Exploring Diasporic Perspectives in Music Education [1st ed.] 9783030521042, 9783030521059

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Exploring Diasporic Perspectives in Music Education

Exploring Diasporic Perspectives in Music Education

Ruth Iana Gustafson

Exploring Diasporic Perspectives in Music Education

Ruth Iana Gustafson University of Wisconsin-Madison Madison, WI, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-52104-2 ISBN 978-3-030-52105-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52105-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

To my former colleagues in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction University of Wisconsin-Madison who have made my research a rewarding adventure over the last twenty-two years: Julia Koza, Jinting Wu, Tom Popkewitz, and members of Wednesday Group from early on who encouraged looking under the hood of the rhetoric of educational policy and its dubious claims of progress. I also want to thank my husband James Paul Gustafson for his encouragement during the 2–4 years I was fitfully forming the idea of diaspora as a framework for music education.

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Contents

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Diaspora: A New Paradigm for Music Education

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The Racial Legacy of the Enlightenment: Early Vocal Instruction, Music Appreciation, and Multiculturalism

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Folk Music and Dance: Imaginary Images of Modern Nationhood

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Fictions of Origin: Music Appreciation, Multiculturalism, and World Music

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Conundrums of Latin/American Music and National Belonging

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Diaspora: A New Paradigm for Music Education

Abstract The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the concept of diaspora and how it departs from the current framework for the music education curriculum, multiculturalism. The proposed new paradigm avoids the fragmentation of music by categories of origin whether racial, ethnic, or national. The book’s fundamental breakthrough is to illuminate musical contributions submerged in history and to suggest the existence of unknown sources even beyond those that have been granted authenticity by ethnic group, space on the globe, or racial lineage. Keywords Multiculturalism · Diaspora · Race

The idea for Exploring Diasporic Perspectives in Music Education grew out of my discussions with public school music teachers, university colleagues, and graduate students in music education who are seeking a way to teach without dividing music into categories of national, racial, and ethnic belonging. With over twenty-three years teaching music at all levels of education, I have noted that multiculturalism, cultural diversity, and internationalism have failed to recognize the constant churning of the identities of performers and listeners who have become, in the words of Paul Theroux, “world class practitioners of self-sufficiency” (1997). Or, as Aiwha Ong develops this thought, many participants in a global society find ways to maintain flexible identities created in “specific power © The Author(s) 2020 R. I. Gustafson, Exploring Diasporic Perspectives in Music Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52105-9_1

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contexts” (1999: 5, 19, 68). Music also exhibits flexibility in its identity over time. Change reflects the specific power contexts in which an origin for music becomes a pragmatic way to underline national, ethnic, and racial belonging. The aim of this book is to upend fixed notions of origin and belonging. From this point of view, so-called origins become unknowns, even while they have been taken for granted as authentically belonging to a particular ethnic group, space on the globe, or racial lineage. By doing so, Exploring Diasporic Perspectives in Music Education departs from the standard multicultural guides. It avoids, as much as possible, the fragmentation of music by categories of presumed origins whether racial, ethnic, or national. The book’s fundamental breakthrough is to illuminate the global web of musical contributions submerged in history and to recognize the high dimensionality of their creation. Central to the diasporic perspective are the questions of how and why particular selections have become multicultural prototypes that purportedly represent African American, Latino, Hispanic, or European music. Throughout this book I have had to articulate the concept of diaspora in English. This language harbors a system of knowledge or a way of looking at the world through the use of racial, ethnic and national terms. These categories foster racial distinctions and hierarchies, displacing a vast lexicon of words that lead to the historic memories of conquered peoples and the diasporic travels of music. A prominent concern in this book is to reveal how a “strange game of words” created the power of distinction among bodies and music that set them along the paths we now recognize as “reality” (Rancière 2004: 3): e.g., racial, ethnic, and national trajectories. The formation of rhetoric around multiculturalism gives music education considerable, but not total power over the intermixture of flesh and culture that produces music. Music education, like its academic siblings, undergoes continual revision of theories and methods. Change occurs through research and publication, but most notably, through the classroom practices of more than 13,000 school districts in the United States. When it comes to the general music curriculum, the terms “multiculturalism,” “cultural diversity,” “internationality,” and “superdiversity” boil down to distinguishing musical types by racial, ethnic, and national/geographical “origins.” The word game and the system of knowledge it represents prove more enduring than the reforms we attempt to make.

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Today, multiculturalism, the term most commonly used in music education, dominates all levels of music teaching, including instruction and research at the post-secondary level. While multiculturalism has promised to be a theoretical framework that puts classical, folk, and popular music on an equal footing with Euro-American music, it perpetuates Western attitudes of aesthetics and historical development. For example, approaches to music teaching represented in the professional literature have, by and large, established the domain of folk music, especially of the Southern Hemisphere. This category sequesters the folk in past times and pre-modern societies. Exploring Diasporic Perspectives argues that recognition of the historical process of fabricating origins, whether racial, ethnic, regional, folkloric, or hybrids of these categories, allows consideration of the idea of unfinished identities for musical creations. One of the aims of this book is to investigate the emergence of multiculturalism in music education. This requires an analysis of the field from the early 1800s to public music instruction as it now stands. Throughout the following chapters, I argue that multiculturalism derived from the overarching social and governmental principle of the whiteness of the nation and the type of culture understood to be consistent with a civilized society. Caught up with the rhetoric of civilization, musicians and audiences engage with music as a racially inflected entity (Radano 2003). Race has been a major consideration in the design of the music curriculum from its earliest days to the present (Gustafson 2009). My experience supervising future music educators and classroom observations brought me to investigate music education’s racial foundations. By no means do I understand this foundation to be unique to our field. One of several key incidents that piqued my curiosity took place in a high school general music class. The class had viewed the movie “Showboat.” After the film, the teacher asked a sophomore student to identify an “African American” song he had heard in the performance. He picked out “Ol’ Man River.” The teacher concurred with his choice. Another student, however, raised her hand to comment, “Before the movie you [the teacher] said that the songs were written by famous composers.” “Yes,” the teacher answered, “the words and music were written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein who were white. It was sort of their view of black singing at the time.” This was as far as the class went into the fraught history of the creation of “Ol’ Man River.”

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The incident left me wondering if a different point of view with a more persistent focus on the social exchanges between so-called African American music and European music within the entertainment industry would better explain the source(s) of “Ol’ Man River.” A more complex view would consider how popular interest in minstrel performances and Negro Spirituals circulated throughout the concert and entertainment world in the first half of the twentieth century. Both genres added to the fanciful link between black music and notions of enslaved peoples’ innate spiritual loftiness. As Ronald Radano writes of black music, it is, among other things, an object with the power to mirror race relations in the United States (2003). The point is that a fuller account of sources for “Ol’ Man River” would include the common, yet imaginary, idea of slavery as an ennobling experience. It would also include the inextricable but little-known musical ties forged over centuries of African and European migrations to North America as well as the racial stereotypes generated from Broadway, concert stage, and film imported into music classrooms. Similar dynamics have compelled Latino, Spirituals, Gospel, Reggae, Mariachi, Gaucho, and European classical music to assume the mythic origin of representing nations, races, and ethnic groups in music teahing. Thus, I have allotted a large portion of this book to understanding the fabrication of music’s origins. Among the subjects covered are Sub-Saharan tribal and popular music and gypsy/flamenco entertainment in modern Spain. The process of fabricating origins has lent “authenticity” to the already-heated narratives around national, racial, and ethnic conflicts. By focusing on the historical construction of the lineages of the genres mentioned above, Exploring Diasporic Perspectives investigates how racial and national identities emerge from particular political and social conditions and not from inherited dispositions. Thus, I recognize that there is an inherent tension between a multicultural approach that assigns a kind of “ownership” to music and a diasporic perspective which complicates ties between music and particular demographic groups. In this book, I hope to answer the questions of how music education arrived at this point and how a diasporic perspective will help navigate this dilemma. The first chapters of the book establish how it came to be that music educators are inheritors of the Enlightenment of the Sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. From this point of view, whether we locate music in the West, the Global North, South, or Euro-America, music is identified as the product of human types. The Enlightenment

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spawned a comparative logic in which the rubrics of race, nation, and ethnicity were persuasive ways of understanding differences in music, knowledge, religion, and culture in general. This book urges music educators to explore diaspora as a paradigm that rejects comparative scales based on race, nation, and ethnicity on the grounds that these categories are philosophically and historically inaccurate and that they perpetuate inequality. One caveat: diaspora does not fully solve the problem. As a proposal for change it is subject to the uncertainty of the very reason it projects for the future (Popkewitz 2008: i–xv). Curriculum guides (local or national), generally products of academic music education, have bolstered notions of fixed and comparable music origins. For example, a foundational principle in college music study recommends knowledge of significant musical links between two or more pieces from distinct musical cultures to indicate competence in music appreciation and history (College Music Society 2017). Exploring Diasporic Perspectives in Music Education argues that the concept of distinct cultures overlooks the formation of music on a global scale. By asking how institutions came to see links between distinct musical cultures as a mark of competence, I hope to shed light on the global economic and political forces that made race, ethnicity, and nation a cornerstone of musical knowledge. An article from the late twentieth century on urban music education published by the Music Educators Journal typifies thinking in the early decades of multiculturalism when race and cultural background imply innate differences in taste and social context. In “Music for the Black Ghetto Child,” Bennet Reimer, noted author of music textbooks and several books on the philosophy of music education stated, “Within the general goal of making a great diversity of music available for freedom of choice, the actual music used will of necessity reflect the attitudes of the children involved. If a situation rules out anything perceived as even remotely ‘white,’ the teacher must accept that fact” (1970: 148). While Reimer and other educators espoused diversifying the music curriculum for the benefit of all children, they used a fictive collective identity, “the black ghetto child,” understood as a distinct human type. The rhetoric suggests the “ghetto” child has limited capacity to engage with and appreciate many forms of music. In later decades, educators moved away from race and environment typology by using the concept of “cultural diversity.” This phrase seems to grant equality to cultures, while it operates as a euphemism for comparison (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992: 3; Born and

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Hesmondhalgh 2000; Ndhlovu 2016). Paul Gilroy argues that “cultural diversity” represents an assortment of verbal strategies, creating imaginary terrains of white racial, linguistic, and geographic homogeneity to compare with others (1993: 3). The racial imagination in music has been fueled by colonial regulation of property and people in the Caribbean and Southern hemisphere. In Black on White: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550–1812 (1968), Winthrop Jordan describes how British rule in Jamaica and Barbados divided emigrants into several categories depending on the ratio of blacks to mulattoes and mulattoes to whites. The policy was rooted in the fear that individuals of African descent would outnumber whites, accumulate property, and encourage rebellions, already on-going, against the British. It denoted three degrees of lineal descent for whiteness, keeping many persons of color unable to vote. Mulatto children were barred from inheriting property in order to economically perpetuate racial distinctions (1968: 176–177). The rhetoric of distinct racial lineages constructed an aesthetic hierarchy for music as well. Labeled, for example, black or white, foreign or native, music’s origins depended upon the identity of composers, audiences, and performers. While the terms that differentiate music have broadened over the centuries to fit a spectrum of biological claims and political purposes, the persistence of singular categories continues to register the imprint of a colonial system of valuation in music education and scholarship. An awareness of this process in music history has only recently become a topic of interest. In his essay, “The Remembrance of Things Past: Music, Race and the End of History in Modern Europe,” Philip Bohlman argues that music can be put to the task of reclaiming, imagining, or erasing the history of inhabitants who once lived in a specific place by mapping certain types folk music onto fraught geographical areas. Bohlman’s illustrations are numerous and disturbing. For example, an early nineteenth century volume of Silesian folksongs, consisting solely of German language examples, omits the music of Jews and Poles who inhabited the Silesian border of Prussia for centuries. While ethnomusicologists categorized this long-contested territory as German by producing detailed maps of places where German language songs were sung, their method failed to recognize the music of different ethnic groups within that region (2000: 652). The Silesian example demonstrates the erasure of memory and the replacement of the past that was

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part of an urgent nationalist agenda in Germany. Other monolithic narratives such as Alan Lomax’s 1968 study of the global distribution of a European genre of song rest on missionary and colonial accounts, minus a record of other forms of music that were sung, heard, and played (Bohlman 2000: 659). In Exploring Diasporic Perspectives, attention is drawn to the social production of racial categories such as those put forward in colonial Jamaica and Euro-American ethnomusicology. Discussions of race and music included the idea that sounds can be identified as black or white. National Public Radio, for example, has recently provided an example of musical influence with the intention of combatting a picture of homogeneous whiteness in the rock and roll history. In this radio essay, “Reconsidering the King: Elvis in America,” Elvis Presley’s familiarity with black church singing songs served as an “influence” over his originality and style (National Public Radio 2018). But intention to combat racism does not change the picture of homogeneous whiteness produced in the radio story over all. Notions of style, influence, and even hybridism, create a situation in which the music identified with whiteness absorbs “minority” idioms without changing its essential, in this case, “white” standing (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000).1 Moreover, the use of stylistic traits to identify the influence of black music sidesteps the historical permeability of geographic sites where blacks and whites performed together in the South and North for centuries previous to Presley’s recordings.2 Influence and hybridism also overlook the continual transformation occurring on the Internet through which musical identities outpace our stories of time-limited cultural encounters and notions of influence (Kapchan and Strong 1999). Moreover, borrowing some of the conceptual language from Ronald Radano’s research on efforts to trace the origins of black

1 Also see discussion of this process with regard to Japanese national rhetoric in Koichi Iwabuchi, Re-entering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2 See Martin J. Powers, “Art and History: Exploring the Counterchange Condition.”

Art Bulletin September 77, 3, 382–388, 1995 for a discussion of the relation between the ethnocentrism of Western art criticism and the web of ethnic/racial innuendo in its hierarchical rhetoric. Also see Ronald Radano’s Lying Up a Nation (2003) and Kathleen M. Gough’s Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic. New York: Routledge, 2014.

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music, racial categories, as used in the radio essay on Presley, bring instability on board as we consider how they emerged from the troubled formation of racial ideologies in the United States (2003: 52). Attempts to encompass intercultural contact when it comes to narratives like the one above about Elvis, have given rise to the use of “superdiversity.” This term enlarges the meaning of the multicultural model of world cultures but fails to account for the more common rubrics we use to represent music. In any case, culture, race, or nation, treated as “superdiverse” groupings are only an approximate grasp of complex situations filtered through global imaginaries (Erlmann 1999; Cuche 2001). Diversity terminologies appear to portray an essence of ethnic and racial identities without investigating how a cosmopolitan, enlightened viewpoint has created the list of diverse identities and how diversity re-inscribes homogeneity (Popkewitz 2008: 137).3 A diasporic perspective points out specific events in the historical production of notions of racial, ethnic and geographical origin, focusing on the complexity of the musical interactions that have historically occurred within and between different groups, individuals, dispersed across the world. Nonetheless, notions of race and territory are powerful dynamics when it comes to protesting discriminatory practices of dividing political, economic, and social resources. Racism is an important factor in the delivery of social justice (Gilroy 1993; Radano 2003). As a conceptual framework for this book, diaspora also constructs and negotiates new identities. It is therefore necessary to acknowledge diaspora’s derivation from a cosmopolitan faith in emancipatory reform (Popkewitz 2008: xiv). As such, this book invites thinking about the history of paradigms, including a diasporic perspective, that produce new ways to differentiate identities, dividing music into the reasonable and unreasonable objects of study. Diaspora envisions no final emancipation, but it serves here as a critique of notions of progress enfolded in multiculturalism and a warning. This book avoids proposing methods for music teaching that are more “authentic” than multicultural approaches. Rather, it asks readers to consider the unknowns of origin: how the music in our classrooms comes to us in its present form and why it carries a singular (in most cases) label of origin. This is not a master plan for teaching, but it does suggest 3 As Michel Foucault has famously written in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, histories of the present reveal how we have come to use technologies of power over the body and soul to distinguish one person or thing from another (30–31).

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that closer ties between recent music scholarship, studies of the history of the present, and music education should be forged in pre-service teacher programs. There is an abundance of scholarship that remains outside of the instruction for future teachers that could make a difference in discussions of music as an art formed by historical interchange rather than by racial/national/ethnic genius or its opposite, lack of knowledge. Diasporic perspectives cannot avoid references to singular ethnic, national, and racial terms as they are built into the system of knowledge evolved in the West. We may, however, use that same system to complicate singular categories. Take, for example, discussions about the early history of what is now termed Irish music. There is much evidence that the ancient tribes of Vikings, Celts, and Normans shared family life and raised offspring together (O’Corrain 1972; Downham 2014: 1–21). What is known as “Celtic” music today is a transethnic and trans-territorial conglomerate of music, language, and instruments. While Celtic myths and music enforce the narrative of a bygone Celtic unity stretching from the British Isles to France and Spain, what travels as authentically Celtic in different geographic locations underwrites its circulation as “world music” in Celtic in festivals and small local gatherings (Bohlman 2002: 78–81). The politics of religion is also important to the classification of music. Central Europeans migrated to England before the formation of the nations of France, the Netherlands, and Germany. New arrivals encompassed different religions, several languages, and musical practices. The refugee French/Huguenot and Belgian/Dutch Reformed churches, for example, established themselves in England, Ireland, South Africa, and America during the violent upheavals following the Reformation and the genocide of Protestants led by Louis XIV. In spite of these catastrophes, the number of non-conformist church or “stranger church” records show that Huguenots and other non-Anglican Protestants settled in parts of Anglican and Protestant Europe by the middle of the 1500s (Collinson 2002: 60).4 There are accounts of the Huguenots bringing hymnody and 4 The diaspora of non-conformist church produced two notable effects on the religious life of settled peoples. One was the internalization and privatization of beliefs promoting assimilation. The other was the gradual acceptance of minority church doctrines by Anglicans and Lutheran Protestants in the face of Catholic dominance in places such as Ireland. At the same time, the diaspora of Jews and the Protestant or “stranger churches” from the continent to Britain show how past emigrations of strangers were normalized at different rates and by different degrees. Both examples point to transformations

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psalms with their expeditions of 1564 to indigenous people in what are now the states of South Carolina and Florida (Williams 1954). R. Anderson Sutton, a scholar of Indonesian music, poses the question, “Isn’t all music hybrid?” (2010: 180). This query expands the meaning of hybrid to include music flowing in different directions between Ancient Persia, Turkey, and territories of what are presently Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India (Bohlman 2013: 3). Connections among musical lineages with no single point of origin included the ancestors of Western systems of modal scales and the foundation of the science of music attributed to Pythagoras in 600-500 BCE (Wade 2013: 130). While Western music histories hold closely to Greek origins, centuries of migrations flowing to Europe from the Middle East and the Global South of Indonesia, and Africa largely evaporated. Since the 1600s, the presence of colonialized people in Europe has been pushed aside in efforts to form a cultural image of the English, Dutch, or French as homogenously white (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1992: 20; Gilroy 1993: 2–4, 5). According to DNA researchers at European archaeological sites, national and racial paradigms are built on faulty understanding of neolithic migrations. Europeans, for example, are part Russian, part African, and part Middle Eastern as those regions are known today (Ogliore 2019). Preoccupations with whiteness have led to underestimating the action of human agency between borders where nationality, race, and ethnicity necessitate changeable identities and variable national documentation (Ong 1999). So too, notions of race become less stable when feelings and mutual sympathy override concern for homogeneous whiteness (Stoler 2009: 64–67). Multiculturalism discounts sympathetic feeling in its assumptions of racial, geographic, and ethnic origins. Admissions requirements to post-secondary study of music reflect a fixed hierarchy of values. Having demonstrable skill in jazz, rock, gospel musical theatre, pop, or folk music does not count for admission to study voice in most music departments. The applicant must be versed in the bel canto traditions of Western High Art (Koza 2009: 87). A diasporic paradigm for music education would include the traditions of both the Global South and North in order to offset the privileging of Western musical skills and

of religious practices and identities driven by diaspora or the movement of music and peoples.

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colonial attitudes toward race.5 But the concern of this book is not to enlarge the tent of music study. Rather, it is to shift away from thinking about racial, national, and ethnic musical types. Diaspora encounters difficulties of its own. It necessitates a lack of certainty about time, authorship, and place, serious challenges to the institutional logic of music education. Lack of an ordered framework brings up the question of how to characterize music, listeners, and musicians who were points of contact for past and present music making. Setting diaspora and multiculturalism apart lies in the recognition of two different historical attitudes: one in which race, ethnicity, and nation are eternal facts and one in which these categories emerge from recent political, social, and economic conditions. In Gareth Williams’ account of a series of puzzling Andean ritual murders, the events acquire meaning when seen in the light of the long history of colonial policies of racism and economic exploitation resulting in famine and death for mountain peoples. Revenge killing was a means of keeping the memory of historical traumas alive while evading blame by local authorities (2001: 269, 279). Thinking analogously to Williams’ understanding of Andean history, my point is that music performances have undergone suppression and erasure that conventional narratives paper over in the construction of origins. The link between Andean and music history is that or suppressed forgotten events open up new worlds of meaning. The aim of multiculturalism in music educations is to revive interest in the musical genres and styles of minorities and immigrants. With the intent of equalizing cultures, its highest purpose is to include minority students in public school music programs (Lornell and Rasmussen 2016). But in most school districts, this approach has largely missed the mark of broadening the participation of diverse student groups in music programs (Gustafson 2009). Multiculturalism, as I will argue in this book, unconsciously maintains a standard of mainstream American culture against which other cultures are measured. However, insofar as multiculturalism appears to strive for classroom diversity, proposing a diasporic paradigm as this book does, raises questions of how to weigh claims of racial and ethnic authenticity in musical creation against a diasporic perspective that

5 Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving Toward Africa, call for an integration of cultures to exit the essentialist claims of multiculturalism.

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appears to renounce singular categories of ownership and origin. Moreover, diaspora runs the danger of lapsing into postures characteristic of post-modern critiques of identity as merely discursive or textual (Gilroy 1993: 75–77). While not a complete solution to this dilemma—one arising at every consideration of racial/ethnic/national claims of ownership, essential origin, and authenticity in music—the perspective offered here focuses on the impact of social forces that go into the making of, for example, the category of African American music. As Radano argues, racialism plays a generative role in discussions of black music, having attained its importance in an interracial atmosphere that supports regimens of essential musical differences among races (2003: 42, 52). In the present book, I also attempt to avoid essentialisms without denying race as a factor in music via its importance as a marker for social identity. Where race seems a fiction when it comes to music, it derives from racial ideology, requiring, as Radano writes, the use of interpretive strategies to trace the development of its power (52). From a diasporic perspective, the musical practices of performers and audiences rely on transnational economic, and cultural experiences rather than on fixed entities such as race or ethnicity (Bonilla-Silva 2003; Brah 2010; Ndhlovu 2016; Radano 2003: 39). Music in diaspora captures the complexity of musical exchanges and the dominance of Global North technologies occurring between and among populations (Roberts 1999: 26–27). While including the contributions of historically marginalized minority groups, diaspora offers a sturdier analysis of music to include the economic, political, and transnational dynamics that have exported its treatment of the Global North to the Global South. Raewyn Connell, writing of culture in general, sums up this unequal situation by recognizing that Global South societies produce as much intellectual theory as the North, but the work to connect different bodies of thought has just begun (2007: xii). Among several examples of scholarship attempting to trace North/South dynamics in Latin American musical practices, a study of Texas-Mexican (Tejano) music shows Euro-American aesthetics have shaped the larger category of Mexican music’s divergent content and tastes (Sheehy 1979: 139). For prosperous Tejanos it was possible to acquire the Global North valuation of bel canto voice training and also feasible to assemble orchestral groups for wedding entertainment and other celebratory events. So-called folk music of the working class was represented by more homespun vocals and smaller ensembles, often with an accordion. The latter came about through contact with German

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immigrants in the northern Mexico region. When recordings became available in the first half of the twentieth century, musical consumption followed a similar pattern. For celebrations, whether urban or rural, the working class preferred country style while wealthier families preferred the bel canto singing style and “orquesta” accompaniment (Peña 1985: 42–43). Considering the interpenetration of European and Latin practices, some have navigated this question through the notion of “influences,” suggesting there is an essence of Mexicanness underpinning Tejano music. Yet, over the more than two-hundred-year-old genre of band music associated with Mexico, the diasporas that brought European practices to the region nurtured countless musical variants, neither essentially European nor Mexican. Nevertheless, the politics of singular identities implied in multicultural categories result in what Paul Gilroy terms “crypto nationalism” (Gilroy 1993: 4). A diasporic framework engages with the fractal nature of culture transcending borders and oceans as the construction of the nation was a historically late and unstable concept (Turino 2003). Exploring Diasporic Perspectives in Music Education includes different vignettes from public school music classrooms where students and teachers have made distinctions about the racial, ethnic, and national “culture” of what they hear, play, or sing. I use these events as opportunities to discuss forgotten histories underlying such labels. Borrowing the phrase “deposits without inventory” from the social theorist Antonio Gramsci (1971), music in diaspora points toward an inventory of historical vestiges that destabilize our sense that these categories are adequate descriptors of music per se. I address this book to practicing teachers and scholars in the field of music education. This includes elementary and secondary school music teachers, some of whom are pursuing graduate degrees in university departments of music education around the world. Offering a transformational rather than static view of music, the book responds to teachers seeking an approach less burdened by Euro centric assumptions of racial, ethnic, and national origins. To this end, I envision the book as a resource for delving into the complexity of musical heritage in which teachers and their students are active participants. I would also include as potential readers those music educators and others seeking a career in postsecondary academic institutions. The diasporic perspective is absent from discussions in journals of music education on the philosophy and history of the field, pedagogical methods, research agendas, and approaches to teacher training. Yet, diaspora is not a new hypothesis in the academic

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world. As many anthropologists and music historians argue, theories of aesthetic production typically overlook the power that Eurocentric analysis has wielded in the construction of national, racial, and ethnically inflected impressions of music and its “origins.” Music educators have as so far neglected to use the concept of diaspora as a way to diminish Eurocentric approaches to music. even while several nationally recognized music education reform movements have authorized guidelines for the inclusion of non-Western compositions in general music classes. As the decades passed, multiple editions of guides to teaching demographically diverse classrooms have appeared from the 1980s to the present. Notable as multicultural methods and/or philosophical points of view on teaching are those by Patricia Shehan Campbell and William M. Anderson Multicultural Perspectives in Music Education (1986, 1996, 2010), Carlos R. Abril and Brent M. Gault’s Teaching General Music: Approaches, Issues, and Viewpoints (2016), Culturally Responsive Teaching in Music Education by Vicki R. Lind and Constance McKoy (2016), as well as Music, Education, and Multiculturalism by Terese M. Volk (1998). It should be noted that the above texts approach diversity through the lenses of race, ethnicity, and other facets of human societies. More recently, writing on music education has taken a different direction. Some music educators diverge significantly from conventional principles and protocols in post-secondary institutions of music education while some challenge the values and premises embodied in classroom pedagogy for younger students. Those perspectives appear in several chapters in Music Education for Changing Times, edited by Thomas Regelski and J. Terry Gates (2009), and Randall Allsup’s Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education (2016). Exploring Diasporic Perspectives in Music Education may inform readers outside of music who have felt that scholarship on the politics of music is unrelated to their interests. This set of readers includes those working in, for example, linguistics, sociology, political science, and education. For the most part, these disciplines have had little opportunity to understand how we teach music in the United States and how it is related to the formation of racial and national ideologies. Thus, music teaching offers an empirical ground on which to examine the failure of terms such as “multiculturalism” and “cultural diversity” to deliver equitable standing to marginalized cultures. Writing on the politics of music has played a large role in Exploring Diasporic Perspectives in Music Education, specifically the literature on

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critical approaches to cultural identity. Chief among the resources I wish to acknowledge are, The Politics of Belonging by Nira Yuval-Davis (2011), Hybridity and Its Discontents Politics, Science and Culture, edited by Avtar Brah and Annie Coombes (2000), Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality by Aiwha Ong (1999), Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform: Science, Education, and Making Society by Making the Child by Thomas Popkewitz (2008). Critical to my development of a diasporic framework for musical works are Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Conscious ness (1993), The Cambridge History of World Music, edited by Philip Bohlman (2013), Music and the Racial Imagination by Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman (2000) and Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music by Ronald Radano (2003). Finally, it is time to turn to the structure and the order of my argument. Chapter Two, “The Racial Legacy of the Enlightenment Taken up in Early Vocal Instruction, Music Appreciation, and Multiculturalism” takes a critical look into the effects of the Euro-American Enlightenment on music education in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It describes how civic anxieties concerning Irish Immigration, black freemen and escaped slaves became a central issue in establishing music instruction in the public schools of Boston in the early nineteenth century. Chapter Three “Folk Music and Dance: Imaginary Images of Modern Nationhood” argues that the ethnic, racial, and national identity of folk music in multicultural approaches to music teaching have lagged behind recent writing on marginalized cultural identities. It discusses the invention of Volkslied and its use in promoting notions of inherent national qualities in music. Chapter Four “Fictions of Origin: Music Appreciation, Multiculturalism, and World Music” describes the major shifts in approaches to the music curriculum from 1900 through the early decades of the twenty-first century sequentially known as Music Appreciation, Multiculturalism, and World Music. It focuses most closely on how the recording industry and music appreciation guides for teachers in the early and middle twentieth century developed a nationwide repertoire divided by categories of race, nationality, and ethnic group often linked to genres such as Spirituals and Minstrel songs. Chapter Five “Conundrums of Latin/American Music and National Belonging” discusses the advantage of a diasporic paradigm for Latin American and African American music in music education programs. It discusses surveys of the folk music of particular Caribbean countries, focusing closely on the rhetoric of ethnic belonging in efforts to include demographic groups that have high

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attrition rates in music programs. A brief summary of the major points in Exploring Diasporic Perspectives in Music Education pulls together the findings of previous chapters. It argues that there is a greater possibility of creating mutual sympathies for music when music is heard as a display of creation from both known and unknown human individuals and communities.

References Abril, Carlos R. and Brent M. Gault. Teaching General Music: Approaches, Issues, and Viewpoints. Oxford Scholarship Online, 2016. https://www.oxfordsch olarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199328093.001.0001/acprof9780199328093. Web. 2 December 2019. Allsup, Randall. Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. Print. Anderson, William M. and Patricia S. Campbell. 2010. Multicultural Perspectives in Music Education. Vol. 1. Third Edition. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Print. Anthias, Floya and Nira Yuval-Davis. “The Concept of Race.” In Racialized Boundaries: Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-Racist Struggle, edited by Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Print. Bohlman, Philip. “The Remembrance of Things Past: Music, Race, and the End of History in Modern Europe.” In Music and the Racial Imagination, edited by Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman, 644–676. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Print. ———. World Music: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print. ———. “Introduction: World Music’s Histories.” In The Cambridge History of World Music, edited by Philip V. Bohlman, 1–20. Cambridge UK, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Print. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism Without Racists: Color Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racism in the United States. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. Print. Born, Georgina and David Hesmondhalgh. Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Print. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities. London: Routledge, 2010. Print.

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Brah, Avtar and Anne Coombes. “Introduction: The Conundrum of ‘Mixing.’” In Hybridity and Its Discontents: Politics, Science and Culture, edited by Avtar Brah and Annie Coombes, 1–16. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print. College Music Society. https://www.music.org/index.php?option=com_eventb ooking&view=event&id=89&Itemid=330. Web. 3 December 2017. Collinson, Patrick. The Sixteenth Century. Series: Oxford History of the British Isles. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print. Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff. Theory form the South: Or, How EuroAmerica Is Evolving toward Africa. New York: Paradigm, 2012. Print. Connell, Raewyn. Southern Theory. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007. Print. Cuche, Denys. La Notion de Culture dans Les Sciences Sociales. Éditions Les Découvertes, 2001. Print. Downham, Clare. Celtic-Norse Relationships in the Irish Sea in the Middle Ages 800–1200, edited by Jon Vidar Sigurdsson and Timothy Bolton, 1–21. Boston: Brill Press, 2014. Print. Erlmann, Veit. Music, Modernity and Global Imagination: South Africa and the West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. Print. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Print. Gough, Kathleen M. Kinship and Performance in the Black and Green Atlantic: Haptic Allegories. New York: Routledge, 2018. Print. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York: International Publishers, 1971. Print. Gustafson, Ruth I. Race and Curriculum. Music in Childhood Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. Jordan, Winthrop. Black on White: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550– 1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968. Print. Kapchan, Deborah A. and Pauline Turner Strong. “Theorizing the Hybrid.” Journal of American Folklore. Summer 99, 112, 445, 239–253, 1999. Print. Koza, Julia E. “Listening to Whiteness: Hearing Racial Politics in Undergraduate School Music.” In Music Education for Changing Times, edited by Thomas Regelski and J. Terry Gates, 85–95. Springer: Dordrecht and Heidelberg, 2009. Print. Lind, Vicki R. and Constance McCoy. Culturally Responsive Teaching in Music. New York: Routledge, 2016. Print. Lornell, Kip and Anne Rasmussen. “Introduction.” In The Music of Multicultural America: Performance, Identity, and Community in the United States, edited by Kip Lornell and Anne Rasmussen, 3–132. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2016. Print.

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National Public Radio. “Reconsidering the King: Elvis in America.” https:// knpr.org/npr/2018-04/reconsidering-king-elvis-america, 2018. Web. 10 December 2018. Ndhlovu, Finex. “A Decolonial Critique of Diaspora Identity Theories and the Notion of Superdiversity.” Diaspora Studies. 8, 1, 28–40, 2016. Print. O’Corrain, Donnchadh. Ireland Before the Normans. Series: Gill History of Ireland, Vol. 2. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1972. Print. Ogliore, Talia. Tunedin.com. https://source.wustl.edu/2019/09/ancient-dnastudy-tracks-formation-of-populations-across-central-asia/2020/. Web. 15 January 2020. Ong, Aiwha. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999. Print. Peña, Manuel. The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working-Class Music. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985. Print. Popkewitz, Thomas S. Cosmopolitanism and the Age of School Reform: Science, Education, and Making Society by Making the Child. New York and London: Routledge, 2008. Print. Powers, Martin J. “Art and History: Exploring the Counterchange Condition.” Art Bulletin. September 77, 3, 382–388, 1995. Print. Radano, Ronald. Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music. University of Chicago Press, 2003. Rancière, Jacques. The Flesh of Words: The Politics of Writing, translated by Charlotte Mandell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Print. Radano, Ronald and Philip Bohlman. “Introduction.” In Music and the Racial Imagination, edited by Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman, 1–53. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Print. Regelski, Thomas and J. Terry Gates. “Grounding Music Education in Changing Times.” In Music Education for Changing Times, edited by Thomas Regelski and J. Terry Gates, xix–xxx. Dordrecht and Heidelberg: Springer, 2009. Print. Reimer, Bennett. “General Music for the Black Ghetto.” https://doi.org/10. 2307/3392700, January, 1970. Web. 4 October 2018. Roberts, John Storm. The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Print. Sheehy, Daniel E. The “Son Jarocho”: The History, Style, and Repertory of a Changing Mexican Musical Tradition. Phd Diss. University of California Los Angeles, 1979. Print. Stoler, Ann L. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Print. Sutton, R. Anderson. “Gamelan Encounters with Western Music in Indonesia: Hybridity/Hybridism.” Journal of Popular Music Studies. 22, 2, 180–197, 2010. Print.

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Theroux, Paul. 1997. “Memories That Drive Hong Kong.” https://archive.nyt imes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/06/18/specials/theroux-honged. html. Web. 22 November 2017. Turino, Thomas. “Nationalism and Latin American Music: Selected Case Studies and Theoretical Considerations.” Latin American Music Review. 24, 2, 169– 209, 2003. Print. Volk, Teresa. Music, Education, and Multiculturalism: Foundations and Principles. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print. Wade, Bonnie C. “Indian Music History in the Context of Global Encounters.” In The Cambridge History of World Music, edited by Philip V. Bohlman, 125–154. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Print. Williams, Gareth. “Death in the Andes: Ungovernability and the Birth of Tragedy in Peru.” In The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, edited by Ileana Rodriguez, 260–287. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. Print. Williams, George W. “Charleston Church Music 1562–1833.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 7, 1, 35–40, 1954. Print. Yuval-Davis, Nira. The Politics of Belonging. London: Sage, 2011. Print.

CHAPTER 2

The Racial Legacy of the Enlightenment: Early Vocal Instruction, Music Appreciation, and Multiculturalism

Abstract This chapter examines the roots of multiculturalism in music education through a discussion of Enlightenment philosophy, anthropology, and ethnography. The discussion weaves two centuries of music education history together to demonstrate the persistence of eighteenthcentury notions of race, ethnicity, and nationality in music education. Enlightenment thinking in music education generated a manifold of musical works and teaching methods while creating images of the United States as homogeneously white. Keywords Enlightenment · Human types · Bare life

This chapter takes a critical look into the effects of the Euro-American Enlightenment on music education in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its main purpose is to examine the roots of multiculturalism in music education and through this uprooting to redirect the present theoretical orientation of the field to a diasporic outlook. While I begin with a description of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the discussion weaves two centuries of music education history together to demonstrate the persistence of eighteenth century notions of race, ethnicity, and nationality in music education. These categories, I argue,

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not only generated musical knowledge and teaching methods, but helped to create images of US citizenry as homogeneously white. Enlightenment through education had become a leading philosophical point of view in the eighteenth century. Prominent intellectuals such as John Locke, Johann Pestalozzi, and Jean Jacques Rousseau proposed new methods of teaching. They adopted mechanistic views of the world, diminishing the role of churches and God as the purposeful Creator of the Universe. Scientific knowledge and empirical proof set the standard for truth. Mankind could be educated to reason because it was a universal endowment. Ironically, these views developed alongside the expansion of colonial powers with their ambition to establish economic and political domination of continents whose people were considered primitive or lacking in reason. The chapter explores the relationship between music education and the exclusion of inferior others from the circle of modern, worthy citizenship. This is the shadow side of the Enlightenment and the central insight in this chapter: namely, that music education relied on the contrast between those endowed with worthiness and those reduced to bare life. At its inception in the early nineteenth century, school music’s paradoxical task was to inspire children to fulfill their civic obligations through singing while contemplating the unworthiness and danger of non-white populations. This paradox, present in generations of curriculum reforms through nearly two centuries, has left music education with the burden of excluding much of the music, loved, played, studied, and listened to by students today. Enlightenment views set music education on a path of splitting music into worthy and unworthy categories corresponding to human types. As I will describe, there is a long history of hearing music as the product of racial groups, but for music education as a professional field the systemization of racialism in school music began with the intersection of enlightened pedagogy and civic anxiety. At the end of the eighteenth century when new philosophies of education began to appear, educators in Switzerland and Germany introduced new methods for teaching. A noted relic of this era is Pestalozzi’s “object lessons,” an approach, it was argued, that would bridge the divide between social classes by developing the capacity for reason among the common people. In music education in the United States in the 1830s and 1840s, object lessons placed emphasis on the child’s innate capacity to grasp the principles of rhythm and melody through singing, leaving the teaching of abstract symbols such as notation for later stages of childhood.

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An important part of the construction of the universal ability of the child was his/her aptitude for self-discipline. This attribute, called into action by diverse methods, would insure the triumph of reason over will. Character could be judged according to how the individual balanced feeling and reason. But it was now also possible to quantify and to read social differences by measuring the skull (a practice called phrenology) and observing the listener’s responses to music (Broman 1987; Gould 1981; Gustafson 2009: 81). Mind and soul, once hidden from view, could reveal moral intent through skull shape, often linked to race and ethnicity. Even while the concept of universal ability stood in contradiction to phrenology and the identification of human types through physical features, music education followed so-called sciences of character/intelligence diagnosis heedless of the limitations of methods and hypotheses used to produce comparative racial data on skull shape and size (Gould 1981: 114–128). The comparison of human types has a long history. Giorgio Agamben traces the tendency to divide human beings into worthy versus unworthy types from the era of the Roman Empire to the twentieth-century genocides during WWII. Judgments of worthiness have left a legacy of practices in which ranking some as fully human and others as bare life is the prerogative of the State, commonly enacted by civil and military authorities under states of emergency (1995, 2005). How is music education linked to ancient and Enlightenment projects that distinguish bare life from full life? Starting from its founding in Boston, as this chapter argues, the music curriculum of the 1840s won approval from the School Committee by drawing distinctions chiefly between worthy, white citizens, and lesser beings such as Irish immigrants and former black slaves. It did so through tacit compliance with conventional views in an era when contagious diseases, such as tuberculosis and cholera, were thought to be caused by contact with inferior human types. A sense of alarm tantamount to a civic emergency set a “mechanics of power” into action within the public school system. The term “mechanics of power,” refers to the steady growth of institutional demands operating on all bodies within the state and colonial territories (Foucault 1984: 182–183, 187). It is a power that sets expectations for the conduct of meritorious individuals, persuading them to comply with societal norms willingly without the use of physical force. Brute force exists, but compliance with the soft power of persuasive rhetoric leads more efficiently to the acceptance of a state of emergency and, commonly, to the exclusion of those who carry the marks of bare life by virtue of race and other “creaturely” characteristics

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(Santner 2006: xviii). Examining how the mechanics of power operated on music teaching in pre-Civil War is a case in point. Boston had become a gathering place for the migration of blacks fleeing slavery and the Irish poor seeking refuge from the economic and social deprivations suffered under British rule in Ireland. Both blacks and Irish were seen as in need of interventions from civil authorities that would address the danger they purportedly posed to the health and wellbeing of society. Music instruction, civic leaders claimed, would create order in a city threatened by others. The soft power of music would focus attention on the creation of tranquility and domestic harmony in the environment, images of how the worthy citizen, understood as white and Protestant, should strive to maintain. A typical song of this type served as a model for the cultivation of reason and self- discipline, hallmarks of a superior civilization: Then I will never beat my dog Nor ever give him pain, But good and kind I’ll be to him and He’ll love me again. (Fitz 1819)

“Then I will never beat my dog” illustrates but one facet of the soft power operating through music instruction. Singing songs about monitoring one’s every day conduct was a rite of passage for the future citizen, obliging him/her to reject force and to exercise reason. Incorporating songs like the above, the founding of public vocal instruction in Boston in the early 1800s marks an official starting point for the power that ethnic and racial differences maintain in the multicultural curriculum of the 1900s and beyond. But it is important to recognize that public music teaching has deeper roots in the comparative scales of civilizations permeating Enlightenment thinking in the modern age. The Protestant singing schools in New England of the1700s, for example, were important models of music for the public schools in its early decades. They were also the source of music taught in the loosely organized system of New England common schools. Likewise, European children’s songs were transcribed to fit the civic ideals of the new Republic. These sources of classroom singing were different than the music heard at the loading docks of New England manned by former slaves who had bought their freedom or fled slavery and indentured

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laborers arriving from Europe. In politics and in society at large there was much apprehension about the abolition of slavery creating mass immigration of blacks to the city. In his famous analysis of democracy in early nineteenth-century America, Alexis de Toqueville wrote, “The prejudice of race appears to be stronger in the states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists …” (de Toqueville as quoted in Litwack 1961: 65). But among the statements of the civic leadership favoring music education, no direct mention is made of racial prejudice with regard to blacks or Irish Catholics. They were a form of bare life for whom reason was not universal. In effect, they were excluded from consideration as bona fide citizens. The fledgling years of music instruction expose the perpetual political agenda of distinguishing persons of merit from those of low value. In the twentieth century, classical music was intended as a palliative measure to contain the perception of European cultural decline. Encompassing a broad swath of industrial and rural America, social anxieties prompted the dissemination of Music Appreciation. It aimed to transform the proclivities of urban youth and adults of all backgrounds who tuned into ragtime and jazz by record player and radio. While there were and are constant variations in music teaching within school districts and across the country, music education’s overall aim remains closely tied to the governance of the public at large. The recommendations of national curriculum conferences conformed to earlier patterns of distinguishing worthy music from degraded types of entertainment. Teaching guides, whether local, national, or state authorized reflect a mechanics of power at the heart of public music instruction. Standard narratives on the history of early music education keep the subject of school music at a great distance from the wrenching controversies about personhood and the civic fabrication of worthiness as whiteness. This is relevant to music education in the present era in which race and ethnicity form a state of emergency to separate undocumented immigrants, non-white minorities and asylum seekers as alien, another term for bare life. At inception, music chosen for the schools conflated whiteness with worthiness. Broadly speaking, early singing instruction was to strengthen the child’s moral nature and capacity for reason through music. Testifying on behalf of public vocal instruction in the Massachusetts public schools, Horace Mann, Secretary of Education for that state in the 1840s, commented in his Report to the Boston School Committee:

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If the subject of school-books is important, the subject of song-books can hardly be less so … they will constitute a part of [children’s] moral nature … regard and sympathy for domestic animals; consideration and benevolence towards every sentient thing. (1844: 159)

Mann’s address to the School Committee became an important element of the mechanics of power that music would wield in municipal centers across the country. Early vocal music instruction in public schools emerged from the authority of Boston’s civic leaders to organize thought and action around rhetoric evoking a state of emergency in New England. Although not overtly declared, this sense of “emergency” concerned Irish immigrants who were seen as other than white and former slaves who migrated to Boston, a city known for its abolitionist sentiment. The common understanding and legal status of blacks and immigrants was that they were “foreign,” outside of racial notions of full citizenship (Lloyd 2009: 4; Parker 2001). The principle definitions of citizenship in the United States in the early decades of the 1800s left their impression on the music curriculum in important ways. It made distinctions between those with bona fide citizenship and others: those who had come via slave ship, Native Americans whose material existence was quashed, or those who came to the United States from places other than England. The authority to govern these populations reflected the “enlightened” points of view on education and health among American elites who made the journey to observe the Prussian public schools. They observed several public schools in Prussia which had set precedents for considering public education as vital to the modern state. Wilhelm von Humboldt was closely identified with the public educational institutions that would broaden the quest for inner enlightenment among the common people of Germany. Such was Humboldt’s reputation among American educationists that his writings formed the dispositions of the genteel music societies in Boston and other cities. The message of cultural refinement and sensitivity, although considerably modified to suit an American egalitarian outlook, was transformed to serve American schooling along with an admiration of German culture in general and, especially, German music. Bostonians, such as Horace Mann and Lowell Mason, championed the moral principles of an enlightened society. Ironically, the underlying message of their writing was the fear that people different from themselves in race, nationality, or social class

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bred instability and rampant disease. White supremacy lay just beneath the surface. Civic leaders carried messages of how singing would defend a vulnerable white population amid a continuing state of emergency created by immigrants from abroad and blacks (Gustafson 2009). At its inception, vocal music instruction joined the familiar style of Protestant hymn books to the secular, non-religious system of reason gaining traction among public school advocates. In his Manual of the Boston Academy of Music published in 1836, Lowell Mason, writes that his method makes it possible for all to learn to sing. In his view, the governance of the voice depended on enlisting the child’s “natural” inclination to recognize the beautiful and to encourage turning the mind to this task. Not all possessed the same natural inclination or mind. Reason set the citizen apart him from the slave, the indentured servant, and those whose religious or political outlook was grounded in revivalist or autocratic convictions (Wood 1992). Adam Smith’s writing armed cosmopolitan elites with a set of social and economic theories that sketched mutual obligations portraying individuals as motivated by self-interest, but also as sympathetic to others. Mere self-interest would be constrained by the serious consideration of others’ opinions (1776). This dual image, splitting personhood into inner conscience and outer performance, mirrored the soul/body dichotomy. An interest in aesthetic pursuits to cultivate the soul—literature and music especially, where the arts were not solely for pleasure—but for the general good. Reflecting these values, public music instruction would produce the self-governing, modern citizen. The old social order was no longer relevant as the meritorious individual was became a figure who planned for a future that would be increasingly urban and divided along racial, political, and religious lines as each group jostled for power and influence. Singing instruction would harmonize social dissonance, at least in the minds of Boston’s civic leaders. However, the increasing strength of the abolitionist movement, the chafing of the Southern states under the legal jurisdiction of the Northern states, and the increase of immigration formed an atmosphere in which the tension between contending groups at all levels of society lent a sense of urgency to public music education as a stabilizing force throughout this period. Important. Early nineteenth-century legal theory judged the worthy citizen on the basis of ownership of property. As a criterion for citizenship, however, property ownership excluded the majority of the population. Reasons for

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the limitations were to avoid, ostensibly, corrupt British practices of patrimony, indenture, and aristocratic inheritance (Miller 1961: 193). The effects were, however, that women, children, people of African descent, Native American,s and immigrants who became partial persons in the eyes of the legal system. After the Revolution, American law continued to carry the distinction between the rights of privileged groups in society and others abandoned to the fate of humans who may be killed or degraded at will (Agamben 1995; Pratt 2005). Insofar as full citizenship overlapped with notions of full life, those granted freedom and the right to vote were white, native born, male, and property owners. The Dred Scott Supreme Court decision of 1857 had ruled against ensuring any rights for runaway slaves, increasing tensions over slavery, and the idea of a person as mere property. The legal definition of citizenship in the Dred Scott case reflected the public’s general attitudes toward slavery, leaving their impression on the music curriculum in important ways. The legal system outlined mutual obligations between citizens as matters of law rather than as teachings from a religious creed. It made distinctions between those with bona fide citizenship and others: those who had come via slave ship, Native Americans whose sovereignty was overturned during the Westward expansion, and those who arrived from places other than England. In New England in the first half of the nineteenth century, most notably in Boston where public singing instruction first appeared, numerous newspaper editorials and pamphlets supported the Abolitionist Movement. This had begun in the late eighteenth century when abolitionists lobbied legislators to abolish slavery. As a result, there were more former slaves in New England in the first decade of the nineteenth-century. Massachusetts was among the leading centers of abolitionist publications dedicated to freeing the slaves in the Southern United States and preventing expansion of slavery in new territories. Massachusetts was also a refuge, along with points along the Canadian coast, for two million impoverished and malnourished Irish fleeing the economic and social oppression foisted on them by the colonial administration of Ireland. While the history of the Irish diaspora is beyond the purview of this book, it had profound effects on the formation of popular entertainment and music education. In the long history of English occupation of Ireland and the Caribbean, Irish positioning in the social hierarchy conferred a separate racial identity. Although skin color was similar to those called “white,’ the abject poverty of the Irish as indentured servants instilled the idea that “a blanket of

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blackness” covered the native Irish (Robinson 2009: 53). Fears of racial impurity and contagion from Irish immigrants and blacks were prevalent. In general, worries about Catholic spiritual doctrines corrupting ordinary citizens were thinly veiled (O’Neill 2009: 116). In the Boston archives related to music education, no direct references to religion or race have been preserved. It was enough to voice anxiety over the turmoil perceived to be caused by people different from the diminishing white Protestant majority. Such were the early flashpoints of contact between early nineteenth-century music education and whiteness. Music education caught fire when schools began to be seen as institutions that would counteract the perceived moral decay in the crowded and newly industrialized cities of the North. Boston was described as Satan’s seat by one minister who asserted that in the compact section of town” … there are three hundred wholly devoid of shame and modesty” (Schultz 1973: 28–29). Lowell Mason and several other Massachusetts educators and civic leaders had watched Prussian teachers use singing as disciplinary routines. This made a deep impression on American educationists. In the “Preface” to Mason and Ives’ songbook, The Juvenile Lyre, published in 1831, Mason points out that many of the songs in the collection were translated from Prussian sources. These were to imbue the future citizen with the power to resist the “unbridled emotionalism” of tavern and revival meeting. Robert Southey wrote that dancing, both in school and at home, was not sanctioned by the Methodist Society (1836). Horace Mann’s Report to the Boston School Committee, written in support of Lowell Mason’s innovative public school vocal instruction, focused chiefly on the promise that the singing methods carried a Northern European pedigree. “[With singing] … the schools of Prussia are kept in such admirable order that with so rare a resort to corporal punishment” (1844: 151). Music’s appeal to civic patrons was that it would mold the child from inside rather than through the threat of punishment. The guiding image of school singing was pastoral, casting the teacher as shepherd and students as docile sheep: “The bells worn by the sheep [in Southern Germany] are tuned to the common chord, so as never to make a dissonant sound. … We have evidence nearer home of the beneficial effects of music in schools …” (Mann 1844: 148). Thomas Popkewitz writes in Struggling for the Soul, “Pastoral care … links discourses about competence and achievement to discourses about personal salvation—personal satisfaction, inner success and personal reward” (1998: 71). “Every child can vary the tones of his voice; and if he receives early instruction, it will

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be as easy for him to learn to sing, as to learn to talk or read” (Mason 1834/1982: 127). Singing was also thought to enhance abilities for other subjects: “Vocal music furnishes the means of intellectual exercises. All musical tones have mathematical relations … Music furnishes problems sufficient to task the profoundest mathematical genius… The voice and the ear are universal endowments …” (Mann 1844/1982: 149–150). Implied, if left unsaid, was that if one were not compelled to be diligent by the singing in school, the child lacked the capacity of self-governance and was at risk of succumbing to the corrupt influences of society. Connections between musical taste and bona fide citizenship also circulated in musical periodicals such as the Euterpeiad,1 in civic organizations such as the Handel and Haydn Society, and in texts such as Thomas Hastings’ A Dissertation on Musical Taste (1822). In Spiritual Songs for Social Worship, the introduction states that the aim of the collection was to counter the many publications of “insipid, frivolous, vulgar and profane melodies” (Mason and Hastings 1831: 4), referring pointedly to revival hymns. These texts had set the tone for genteel society on the grounds that public music instruction would develop sophisticated tastes and concert comportment among the masses. But even while songbooks promoted public education in the broadest sense, the vocal curriculum of the early nineteenth-century churned within the mechanics power, drawing racial, ethnic, and birthplace boundaries for worthy citizenship. By 1910, saving the country from degradation became a common theme in national journals and conferences that set the tone of school district standards and practices. The curriculum featured recordings of the 1920s and 1930s with “folk” and “foreign” music as examples of primitive musical cultures under the heading of “Music Appreciation.” In what became a national curriculum, “Music Appreciation,” teacher organizations formally proposed that music of different cultures become an important focus of classroom teaching in its inherent capacity to compare notions of degraded music to the standard European repertoire. Thus, public music education became a more important spoke in the wheel of state power than it was in the nineteenth century, furnishing the mechanical means to separate the ideal citizen from the less worthy on a national scale. Operating as a selection device, the model listener is a specific human type who draws a contrast to those singing in taverns, in 1 Euterpeiad: An Album of Music, Poetry and Prose. Vol. 2 (New York: James Robinson, 1830–1831).

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the streets, and in revival meetings. In this sense, public vocal instruction and Music Appreciation fabricated the images of the worthy and not-so-worthy child-citizen. By the early twentieth century, the white population perceived a threat, for some an emergency, in the degradation of the public sphere by blacks moving north and from immigrants from countries in the east and south of Europe such as Poland and Italy. Stereotypes attached to these ethnic groups were accompanied by the imaginary idea of innate rhythmic abilities and tastes. Black music was closely identified with imaginaries of propulsion and seduction (Radano 2000: 473–474). Finding markets on the urban musical scene, in the recording industry and in radio broadcasting, popular tastes challenged the values of music educators. The strategy of music educators was to elevate taste through a new curriculum whose foundation and philosophical conviction to European aesthetic values would endure for most of the twentieth century. Standards set in teacher manuals for selecting music and teaching rhythmic regularity in challenged popular taste: [Music] chosen for children should embody the … principles of design which distinguish all great works of musical art. These principles demand … recurrent rhythms… and the artistic blending of unity … by repetition and contrast. For without unity, the listening mind is bewildered [and] benumbed. (McConathy et al. 1930: 13)

The most obvious sources of “bewildering” sounds were black and socalled foreign musicians on radio and gramophone. Poised to counter the effects of listening to inferior music was the nationwide network of music educators in the first half of the twentieth century, who prescribed an age-appropriate pedagogical system distributed by major recording and radio industries. The greatest threats to the reason embodied in the music appreciation curriculum, however, were the bands playing ragtime, jazz, tango, and other popular form of musical entertainment. “The standard of musical taste in the majority of people is doubtless far below what it might be … the phonograph [provides the occasion for] the most sensuous, sentimental and even vulgar records” (Briggs 1925: 7). The failure to restrict the nation’s listening, was an emerging theme at the Music Supervisors’ National Conference throughout the early decades.

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The radio with its untold possibilities for good is not yet controlled. Therefore, much that masquerades under the name of music is unworthy to be so designated. This degradation is also filtered through other mechanical instruments … Raucous, noisy, blatant sounds conveying commonplace, even vulgar, sentiment in both words and music, tend to degrade the taste and more the morals of our youth. (Adams 1929: 85) [The use] of “trashy and worthless” music for teaching has a harmful effect … undermining the splendid in building up tastes and ideals for good music in the ears and minds of children. (Clark 1913: 14)

The typical classroom was one in which there were those who would disturb the other children. Among the prescriptions for elevated listening was that the body remain still: Pupils should be taught to eliminate every sound except the music of the lesson. … They are supposed to remain quiet and give their entire attention to the music. … Those who fail to do this are discourteous to the performance and discourteous to those of the audience who desire to enjoy absolute quiet By way of these forewarnings and the views of prominent child psychologists, music appreciation built a picture of the ‘troubled’ child. The music teacher must be aware of the tendency in this child to not pay attention; truancy and delinquency were on the horizon. (Giddings et al. 1926: 31–33)

Some “are unable to take a reasonable point of view about music” (Surette 1906: 112) [In] the feelings and passions aroused by music there always coexists a strong physical agitation … music produces in young people [whose natural inclination is not controlled by social restraints] a twitching of the whole body and especially the feet. (1906: 112)

The Music Hour series authored by a group of music educators discourages free rhythmic response in order to stimulate reflection and mental activity (McConathy et al. 1930). In a similar handbook for teachers, the authors are more tolerant of the “natural” undirected type of movement followed by more organized lessons in concentration, music history,

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discrimination and reproduction of musical phrases (Cundiff and Dykema 1927: 172). For the older student, valuable responses come through silent attention to detail. In other words, the staged development from bodily rhythmic marking to an understanding of great musical works defined an overall approach to music appreciation, but also to the professional training of musicians up to the present day (Koza 2009). Early childhood rhythmic responses, the motion of the body to music, must be left behind as the child grows. Thomas Bolton, writing in the American Journal of Psychology on the perception of rhythm, described a “natural” system of accents: “The first note in each measure receives a strong accent … the strong accent occurs at regular intervals (1894: 166). For many music educators, the offbeats and syncopation marked jazz an “unnatural” system. “[Music] chosen for children [to listen to] should embody the same fundamental principles of design which distinguish all great works of musical art. These principles demand … recognizable contour, and recurrent rhythms” (McConathy et al. 1930: 14). The body of the cultivated listener was configured as sensitive. In a section of Music Appreciation in the Classroom called “The Courteous Listener,” the authors stated: One of the tasks of the teacher [is to direct listening] … Music, to be properly appreciated must be listened to without interruptions or disturbing noises. In school a quiet room is necessary to the success of any music lesson, and particularly of the lesson in music appreciations Pupils should be taught to eliminate every sound except the music of the lesson … they are supposed to remain quiet and give their entire attention to the music … those who fail to do this are discourteous to the performance and discourteous to those of the audience who desire to enjoy [the music in] absolute quiet. (Giddings et al.1926: 31–33) Another teacher’s manual describes the typical classroom as one where there are those who find “satisfaction in quiet listening”; however, there were those who may not be paying attention, children who “disturb the other children” and impede the lesson. And further, “… some music is best appreciated in silence …”. (McConathy et al. 1930: 14)

Through these and other proscriptions, a picture emerges of the “troubled” child as one who can be identified through musical activity. The

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music teacher must be aware of the tendency in this child to not pay attention; trouble might emerge in the form of truancy and delinquency. (Giddings et al.1926: 31–33). Thomas Briggs, a Professor at Columbia University in the early decades of the twentieth century, uses a language that alludes to ragtime, jazz, tango, and other popular forms as outside the bounds of cultivated taste (Leonard 1962). Briggs wrote, The standard of musical taste in the majority of people is doubtless far below what it might be … the phonograph [provides the occasion for] the most sensuous, sentimental and even vulgar records. (1925)

The failure to restrict the nation’s listening was the theme of an address to the Music Supervisors National Conference in 1929: Our forward-looking country is making large plans for the future. In this future lies not only the promise of greater things to come, but also certain grave dangers to cope with. The radio with its untold possibilities for good is not yet controlled. Therefore, much that masquerades under the name of music is unworthy to be so designated. This degradation is also filtered through other mechanical instruments … Raucous, noisy, blatant sounds conveying commonplace, even vulgar, sentiment in both words and music, tend to degrade the taste and more the morals of our youth. (Adams 1929: 85)

Moreover, the teacher is disciplined as well: [The use] of “trashy and worthless” music for teaching has a harmful effect … undermining the splendid in building up tastes and ideals for good music in the ears and minds of children” (Clark 1913: 14). The aurally vigilant listener were those who, in Surette’s words, “are unable to take a reasonable point of view about music” (1906: 112). This referred to a common stereotype of the Wagnerite who was a large part of the operatic scene and had many proponents in music education as well as music journalism. With regard to school music, the Wagner enthusiast was cast as too “interested” a listener, one who lacked the discriminations of aesthetic disinterest. This individual insisted on drawing irrelevant ideas into music; she became stereotyped as one whose superficial understanding led to untoward body movements, signs that the listener did not perceive nor comprehend the organization of the music:

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[In] the feelings and passions aroused by music there always coexists a strong physical agitation … music produces in young people [whose natural inclination is not controlled by social restraints] a twitching of the whole body and especially the feet … whoever glances around in an opera house will notice the ladies involuntarily beating time with their heads to any lively or taking tune … (Hanslick 1854: 84)

Differences in response were linked to the familiar dichotomy between the exercise of reason and imagination: Those … who ground the beautiful in music on the feelings it excites … only indulge in speculation and flights of fancy. An interpretation of music based on the feelings cannot be acceptable either to art or science. (Hanslick 1854/1957: 84)

The contradictions riding within various feeling/reason tropes often contended within one music text or series of texts. For example, in one school textbook series the very young child is encouraged to experience the free play of physical response in order to engage feeling. The toy orchestra exercise in The Music Hour series for kindergarten and first grade teachers asks that children use percussion instruments to mark the beats while they listen to music. The authors explain, “This implies the ability to enter freely into rhythmic interpretation … and enables “impressions [to] be followed by expressions, or in other words that reactions should be encouraged to the impressions brought to the children” (McConathy et al. 1929a: 4) However, elsewhere in the same text series, as the child proceeds through the higher levels, free rhythmic response is discouraged in order that reflection and mental activity replace the “toy orchestra” method: [Teaching is directed to] a consciousness of musical structure … consciousness is developed through rhythm play … by playing rhythm sticks, blocks, etc., to mark the fundamental rhythms. This phase of appreciation is further developed in the detailed observation of phrase, motive and figure relationships. (McConathy et al. 1929a: 12) [The child pays] attention to the flow of the phrases and to recognize the phrase … [as well as] recognize also rhythmic differences as expressions of different moods and ideas. (McConathy et al. 1929b: 4)

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In a handbook for teachers, Thaddeus Giddings, Will Earhart, Ralph Baldwin, and Elbridge Newton, music supervisors in the 1920s, wrote: It is well for every teacher to have in mind the typical or average tendencies of children of every age … the average child … has as his most marked physical characteristic the love of free movement which involves the whole body … (Giddings et al. 1926: 27)

The above refers to a love of freedom of movement that would be tamed and reshaped by music instruction. The Music Appreciation curriculum adapted the concept of Enlightenment progress to the child’s intellectual development. By doing so, kinds of musical responses such as singing along, rhythmic movements of the torso, clapping, and marking rhythm with the foot in an upper elementary level student were viewed as regressive, enacted by children of little musical and intellectual ability. The School Music Handbook by Hannah Cundiff and Peter Dykema presents a typology of reactions to listening and ranks them according to level of sophistication: the most elementary level is the “natural” undirected type followed by more organized reactions such as training in concentration, music history, discrimination and imitative reproduction of musical phrases (1927: 172). Finally, for the older student, responses are captioned as “the pleasure resulting from beauty” garnered through silent attention to detail: If we are to become really appreciative listeners, exerting our intellectual and discriminative powers, we need to direct our attention to the factors which, touched with the spark of genius, contribute to make great music … if we wish to become less puzzled, more intelligent, more discriminating, we must become conscious of those factors which make good music and which by their absence cause the poverty and the unsatisfactory quality in music that is poor. (Giddings et al. 1926: 25)

In other words, the staged development from bodily rhythmic marking through percussive exercises is to lead to an understanding of great musical works. This is portrayed in teacher manuals as the proper unfolding of a mature musical response. Early childhood rhythmic responses, the motion of the body to music, must be left behind as the child grows. Advancement in musical knowledge required the introduction of regular meter as the universal structural basis of music. Regular meter was described as a repeated pattern of a strong beat followed by

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one or more weak beats, coming from a Eurocentric analysis of classical music at the center of the curriculum. Music Appreciation fell out of favor as educators confronted the unequal treatment of non-European forms of music that valued irregular meter and the active engagement of the body in singing and rhythmic punctuation. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s was an important source of pressure for revising the Eurocentric music curriculum. Beginning with the recommendations of the Yale Seminar on Music Education in 1963 and the Tanglewood Symposium in 1967, educators and music scholars were dissatisfied by the narrow focus on classical music and performance skills. They laid out plans for a broader curriculum of “jazz, folk, and contemporary music” that would be undertaken by teachers in classrooms at all grade levels (Mark 1986: 43, 62–63, 225). Multiculturalism grew out of those conferences in tandem with a growing awareness of the need to broaden minority participation in music programs through additions of non-Western music (Volk 1998). Having undergone several rounds of reform aimed at changing the Eurocentric music curriculum, multiculturalism, supported by educators in a broad range of disciplines, took an earnest hold in the music curriculum by the 1990s. Music educators looked to scholars in ethnomusicology to play an important role in authorizing specific songs, dances, and concert works by racial, ethnic, and national origins (Volk 1998; Hebert and Karlsen 2010). With emphasis on the “origins” of folk music that would link selections to specific nations, however, multiculturalism reinforces the tenaciousness of what Gilroy has described as the Enlightenment’s “fatal juncture” of nationality and race (1993: 2) even while it appeared to offer an even hand to Euro-American and non-European genres alike. The legacies of the state of emergency and notions of contamination from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, had carried forward the project of whiteness lurking in notions of musical difference and worthiness as articulated in Music Appreciation guides for teachers. These ideas became deeply embedded in the training of music teachers, not, as some have argued, due to lack of experience with jazz and nonWestern music, although this is overwhelmingly the case, but because the exemplars of multiculturalism have been built on faulty assumptions of racial, ethnic, and geographic origins. Insofar as Enlightenment ideals carry within them an enduring schism between enlightened and non-enlightened populations identified by race and immigrant status, the

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“origins” of music reflect, as Gilroy argues for cultural studies in general, a mechanics of power operating “often by default rather than design” frames culture as racially determined (1993: 5). One hundred eighty years after the founding of public music education in Boston, deeply embedded assumptions about civilized versus uncivilized populations continue to operate by default in the multicultural music curriculum. In theory, multiculturalism was a remedy for inequality. On closer examination, its colorblind ideology authorizes a subtler coding for the identity of musical types. Terms such as cultural diversity, superdiversity, and multiculturalism conceal the mechanics of power that gave music an enduring racial/ethnic origin. As racial ideologies have become odious, multiculturalism, without critical reflection on its effects, has preserved the non-symmetrical relations between Global North and South and the mythologies of racial origin attached to music (Ndhlovu 2016: 30; Bonilla-Silva 2003; Radano and Bohlman 2000: 9). While Enlightenment ideals asserted equality of citizens and representative government, they exist today in paradoxical relation to reality as governments commonly recognize exceptions to protection by the law under states of emergency. Past and present exceptions are specific to ethnic groups such as the internment of Japanese citizens in World War II, the barriers to entry and asylum under the Immigration Act of 1924, and the “state of emergency” under the Trump Administration regarding Muslims and Latinos. These exceptions to inclusion as people of full life expose a common theme: identifying people as unworthy outcasts, husks of men, bare life who can be deported, confined, or killed with impunity. The ambiguous constitutional powers of government and its militarized force are indeterminant, appearing in different guises within the law and outside of the law. The consequence is that all live in the potential of bare life since the state of emergency has a shifting threshold that divides the worthy being from her opposite (Agamben 2005: 2–3; Santner 2006: xvi). How and why has the state of emergency driven the direction of public music education? For the most part, music education has represented the field as separate from the state and from politics, existing in an aesthetic realm transcending society’s debates and dilemmas. The following chapter provides a description of the system of distribution of the racial imagination and the political, social, and economic factors underpinning a national Music Appreciation curriculum through the twentieth century. Music Appreciation met the state of emergency of mass immigration and migration from the South through rubrics of race, nationality, and ethnicity as

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ways of understanding differences in music to preserve the aesthetic values of Enlightenment consciousness at the pinnacle of hierarchies of culture. Another way of thinking about music emerges from the diasporic perspective. Citing multiple intersecting channels of music makers over time, music in diaspora rejects notions of race, nation, and ethnicity as fundamentally unfeasible.

References Adams, Crosby. “The Meaning of Appreciation.” Journal of the Music Supervisors National Conference, 85–90, March 1929. Print. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel H. Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Print. ———. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Print. Bolton, Thaddeus L. “Rhythm.” The American Journal of Psychology, 2, January 1894. Print. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. Racism Without Racists: Color Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racism in the United States. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Print. Briggs, Thomas. “Music Memory Contests.” School Music Monthly, 5–7 September–October, 1925. Print. Broman, Timothy. The Transformation of Academic Medicine in Germany, 1780– 1820. PhD Diss., Princeton University, 1987. Print. Clark, Frances Elliott. “Festival of the Nations with the Victor.” Journal of the Music Supervisors’ Conference, 13–15 May 1913. Print. Cundiff, Hannah M., and Peter W. Dykema. School Music Handbook: A Guide for Teaching School Music. Boston: C.C. Birchard and Co., 1927. Print. Fitz, Asa. A Child’s Songbook. Concord, NH: B. Merrill, 1819. Print. Foucault, Michel. “Docile Bodies.” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 179–187. New York: Pantheon, 1984. Print. Giddings, Thaddeus, Will Earhart, Ralph Baldwin, and Elbridge Newton. Music Appreciation in the Schoolroom. Boston: Ginn and Co., 1926. Print. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Print. Gould, Stephen J. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981. Print. Gustafson, Ruth. Race and Curriculum: Music in Childhood Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. Hanslick, Edward. The Beautiful in Music. New York: The Liberal Arts Press, Inc., 1854/1957. Print.

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Hastings, Thomas. Dissertation on Musical Taste. New York: Da Capo Press, 1822/1974. Print. Hebert, David, and Sidsel Karlsen. “Music Education and Multiculturalism.” https://www.academia.edu/799178/Multiculturalism. Web. 21 April 2010. Koza, Julia E. “Listening to Whiteness: Hearing Racial Politics in Undergraduate School Music.” In Music Education for Changing Times, edited by Thomas Regelski and J. Terry Gates, 85–95. Springer: Dordrecht Heidelberg, 2009. Print. Leonard, Neil. Jazz and the White Americans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Print. Litwack, Leon. North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790–1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Print. Lloyd, David. “Black Irish, Irish Whiteness, and Atlantic State Formation.” In The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross-Currents of the Irish and Black Diasporas, edited by Peter O’Neill and David Lloyd, 3–19. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. Mann, Horace. “Report for Vocal Music in the Schools.” In Source Readings in Music Education History, edited by Michael L. Mark, 144–154. New York: Schirmer Books, 1844/1982. Print. Mark, Michael L. Contemporary Music Education. New York: Macmillan, 1986. Print. Mason, Lowell. The Elements of Vocal Music on the System of Pestalozzi Published for the Boston Academy of Music. Boston: Wilkins and Carter, 1834. Print. Mason, Lowell. “Manual of the Boston Academy of Music.” In Source Readings in Music Education History, edited by Michael L. Mark, 144–154. New York: Schirmer Books, 1836/1982. Print. Mason, Lowell, and Thomas Hastings. Spiritual Songs for Social Worship. Utica, NY: G. Tracy, 1831. Print. Mason, Lowell, and Elam Ives. The Juvenile Lyre or Hymns and Songs, Religious, Cheerful Set to Appropriate Music for Primary and Common School. Boston: Richardson, Lord and Holbrook, 1831. Print. McConathy, Osbourne, Otto Meissner, Edward Bailey Birge, and Mabel E. Bray. The Music Hour; Intermediate Teacher’s Book. New York: Silver Burdett, 1930. Print. ———. The Music Hour; Kindergarten and First Grade, The Music Hour. New York: Silver Burdett, 1929a. Print. ———. The Music Hour; Elementary Teachers’ Book. New York: Silver Burdett Co., 1929b. Print. Miller, Perry. The Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961. Print. Ndhlovu, Finex. “A Decolonial Critique of Diaspora Identity Theories and the Notion of Superdiversity.” Diaspora Studies, 8, 1, 28–40, 2016. Print.

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O’Neill, Peter. “Laundering Gender: Chinese Men and Irish Women in Late Nineteenth Century San Francisco.” In The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross Currents of the African and Irish Diasporas, edited by Peter D. O’Neill and David Lloyd, 113–130. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. Parker, Katherine M. “Making Blacks Foreigners: The Legal Construction of Former Slaves in Post-revolutionary Massachusetts.” Utah Law Review, 75– 96, 2001. Web. Popkewitz, Thomas. Struggling for the Soul: The Politics of Teaching and the Construction of the Teacher. New York: Columbia University Teachers College Press, 1998. Print. Pratt, Geraldine. “Abandoned Women and Spaces of the Exception.” Antipode, 37, 5, 2005. Print. Radano, Ronald, and Philip Bohlman. “Introduction.” In Music and the Racial Imagination, edited by Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman, 1–53. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Print. Robinson, Cedric. “Ventriloquizing Blackness: Eugene O’Neill and Irish American Racial Performance.” In The Black and Green Atlantic: Cross Currents of the African and Irish Diasporas, edited by Peter D. O”Neill and David Lloyd, 49–63. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print. Santner, Eric L. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, and Sebald. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Schultz, Stanley. K. The Culture Factory: Boston Public Schools, 1789–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Print. Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. Vol. I. London: Penguin Books, 1776/1979. Print. Southey, Robert. The Doctor and Etc. New York: Harper Brothers, 1836. Print. Surette, Thomas. “Musical Appreciation for the General Public.” Journal of the Music Teachers’ National Association, 109–114, 1906. Print. Volk, Teresa. Music, Education, and Multiculturalism: Foundations and Principles. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print. Wood, Gordon S. The Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Knopf, 1992. Print.

CHAPTER 3

Folk Music and Dance: Imaginary Images of Modern Nationhood

Abstract In this chapter, I argue that the ethnic, racial, and national identities of folk music in multicultural approaches to music teaching have lagged behind recent writing on the marginalizing effects of AngloAmerican histories of cultures. Vastly different worldviews and access to power have existed behind a curtain of silence. Lacking tangible documentation of their history, unknown populations and their musical practices become stereotypes as people(s) and music(s) with no history. To appreciate the shift from the idea of folk music with no history to a focus on music’s changing character, form, and substance, this chapter revisits the founding concept of “folk music” that has and continues to dominate multicultural music methods. Keywords Folk music · Racial character · Nationalism

Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492. Upon arrival, he opened a route for the slave trade between the Caribbean and Africa, displacing and enslaving the indigenous Amerindians. A mere ten years later, the forced migration of Africans provided slave labor for newly established European-owned sugar plantations. Music traveled back and forth between the coastal regions bordering the Atlantic (Rommen 2013: 557–561). Despite exchanges between Europeans, Africans, and Amerindians, musicologists stressed racial inheritance as the heart of © The Author(s) 2020 R. I. Gustafson, Exploring Diasporic Perspectives in Music Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52105-9_3

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musical expression. Recent scholarly work in musicology now recognizes connections between changes in musical practices and the shifting landscape of global trade, politics, social upheaval, slavery, and economics. In this environment, the Atlantic and Caribbean diasporas compelled musical exchanges, shaping dance and song as vehicles to express resistance and/or subjugation to these forces (Mudimbe 2013; Waxer 2002). Through the lens of Western imperialism and the construction of a canon of European music, the dynamism of music forged among subjugated peoples was diminished to “folk” status. This chapter argues that the ethnic, racial, and national identity of folk music in multicultural approaches to music teaching have lagged behind recent writing on the marginalizing effects of Anglo-American histories of cultures. As Gayatri Spivak writes, people with vastly different worldviews and access to power have existed behind a curtain of silence. Lacking tangible documentation of their history, the unknown become stereotypes as people(s) with no history: i.e., the folk (1988: 288, 297).1 To appreciate the shift from the idea of folk music with no history to a focus on its changing character, form, and substance, it is important to revisit the founding concept of “folk music” that has, and in many cases, continues to dominate music teaching. Assigning the music of the “folk” a geographic origin has been an important theme in music history and pedagogy since Johann Gottfried Herder’s eighteenth-century book on folk song, “The Voices of the People in Songs.” Celebrating folk music as a regional heritage, Herder’s theories did not encompass race or nation per se. His method was limited to connecting vernacular poems to music, giving them temporal, melodic, and geographic dimensions. These, he asserted, could be culturally translated as the “mother tongue” of regional inhabitants. In a first of its kind published attempt at defining the “folk,” Herder’s method used local songs and poems to identify heroic figures as emblems of regional character. Selecting verse from French, Latin, North African, Iberian, and other sources to compose “The Cid—The Story of Don Ruy Diaz, Duke of Bivar,” Herder became known as the founder of ethnomusicology. His work was commonly used by politicians to claim national 1 See Gareth Williams’ 2001 account of the opposite phenomenon in which history became palpable among subjugated peoples. “Death in the Andes: Ungovernability and the Birth of Tragedy in Peru.” 260–287. In The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, edited by Ileana Rodriguez. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

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ownership of folk tales, language, and music. Numerous so-called national epics such as Wagner’s nineteenth century “Der Ring des Nibelungen” and “La Chanson de Roland,” popular as an oral epic in the 1100s, represented the “spirit” of the people when it was politically expedient to tie music, poetry and epic myths to an imaginary ethnic/national character. Unfortunately, despite lack of evidence or claims of such in “The Voices of the People in Songs,” Herder’s “discovery” of the folksong laid the foundation for linking racial characteristics to national identity and musical types in the twentieth century (Bohlman 2013: 255, 268; Schwartz-Kates 1997). Two centuries after Herder, Bela Bartok’s Essays, written during the tumultuous and tragic period of the early twentieth century in Europe, asserted that authentic folk music was a product of racial/national character. Bartok was especially concerned that tastes for Jewish and Gypsy music among Hungarian elites had compelled a devaluing of “native” folk music and a corruption of the “essence” of Hungarian culture. Bartok, however, was against the extreme nationalism of German and Hungarian regimes even while he remained committed to the ideas of racial essences in his later work, Essays (Trumpener 2000: 422–424). The significance of Herder and Bartok to this chapter is that they set precedents for the way ethnomusicologists and educators have classified music in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Recently there has been a sea change in music scholarship, aided by an openness to cross-disciplinary writing. This has led to an understanding of the political context underlying the manufacture of musical origins assigned by scholars in the past. Previously, the model for standard practice of music history was to segregate musical identity by region or nation, tribe or race, and language. This method conceals the historically transcultural and intercultural complexities of music as well as its political role in nation making. The singular “national” identities supported by overly broad and misguided interpretations of Herder and Bartok obscured the political and economic differences of minorities and subgroups, imagining the homogeneity of populations useful to nationalist agendas (Cooley 2013: 365). While this chapter is not concerned with the authenticity of folk music in Herder’s or Bartok’s work per se, it aims to call attention to the mechanics of power that made particular folk heroes and music important symbols of a nation or region. Rendering folk music as the authentic voice of a particular people reaches back to Enlightenment projects in which nostalgia for a territory

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would become instrumental in constructing symbols of unity a century later (Bohlman 2013: 259–262). In the nineteenth century, transcriptions of folk music produced intimate sentiments about the land in the form of Romantic ballads. So-called folk ballads became rallying cries for the formation of nations tied to ethnic groups (Illari 2013: 387). Today, with the availability of the Internet, global culture producers and entertainers use exotic racial, geographic, and ethnic identities to commoditize particular performances as “world music.” Presented as non-political in nature, denuded of the history of how they acquired their public image, world music(s) promote a picture of the equal treatment of the “folk” in a multicultural universe. Moreover, world music presentations for classroom use on the Internet provide descriptors that are easily adapted to the present multicultural focus of music education. The uneven history of how the figure of the Gaucho was transformed into a symbol of Argentine life is a case in point. During the Spanish occupation, Gaucho folk music was considered a product of uncivilized people. A common theme in Argentine history was fear of the countryside. This attitude stemmed from early views of rural areas as barren, culturally primitive, and its people organized into hostile militias. These kinds of lingering prejudices from the colonial era deepened rural resentment over the control over and cheap sale of raw materials from the provinces to European buyers. The hostilities between social classes and the interests of those living in the pampas or grasslands negatively affected the acceptance of folk music in the city. Changes in the status of Gaucho musical life and legends are deeply entwined with large shifts in the political and social economies during the first in a series of civil wars lasting from 1814 to 1820. This period of turmoil included the struggle for independence from Spain, won finally in 1816. The positive recognition of “Gauchesco” culture began during those years, but it was not until two opposing internal factions of Federalist and Unitarian movements emerged to dominate Argentine politics that Gaucho culture became an issue of political importance. Gradually modernized and given concrete musical form in the nineteenth century, the Gaucho persona and the urban cultural milieu projected the heroism and grit of an entire nation even while Argentinians remained engulfed in conflicts of social class and land ownership disputes. Despite these antagonisms, the abrasiveness of colonial rule eventually brought both rural and urban communities together to resist Spain’s exclusive rights over trade and land distribution as well as the edicts barring trade with France and

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England. By 1850, an Argentinian Constitution formed a Confederation of Argentine states. Rural areas began to establish a body of folklore on the Gaucho rider, poet, singer, and hero. Still, negative views of Gauchesco and rural culture continued to circulate among the urban population, becoming major themes in the writings of prominent Argentinian elites. Social and economic differences between indigenous peoples and Europeans widened with mass immigration from Europe, urbanization, and the internal migration of indigenous people from the impoverished rural areas to the cities. While the economy created large fissures between land owners and rural laborers on cattle ranches, the Gaucho figure, portrayed heroically in the war against Spain, began to transcend the split between those favoring the older Hispanic authoritarian rule and those who endorsed a cosmopolitan French political model (Schwartz-Kates 1997: 30, 513). In the early twentieth century, with the emergence of songs from the Buenos Aires region in the style of European lyricism, a “rediscovery” of the value of rural land due to successful mining ventures compelled a reassessment of Gaucho culture. José Hernandez’s wildly successful poetic epic, Martin Fierro (1872) painted the Gaucho as a fierce, but misunderstood hero of Argentine legend. Decades later, the epic prompted an explosion of genres on the Gaucho in popular stage shows, film, and music. While some aristocratic and middle class sectors continued to resist Gaucho songs and dancing as “lowbrow,” citing its “origins” as Indian or mestizo, the fame of Martin Fierro and the wealth drawn from the grasslands enabled Argentina to reach a tentative point of accord between rural and urban interests, prompting the country’s image and entry into modernity. By the later decades of the twentieth century, the figure of the Gaucho folk hero became a sign of cultural vitality and symbol of the imaginary unification of the nation (Illari 2013). As for the establishing the musical content of the guitar, accordion or violin accompaniments to Gaucho songs and dances, scholars have relied on transcriptions of performances from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While there are no clear “origins” of either melodic material, instrumentation, or rapid rhythmic patterns, there are Gaucho musical elements found in Peruvian, Bolivian, Uruguayan, and Chilean country dances such that most research on the genre points to Amerindian antecedents. Between indigenous forms of expression and centuries of Spanish control of vast areas of South America, music crossed ethnic,

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linguistic and territorial borders. The intermixed heritages of music and dance are evident in the malambo, typically a contest between two male Gaucho dancers, a form most closely identified with Gaucho festivities in South America (Schwartz-Kates 1997: 238–240). Its fast tempo and cross rhythms are performed with the contestants wearing high leather boots, belted riding pants, flowing neck scarves, and distinctive flat hats with wide brims, emphasizing the malambo as a fiercely competitive event especially when cheering and jeering crowds encircle the dancers. The Gauchesco myth of leading a life far from the power struggles of Buenos Aires took hold of Argentina in several ways, creating a fulcrum of images to support Argentinian nationalism. It was, first, a symbol of independence and fearlessness appealing to patriotic sentiments. Nostalgia for a Gauchesco way of life of freedom permeated the lower social classes as well, whether among struggling rural migrants in the cities or ranchers and farmers in the hinterlands. From the American perspective, the Gaucho is familiar as the Western cowboy, imagined as a heroic figure in stark contrast to the mundane routines of urban and rural life in the twentieth century. But gaucho life itself was undergoing extinction as more government control extinguished independent militias, small ranches, and nomadic herders of the pampas, pushing them to the margins of the economy and political relevance (Rock 1975: 142). Paradoxically, Gaucho music and dance performances rose to prominence even as the diasporas from Europe in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century were underway. Buenos Aires became a cosmopolitan center for popular music and dance such as the tango, ballet, opera, and classical music. Gauchesco stories and music were incorporated into solo and ensemble art genres by classically trained composers, most famously by Alberto Ginastera who used gaucho musical idioms to fit the modernist style of twentieth-century art music emerging in North America and Europe.2 Rural horsemen and their value as symbols of individual freedom became key elements of Argentine nationalism during the decades of industrial growth, European immigration, and an accumulation of wealth in Buenos Aires. The mythic and exotic Gaucho offered an image of unity that the governing elite projected to the outside world during a period of six military coups and dictatorships between 1930 and 1976. Overall, the popularity of the Gaucho image 2 Listen to one of Ginastera’s composition based on his interpretation of Gaucho dance rhythms. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1Wb_TM0HVo.

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passed through radical change relatively intact. Argentinian nationalism resurrected the image of the Gaucho as typically Argentine in his existence on cattle ranches and as a defender of the traditional value of self-reliance (Schwartz-Kates 1997: 84–86). The economic history of Argentina, ranking second only to the United States in its percentage of emigrant workers, reveals that it failed to industrialize. The unfruitful efforts of labor to achieve middle class incomes left a trail of hyper-inflation, massive strikes, and antagonisms between agrarian, urban labor, and state interests, creating vulnerability to severe economic decline, savage internal conflict, fascism, and military juntas Establishing governmental institutions to heal these fissures has proven elusive. Oligarchic control and neoliberal policies have aligned under the theme of “self-reliance,” exacerbating severe class differences that have haunted Argentina for many decades (Gezmi¸s 2018; Rock 1975; Korol and Sabato 1990). Yet, the Gaucho remains an iconic symbol and dream of fierce independence. Today, Gaucho dance contests take place at festivals in the cities and rural towns, spurred by a tourist industry built around the revival of Gaucho culture and the imaginary ideal of a heroic essence in the national character. It is evident from the idealization of the “Gaucho” figure, starting with Hernandez’s widely popular epic poem Martin Fierro, that representation of Argentina would follow the path traveled by Herder in his linkage of epic poetry to heroic figures who, over time, became national symbols. Given the polyglot and mixed ethnic legacies that makeup rural and urban Argentina in the last 200 years, it may seem paradoxical that the Gaucho, overall, sustained its image as hero of the nation. As Philip Bohlman writes, making music a national symbol, often succeeds by stressing the dynamic of “self” and “other” (2002: 106). For Argentinians, the Gaucho figure eclipsed the reality of racial animosity and the negative reputation of rural characters through the popularity of Martin Fierro. Its circulation is an example of what Benedict Anderson has called a vehicle for imagining a community (1994: 6). That is to say, Argentinians who never knew and will never know Gauchos imagine a shared bond by virtue of living within a particular region that became a nation despite severe economic obstacles and grave political trauma. Applying Bohlman’s dynamic prescription for musical identity, Gaucho images and performances fabricate an ideal, independent nation in comparison to its struggling neighbors (“others”) even while Chile and Brazil, for example,

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have grappled with similar large-scale problems: servitude, debt, and political oppression (Motta and Nilsen 2011). Maintaining contemporary relevance, the Gaucho absorbs much economic and social change that would have been problematic in a prior era: the performance of females dressed as male Gauchos and the inclusion of dance steps similar to the Irish River Dance groups. Within the global marketization of culture, making Argentina a modern nation, despite its periods of fascist rule, includes projecting a striking image to represent the whole country and building careers for Gaucho “stars.” Well known Gaucho impersonators appear on formats such as YouTube and “America’s Got Talent.” Through Gaucho imaginaries, the country reaches an international audience as an equal player in world entertainment (Sauls 2015: 22; Radano and Bohlman 2000: 1–53).3 In his/her unique rustic outfit and compelling performances, the Gaucho fits the multicultural imagination promoted online and in teaching manuals. The Gaucho became a national figure through the widespread viewing of the film, Martin Fierro, in which a person of mestizo (Indian-Spanish) heritage as an independent force for the greater good. The plot revolves around the life story of the Gaucho Fierro crossing back and forth between “Indian” camps and the scene of interracial violence from which he has fled. Its mythology glosses over the history of rural/urban tensions, revolutions, and violent dictatorships that made Argentinian national identity “white,” gradually erasing African and indigenous lineages from consciousness (Karush 2012). As the Gaucho became whiter within the imaginary of urban legend, his authenticity as a national emblem grew more secure in relation to his reputation for resistance to oppressive authority. Websites featuring “world music” lessons are pragmatic ways to make the curriculum multicultural. “World Music” authenticates ethnic types and geographic locales despite the uncertainty of its claims. Gaucho performances continue to represent Argentina and Uruguay according to media offering multicultural lessons to music educators—for example, “Teaching Children About South America” (2019)—notwithstanding the fact that immigration over two centuries from Europe and Global South countries accounts for a majority of the population by 1900 (Germani 2018). A similar process of nation making and an amalgamation of

3 See Gaucho drummers from the city become “Gauchos” from the pampas. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=83fGoM_xGlE.

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folk mythology applies to Flamenco song and dance in its relation to independence movements within Spain. Flamenco remains a term of indefinite origin. One theory is that it is from the Arabic, Felah-Mengus, meaning a “wandering peasant.” Other theories suggest it comes from the mating dance of the flamingo, a tall wading bird with colorful plumage; yet another, is that its complicated moves echo the polyphonic music of old Flanders. In any case, these theories gravitate toward portraying Flamenco as a uniquely spectacular performance event. The popularity of Flamenco artistry signals a renewed interest in exploring the repression of Romani culture within Spain and demands for independence circulating in the Andalusian region in the south of the Iberian Peninsula. Its performance practices have an obscure history. Not only is it difficult to capture a single example of “flamenco” to represent its scope and variety, but it has, at one time, under the fascist dictator Franco, been used as a symbol of Spanish nationalism during the Civil War. This history exerts considerable emotion in the struggle for an independent Andalusia and other regions of Spain. Movements for the independence for Andalusia and its ownership of flamenco heritage is more than cultural. Spain’s bitter Civil War in which Franco, with Hitler’s support, established a fascist dictatorship by destroying the duly elected Republican government of Spain. Andalusia was the site of mass slaughter of civilians by Franco’s troops. In the case of establishing Flamenco patrimony and a heritage community, the past looms large. During WWII up to the mid-seventies witnessed the rule of a brutal dictator whose nationalist imagery claimed Flamenco “culture” as Spanish. On websites of heritage music sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution, Flamenco has attained an Andalusian identity, coupled with references to a Romani or a “gypsy” source of this art form. The Smithsonian’s theory that “heritage” music belongs to a specific place and a people is underpinned by UNESCO, a global institution which asserts that patrimony depends on native tastes and styles. Both nationalist Spanish and Andalusian claims, however, run into the difficulties of uncovering ethnomusicological sources and the tensions of identifying a single patrimony all parties honor. In 2007 Flamenco was declared an Andalusian heritage by the Andalusian government without the specifying the style or content of what constitutes an “authentic” performance (Washabaugh 2012: 1–6).

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Treating Flamenco as Spanish is problematic for the multicultural music curriculum. First, because Flamenco is not a single type of folk music or dance although it is represented as an autonomous art. In the broadest sense, it is the expression of present and past resistance against oppression by the Spanish state (Washabaugh 2012: 12). Diminishment of the political ecology surrounding music cuts off the possibilities for discussion of the troubled past and unsettled present situations framing Flamenco as the icon of a homogeneous Spanish culture. Second, music education has lacked sufficient theory to incorporate the idea that national emblems appear and vanish, depending on the political and economic tensions bearing on music and dance at a particular time. The dominant model for study, performance, and research in music education, as John Shepherd and Julia Koza describe in separate chapters in Music Education for Changing Times, diminishes the power of music when educators see musical works as autonomous, treating them as purely music apart from society (Shepherd 2009: 118; Koza 2009: 85). For educators who aim to loosen the grip of stereotypical representation of individuals and nations, what follows is a discussion of two versions of the opera Carmen that have used images of flamenco dance and music to tell a larger story of conflict between ethnic groups, gender relations, and the socioeconomic classes in Spain. The portrayals of each of these works, the opera, Carmen, by Georges Bizet and the film ballet, Carmen, directed by Carlos Saura, serve as examples of the way art communicates social tensions hidden beneath national symbols. Why is this important to the argument for a diasporic perspective put forward in the present book? Homogeneous views of the nation and cultures disregard the complexity of identity while supplying a fictional icon as the essential character of the nation. The foundational logic of the multicultural ethos in music education has been to forefront iconic and stereotypical images as stand-ins for nations. In the Gaucho case, a multicultural approach has represented Argentinians as a homogeneous population rather than people who bear a fractious history of resistance to colonial and fascist governments. Insofar as school music relies on the assumption that diversity in the curriculum is a matter of equally valued, essential cultural differences, multiculturalism4 pushes aside political, social, and economic 4 See, for example Michael Bakan’s World Music: Traditions and Transformations, 2012: 11–12 for a more tempered view of the formation of singular identity in relation to multiculturalism.

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differences. A diasporic perspective focuses on the problematic simplification of cultural identity and the shifting political grounds obscured by singular rubrics representing nations or peoples. Using a diasporic lens in the presentation or discussion of Flamenco music(s) and dance(s) offers a fluid view of personal, national, and ethnic musical identity, one which can better withstand the notion of unchanging, socially bound minority differences diminished and overtaken by majority nationalist agendas. I turn now to the way in which the opera Carmen by Bizet and the film/ballet by Saura dramatize the shifting ground of politics and history to reveal underlying tensions between Spanish national governance and the aspirations of separatist movements within Spain. This discussion is, in part, an example of scrutinizing iconic images such as Flamenco performance for what they can tell us about the tension between the suppression of minority histories such as the Romani/Andalusian resistance and nationalism. Flamenco depicts such tensions through the posture and dance rhythms of a man and a woman duo. The interplay of male and female power can be taken as a metaphor for the historical dominance/submission dynamics between Spain and Andalusia. Carmen’s plot, adapted from a French novel, is fraught with the social alienation and discontent of the Romani (commonly known as gypsy people) under Spanish rule (Washabaugh 2012). Cultural historians argue Flamenco sprang from the bottom rung of society, namely, from the Romani whose social status as Spaniards, even while most were born in Spain, has remained low since their arrival in the 1400s. With a nomadic form of existence and different spoken languages, Romani are multilingual. Commonly, they are speakers of Romani, itself Indo-Aryan language and Spanish, yet their descendants have remained outside of the dominant structure of the political economy of Spain (Manuel 1989: 64). The character, Carmen, is not a French or Spanish invention. She appeared as a warrior/sorceress in Celtic/Greek myth and, in recent centuries, she appears in film, opera, ballet, and music as a femme fatale. In the first act, Carmen is jailed for fighting with a co-worker in a tobacco factory. A soldier, Don José, arrests her, is seduced by her. He sets her free, but Carmen is not faithful. She begins a romance with a handsome toreador who catches her fancy. Maddened with jealousy, Don José kills Carmen. Reversals of freedom and captivity move the plot from one point to another: the arrest, the rejection of Don José, and finally Carmen’s death and the ruin of Don José.

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Both the mythical Carmen and her newer renditions embellish and magnify an unnerving theme: the power of women to take revenge on male privilege. This theme has played out with an interchangeable set of fictional women characters: Salome, Medea, Lady Macbeth, and Hedda Gabler to name but a few from opera and theatre. In Bizet’s Carmen the conflict is between her ferocious independence, her reputed gypsy character and her required submission to patriarchal state authority. The Flamenco idioms, especially in the Habañera aria, the gypsy camp, and the traditional costuming mark her as Romani or gypsy for opera audiences. Following the plot of Bizet’s opera, the film/ballet, Carmen by Carlos Saura, from 1983, is a complex rendition of the traditional story as it takes the form of a play within a play. Rejecting a recapitulation of the familiar plot from the opera, Saura stages the story in a ballet studio in Madrid where the company is in the process of choreographing the story with music made famous by Bizet. A bizarre turn of events arises. The lead male dancer playing Don José is seduced by the dancer who plays Carmen. Fiction becomes reality as the male lead falls under Carmen’s spell. As the film invites the audience to experience the undoing of Don José, the socio-political context of the film emerges. It speaks to the central political dilemma of Spain in the its present constitutional structure: how to resolve conflicts arising between the Spanish government and regional independence movements. Weakened by the violence of Civil War, WWII, and Franco’s dictatorship (1936–1975), the Spanish government sought to defend democratic expression of the separatist movements while standing behind a collective identity. The 1980s brought the conflict between Andalusia and Spain to a dangerous pitch similar to the turmoil of the 1930s. Some Andalusians favored independent nationhood for the region. Similar struggles were percolating within other regions as well. Saura’s Carmen broadly represents the conflicts of power versus powerlessness central to history of the Global South and North as well as the Global East/West in their violent clashes across the world. Flamenco artistry in its profound ability to activate passion through its rhythmic and melodic patterns of the body has unknown roots. It has no “pure” foundation in ethnicity or regionality but finds its expression in different contexts across time. Neither does its interpretation harbor universal truths. Flamenco’s appearance, however, in the domain of “world music” has taken on Spanish origin. This fails recognition of the complexity of its diasporic lineage, whether

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of Romani, Spanish (Andalusian), Flemish, Arab or other, unknown source. It has been, perhaps, millennia in the making (Washabaugh 2012: 1). Despite the energetic and complex rhythms made by the of heavy foot stamping and castanets, Flamenco’s uncertain beginnings lie in the diasporas of people whose experiences summoned music to reflect aspirations and fears that found expression through this art form. In the case of Flamenco’s nationalist platforms in media and government agencies, marginalizing gypsy artistry echoes a history of rejection of generations of Romani as native to any region across Europe. Likewise, with respect to Gaucho music and dance, association with the “uncivilized” Indians of pre-colonial South America, inclusion in folklore entails taking on the image of “noble savage” in the Romantic period and enduring rejection in periods of urban economic growth (Illari 2013: 376). Some musicologists have begun to question the essential identities attached to folk music. They are making efforts toward “a post-areastudies” approach that “favors transnational and transregional flows of musical meaning over the nation concept” (Cooley 2013: 353). Nevertheless, many music educators continue to link national, ethnic, or regional identity with particular performance traditions. Where music/dance traditions are reiterated on the Internet as examples of the “world” or “folk” culture, however vague those terms are, notions of national origin inevitably dominate marginalized groups. Some music educators are advocating letting go of habitual, uncritical acceptance of Eurocentric aesthetic standards, curriculum guides, and pedagogical formulas. In their view, any single method can prove too narrow for welcoming the musicmaking of students whose orientation is different from the prescribed list of categories. They recommend a crossdisciplinary approach that will turn away from categorical thinking to listen to the uncategorized alongside the conventional canon as if it were also unfinished and unknown (Allsup 2016: ix, 27; Cain et al. 2013; Koza 2009; Regelski 2009: x; Shepherd 2009: 118). Asking music educators to turn up the volume on the “dissonant and the strange” (Jorgenson as quoted in Allsup 2016: xii) is a tall order and it will involve a revision of older points of view on canonical “masterworks,” theories of origin, culture, and national identity. How does the concept of diaspora prepare teachers for challenging what has become the curricular approach of canonical multiculturalism?

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Diaspora is not a seamless theory; nor is it yet another concept proposing a universal truth. What it offers is a powerful lens for questioning the methods, sources, and authority of multiculturalism in music education. As I have argued for Gaucho and Flamenco genres, exploring the mechanics of power underlying the construction of national musical icons exposes the effects of colonial and dictatorial regimes which have endorsed these images to obscure intercultural tensions and promote national political agendas. “World music,” has a similar effect as it travels at lightning speed on the Internet, commanding attention as the exotic “other.” Its capacity to reach immense audiences carries a message of cultural, political, and economic, and racial equality among nations and, by default, an avoidance of conflicts over resources and political systems, as Paul Gilroy so aptly put it (1993: 5). A diasporic perspective disputes singular origins, opening to the possibility of contemplating multiculturalism as a strategy that suppresses difference.

References Allsup, Randall. Remixing the Classroom: Toward an Open Philosophy of Music Education. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. Print. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1994. Print. Bohlman, Philip V. World Music: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Print. ———.“Johann Gottfried Herder and the Global Moment of World-Music History.”. In The Cambridge History of World Music, edited by Philip V. Bohlman, 255–276. Cambridge UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Print. Cain, Melissa, Shari Lindblom, and Jennifer Walden. “Initiate, Create. Activate: Practical Solutions for Making Culturally Diverse Music Education a Reality.” Australian Journal of Music Education. 2, 79–97, 2013. Print. Cooley, Thomas, “Folk Music in Eastern Europe.” In The Cambridge History of World Music, edited by Philip V. Bohlman, 352–370. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Print. Germani, Gino. “Mass Immigration and Modernization.” In Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, edited by Jorge Il Dominguez, 37–54. New York: Routledge, 2018. Print. Gezmi¸s, Hilal. “From Neoliberalism to Neo-developmentalism? The Political Economy of Post-crisis Argentina (2002–2015).” New Political Economy. 23, 1, 66–87, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2017.1330877. Web. 4 December 2019.

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Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Print. Illari, Bernardo. “A Story With(out) Gauchos: Folk Music in the Building of the Argentine Nation. In The Cambridge History of World Music, edited by Philip V. Bohlman, 255–276. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Print. Karush, Matthew B. “Blackness in Argentina: Jazz, Tango and Race Before Perón.” Past & Present. 216, 1, 215–245, August 2012. https://doi.org/ 10.1093/pastj/gts008. Web. 24 November 2019. Korol, Juan Carlos and Hilda Sabato. “Incomplete Industrialization: An Argentine Obsession.” Latin American Research Review. 25, 1, 7–30, 1990. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/2503558. Web. 23 November 2019. Koza, Julia E. “Listening to Whiteness: Hearing Racial Politics in Undergraduate School Music.” In Music Education for Changing Times: Guiding Visions for Practice, edited by Thomas Regelski and J. Terry Gates, 85–95. Dordrecht and Heidelberg: Springer, 2009. Print. Manuel, Peter. “Andalusian, Gypsy, and Class Identity in the Contemporary Flamenco Complex.” Ethnomusicology. 33, 1, 47–65, 1989. https://doi.org/ 10.2307/852169. Web. 3 December 2018. Motta, Sara C. and Alf G. Nilsen. “Social Movements and/in the Postcolonial: Dispossession, Development and Resistance in the Global South.” In Social Movements in the Global South: Dispossession, Development and Resistance, edited by Sara. C. Motta and Alf Nilsen. Rethinking International Development Series. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print. Mudimbe, V. Y. On African Fault Lines: Meditations on Alterity Politics. University of Kwa-Zulu Natal University Press, 2013. Print. Radano, Ronald and Philip V. Bohlman. “Introduction.” In Music and the Racial Imagination, edited by Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman, 1–53. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Print. Regelski, Thomas and J. Terry Gates. “Grounding Music Education in Changing Times.” In Music Education for Changing Times: Guiding Visions for Practice, edited by Thomas Regelski and J. Terry Gates, xix–xxx. Dordrecht and Heidelberg: Springer, 2009. Print. Rock, David. Politics in Argentina, 1890–1930: The Rise and Fall of Radicalism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Print. Rommen, Timothy. “Landscapes of Diaspora.” In The Cambridge History of World Music, edited by Philip V. Bohlman, 557–583. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Print. Sauls, James D. “Urban Cowboys: An Examination of Gaucho Identity Formation in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.” PhD diss., Graduate College of

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the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2015. Proquest Dissertations. https://www.noshelfrequired.com/?s=sauls+phd+dissertation+urban+ cowboys. Web. 3 January 2020. Saura, Carlos. Carmen. Madrid: Emiliano Piedra, 1983. Film. Schwartz-Kates, Deborah. The Gauchesco Tradition as a Source of National Identity in Argentine Art Music (ca. 1890–1955). PhD Diss. University of Texas-Austin. 1997. Web. 21 February 2020. Shepherd, John. “Breaking Through Our Own Barriers.” In Music Education for Changing Times: Guiding Visions for Practice, edited by Thomas Regelski and J. Terry Gates, 110–118. Dordrecht and Heidelberg: Springer, 2009. Print. Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988. Print. Teaching Children About South America. https://www.teacherspayteachers. com/Product/Teach-Kids-About-South-America-Uruguayan-Gauchos-AllAround-This-World-2876342. Web. 12 December 2019. Trumpener, Katie. “Bela Bartok and the Rise of Comparative Ethnomusicology: Nationalism, Race, Purity, and the Legacy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.” In Music and the Racial Imagination, edited by Ronald Radano and Philip Bohlman, 403–434. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Print. Washabaugh, William. Flamenco Music and National Identity in Spain. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012. Print. Waxer, Lise. “Situating Salsa: Latin American Music at the Crossroads.” In Situating Salsa: Global Markets and Local Meaning in Latin Popular Music, edited by Lise Waxer, 3–22. New York: Routledge, 2002. Print.

CHAPTER 4

Fictions of Origin: Music Appreciation, Multiculturalism, and World Music

Abstract The main aim of this chapter is to show how multiculturalism and its latest iteration “world music” emerged from the theories of cultural, geographic, and racial origins present in foundational documents of early music education and Music Appreciation, the dominant music curriculum in public schools for most of the twentieth century. It describes the major shifts in the music curriculum from 1900 through the early decades of the twenty-first century, sequentially appearing as Music Appreciation, Multiculturalism, and World Music. Keywords Music appreciation · Multiculturalism · Evolution of civilizations

This chapter describes the major shifts in the music curriculum from 1900 through the early decades of the twenty-first century, sequentially appearing as Music Appreciation, Multiculturalism, and World Music. As described in Chapter 2, the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries established the foundational concepts of modern education. Music education assumed the Enlightenment premise that the progress of mankind depended on the recognition of inferior cultures and their difference from the reason essential to the economic enterprises and intellectual institutions of the West.

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One of the aims of this chapter is to show how multiculturalism and its latest iteration “world music” emerged from the theories of cultural, geographic, and racial origins of the earlier commitment to Music Appreciation, the dominant music curriculum in public schools. In many ways the latter was the precursor of multicultural music education in that it adopted a similar theoretical framework for identifying music and its principle audiences through the lenses of race, geographic roots, and aesthetic taste. Multiculturalism was far from alone in constructing cultural and racial hierarchies. Medicine, psychology, anthropology, philosophy, education, and other disciplines categorized individuals according to race and country of origin in their quest for inherited mental and physical superiority of Northern European descendants. While in its own right, the multicultural movement in the 1980s and 90s attempted to grapple with Eurocentrism by designing a palette of equally valued cultures, its formulation of identities for music, I will describe, contributes to the maintenance of the racial stereotypes from the early years of public music education in the 1840s to the present. Similarly, the recent popularity of “World Music” commercial enterprises depends on the recognition of enduring fictional origins that form exotic visual and audial hybrids designed to attract viewers on the Internet (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000: 25–28; Sheppard 2013). In Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line, Paul Gilroy argues that projects based on notions of cultural identity continue to assign essential origins: “The main problem that we face in making sense of these and more recent developments [such as multiculturalism and World Music] is the lack of a means of adequately describing … intermixture, fusion, syncretism without suggesting the existence of anterior ‘uncontaminated’ purities” (2000: 250). In other words, cultural identity, a cornerstone of the Music Appreciation, Multiculturalism, and World Music pedagogy rest on essential differences of race, birthplace, and ethnicity without recognition of the diasporic fusion and cross-territorial formation of music over many epochs and spaces. This does not mean that race, geography, or culture, often used interchangeably, should be short-changed when used to challenge discrimination and/or exploitation. Racial, ethnic, and cultural identities used in conjunction with music, however, are often, in themselves, discriminatory and misused, especially so when it comes to validating claims for a share of cultural capital and commercial value

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invested in a particular genre or composition. Claims of lineage are especially problematic in American music when documentation is absent and racial attribution has been used to stereotype and ridicule minority groups (Lott 1995). The political and social environment for judging cultural capital constitute a “mentality” traceable to the colonial ventures and systems of knowledge embedded in Enlightenment thinking. While this mentality does not include the total population existing within spheres under Western control, nevertheless it maintains a role in the appraisal of cultural capital and or/aesthetic worth that had insured classical music listeners a higher rank in society (Bourdieu 1991). Music teacher training is increasingly bound to cultural, geographic, and racial origin narratives without regard to the fraught policies and social tensions that have compelled the racialization of music itself (Agawu 1995; Radano and Bohlman 2000: 1–53). The central task of the contemporary general music teacher is to deliver a diverse array of music based on the multicultural cultural demographics in his/her classroom. Aside from inaccuracies. Complexities, and ambiguities regarding identity, the stock of knowledge about differentiated cultures, races, and geographies creates problems for those students and teachers who experience multiple “homelands,” racial, ethnic, and linguistic identities on a daily basis and over the course of months and years (Joseph et al. 2018; Mendoza-Denton 2008). Looking at music education through the lens of a diasporic perspective eliminates the perceived necessity to affix racial and cultural essences to students or to music. A diasporic perspective unsettles certainties of origin. In place of sureness, it complicates the relations between recent émigrés, indigenous, and older settler groups. It notes discrepancies between claims of ethnic essence and a view of history that brings different lineages into the picture. Judgments of taste were part of the Enlightenment idea of the evolution of civilizations for centuries before the invention of recorded sound. Most evident in teacher manuals produced by the recording industry for Music Appreciation in school programs, a far-reaching communication network, including radio, made it possible to codify the supposed similarities and differences between human kinds and their abilities, tastes, and practices. Built on Enlightenment theories of culture, the Music Appreciation recording and radio industries supported programs in which the pedagogy demonstrated how music evolves toward higher levels of refinement and civilization while some music fails to reach higher aesthetic

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planes. A hundred years ago, Music Appreciation was a new embodiment of “the evolution of civilizations” paradigm. By the beginning of the twentieth century, an array of music from around the world had entered the United States. The songs and dances of Scandinavian, Native American, Negro, Eastern European, and British peoples, included in the earlier Music Appreciation curriculum, stood for unchanging folk music. In contrast, to music educators and some American elites, the music emanating from the Global South (e.g., jazz and ragtime) posed a challenge to the image of civilizational progress in the United States. Seizing on the historical moment of mass immigration of blacks northward as a cultural crisis, the recording industry, led by the Victor Talking Machine Company under the direction of Frances Elliott Clark, a prominent music educator, aligned musical growth in the child with the concept of the stepwise stages of civilization from primitive to modern (1901). For much educational reform modeled on Dewey’s principles in the first half of the twentieth century, Music Appreciation courses produced by RCA (Radio Corporation of American, previously the Victor Talking Machine) adopted the modern view that education should be built on a foundation of everyday, direct experience and not upon the collection of facts and impressions from experts. In tandem with Dewey’s educational philosophy, the field of developmental psychology contributed to music education’s scope by integrating Dewey’s theory of the stages of levels of skill in students and to the selection of music for graded classroom instruction. Yet, despite the notoriety of Dewey’s outlook on the role of the arts in democratic education, protocols to cultivate preferences for visual art and music followed a stepwise ranking of cultures (Dewey 1934; Popkewitz 2005). Attempts to diversify the general music curriculum by differentiating cultures appeared in several texts. The “Indian” ballad, for example, takes its place in early Music Appreciation texts as an example of the “primitive” in music, often characterizing the Native American as blood thirsty and unfeeling. These descriptions were poles apart from the sensibility of the genteel, white listener. In the early twentieth century, songs ostensibly representing Native American music were in the Victor Talking Machine manuals for teachers. A lesson on a Blackfoot song serves as the beginning point of musical evolution; representing the monotonal ancestor of classical music and exhibiting child-like ideas of the afterlife. One prominent music educator, employed by Victor Talking Machines, wrote: “Folk song

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and folk dance are the wild flowers in music—the spontaneous expression of primitive peoples” (Rhetts 1923: 20). On occasion, a Native American song was in a separate category, often given a foreign identity. With the latest in phonograph design, advertising and distribution centers, Music Appreciation built a national music curriculum for elementary and secondary students across 48 states in addition to similar instructional programs for teachers-in-training in regional Normal Schools. Manuals printed by the Victor company delineated the differences between classical music and a selection of folk music, including an extensive set of recordings with lesson plans (Education Department of Victor Talking Machine 1923). The effects of the Victor and RCA systems designed for teachers cannot be overestimated. Distributed at the height of the Jim Crow and the eugenics movement when music educators used the Music Appreciation materials to heighten racial/musical differences, music memory contests on local and national radio broadcasts became platforms to promote the RCA Victor recordings for use in the home, but also to disseminate the promise of classical music as a national cultural treasure. With lucrative contracts for sale of the school curriculum and phonograph in tandem with domestic sales, the company capitalized on employing music educators who functioned as sales representatives for the phonographs and manuals of Victor Talking Machines and its later formation as RCA Victor (Cady 1923). The agenda of RCA and other major broadcasters was to enlighten and civilize the masses through serious music. At base, these protocols and materials ranked differences in musical development by human type. As a national project, music appreciation produced scales of worthiness for musical ability and taste modeled on widely read texts on the subject from previous decades.1 Lowest to highest (classical music) dispositions were synonymous with the “natural” steps taken by nations and continents. When coupled with psychological tests on ability and the eugenics movement sweeping the country, the custom designed RCA materials organized a hierarchy of music based on race, ethnicity, and nationality.

1 Discussions of types of listeners run through the pedagogical literature on music appreciation. See for instance the widely read text by Sir Hubert Parry The Evolution of the Art of Music (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1883/1901) and Thomas Surette and Daniel Gregory Mason’s The Appreciation of Music (New York: Novello and Co., 1907), I, 1–3.

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Thus, Radio broadcasting corporations played an important leading role in the Music Appreciation curriculum and in the formation of the racial imagination in the twentieth century. But it would be a mistake to cite the radio and gramophone industry, for example, the Radio Corporation of America, university music educators, or music teachers as autonomous agents who set about teaching the differences between primitive versus advanced musical cultures and abilities. Theories of comparative culture were deeply embedded in popular and scholarly thought. Eugenics, a pseudo-scientific movement based on superficial racial differences and aimed at increasing the reproduction of individuals with superior talent, had framed particular composers as products of national genius (Galton 1869/1962: 393–404).2 Furthermore, as the popularization of eugenics theories gained ground, protocols to test for desirable mental and physical traits had already emerged in institutions where music was taught prior to the formal research agendas of music educations (Devaney 2019). Carl Seashore, founder of music psychology at a major research university in the Midwest, used his early twentieth-century experiments to link measurable parameters of hearing to musical ability. The new field of psychoacoustics, of which he was a proponent, produced tests with categories of listeners that endowed public music instruction with the capacity to divide children along racial lines through comparative exercises in rhythm, pitch, taste, and comprehension (Seashore 1915, 1916, 1919). Predicated on Galton’s notion that musical abilities were inborn, the supposition of inherited talent or lack thereof, was based upon a dubious selection of criteria for participation and resulted in vigorous efforts to determine racial differences in musical ability (Koza ….). Despite these weaknesses, Seashore’s work further infused public music instruction with narrow definitions of talent and a large testing agenda. Procedures grounded in racial biases became routine protocols for access to music education at many levels, having severe consequences for educational equity at the present time (Devaney 2019; Koza 2009).3

2 See Penelope Murray’s account of genius in her “Introduction” to Genius: The History of an Idea (London: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 1–8. 3 Also see chapter entitled “The Comparative Worth of Different Races” in Francis Galton’s Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences (Cleveland: Meridian Books 1869/1962), 393–404.

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This is not surprising given that for decades the public’s enthusiasm for eugenics and Music Appreciation programs converged to make public music education appear consonant with the progress of the nation. Emanating from many local and national broadcasts as well as settlement institutions such as Hull House in Chicago, Music Appreciation lessons coincided with the progressive project of shaping democratic citizens. Radio programs under the heading of “Music Appreciation” assuaged fear of immigration from all corners of the globe and quelled anxieties regarding the internal migration of blacks from the southern United States to the industrial cities in the North. NBC radio’s School of the Air rejected charges of elitism by pointing to the nationwide scope of radio programs that would convince Americans of their “common heritage” in fine music (Goodman 2011: 33, 128, 133, 135). Yet, despite the circumstances in which teacher training in music appreciation protocols set the standard for music instruction throughout most of the twentieth century, rural and urban immigrants from afar as well as a large portion of the settled population were not passive followers of the principles of its programs. The tastes of the public, comprised of all social and racial groups, led to radio programming of jazz and other popular forms of music, thereby challenging the idea that classical music represented a “common heritage.” Popular music eventually won out on radio and record sales despite the systematic and nationwide efforts embodied in RCA’s school and community programming. As I have argued, the status of music appreciation in music education training for teachers, with its ability to capitalize on the idea of comparative civilizations so deeply embedded in music history texts, endured through the practices of multiculturalism and world music. By the mid-90s, the Music Appreciation curriculum had almost entirely given way to multiculturalism in efforts to change the Eurocentric focus of music education gathered steam. Multiculturalism became an umbrella term for the inclusion of the purportedly representative music of minorities previously left out of music instruction. Changes to the curriculum under this umbrella term have, however, retained the principle of single or hybrid ethnic “origins” for musical works, leading to the “us” versus “others” train of thought as I have discussed in Chapter 1. It has been difficult to change the biases underlying these points of reference as they have pervaded multicultural curriculum guides. As Julia Koza writes, the overall focus in music schools and conservatories where teachers receive certification remains on children experiencing the “high art” of

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music and its cultural “identity,” slighting the aesthetic qualities of nonEuropean music (2009: 85–95). Randall Allsup, also an advocate for critical reflection on contemporary music education, challenges teachers “to move beyond the comfortable. … Few teachers can be blamed for wanting to freeze time in its tracks … to tune out the unlovely and surprising, to quiet the buzzing of twenty-first-century life …There may be a great longing by many for the closed and categorical.” By “the closed and categorical” Allsup is referring to, for example, didactic lessons on theme, harmony, and structure. For many students, Allsup writes, music presented without theoretical descriptors transmits a sense of unspoken possibilities of meaning and interpretation (2016: x, 132). Similarly, Paul Gilroy argues in “Diaspora and Detours of Identity,” that the concept of diaspora, lacking closed categories, offers a vision of culture that allows for nuance, heterogeneity within and among groups of people or artifacts. Diaspora implies worldliness that pushes against comparative scales of cultural development. It also moves beyond the closed and categorical to consider previously unknown affinities and intercultural encounters between peoples previously thought to be culturally distinct (1997: 299– 346). For example, Scottish ballads about male heroes and slave songs have interesting overlaps in melodic motifs. Yet, the identification of particular songs with Scottish-ness reflects the ability of the racial imagination to attribute origins for music by seizing on the novelistic portrayal of Scottish heroes while omitting the possibility of interchanges between slaves and Scots (Radano 2003: 171). An important example of cultural omission brought to light by diaspora studies are the historical interactions among the working class, an understudied subject with regard to the migrations of the Irish and the trajectory of African Americans in ante and post-Civil War decades (O’Neill and Lloyd 2009: xvi).4 Little known are the social bonds between Irish peasants and former slaves. The latter had served as symbolic surrogates for one another when oppression and Britain’s genocidal policies had similar effects on their fate (Gough 2018: 2, 15). Moreover, rich sources of contact between African American and Irish

4 Literature on music education has recently opened a path to recognizing the diasporic production of music as evidenced in lessons on jazz and rock music. On the whole, however, multicultural texts have maintained the “origin’ narratives for genres predating the Jazz Age. See, for example, Anderson and Campbell (2010: 113).

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music comes through recent research on dock workers in the Atlanticbordering states where social encounters often included exchanges of music (Womack 2012). Evidence of black and green (Irish) musical encounters exists in the dances and instrumentation of minstrel acts in the 1800s (Lott 1995: 94). By late century, the taken for granted identity of minstrel songs had become black, despite the central role of whites in the performances and composition of racially caricatured lyrics in minstrelsy. Suffice it to say that the “blackening” of the Irish and linkage to African slaves by settled antebellum whites was commonplace as the Irish were also seen as a different human subtype. Unfortunately, over the century when the Irish “became” white (1830–1930), mutual recognition of the experiences of oppression ceased. Conditions for whites improved while those of blacks did not (Lloyd 2009: 3–17). Due to the process of racialization occurring within the labor market, the granting of citizenship to the Irish, and the withholding of civil rights for blacks, the racial identities attached to music reflected antagonisms and competition between Irish and black laborers in the United States (Coogan 2012; Gough 2018: 2–6; Lott 1995: 67, 71, 94; Samito 2009). The struggle for civil rights in the 1950s and 60s, embodied in the Brown Decision of 1954 ordering the desegregation of public schools, prompted only limited change in the music curriculum. Transition to a more equitable approach to the music curriculum was slow (Mark 1998). There was a long transitional time during which pedagogy of Music Appreciation continued to dominate music education. While nationally prominent music educators endorsed multiculturalism in the 1990s in order to reflect greater diversity among school populations, texts such as Music Appreciation for the Elementary Grades by Tanner and Wilcox (2013) are commonly found on the Internet for use in home schooling and in schools. In between 1960 and the 1990s, it was common to find black music represented by songs from sentimental pre-Civil War collections. A set of lessons and recordings published by the Willis Music Company of Cincinnati in 1962 titled Music Appreciation for the Elementary Schools, Grades 1–6 by Jeanne Marie Lortie illustrates this point. In one lesson on Negro music, there is an imaginary tour of the lower Mississippi by Stephen Foster who first published his songbooks in 1851. Lortie’s text memorializes Foster’s affection for slaves by picturing him listening to wharf laborers sing and dance “Juba, Juba.” The song’s lineage is complicated and attributions of its lyrics are largely supposition. As Lortie would have

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it, in her introduction to the song, the images are of a collection of happy, kinky haired boys singing and dancing around a bale of cotton. The words of the song are: Juba dis and Juba dat, and Juba killed da yellow cat, You sift the meal and ya gimme the husk, you bake the bread and ya gimme the crust, you eat the meat and ya gimme the skin, and that’s the way, my mama’s troubles begin. (composer unknown appearing in Lortie 1962)

Research on music of the pre-Civil War era, however, allows us to filter the picture of slave music in Lortie’s text through representations of blacks as content in bondage, living out the destiny of their “natural” musical capacities. Historical commentary on slave songs reveals that accounts of its existence are absent and that commentary on slave songs went through a period of silence. Testimony of the performance of slave songs was rare. In Lortie’s fictional scene, “Juba” is folklore, but evidence of a black/white shared musical space, according to what is now known about an affinity between Irish and black workers in the early nineteenth century would imply an integrated social environment in which the fast-moving, complicated rhythm of dances performed to “Juba” (viewable on the Internet today) appear. These dance steps are reconstructed from accounts of social dancing in the eighteenth century and the minstrel tradition, in which jig-like dancing emerged from interchanges between Irish immigrants and African Americans who labored together on the wharves of Baltimore, New York City, and Boston. Informal social encounters blended the steps of the Irish jig with West African dance motifs which some scholars refer to as remnants of culture surviving the Atlantic crossings of both the Irish and Africans. “Da yellow cat,” a phrase that is typically in the first verse of “Juba,” refers to violence against white slave owners occurring in slave rebellions, possibly in the nineteenth century or earlier. Thus, there is a mingling of two traditions in “Juba”: the dance movements of a jig and the coded lyrics that reach back to the repressed history of the Atlantic diasporas. In the Music Appreciation text of 1962 by Lortie, “Juba” represents a “blackening” of a creolized form. Nonetheless, it gestures toward the revelation of spaces shared by whites

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and blacks that have been obscured and emotionally contested as to racial origins (Radano 2003: 328n18, 375n106; Womack 2012). “Juba Juba” and other so-called Negro songs popular in the 1800s had a prominent role in the rise of a vocation for white entertainers as minstrels. Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface, Minstrelsy, and the American Working Class describes audiences’ preference for whites in blackface in place of black entertainers as a complex effect of the subjugation of black subjects. Several factors—the economic threat of black labor replacing whites, fear of black women, and the projections of homosexuality through the feminization of black men on stage contributed to the popularity of white men in blackface. Accounts of a “first” performances of minstrelsy places this genre in the years between 1828 and 1832 when T. D. Rice, purportedly “white,” as the story goes, put on blackface and borrowed a black laborer’s work clothes to sing “Jump Jim Crow.” This event reportedly took place in a New York City theatre. In 1840, a man dubbed “Master Juba,” white, but painted in blackface, William Henry Lane, imitated fictional minstrels whose choreography combined and transformed dance steps of slave and Irish immigrants (1995: 152–155). The silence falling over the blended, neither black nor white ballad “Juba” marks a larger fictional narrative of nation and race in which the country and its music is homogeneously white while black music’s strangeness that mirrored notions of African primitivity. Part of the narrative was that black music, at times, exhibited the transcendent creativity of a debased race.5 “Juba”’s place in Lortie’s Music Appreciation manual, however, engages with racial stereotypes that often appeared in minstrelsy acts: the mimicry of racially imagined personae by whites including the joyful and docile figure of the plantation slave. Notably, her manual omits mention of the ridicule and vicarious thrills that “Juba” and other songs written in dialect had contributed to myths about slavery. Similar to other manuals for elementary school music teachers in that era, “Juba” portrayed slaves as child-like folk who had no harsh feelings about labor on the wharves of the Mississippi and the hardships of plantation life. “Massa’s in the Cold, Cold Ground,” written by Stephen Foster, is another example of imaginary life under slavery. Appearing in the RCA library accompanying many standard Music Appreciation manuals, 5 See Ronald Radano’s extended discussion in Lying Up a Nation on the historical construction of African and African American music in his chapter titled, “Resonances of Racial Absence” (2003: 49–104).

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“Massa” paints a picture of a slave mourning the loss of his or her master. It begins with a picture of the slave’s master buried in “de cold, cold ground” and proceeds with descriptions of “darkeys” mourning his passing since he was “so kind.” He sadly left “dem” behind to weep at his absence (quotes from Stephen Foster 1852 as appearing in Lortie 1962).6 “Massa’s in the Cold Cold Ground” is a performance of ventriloquy in which Foster has appropriated use of a dialect associated with blackness. In language and subject, it represents a form of popular entertainment that had a notable presence on theater stages for over one hundred years. Published in Foster’s song collection, Old Folks at Home (1852) the song gained a lasting reputation, percolating in national consciousness as an authentic slave song despite the authorship of Foster. It lived as a picture of slaves’ emotions in the pre-Civil War period through its performances on radio, television, and in educational institutions well into the twentieth century. As historian of American culture Everett Carter wrote, these sound images of Negro voices were part of a “plantation illusion” containing many fictional elements. Chief among them was a belief in the “golden age” of the antebellum South when slaves were loyal, tranquil, and happy (1960: 350). The sentimentality of Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” stands in dramatic contrast to the abolitionist picture of the cruelty and deprivation slaves suffered. Disseminated in novels, newspapers and speeches, dual narratives of musical eloquence, slave tranquility, and the endurance of suffering under bondage gave rise to the belief that blacks were “natural” musicians whose talents were enhanced by servitude (Radano 2003: 144, 146). Immensely popular among whites, songs celebrating the tranquility of slave life indicate how robust the idea of African Americans transcending suffering through music became over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as sentimental narratives of slavery permeated the Music Appreciation movement. While Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” were popular as a model of slaves’ emotions, we come to the question of authentic African American song. How is that authors of music appreciation guides for teachers assigned African American origin to songs written by Stephen Foster? Within the social context of antebellum culture in the South where Foster lived and worked, the evidence is considerable that the many 6 See Lyrics by Stephen Foster as posted on web by University of Pittsburgh. http:// www.pitt.edu/~amerimus/lyrics.htm.

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versions of “coon songs” or minstrel ballads were understood as neither black nor white. Ken Emerson, a Stephen Foster biographer, suggests that the composer “crossed paths” with numerous minstrel performers whose songs have been traced to Scottish and Irish tunes. Foster’s brother, Morrison, recalled that a black servant in the household regularly took Stephen to an African Methodist Episcopal Church during her tenure with the Foster family. In Love and Theft, Eric Lott describes lowerclass entertainment and musical life as cross-racial; it included whites, and prominent among them Irish immigrants, mixing with slaves and servants of all kinds for work and a variety of spontaneous musical and comic entertainments (1995: 47). Lott writes, “Frederik Douglass once remarked that the only songs that came close to the pathos of slave songs were the ones he had heard in Ireland in 1845-6” during the Famine (95). Adding to the racial complexity of popular entertainment in the antebellum decades, black minstrel performers were often cast as white backwoods pioneers at a time when the cities in the Northeast had become more industrialized and the image of the primitive past satisfied a need to be entertained by uncivilized, “lesser” human types of all backgrounds (Emerson 1997: 68–71). The era of racial cross-identification in entertainment marked a time in which new versions of minstrelsy built and solidified older racial ideologies. Ballad structures varied among versions of the same song, reflecting cross-borrowing in both directions of black/white interactions (Lott 1995: 175–176). Identification of the music as black came about through the use of blackface, mimicry, and stock appropriation of dialect remained the indelible features of racism in Jim Crow legislation prevalent in the Music Appreciation movement. Despite anti-slavery sentiment, the outcome of the Civil War, and later rulings for desegregation of public schools, cultural merging from the pre-Civil War era to the mid twentieth century was still too dangerous an idea. It suggested racial amalgamation. As Lott comments, the racial anxieties evoked by whites performing “Negro” songs led to intense denial of racial mixing in any context: personal, social, or economic (1995: 57, 58). A probable consequence was that Stephen Foster’s compositions passed as Negro folk songs in music appreciation manuals such as the one assembled by Lortie in the early 1960s. This was also a time when Negro Spirituals first came to have a place in music instruction in the public schools after the publication of Frances Elliott Clark’s music history course of the early 1900s. Described as examples of musical sublimity, Music Appreciation proponents suggested an

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origin for Spirituals beyond the materiality of black bodies. Edith Rhetts’ Outlines of a Brief Study of Music Appreciation for High Schools (1923) places “Negro Spirituals” in a category of a national song, implying a separate origin for Spirituals other than an American grounding: perhaps African, but left unstated. Anne Shaw Faulkner’s What We Hear in Music (1931), written as a high school and college music appreciation curriculum, includes “Spirituals” under the heading “Primitive Music of America.” The narrative of a separate “African” origin for the melodies of Spirituals ran unopposed until the work of several scholars compared these songs with Methodist and Baptist evangelical music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After considerable debate about which racial group shaped the form, melodies, rhythms, and lyrics of Spirituals, with textual and content comparisons offered on both sides of the white versus black question of origin, Lawrence Levine concludes that the consciousness, not necessarily the musical language of Spirituals, indicates the continuous experience with slavery at a personal level (2007: 24–25). Nevertheless, the mixed origin of minstrelsy and Spirituals have been issues of great contention as it questioned the notion of an essential musical difference emerging from race per se. These debates call attention to cultural and interpersonal exchanges as features of racial intermixing. While there could be no doubt by commentators in the nineteenth century that a transfer of some kind occurred to account for whites singing “black” songs in minstrel performances, the notion of transfer of Spiritual singing suggested the possibility of mixed socializing and familial connections as well as the sexual privileges enfolded in master/slave power relations. Racial origin theories and notions of racially authentic sources of Spirituals is often a defense of black creation and appears in response to appropriation of what has come to be known as black music. The use of racial difference as a root of creation serves a form of cultural capital adhering to musicians and audiences (Pantoja 2017), but the question of how to racially categorize music often leads to contradiction. In reaction to the dominance of Eurocentric scales of worthiness in music, as well as the bias of institutional support for music associated with whiteness, the Black Arts Movement, a continuation of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, also championed the idea of a racial origin for the African American sound. If Afrocentrism constructs an African identity through the ambiguity of history, it is also an attempt to mitigate the effects of white supremacist on many different scales (Radano 2003: 10, 35–42,

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56–58, 294n 28; Thomas 1995; Ware 2001: 185). Theories of monolithic African-ness, however, reduce centuries of intersecting traditions to produce a record of “black music” as if unchanged by interactions with Europe and indigenous groups throughout the Western hemisphere. Notions of essential blackness in music, have fueled stereotypes of African American sexuality and irrationality tied to rhythm (Radano 2000: 459–480). In the introduction to the chapter on African and African American music in Multicultural Perspectives in Music Education (2010), for example, “African origin” implies singular origin; yet, the assertion is challenged by the notion that African Americans altered European musical practices to fit the form and content of their music. “African American Music” emerges from the “adaptation of the major European musical characteristics by slaves in early American history is evidenced by “tonal language practices…regularity of pitch…. and the European ‘sound phenomenon,’” the latter further described in the chapter as “the method of creating and making music” in an African American context (Moore et al. 2010: 47–48). The source for the songs in the chapter referred to, “I Want To Be Ready” and “Seven Times,” is John W. Work’s American Negro Songs (1998) in which the author states that the formal shape of call and response is “peculiar to African music … not reproduced in any of America’s music save the Negro spiritual until imitated on the minstrel stage” (9). While “call and response” serves in Work’s collection as an assertion of African essence, music scholars have shown that this form was too widespread to bear up as solely African, or as the authors of the chapter in Multicultural Perspectives in Music Education suggest, to be an adaptation of African music to European sound phenomena. Historical precedents for call and response show that the form was in use among white laborers in the United States, among Europeans, in Pentecostal churches, and among singers at the religious revival camps throughout New England and the South. With the segregation of the work force and later, negative views of Pentecostal practices, call and response repertory became more closely associated with slavery and blackness than with the practices of a broad American working class. While it is the case that work songs were commonly sung by slaves, call and response has an indeterminate lineage, dispelling notions of African origin and racial essence (Alexander 2011; Masolo 2000: 350; Radano 2000: 461; 2003: 159– 161; Radano and Bohlman 2000: 5). Counter arguments emphasize the power of appropriation in the marketplace: “[Minstrelsy] is all around us

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… fomenting a process of black culture being marketed for white profit” (Womack 2012: 85). The idea of cultural uniqueness is one also used by some country music musicians and fans. For example, “Real Country” music in South Central Texas displays particular characteristics of speech and lyrics about work, war and patriotism. These subjects in tandem with a musical signature have given “Real Country” a form of cultural capital to the white workingclass fans and musicians who feel their way of life threatened by demographic and economic changes (Fox 2004: 26–27; Radano 2003: 155–159). In addition to strategies of producing cultural capital there is an entrenchment of mutual adaptation narratives in an attempt to avoid the presumption of single origin. Mutual adaptation narratives suggest that Negro songs are “hybrids.” But while terms such as adaptation, influence, and hybrid reflect the inextricable blending of musical qualities on the one hand, on the other they instill certainty in the idea of particular origins, one white, one black that solidify imaginary racial components in the music itself. Given the prevalence of notions of racial origins, but also the persistence of race as a powerful factor in community and personal identity, Ronald Radano writes, “Black music research becomes a kind of dreamwork … drawing sound from silence …What emerges ‘unforgotten’ are the strains of accumulated texts that find new form in the modern as ‘resonance.’” The term “resonance” is a place holder for what cannot be known about the origins of musical practices since empty spaces of the time and place of transmission speak of repetitions without a definite beginning. What we hear as resonances are echoes of hypothesized “originals” made different through time. The emergence of racial difference in music is a key element of the formation of racial ideology in the United States (Radano 2003: 52–53). In her groundbreaking study of pre-Civil War folk music, Dena Epstein asserts that the question of origins is unresolvable given the gaps of evidence of a “pure” beginning for any one vocal or instrumental event (1977). Since the imagined beginning of slave performance, the additional complications of appropriation and commodification have entered the picture. Against such vagueness and controversy, in Epstein’s view, the testimonies of prominent African American writers such as W. E. B. Dubois and Frederick Douglass whose hearing of slave songs as tales of suffering underlines the horrifying racially perpetrated history expressed in vocal music.

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But what we commonly see in many music appreciation and multicultural guides is the entrenchment of distinctions of musical dispositions between races rather than class as described by Pierre Bourdieu (1984: 14–18). Although there are few studies of that have expanded Bourdieu’s findings to race (Cui 2017), discontent with the racial and socioeconomic aspects of high attrition rates in music programs in the United States led to efforts to diversify the Eurocentric bias of the music curriculum in the mid-1960 and 1970s. Music educators expanded the small space in the curriculum devoted to “folk music” in the Music Appreciation texts. The effect of change was far from fundamental, as for example, with a manual published as late as 1991 for classroom use and music teacher training institutions. The manual includes brief mentions of nonWestern genres such as Asian and African American music (Hoffer et al. 1991: 12). Despite efforts to transition to multiculturalism and world music as evidenced in Bakan’s manual, a robust market for popular books on music had already established itself, most of which stereotyped the music of minority groups as lacking harmony, logical form, and “seriousness.” Ruth Zinar, author of a study of books on music for the general public, describes one children’s book as highlighting Stephen Foster’s songs as stand-ins for the contributions of African Americans. Several of the books in her study found their way to teachers whose training leaned heavily on libraries with limited information on the history of music, especially so with regard to Native and African Americans (Zinar 1975: 33).7 Decades later when “world music” became a popular media trend, a sizeable text published in 2012 provides technical resources to teach “how music works” across the globe. Addressing Euro and ethnocentrism, the author adopts the multicultural approach of identifying music as belonging to national and ethnic categories, distinguishing each selection through analytic terms common in Western music scholarship (Bakan 2012: xxviii, 7). In last two decades of the twentieth century the concern for diversity was overshadowed by standards for education and concerns for academic achievement. Whether the meeting up of cultural diversity and the enforcement of standards was strategic or not, it is clear that standards for assessing music learning came into vogue at about the same 7 Books for adults registered exceptions to racial stereotyping cited by Zinar are America’s Music by Gilbert Chase (1955), John Rublowsky’s Music in America (1967), and Nancy Hess and Stephanie Wolf’s The Sounds of Time (1969).

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time as the zenith of multicultural curricula. Political attention, in the form of a “nation at risk” focused on the “emergency” and the need for testing in all school subjects as well as the grading of schools and teachers (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983). In some school districts, university music educators took on the task of designing tests to measure teacher inputs against student outcomes. If something positive for music teachers came from testing protocols, it was awareness of the steep attrition rates of minority students from music programs and the shortcomings of meeting the goals of earlier diversity reforms (Gustafson 2009; Mark 1986: 221–227). More recently, renewed efforts in the form of publications aimed at home listeners and classroom teaching are part of a large selection of multicultural and world music lessons available in print and on the Internet. Organized around ethnic categories, this vast array of material in English distinguishes non-Western forms of musicmaking from European techniques. Multicultural Perspectives in Music Education by Anderson and Campbell (2010) uses “ancestry” as an alternative for African and/or African American “origin.” Selections in other recently published texts suggest a “foreign” and “primitive” ancestry similar to the one used in the earliest music appreciation guides by Frances Elliott Clark (1901: 5–7) and Agnes Fryberger (1925: 249). The establishment of ancestry with regard to music spans a history of fabricating qualitative distinctions between races and civilizations. The term recalls its use in the eugenics theories of Francis Galton who believed that children of parents of high social standing would exhibit the same capabilities that made their parents successful members of society. Notions of ancestry and the inherited talent of races produced narratives about Negro singing as the heart of the American spirit as well as its opposite—that black singers lacked the reason and intellect to rise above savagery. Institutional aesthetic preferences for whiteness has found the quality of black singing inadmissible as it failed to meet Eurocentric standards of performance (Koza 2009: 85–95; Radano 2003: 147–148). In general, black music goes unnoticed in history of music texts available for music majors. A widely used college textbook for music majors circa 1970–1980, Donald Jay Grout’s A History of Western Music (1973), makes no mention of an African American musical tradition except for the vague comment that some composers blended folk music with a “cosmopolitan style” and a reference to Stephen Foster as a composer of “urban popular minstrelsy” (Grout 1973: 643, 678). While mindful of a multicultural consciousness in academia, the 2010 edition

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of A History of Western Music by Donald Jay Grout, J. Peter Burkholder, and Claude V. Palisca, is similar to earlier editions. Following the principle of what the authors call a “quintessentially Western” capacity to absorb foreign elements such as the “World Beat” style of Paul Simon’s collaborative South African project in Graceland, reference to Western music marginalizes the “other” in both racial and musical terms (985). Efforts to break away from mainstream narratives have led music historians and ethnomusicologists to examine the power dynamics in the creation of notions of foreignness and belonging. The wide dissemination of “world beat” and “world music” is both ideologically and economically tied to Western musical values. Twenty-first-century recording devices circulate thousands of performances each day that carry exotic identity tags such as African, Asian, or. Middle Eastern. Each offers a sense of authenticity through references to geographic and racial origination, overshadowing the intercontinental exchanges across other regions. Despite an emphasis on globalization, World Music maintains the fascination with orientalism and exoticism in its enduring preoccupation with scales of civilization from the colonial era ranking Western music as the most developed form of music (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000: 5–8; Bohlman 2002: Preface; Middleton 2013: 807; Radano 2003: 155, 336–337n69, 338n81). The music appreciation curriculum roughly from 1910 to 1970 and its later counterpart, multiculturalism, was an attempt to lessen the amount of European music and build a culturally inclusive approach to music teaching. Fundamentally, however, music appreciation and multiculturalism assert a racially essentialist claim of separate origins for black music. Even with efforts such as the Black Arts Movement to reclaim what are viewed as appropriated musical genres such as jazz and blues, racial origin remains an untenable foundation upon which to argue for exclusively black art forms. It leads back to hypothesizing musical isolation that omits the social context of interaction between peoples of different racial and ethnic identities in American history. World Music, attempts to raise awareness and the value of non-Western music through the concept of hybrid forms. In the main, however, world music relies on the dynamics of exoticism, orientalism, and notions of essential origins of foreignness as well as on visual representations of nations and continents as the geographic sources of exotic music (Bohlman 2002). For example, on tunein.com (2020), Middle Eastern, European, and Asian rubrics music keep company with Lithuanian, Greek, and Polish music

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and dance. Attracting headline attention on that website are a number of selections called “Afro-Beats,” listed as West African and African music, designating the United States as the production site. Tunein.com keeps tabulations of the number of listeners who click on each choice. In this and similar venues, World Music denotes national and continental “origins,” neglecting the untraceable encounters between musicians and audiences that produced what is vaguely noted as hybrid or fusion music and dance.8 Finding multiculturalism and World Music regressive in the sense of dependence on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western ethnomusicological analytics, some music educators and musicologists present different arguments on how to treat African music. They maintain there is no single entity capable of representing the whole continent. Dawn Joseph (2018) maintains that substantial migration from South Africa to Australia, including black indigenous peoples, but also those of European and Indian heritage, necessitates including music from various areas of Africa to teach the connection between dance and music in Australia.. Joseph discusses the difference between indigenous and endogenous African roots, the former referring to black populations and the latter to white while simultaneously invoking to the notion of a “collective heritage” in which the two groups have participated together over time (102). Dismas. A. Masolo, Africanist and ethnomusicologist, moves in the opposite direction, expressing an “unrelenting impatience with essentialism.” In his view, classification of music and people as indigenous or endogenous leads to a cul de sac in which the academic disciplines have created a space for marginalized peoples who practice non-Western forms of music (2000: 350). One of the reasons for advocating an always unfinished, diasporic condition for musical creation lies in the incommensurate notion of origins when contrasted with the constant permeability of culture, language, and music moving across and between any one work or song (Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000: 27). Another aspect to the unfinished condition of music is the constantly shifting cultural present in which it is performed. Musical elements are often cited as key factors of identity. What makes one piece analytically distinct from another for example, 8 See, for example, Michael Bakan’s World Music: Traditions and Transformations (2012) in which “world” music is treated as a collection of musical works from different nations and ethnicities.

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within the genre “Nightsongs” in South Africa, are the emotions it arouses, its lyrical allusions, and the recognition of economic and political struggles that musicians and audiences experience in daily life. Audiences are considered participants in South African music and are central to the meaning and power conveyed by singing, dancing, and drumming. Description of the musical structure itself speaks little about the social context in which it finds its audience (Erlmann 1996: xv–xxv). Masolo describes how a well-known popular song in Kenya gripped audiences through references to the socio-political tribal rivalries for the presidency of that country in the 1980s. He outlines three levels that distinguish the cultural identity of the performers and audience of a particular Kenyan song: the referential meaning of the words, the relationship between the speaker or singer to others, and how the text is interspersed throughout the song. As Masolo writes, the order of verses concern itself with the economic, social, and political ruptures in the local society. For that reason, the song is temporally complex, sometime contradictory in content and variable in structure allowing the listener to move back and forth from village to city, present to past, expressing the uncertainties of belonging to a homeland once shared by villagers (2000: 399). Commentary on African music commonly found in multicultural music guides for teachers and families, mentions the diversity of languages, tribal affiliations, and religious traditions within the continent. With some generalities about a shared philosophic outlook, these guides often divide discussions of music into sections dealing with instrumentation, melody, rhythm, texture, and similar characteristics found in three regions, roughly: North Africa, the Sudanic Belt, and the Bantu World south of the Sahara. Each of these regions is subdivided by country. While similarities and differences in music, and especially in instrumentation, are found across these regions, what is missing are the effects on musical expression stemming from long periods of colonial rule by the French, British, and Dutch Empires. In the nineteenth century changes in music were wrought by the many European missionary institutions across the Sudanic Belt and the Bantu World. Rule by colonial administrations divided these broad territories into nations even while tribal languages, kinships, and musical traditions cut across national borders.9 9 See, for example, Anderson and Campbell (2010) and Bakan (2012) for attempts to classify music in Africa by nation and/or region.

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Music labeled as indigenous underwent and continues to undergo significant change in postcolonial decades, especially so with the widespread use of television and radio. African American music was considered the model of forward-looking cultures of modern nations. During the black nationalist period and civil war in Zimbabwe, for example, indigenous elements such as drums and “village” dances merged with staged performances of missionary and popular musical styles, along with pop star fanhood for artists famous in the West. Desire for what was understood to be “progressive culture” acted as a crucible in which social class and level of education effectively overtook the traditional music making of the rural areas. This overall dynamic illustrates the desire of elites and aspiring members of the urban middle class to be part of a cosmopolitan worldview associated with modernism and the West (Turino 2000: 561–564, 578). Attention to culture along the Sudanic Belt and trade routes across the Sahara has led scholars to examine exchanges between the former kingdoms of Mali, Ghana, Morocco, Egypt, and the sub-Saharan South thousands of years previous to colonial rule to the present day (Austin 2006). Ancient trade routes speak to the diaspora of music unaccounted for in multicultural approaches to world music. When the African diaspora appears in music teaching manuals, it is limited to migrations of people from a’ homeland.’ Less attention is paid to nomads such as the Tuareg and Romani who disseminated music along the trade routes crossing Africa. The Western notion of cosmopolitanism, or the privileging of Euro-American worldviews on the Global South is undergoing revision in light of the intervention of postcolonial project by provincializing Western history and philosophy (Chakravarty 2000: 2–29). Ethnomusicology was built upon the conviction that rhythm was the hallmark of “primitive” music and that primitive music lacked a rational basis of production. According to this perspective, Africans are trapped in an irrational approach to life without a view of their own history. The status of primitive music, largely referring to African indigenous tribes being unexposed to recent history, oscillates between a reputation as an exotic product of primitive tribal culture and rejection as a legitimate form of art (Masolo 2000: 356). A diasporic perspective, I argue, is to recognize the complexities of global movement, socio-political change, and the on-going interchanges of cultural practices. With an eye to a cultural context as large and differentiated as Africa, music scholarship has been turning away from the idea of primordial roots (Erlmann 1999: 8–9). Male group dances in South Africa appeared

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as “traditional” as late as the 1920s, demonstrating that tradition is a malleable category dependent on urban versus rural memory. Popular music in and around Durban, South Africa, has also undergone significant change with respect to rural/urban musical interactions, mixing formerly recognized indigenous qualities with the strains of jazz and rock available to city dwellers. Although music educators are now questioning the value of attempting to authenticate a particular version of a musical creation as foreign or Zimbabwean Shona, for example, curriculum guides and research on multiculturalism refer to the music of the non-West in order to maintain hypothetical differences between Western and non-Western ways of organizing sound (Aubert 2007; Bakan 2012; Cain et al. 2013; Volk 2002: 53). The ever-present protocol of determining where the music comes from, specifically what national, racial, or tribal group obscures the crosscultural weaving of music across time and space. In the literature dealing with multicultural music education, we are taken down the road to primordial roots where time freezes on the threshold of colonial and missionary administration of musical life in Africa, discounting the impact of recent centuries. This posed the following conundrum for some music scholars today: how to characterize and acknowledge African roots while recognizing African American originality. In Rock Music Styles: A History by Katherine Charlton (2003), the author speculates on the earliest roots and nearest predecessor of the blues, characterizing it as a descendent distinct from the West African Griot lineage. The author reasons that the difference between Griot and American blues is due to transformations occurring during the Atlantic Crossing and exposure to European music in the United States. Both had undergone long exposure to the circulation of music from Europe, the Sudanic Belt, and Latin/Caribbean cultures. Charlton writes that African strains of “Griot” songs were also re-synthesized through connections, at various times, to Sierra Leone. Her attempt to establish a sense of the blues as original African American music encounters the difficulty of assuming both a Griot and an African American essence. Similarly, the history of reggae in Charlton’s Rock Music Styles abbreviates the rich historical/political background of the word and symbolism of reggae in opposition to the dominant interests of Jamaican society that oppresses and marginalizes the population descended from African slaves and East Indians. Both Bakan’s World Music and Charlton’s Rock Music Styles, are published as reference texts

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for classroom use. Their approach(es) to genres that have become world music point to the limits of knowledge when music is examined through the lens of origins by place, race, and ethnicity. Reggae carries allusions to Rastafari beliefs of African Messiahs, who were not in British Anglican teachings initiated by the schools and churches in the colonial and postcolonial regimes. Reggae also alludes to the violent conflicts in Jamaican history. Anita Waters describes the message of Rastafari religion in combination with reggae music have been used by the two political parties to further their hold on the black vote. Although it broadcasts a message of anti-establishment politics and, in some decades, the “Black Power” movement, the broad electorate of Jamaica’s creole population identified with the political party seeming to support Rastafari views and Reggae music. Reggae’s social power was activated in response to the history of slavery, British colonial rule, and postcolonial continuation of unequal access to the country’s resources. Thus, Reggae offers a view of the pliable aspect of music in its ability to communicate the historical impact of oppression it translates into music and lyrics. As Waters writes in Race, Class, and Political Symbols: Rastafari and Reggae in Jamaican Politics, “Scanty history [of Reggae], when revealed as such, is oppressive in retrospect” (2017: 1). Conventional and superficial historical accounts omit the ties to African messianic beliefs as the engine of some forms of political opposition. African messianism was not tied to race alone, given the dynamics of political competition in a society fraught with dire economic inequality across demographic groups (1–10). This chapter has explored how identities of musical works emerge from a crucible of the politics of knowledge. It has described the major shifts in the music curriculum 1900 through the early decades of the twenty-first century, appearing sequnetially as Music Appreciation, Multiculturalism, and World Music. It emphasized their philosophical foundation in the Enlightenment premise that the progress of mankind depended on the recognition of inferior races whose systems of knowledge about music were historically frozen in primitivity. Two theories of racism come together in the chapter. The first is that dysconscious racism or the tacit acceptance of white norms persists in our institutional life (King 1991: 133). The second is that Enlightenment ideals created a “fatal juncture” of nationality and race that clouds efforts to understand the diasporic construction of culture (1993: 2).

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In theory, music appreciation, multiculturalism, and world music posed remedies for the neglected music of minorities and others outside the circle of Western art music. On closer examination, these colorblind ideologies veil the operations of dysconscious racism that have emerged from an evolutionary view of civilizations as a timeline along which “Europe first” become the highest standard of progress. “Europe first” haunts multiculturalism in its creation of musical types that exist in the waiting room of modernity. Always indirect, the unconscious or dysconscious ranking of human types, places the “other’s” music, art, and way of life as forever awaiting inclusion in advanced civilization (Chakrabarty 2000: 3–23).

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Work, John Wesley. American Negro Songs and Spirituals. New York: Bonanza Books, 1998. Print. Zinar, Ruth. “Racial Bigotry and Stereotypes in Music Books Recommended for Use by Children.” Black Perspective in Music. 3, 1, 33–39, 1975. https:// www.jstor.org/stable/1214377?seq=1. Web. September 2019.

CHAPTER 5

Conundrums of Latin/American Music and National Belonging

Abstract This chapter explores the limitations to indexing nation and ethnicity as a strategy for wider participation in music programs where musical practices of students are transnational and personal identity is often transethnic. It also describes the advantage of a diasporic paradigm for Latin American music, serving as a model for rethinking the curriculum. The chapter includes surveys of the folk music of particular Caribbean countries, focusing closely on the rhetoric of ethnic belonging that has spearheaded efforts to stem high attrition rates in music programs. Keywords Narrative multiculturalism · Mariachi · diaspora

This chapter describes the advantage of a diasporic paradigm for Latin American music in music education programs. It includes surveys of the folk music of particular Caribbean countries, focusing closely on the rhetoric of ethnic belonging in efforts to multicultural strategies to stem high attrition rates in music programs. Offering an elective program of Mariachi band, for example, has been launched to attract students thought to identify as ethnic Mexicans to school music. This chapter explores the limitations to indexing nation and ethnicity as a strategy for wider participation in music programs when musical practices of students are transnational and personal identity is often transethnic. Rejecting © The Author(s) 2020 R. I. Gustafson, Exploring Diasporic Perspectives in Music Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52105-9_5

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origin or nativist discourse in which speaking Spanish often invites overlapping implications of nationality and race as one Latin Rock musician exclaimed, “Well I’ve never been to Spain, so don’t call me a Hispanic!” (El Vez as quoted in Avant-Mier 2010: 1). Restrictions of categorization are sometimes overcome by the sheer force of the fact that music, musicians, and audiences continually redefine themselves across political, socioeconomic, and racial divides (Clark 2005; Peña 1985, 1999; Ong 1999: 166–167; Salazar 201). The main argument in this chapter is that framing particular musical examples as anchors for ethnicity and heritage is a restrictive gesture, counter to gestures of inclusion. Multicultural lessons on the music of Latin America, as I will show, are exemplars of the way cultural nationalism adheres to expressive practices such as folk music, manufacturing a collective national sentiment that invites reckoning with the transnationality of popular forms of salsa, rock, and tango. Such a reckoning would challenge the artifice of national boundaries to unearth traveling sonic worlds. Allocating ethnic, racial, or national heritage is central to the project of multicultural music education. One of the tasks of this chapter is to cross examine the cultural identities assigned to music and to propose a diasporic consciousness for music teaching. As I have argued in the Introductory chapter to this book, the multicultural framework for music teaching can have the paradoxical effect of tying colonial and modern era notions of pre-civilized societies to African and indigenous identities. This modernist past is alive in the present postcolonial period, perpetuating the economic divisions prevalent in Latin America. The default to origins is unsurprising given the social, political, economic, and intellectual supports underpinning the instability of governments in the region. In this chapter, I use the broad category of Latino/Latina to indicate a wide range of identities within the vague and often contradictory boundaries of heritage that have been loosely referred to as Hispanic in the music curricula in the twentieth century. The provenance of traditional Mexican music that appears in school music manuals and instrumental programs today references an identity distinct from others. Nonetheless, while the stated aim of the multicultural approach is to differentiate and include, the paradoxical nature of its mission invites more differentiation and hierarchical ranking than equal status. Roberto Avant-Mier writes, [By] the logic of North American racial and ethnic stereotypes, Latino/as seem to fall somewhere in between the Black/White hierarchy … in spite

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of the fact that many second, third or fourth generation US Latino/a artists often do not speak Spanish or have any affiliation with any other Latin American country. … primary identity is simply American. (2010: 6)

I also use the term “folk music” to refer to music that evokes belonging to or nostalgic ties to a particular place. Its appeal is to audiences who participate in community events associated with, for example, with Mexico. The aura of belonging to a Mexican heritage, mexicanismo, commonly materializes from a ranchera or country sound. This is music that alludes to folk heroes of the past while it evokes a sentiment of pride in people who identify with it. The ranchera sound also has a double in that it travels among Latinos in the United States who are seeking to adapt to American society and to modify the image of the peasant migrant that shadows Mexican heritage (Pena 1985: 11–12). To a great extent the popularity and renown of certain songs owes their circumstance to the wide dissemination of various genres through ethnographic recordings, film, radio, and record and cd sales. The insufficiencies of national folk origin as a framework for music from Latin American have been challenged by numerous scholarly works in the field of music history, but music educators have not launched a systematic challenge to the use of national origins in music teaching. This is partly due to the fact that nationalism and national movements have had a profound effect in promoting national identity to populations within its borders. Elite social and corporate interests operating across North, South, Central, and Latin America in the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries produced notions of patriotism, nationality to govern indigenous societies and economically marginalized populations within official national borders. Policies endorsing multiculturalism in societal institutions, in general, encompass and constrain internal differences so that ruptures between groups identifying with particular cultural traits such as language do not undermine support for national sovereignty (Brah and Coombes 2000). The widely available multicultural/multiethnic guides for music teachers today are expertly full of descriptors of instruments, instructions for making them, and directions for reproducing rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic idioms associated with many of the regions of the Caribbean and coastal South, Central, and North America. The most complete guides detail the migrations of peoples from the eastern hemisphere. These point out the African-ness of musical selections from Cuba, Brazil and Haiti,

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for example, noting that drums are the central feature of the music. Lesson plans for classroom teachers are based on the premise that they are national folk songs. Some guides, for example, Anderson and Campbell (2010), provide instructions for dancing, pictures of Mariachi band instrumentation, and samples of rhythmic patterns in some of the pieces cited in the manual. Some multicultural manuals are shaped by government strategies to produce cultural nationalism. In the case of Peru, for example, with its large Andean population, a series of national governments attempted to project an image of the nation as a unified economic and socio-cultural entity even while Peru underwent revolutionary conflict, military coups, and constitutional change. Thomas Turino, an ethnomusicologist who studies Latin culture and Peru in particular, puts it this way: Cultural nationalism is the semiotic work using expressive practices and forms to fashion the concrete emblems that stand for and create the nation…[to] distinguish one nation from another and, most importantly, that serve as a basis for socializing citizens to inculcate national sentiment. (2003: 175)

Music education relies on cultural nationalism to make folk music the commonsense of the multicultural approach. Despite recent research on indigenous practices and popular mythologies about origins that position folk music and its modern manifestations as a fluctuating set of practices, musicians may highlight nationhood, as with the case of salsa to raise awareness of their music as a resistance to particular power interests operating within national borders (Waxer 2002: 14). In the main, however, the media generates imaginaries of nation and race with such categories as “African,” “Latin,” or “Asian” music, that travel transnationally as “world music” (Bohlman 2013: 11–13). The ancient indigenous territories once present in the region have largely been replaced by modern cities and towns. Consequently, national categories for Latin music, however, based on sentimentalizing indigenous, Spanish, and African motifs represent distilled moments of time in shared musical spaces. Although historical moments of contact between musical cultures can be thoughtfully taught as shown in the teaching manual by Anderson and Campbell (2010), there are problems in this approach. The first is that most students in a typical “diverse” music class do not relate to these artifacts as exemplars of their own musical activities such as.

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listening, dancing, singing, and/or playing instruments in local neighborhoods. The second is that the range of music available under the rubrics of Latino/a, Chicano/a, Hispano, Tex-Mex, and other identities is vast. A plethora of musical types points toward the complexity of the relation between Latino/a identity and musical tastes (Peña 1985, 1999). Moreover, single selections are fraught with tensions between competing notions of authenticity resulting in various claims of exclusion and inclusion for individual compositions and performances (Lornell and Rasmussen 2016). Changes in political climate affect musical identity. For instance, singing in English or Spanish can be read as a political strategy to resist the dominance of one form of national identity over another (Avant-Meir 2010: 7–9). Currently, the use of English helps to avert negative reception in many places in the United States where speaking Spanish fuels xenophobia and hostility. In standard approaches to diversity in the classroom, multicultural exemplars are to represent and correspond to diverse demographic groups in public schools. “La Cucaracha,” “Chiapanecas,” and “Cielito Lindo” are on several lists for teachers to represent Mexican heritage. