White Supremacy in the Music School

What are we doing to fix it?

The protests against the police brutality that led to the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and growing support for the Black Lives Matter movement have further underscored the necessity for music educators to update what they are teaching. It is our responsibility as educators to have our teaching to be culturally responsible and not blindly uphold outmoded musical traditions. Generally in academic music, the widespread belief that European art music is the gold standard has rendered everything else as secondary or meaningless.

Here are a few ideas that I have about things that we as educators need to address to eliminate white supremacy from academic music:

• Teach Black music (like jazz, reggae, or hip hop) by providing a cultural context instead of or in addition to a musical analysis.

  Too often the blues has been looked down upon simple music with only three chords. Hip hop music is too often portrayed as lyrics delivered over vamps. Jazz education has become more codified but is too often presented as only the musical elements--melodies, chords, rhythm, and bebop language--without a broader cultural context. What is the meaning of the music? Where did it originate? What were the circumstances of the origin of the music?

• Black music is not an extracurricular activity

  Often, middle/high school students have jazz band outside of school hours. Some college students are only allowed to participate in jazz ensembles if they remain in good standing in their classical study. Jazz is optional for some degree programs when it could or should be written into the curriculum. Viewing jazz music as an "extracurricular" activity only serves to downgrade the importance of learning and knowing the music.

• Don’t only evaluate music technique using classical music

  Why can't educators teach musical technique with jazz repertoire, scales needed for jazz, or the performance of transcriptions? Why is an idiomatic classical sound held in a higher regard than an idiomatic jazz or commercial sound?

• Encourage students to play by ear and without sheet music

  Why is everyone tied to the page? Shouldn't there be a basic level of competency that all musicians must achieve playing by ear? Non-Western artists around the world learn music by ear so shouldn't we promote it in our teaching?

• Don’t only play music written by white or white male composers

  Are we actively seeking to present performers or composers that are not white males?

• Don’t only have students play jazz a few months a year

  Do your students only hear about jazz in the month of April during Jazz Appreciation Month? Is jazz only happening in your school or in your teaching for only a few months of the year?

• Include jazz and Black music in the History of Music course sequence

  How many high schools include Black music in their history courses? How many colleges include the History of Jazz course in a sequence that counts toward a degree program? How many universities administer doctoral comprehensive exams that include jazz?

• Teach jazz harmony in harmony courses

  Students need Harmony courses and instruction that includes blues progressions, rhythm changes, ii-V-I progressions, navigating lead sheets, altered dominant harmony, harmonic extensions, and chord voicings. This is just as important as Italian, French, and German augmented chords.

All of this change is not at the expense of Western Classical music and style. I earned my terminal degree in Classical Performance and recognize the beauty of European music. That said, why is the music of the African diaspora so often ignored or marginalized by trained and educated musicians?

I am proud to work at West Virginia University with friends and colleagues that are working together to acknowledge problems and to solve them to the best of our abilities.