of Music History Pedagogy Special Issue This Volume of the Journal of Music History Pedagogy (volume 10, no. 1) includes articles and reviews on the decolonization of music education.
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Music education has a race problem, and universities must address it by Jacqueline Warwick This is a response to Philip's Ewell's work on Music Theory's White Racial Frame, calling out a rebuttal in the Journal of Schenkerian Studies and calling for an :unflinching examination of our collective investment in the music of the past and in musical whiteness.:
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Music Theory's White Racial Frame by Philip Ewell "Everyone in my field knows that it is unremittingly white and male, but once I began to understand how whiteness and maleness work in tandem to suppress nonwhiteness and nonmaleness, both subconsciously and consciously, I began to do the academic work in order to expose this unjust side of music theory so that we might begin the process of deconstructing our white-male structures. I now consider myself an activist in the field, one who advocates for change by exposing how existing white-male power structures suppress marginalized voices, and by pressing for the necessary changes so that all voices in music theory can be heard."
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Narratives of Musical Resilience and the Perpetuation of Whiteness in the Music History Classroom by Travis D. Stimeling and Kayla Tokar The music history classroom is often deeply implicated in a project that centers whiteness and celebrates proximity to whiteness as an admirable goal for persons of color. Our textbooks overwhelmingly feature the creative work of European and European American men, and although music histories often nod toward the oppression, exploitation, and death of musical African Americans, they seldom point to the individual choices that whites have made to create and sustain oppressive structures of white supremacy. We suggest that a closer look at the 1740 Negro Code of South Carolina and its subsequent ban on the drumming of enslaved Africans offers a useful opportunity to introduce students to concepts of power and to begin important antiracist work in schools of music and music departments in the United States and elsewhere.
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An Open Letter on Racism in Music Studies by Danielle Brown This is a first-hand account of working in Music Studies by ethnomusicologist Danielle Brown, showcasing her thoughts and experiences of racialized work and racism in the field.
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Promoting Diversity in the Undergraduate Classroom: Incorporating Asian Contemporary Composers’ Music in a Form and Analysis Course by Tomoko Deguchi "Despite the greater demand for inclusivity, the literature used in the Music Theory classroom is still limited; the materials for examples and analysis are mostly music drawn from the Western classical musical canon... In the first part of the essay, I discuss further the motivations and background of my decision to incorporate East Asian composers’ music in the course. In the second part of the essay, I discuss several compositions by Asian compossers as implementation of these motivations. :
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Towards a Decolonized Music History Curriculum by Margaret E. Walker "Although musicological scholarship has expanded in recent decades to include critical theories and diverse repertoire, post-secondary music history curricula largely continue to disseminate a Eurocentric canon of composers and works presented within an evolutionary historical narrative. This article places questions of curricular revision in the current context of calls for educational reform through decolonization initiatives. Beginning with an exploration of what decolonizing education might mean, I then investigate the impact that the European colonial project might have had on the standard music history curriculum, uncovering an embedded teleological progression that supports European exceptionalism and culture superiority. A first step in decolonizing music history teaching, therefore, must be to make the historiographical foundations of what we are teaching transparent through contextualizing Western art music history within a critical, global framework."
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“You Might Be Left With Silence When You’re Done”; The White Fear of Taking Racist Songs Out of Music Education by Martin Urbach Urbach discusses the fear that White teachers face when removing racism from curriculum and how it relates back to the larger frame of White supremacy. He also touches on understanding the context of music, recognizing larger systems, and calls for self-reflection in White music educators.
Library Resources
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How to be an Antiracist
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The only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it -- and then dismantle it." Ibram X. Kendi's concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America -- but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it. In this book, Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science, bringing it all together with an engaging personal narrative of his own awakening to antiracism. How to Be an Antiracist is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond an awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a truly just and equitable society."
