A Critical Reflection on "Decolonizing the Music Survey"
by David Chavannes and Maria Ryan
The Context
Since writing “Decolonizing the Music Survey: A Manifesto for Action” in 2018, our thinking has changed substantially enough to warrant a reflection statement. Now holding PhDs and faculty positions at different institutions, we wish to contextualize the manifesto in our intellectual journeys, analyze its assumptions and flaws, and identify new areas for more focused inquiry in the future.
The manifesto was created for a one-day pedagogy symposium which was part of a larger graduate student conference. We were excited about the symposium because we had begun to realize that our educational experiences were not preparing us to effectively support undergraduate learning, despite this being expected of us.
The need for greater compassion in the teaching and learning process was very present in our minds. Maria was concerned about how historical musicology textbooks marginalize the relationships between Western classical music and transatlantic slavery, and wondered how this might impact non-white (and especially black) students. David sought to avoid reproducing the alienation that he experienced as a black student of Western classical music performance, and what he interpreted as the tokenization of non-European musical practices in ethnomusicology survey courses.
We were also both exhausted by the climate and pace of department life. Like many graduate students, we were teaching assistants (Maria as instructor of record) in music survey courses while taking a full load of graduate seminars and working toward major benchmarks in our degree programs (Maria preparing her dissertation proposal and David preparing for a grueling five-day exam). Our training consisted of a single, university-wide, two-day conference during which there was little time to establish relevant background knowledge about how students learn. Tensions around the status of graduate teaching assistants as employees had been building. Further social tensions had arisen within our departments as well. Meanwhile, we were aware of the need to develop sufficient professional experience by producing research before graduation.
Though highly motivated to teach, we did not fully appreciate how little we actually knew about the craft of teaching. This gap in our pedagogical knowledge, compounded by the contextual factors described above, led us to create a well-meaning but flawed manifesto grounded in uninterrogated assumptions, to which we now turn.
The Problems
Problem 1: The central problem is unclear.
The manifesto does not clearly articulate the problem that we were trying to address.
The concept of coloniality allowed us to connect histories of US colonialism and higher education, constructing a problem-space that we still believe can be productive to explore. By citing Freire and hooks to introduce the concept of “liberation” as a “pedagogical orientation,” we seem to be arguing that a colonial epistemology limits the liberatory potential of higher education. We implicitly posit liberation as a solution to the problem of colonial epistemology in music pedagogy, but we move toward a solution before clearly articulating the problem. We assume that “liberation” is a desirable goal for a university course without explicitly defining the term.
Several people (particularly graduate students) have written to us to explain how the manifesto resonates with their own experiences, while others have written because the manifesto is helping them to clarify problems in their own teaching. These are the people we wanted to reach in the first place. They would be better served, we believe, by a more careful and thoughtful articulation of the problem.
Problem 2: The genre does not serve our ultimate aim.
Because we needed to write in a very short period of time, the clarity and easy segmentation of a manifesto made the genre attractive. But the confrontational and polemical nature of this genre can and probably has turned away readers of other political orientations. We did understand something of the genre’s fraught nature, which is why we described our claims as “not unquestionable facts, but rather assertions or provocations that are intended to lead toward action.” We hoped that, in imagining how they might enact these assertions, our listeners would become aware of teaching practices and beliefs that they might wish to re-evaluate—not necessarily to come to our conclusions, but certainly to take substantive action toward improving their own teaching.
Problem 3: Our claims have little evidentiary basis.
The manifesto conjures certain teaching practices in order to criticize them and propose “decolonial” alternatives. But readers must deduce from the proposed alternatives what these “colonial” practices actually are, rather than being presented with clear and evidence-based descriptions of university teaching practices that fit the description of “colonial.”
David offers personal experience as evidence for then-current teaching practices. Such evidence is certainly relevant to the discussion, but cannot alone substantiate the manifesto’s representation of university teaching. Maria does offer one piece of evidence (Hanning 2014) to argue that historical musicology—at least, the way that textbooks represent the field to non-specialists—does not engage substantively with the history of transatlantic slavery. She implies that the field should, but does not explain why.
Further, the “decolonial” alternatives proposed themselves have no empirical basis. For example, one ostensibly “colonial” teaching practice that we describe is “conflating neutrality with whiteness.” The proposed solution is to “recognize that … everyone in your class brings with them a wealth of experiences and histories that may not map directly onto your own experiences and histories” as an instructor. In what ways is it colonial to conflate neutrality with whiteness? How might making room for students’ prior knowledge address that conflation and thus be “decolonial”? Certainly, we could approach an answer by studying empirical research, but the manifesto cites no such sources when proposing “decolonial” alternatives. In the absence of such evidence, the manifesto itself conflates “colonialism” with “whiteness.”
As a consequence, the “decolonial” alternatives that we propose are limited by the frame of identity. For example, we write: “Ensure that you don’t have an all-white and/or all-male syllabus.” What does the white racial identity or the male gender identity of a music scholar, performer, or composer have to do with the content of their work? Depending on the inquiry that such work is being used to pursue, these identities may certainly be relevant; but the manifesto does not parse the different scenarios in which this might be the case. The manifesto therefore reduces to identity the much more complicated question of how to determine the most relevant knowledge and skills with which students should demonstrate mastery by the end of a course. The identitarian logic can only imagine solutions based on quotas and percentages (e.g., the number of white-created versus non-white-created sources that should be assigned, or male versus non-male, etc.), which distracts from more constructive solutions based on content knowledge and skills (e.g., the key ideas that shaped the general development of a particular tradition of thought, or the key skills necessary for identifying types of musical instrument by ear).
