In the face of ongoing protests against police brutality in the US, I’m seeing some music educators fretting about the relevance of their work. I believe that Eurocentric music education can validate and perpetuate white supremacy, and that our responsibility is to dismantle it. Here’s an excerpt of my dissertation in progress. I hope you …
Tag Archives: white supremacy
Racism is not over and America’s prisons prove it
A gentleman named Myron Magnet, whose muttonchop sideburns have to be seen to be believed, has this to say: What is keeping down American blacks today is not racism, oppression, or lack of opportunity. That’s over. Black Americans are now free. What holds them back is the ideology of “authentic blackness”—a black identity rooted in …
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Teaching whiteness in music class
Update: evidence that racism is an urgent problem. Further update: the online alt-right has some feelings about this post. Music education is in a ”crisis of irrelevancy” (Reimer, 2009, p. 398). Enrollment in school music has declined precipitously for the past few decades. Budget cuts alone can not explain this decline (Kratus, 2007). School music …
Duke Ellington, Percy Grainger, and the status of jazz in the music academy
On October 25, 1932, Percy Grainger invited Duke Ellington and his orchestra to perform “Creole Love Call” as part of a music lecture at New York University. It was the first time any university had invited a jazz musician to perform in an academic context. I will argue that the meeting of Grainger and Ellington …
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Ethnomusicology and world music
Writing assignment for Ethnomusicology: History and Theory with David Samuels People like me listen to world music to hope for and imagine a world without imperialism. I’ve sampled Central African pygmy music in my own work, and while I do a better job of attributing my sources than Deep Forest does, I’m motivated by the same …
Cultural hegemony in music education
Music education in American colleges and universities focuses almost entirely on the traditions of Western European aristocrats during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, known conventionally as “common practice music.” This focus implies that upper-class European-descended musical tastes are a fundamental truth rather than a set of arbitrary and contingent preferences, and that white cultural dominance …
The title of this book is everything wrong with music education
This is a widely used college level music theory textbook. Remember, kids, to be a complete musician, all you need to know is the most formal version of the harmonic preferences of aristocratic Western Europeans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Read a longer, more nuanced critique of this book here.
Between The World And Me
I’m taking a sociology class called Learning Of Culture with Lisa Stulberg. It could just as easily be called Culture Of Learning, since it views school as just one cultural setting among many. Our first assignment was to read Between The World And Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. I agree with Toni Morrison’s cover blurb. After …
Subverting music education
Kratus, J. (2015). The Role of Subversion in Changing Music Education. In C. Randles (Ed.), Music Education: Navigating the Future (pp. 340–346). New York & London: Routledge. Here’s a horrifying story from John Kratus: In 2009 I gave a presentation on collegiate curricular change in music for the Society for Music Teacher Education in Greensboro, …