ISBN: 0525509291Publication Date: 2019 -
Mapping Multiculturalism by Mapping Multiculturalism offers cogent critiques of the rubric “multicultural” and its uses by leading scholars in sociology, history, literary criticism, popular culture studies, ethnic studies, and critical legal studies.ISBN: 0816625468Publication Date: 1996-04-01
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The Racial Healing Handbook
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A powerful and practical guide to help you navigate racism, challenge privilege, manage stress and trauma, and begin to heal. Healing from racism is a journey that often involves reliving trauma and experiencing feelings of shame, guilt, and anxiety. This journey can be a bumpy ride, and before we begin healing, we need to gain an understanding of the role history plays in racial/ethnic myths and stereotypes. In so many ways, to heal from racism, you must re-educate yourself and unlearn the processes of racism. This book can help guide you. The Racial Healing Handbook offers practical tools to help you navigate daily and past experiences of racism, challenge internalized negative messages and privileges, and handle feelings of stress and shame. You'll also learn to develop a profound racial consciousness and conscientiousness, and heal from grief and trauma. Most importantly, you'll discover the building blocks to creating a community of healing in a world still filled with racial microaggressions and discrimination. This book is not just about ending racial harm--it is about racial liberation. This journey is one that we must take together. It promises the possibility of moving through this pain and grief to experience the hope, resilience, and freedom that helps you not only self-actualize, but also makes the world a better place.
ISBN: 9781684032723Publication Date: 2019-08-01 -
Seeing Race Again
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Every academic discipline has an origin story complicit with white supremacy. Racial hierarchy and colonialism structured the very foundations of most disciplines' research and teaching paradigms. In the early twentieth century, the academy faced rising opposition and correction, evident in the intervention of scholars including W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Carter G. Woodson, and others. By the mid-twentieth century, education itself became a center in the struggle for social justice. Scholars mounted insurgent efforts to discredit some of the most odious intellectual defenses of white supremacy in academia, but the disciplines and their keepers remained unwilling to interrogate many of the racist foundations of their fields, instead embracing a framework of racial colorblindness as their default position. This book challenges scholars and students to see race again. Examining the racial histories and colorblindness in fields as diverse as social psychology, the law, musicology, literary studies, sociology, and gender studies, Seeing Race Again documents the profoundly contradictory role of the academy in constructing, naturalizing, and reproducing racial hierarchy. It shows how colorblindness compromises the capacity of disciplines to effectively respond to the wide set of contemporary political, economic, and social crises marking public life today.
ISBN: 9780520300996Publication Date: 2019-02-05 -
Soundtracks of Asian America
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In Soundtracks of Asian America, Grace Wang explores how Asian Americans use music to construct narratives of self, race, class, and belonging in national and transnational spaces. She highlights how they navigate racialization in different genres by considering the experiences of Asians and Asian Americans in Western classical music, U.S. popular music, and Mandopop (Mandarin-language popular music). Her study encompasses the perceptions and motivations of middle-class Chinese and Korean immigrant parents intensely involved in their children's classical music training, and of Asian and Asian American classical musicians whose prominence in their chosen profession is celebrated by some and undermined by others. Wang interviews young Asian American singer-songwriters who use YouTube to contest the limitations of a racialized U.S. media landscape, and she investigates the transnational modes of belonging forged by Asian American pop stars pursuing recording contracts and fame in East Asia. Foregrounding musical spaces where Asian Americans are particularly visible, Wang examines how race matters and operates in the practices and institutions of music making.
ISBN: 9780822357698Publication Date: 2015-01-07 -
Speak It Louder
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Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music documents the variety of musics-from traditional Asian through jazz, classical, and pop-that have been created by Asian Americans. This book is not about "Asian American music" but rather about Asian Americans making music. This key distinction allows the author to track a wide range of musical genres. Wong covers an astonishing variety of music, ethnically as well as stylistically: Laotian song, Cambodian music drama, karaoke, Vietnamese pop, Japanese American taiko, Asian American hip hop, and panethnic Asian American improvisational music (encompassing jazz and avant-garde classical styles). In Wong's hands these diverse styles coalesce brilliantly around a coherent and consistent set of questions about what it means for Asian Americans to make music in environments of inter-ethnic contact, about the role of performativity in shaping social identities, and about the ways in which commercially and technologically mediated cultural production and reception transform individual perceptions of time, space, and society. Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music encompasses ethnomusicology, oral history, Asian American studies, and cultural performance studies. It promises to set a new standard for writing in these fields, and will raise new questions for scholars to tackle for many years to come.