Problem 4: Our claim to decoloniality was naive, as was our rejection of Western thought.
We have both engaged more substantively with histories of colonialism and the metaphysics that attend and are shaped by colonial projects in the Americas since creating this manifesto. But the manifesto demonstrates just how early we were in our journey of understanding the complexities of colonialism. We had only recently encountered the concepts of coloniality and decoloniality when we wrote it, and clearly had not fully grasped the implications of decolonization. In an attempt to clarify our use of the term “decolonization,” we write: “Part of what decolonizing means to us is rejecting the imposition and dominance of Western Euro-American systems of knowledge through tangible action in our teaching and learning.” Fair enough, but we provide no evidence of how thinkers indigenous to this continent have theorized decolonization. Naively, we formulated our own project of decolonization, despite having no personal experience of colonization in the ways that for example, the Lenni Lenape, on whose lands we wrote the manifesto, do.
Further, the need to “[reject] the … dominance of Western Euro-American systems of knowledge” might seem intuitively appealing to a certain kind of thinker, but it is far more complex than it sounds. The whole enterprise of academic knowledge work in which we were participating developed directly from, or in relation to, Western thought traditions. While these traditions are not the only ones that contemporary academics engage with in the creation of knowledge, living in the US and participating in North Atlantic academic discourse largely means contending with Western thought. It is possible to bend, stretch, and even break parts of this tradition in pursuit of truth, and this can be done from within the tradition itself or by constellating truths from Western and non-Western traditions. But it is rather rash to reject entire systems of knowledge in pursuit of a solution to a hazy problem in a knowledge economy largely shaped by those rejected systems of knowledge. What is more, the manifesto does not make clear the system of knowledge that we sought to adopt instead.
Finally, the manifesto highlights the dominance of Western thought as inherently harmful. But this takes for granted that the mere presence of some form of dominance in an institution is equivalent to oppressive domination.[1] Certainly, some forms of dominance can oppress, but it is not fully clear from the manifesto how “Western Euro-American systems of knowledge” are oppressive, or how they work against a “liberatory” pedagogy. Every community or institution, whether intellectual or otherwise, will gradually come to prefer certain practices. The dominance of these practices does not in itself mean that other practices are being suppressed—it may mean this, but it does not have to. While colonial epistemology may be dominant in music pedagogy, the extent to which it oppresses practitioners of music performance, analysis, and research is not clearly demonstrated by the manifesto.
The Future
We are still invested in empowering university music survey course instructors to design thoughtful and engaging learning experiences. Below are some broad inquiries that invite a more empirical approach to the question of what exactly (if anything) needs to change about university music pedagogy. In formulating them, we were interested in interrogating our assumptions; we invite you to do so, too. While we will decide on a specific inquiry in the future, we present several options here with the hope that we might inspire others to take a more empirical approach to this question as well.
Why should the content knowledge and thinking skills toward which university music survey courses support students change?
This might involve asking:
What content knowledge and thinking skills are students in university music survey courses currently expected to master?
Which music survey course textbooks are currently being used in universities, and what content knowledge do they prioritize?
Which academic constituencies argue that the content knowledge and thinking skills currently prioritized in university music survey courses should change? Which argue against change?
What do these constituencies argue should change or remain unchanged? What evidence, discourses, or rhetorical strategies do they use to articulate this? Is there a relationship between membership in a given constituency on the one hand and the arguments, evidence, discourses, and rhetorical strategies used on the other?
Why should the dominant pedagogical practices of university music instructors change?
This might involve asking:
What are the learning outcomes toward which current university music survey courses support students? Are these outcomes measurable?
How is student learning currently being assessed in university music survey courses (e.g., exams, research papers)?
Do the knowledge and skills required to complete assignments explicitly support the stated learning outcomes?
Do classroom activities teach the required knowledge and skills to successfully complete assessments?
Is there empirical evidence that current teaching practices in university music survey courses fail to help students connect their musical practices and interests with course material?
How do university instructors incorporate or respond to their students’ prior knowledge?
Why should demographic parity be a goal of university music programs?
This might involve asking:
Which students desire to practice music studies? Into which demographic categories do they identify?
How many such students are prevented from accessing music studies training? What obstacles do such students face in accessing such training?
Which of these obstacles can be substantively addressed in the university classroom?
What are the underlying problems for which demographic parity is a proposed solution? How does demographic parity solve such problems?
What are the consequences (unintended or otherwise) of categorizing students and content according to demographic categories?
Work Cited
Hanning, Barbara Russano. 2014. Concise History of Western Music, fifth edition. New York: W. W. Norton.
Note
[1] Here, we are thinking with David L. Bernstein, “In Search of Systemic Racism: Distinguishing and Evaluating Seven Different Senses of the Term,” Journal of Free Black Thought, June 27, 2022.