[…] Continuation of: III. Some Consequences […]
One possible criticism of the design I sketch out here is that it provides an outline that is still largely oriented by the concerns of a traditional western HoT, even though it populates its syllabus with women and POCs. This is a legitimate point: the selection of figures still allows a coherent story, but this story is only possible—more or less—against the tacit background of the figures from the white male syllabus. In studying Ptolemais, for instance, we have to study the broader harmonicist tradition, in studying Johanna Kinkel we also have to study broader notions of chromatic relations. In the story that the new syllabus outlines, then, students would still learn about modes and tetrachords, about the need for and problems of temperament, the questions of harmony and tonality, and so on.[1]
A syllabus that curates the figures that represent certain predetermined questions—isn’t this the definition of tokenism? Pedagogy should not be reduced to a diversity checklist, which would simply reproduce the hierarchies and hegemonies lurking under the narrative surface.[2] But there is more going on in this syllabus: even if we change our story by choosing different people through which we tell a similar story, we do actually change quite a bit about the story itself: we position the issues between different cultural nodes and open up new connections that had previously not been accessible.
The tale of equal temperament, for instance, was told in my old syllabus through Daniel Chua’s highwire act of bringing together Vicenzo Galilei and Max Weber. But there is no reason that Zhu Zaiyu couldn’t also be used to explain the calculation of equal temperament, and to do so in a musical context that does not deal with the problem of triadic harmonies. This approach would raise all sorts of interesting questions: How do specific concepts relate to different musical contexts? What problem exactly did Zhu Zaiyu’s equal temperament solve in the context of Ming-dynasty yayue?
If the task is to open the students to other possibilities, then teaching other cultural and musical contexts is a plus. When the students learn how Arabic and Persian music theory utilizes the oud, they don’t only learn how the Greek tradition was absorbed by the Islamic world, but they also establish a point of contact on which later studies into South-Western Asian music[3] may build in a different context. When the students learn, with Johanna Kinkel, about Chopin through enharmonic microtones, they learn about a way of listening through new ears (and new politics) to a repertory that may have seemed all too familiar. When the students learn about Julián Carrillo’s vision of the future of music, they learn about changing conceptions of consonance and dissonance, and conceptions of musical progress. Schoenberg’s story is an important one here, too, but—and this is the critical point—it’s not the only one.
This is one way in which diversity manifests itself and spreads outwards. Far from just paying lip service to academic fashions, we will have actually created a structure that offers old and new points of contact, in ways that the old syllabus did not support.
Is it a problem that the cultures represented here are mostly drawn from the most notable cultures of the world, as even the crustiest European cultural mandarin would acknowledge? While the syllabus includes an important Mexican composer-theorist, there is no representation of several central minority groups of contemporary American culture: Indigenous Americans and African Americans. (This point is what I flagged earlier when I noted that global music theory is not the same as diverse theory.) This is a more serious concern and should be considered. If the list were longer, and if the semester had more weeks, there is no reason why both could not be included. I should also work harder to include more African American scholars—a problem that Phil Ewell discusses at length. Indigenous Americans present, as so often, a separate and possibly more protracted issue that absolutely deserves attention. So far I have not found a solution that would satisfy me, and I would be interested to hear from others who have tried.[4]
Perhaps the most important aspect of this thought experiment, certainly to me, is the thought that we need to rethink the relationship between people and ideas in the history of music theory. I sometimes joke that I teach music theory because I am not terribly interested in people. This usually gets a laugh, and there may be a certain kernel of truth to it. But I realize that this joke is not totally harmless, because the professed lack of interest in people is tantamount to accepting that our established histories continue to be peopled by heteronormative white males, which can somehow pass as neutral. As Phil Ewell reminds us, this indifference amounts in practice to a tacit diversity quota, and it’s currently set at 0%. Not every music theory student has the luxury of blithely ignoring ethnic and gender makeup.
One incentive that I hope students would take away from such a diversified syllabus is that they also recognize its opportunities. I am specifically thinking here of unrealized potential. The English secondary literature, say, on Zhu Zaiyu is still pretty sketchy, to say nothing of Johanna Kinkel, who is virtually unknown even in specialist circles. There is plenty of scope for exciting dissertation topics. The additional benefit is that as the research becomes more robust, these figures will automatically become more central. New nodes and points of contacts emerge. In a word, our story is beginning to change.
[…] Continuation: V. And finally, some FAQs (and not-so-FAQs) […]
[1] My colleague David Damrosch would call this a “countercanon.” He points out that the major figures of traditional canons are relatively unaffected by the diversification of the field and in fact form a “hypercanon.” (This would be our Schoenberg–Boethius syllabus.) Rather, he continues, it is the “shadowcanon” of the minor figures of traditional canons (the Marchettos, Morleys, and Marpurgs) that lose cultural capital in this process. See his “World Literature in a Postcanonical, Hypercanonical Age,” in Haun Saussy, ed., Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 43–53.
[2] Or, to make this point more emphatically, there is always the danger of the McDonaldization, of constructing a canon from the perspective of American hegemony, an act of colonization rather than globalization. See Djelal Kadir, “Comparative Literature in an Age of Terrorism,” in Saussy, ed., Comparative Literature, 68–77. Thanks go to Lester Hu for pointing me to this thought-provoking article.
[3] Thanks go to Siavash Sabetrohani for pointing out the problems with the standard label “Middle Eastern.” I have followed his advice in using a more adequate geographic term, but since this label is not (yet) very common, it seems useful to add this short explanatory note.
[4] Ongoing or very recent work, such as Danny Walden’s provocative work on the early generation of comparative musicologists [paywall] working with Indigenous Americans, or Jennifer Bain’s work on chant transmission among the Mi’kmaw, offer promising starting points here.