ISBN: 0415970393Publication Date: 2004-06-28 -
We want to do more than survive : abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom
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Drawing on her life’s work of teaching and researching in urban schools, Bettina Love persuasively argues that educators must teach students about racial violence, oppression, and how to make sustainable change in their communities through radical civic initiatives and movements. She argues that the US educational system is maintained by and profits from the suffering of children of color. Instead of trying to repair a flawed system, educational reformers offer survival tactics in the forms of test-taking skills, acronyms, grit labs, and character education, which Love calls the educational survival complex.
ISBN: 0807069167Publication Date: 2019
Audio Recordings
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Freedom songs: Selma, Alabama a documentary recording This documentary recording chronicles civil rights protesters singing during a march from Selma, Alabama, to the State Capitol in Montgomery, to demand fair access to voting registration. The songs express hope and sorrow and a call for equality, and many of them are traditional with lyrics adapted for the protests. There are no instruments, just the voices of the demonstrators and their leaders.
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A grain of sand music for the struggle by Asians in America. A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle of Asians in America, a 1973 Paredon Records release, is widely recognized as the first album of Asian American music. Chris Kando Iijima, Joanne Nobuko Miyamoto, and William “Charlie” Chin deliver their activist message through simply–recorded acoustic guitars and vocals, with the occasional accompaniment of bongos, bass, and di zi, a Chinese flute. Soul, jazz, and blues elements are interwoven in the American folk style of the songs.
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Never give up! This record, released on Asian Improv records in 1989, is an avant-garde jazz album with activist messages.
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We are America's children In this U.S. Bicentennial album, Jenkins and a children’s chorus celebrate America’s diversity and history in folk songs, blues, hymns,and civil rights and historic songs. We Are Native American Tribes, Ezekiel Saw the Wheel, Ol’ Texas, This Land Is Your Land, In 1776, Happy Birthday Dear America, and more.
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We shall overcome; songs of the Freedom Riders and the Sit -Ins Montgomery Gospel Trio.; Nashville Quartet. This 1961 recording of spirituals, gospel and new music to "express the spirit of freedom" was the result of an effort by producer and performer Guy Carawan to bring together singers representative of hundreds of thousands African American students from the south participating in sit-ins, stand-ins and freedom rides for "first class citizenship" during the civil rights movement. The songs are performed by The Montgomery Gospel Trio, comprised of three high school girls from Alabama, as well as four seminary students who call themselves "The Nashville Quartet" in an impromptu session as recorded by Moses Asch.
Podcasts and Videos
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Cite Black Women This bi-weekly podcast features reflections and conversations about the politics and praxis of acknowledging and centering Black women’s ideas and intellectual contributions inside and outside of the academy through citation. Episodes feature conversations with Black women inside and outside of the academy who are actively engaged in radical citation as praxis, quotes and reflections on Black women's writing, and conversations on weathering the storm of citational politics in the academy, decolonizing syllabi, and more.
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Classically Untrained A safe space to focus on the experiences of womxn, LGBTQIA+, and BIPOC students pursuing a career in music with your hosts, Justin Ochoa and Marissa Marmolejo. Classically Untrained paints a candid portrait of what it is like to be different in a field that discourages diversity of ideas and people.
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A Discussion About Race at ACE2019 with Beverly Daniel Tatum and Robin DiAngelo In this plenary session at ACE2019, two of the country’s leading voices and best-selling authors on race and racism—Beverly Daniel Tatum and Robin DiAngelo—discussed the role of race in the United States and on college campuses, how university leaders can engage their communities on race, and what it will take to close equity gaps. The session was moderated by ACE Vice President for Research Lorelle Espinosa.
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Getting Curious: Are We Hearing A Crescendo of Anti-Racism in Classical Music? with Dr. Kira Thurman and Ashleigh Gordon Available on Stitcher, Apple podcasts, and Spotify. Dr. Kira Thurman and Ashleigh Gordon join Jonathan to discuss the work of Black classical composers and musicians through history and today. Dr. Thurman is an assistant professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. Ashleigh Gordon is the co-founder, Artistic and Executive Director, and violist of Castle of our Skins, a Boston-based concert and educational series.
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The Score An Urban Music Education Podcast hosted by Eric and Justin. They provide tips and strategies through honest discussions about their experience teaching music in an Urban setting. The goal is to provide a positive and solution-based narrative to create more effective, compassionate and culturally relevant music educators.
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Think UDL: Decolonizing the Music Curriculum with Andrew Dell’Antonio at the Big XII Teaching and Learning Conference This is an episode of the ThinkUDL podcast recorded live from the 6th Annual Big 12 Teaching and Learning Conference in the Texas Union Building on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin. Andrew Dell’Antonio, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies in the College of Fine Arts and Distinguished Teaching Professor of Musicology in the Ethnomusicology Division of the Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music at The University of Texas at Austin discusses of the application of UDL principles in music and arts classes as well as how taking a UDL lens to the curriculum causes us to re-examine the overstuffed curriculum as well as the traditional curriculum in the music field.
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Trilloquy Garrett McQueen and Scott Blankenship created TRILLOQUY, where they select news stories and events to connect with pieces of music that help bring light to the issues of today while simultaneously challenging and deconstructing the aural definitions of "classical" music. TRILLOQUY also features interviews with special guests, which have included insights and conversations with entrepreneurs, social justice activists, "classical" musicians, and award winners.
Resource Lists
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Composers of Color Resource Project This webpage houses resources for music by composers of color. It is not intended to be limited to (a) “traditional” music theory topics or (b) notated music in the Western art music tradition.
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Inclusive Early Music Includes a bibliography on "early music" (before 1600) by BIPOC and women musicians:
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Music by Black Composers Inspiring Black students to begin and continue instrumental training. Making the music of Black composers available to everyone. Helping to change the face of classical music through greater diversity.
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Music of the African Diaspora created by Samuel A Floyd The Music of the African Diaspora series is a collection of work invested in the exploration and documentation of the long global histories of Black musical innovation. The series highlights the ways in which the sonic practices and traditions of the African descended engage in and reflect varying racial, social, and political formations across time and space. These award-winning books interpret the music and animate its context in order to amplify the sounds of the Black world. Series Editors: Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr., University of Pennsylvania Shana L. Redmond, Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles
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We Rise: A Movement Songbook We Rise: A Movement Songbook draws on a rich history of social movement music, both old and new. This compilation of movement music is meant to give people ways to join. To remember. To affirm. To honor. To rage. To celebrate. To practice new ways of being in relationship with one another and the earth. To envision and create a world that is just and habitable for future generations.
Blogs & Websites
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#DecolonizeMusicEd Blog author Nate Holder BA (Hons), MMus is a musician, author, speaker and music education consultant based in London. He is an advocate for decolonizing music education and has been speaking, writing, and consulting on the subject internationally for the past few years.
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Decolonizing the Music Room (Opens in new window) Helping music educators develop critical practices through research, training and discourse to build a more equitable future. Their work means centering BBIA (Black, Brown, Indigenous, and Asian) voices, knowledge, and experiences to challenge the historical dominance of white Western European and American music, narratives, and practices that has resulted in minimization and erasure throughout our field.
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Diversity in Music Theory Resources for Diversifying Music Theory Pedagogy The resources on this page provide ideas and materials for racial and ethnic diversity in music theory classrooms.
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Hiphop Archive The Hiphop Archive and Research Institute's mission is to facilitate and encourage the pursuit of knowledge, art, culture and responsible leadership through Hiphop. Their website: hiphoparchive.org provides information about all of our activities and projects and serves as a resource for those interested in knowing, developing, building, maintaining and representing Hiphop.
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Revival Music Project Revival Music Project provides solution-based music education services to school districts, universities, music teacher, and programs to create effective, compassionate and culturally relevant music educators. They strive to create a community of educators committed to serve students through the vehicle of music.
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Sounding Out! Sounding Out! is a weekly online publication, a networked academic archive, and a dynamic group platform bringing together sound studies scholars, sound artists and professionals, and readers interested in the cultural politics of sound and listening. Every Monday, our writers offer well-researched, well-written, and accessible interventions in sound studies, directing the field’s energy toward the social, cultural, and political aspects of sound and listening, particularly their differential construction of and material impacts on variously positioned bodies.