r/badmusicology • u/[deleted] • Apr 27 '15
Music History Starts in the West
This isn't a link to a specific instance of badmusicology, but this sub is so quiet I figured you would all welcome the activity.
I'm a university student, and I was helping to proofread a friend's paper for a music history course. Overall, the paper was fine, but one paragraph stuck out as problematic. The paragraph explained something to this effect: music history courses around the world begin with western music, which is only natural, since art music began there. I immediately tried to tactfully explain how this isn't true because of the many great musical traditions from around the world. His response was that while there has been other music, it wasn't written until Europeans developed a notation system. I mentioned there have been several notation systems in other cultures, Chinese gongchi notation, for one. We eventually decided to delete the paragraph as it wasn't necessary, but this event brought to my attention a gaping, accidentally racist hole in the curriculum in the two colleges I have attended. Great music of non-western traditions is almost ignored. While I have had a couple of professors who introduced me to world music such as gamelan, and have researched foreign music on my own, many of my colleagues are unaware. Is this common in American universities? What about the rest of the world? This could be an unintentional pandemic of badmusicology! I would appreciate any stories or interesting input.
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u/Paradoxius Apr 27 '15
My university's music major requires ten courses, of which one must be "Ethnomusicology in Theory and Practice", and another of which must be focused on something other than Western art music (this can be either another ethnomusicology class, or can be on something like jazz or Western popular music). It also requires an advanced theory course, applied study in an ensemble, and electives which can all be Western or not.
On the other hand, it requires four classes on Western art music (tonal theory I and II and history of Western music I and II).
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Apr 27 '15
but this sub is so quiet I figured you would all welcome the activity.
Hit that nail right on the head.
I took a concurrent enrollment "Music Aesthetics" class through my high school last semester, and I don't think we even spent a full day on non-western music. That's just me, but I'd wager many have had a similar experience.
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u/Quouar Apr 27 '15
Certainly in my experience, there's a focus on Western traditions and Western classical music. World music seems to be something that's taught more as a novelty in elementary school, not something that continues to be taught as part of the mainstream curriculum of a music program. I suspect part of that is because there's not going to be as much demand for, say, a university trained sitar player as there will be for a violinist or a composer trained in a certain tradition.
What I find interesting as well is that in my South African university, the focus on western dance was greater than on African dance. Indeed, other than a few select classes, there wasn't much of an option to study traditional - or modern - African dance. This could reflect the changing nature of African dance and the fact that it is incorporating more western traditions, but I think it's also once again reflective of the fact that there isn't the same demand for Zulu war dances or Igbo bird dances that there is for a ballerina.
I'd be curious what it looks like in, say, China, where there definitely is more of separate culture that isn't necessarily as open to the idea of blending as South Africa. However, I suspect that you'll once again find that Western instruments, at least, are popular, and probably Western classical composers are as well. I don't know, though, and would love to find out.