04/23/23
"Globalizing a Core Music-History Curriculum - A Case Study in Departmental Collaboration" with Drs. Annie Heiderscheit and Kristina Boerger
Today’s music practitioners face rising demands for intercultural/interstylistic fluency. In response, our curricula must expand beyond Western canonic traditions. Despite decades-long discussions about the importance of globalizing music studies in higher education, a two- or three-course sequence in the history of music in the European classical tradition predominates as the required and sufficient norm in music-degree programs. “World music” courses are often designed as single-semester, token requirements, or electives. This arrangement reinforces culturally chauvinistic assumptions about the relative value of distinct traditions. At the same time, it isolates those traditions from consideration of their historical, political, cultural, and musical interpenetrations – or, where styles do not interpenetrate: from the blast of understanding that may come only on recognizing why radically different traditions fulfill their respective cultures’ definitions of “good” music.
This webinar will detail their recent success in aligning their department’s final curricular holdout, the core music-history sequence, with their theory/aural skills, ensembles, and studio curricula – long since diversified to embrace popular, vernacular, and elite musics from several continents. Panelists will narrate the sequence of catalysts and pivotal moments that launched this process, describe the types and levels of leadership required to support their innovative work, and discuss the various practices (e.g. forming workgroups, engaging consultants, establishing procedural boundaries, and creating fantasy proposals) that drove the project’s success. Impediments to the process will be identified and the strategies employed to defuse them revealed. The presentation will include an overview of the redesigned courses and their cross-curricular impact.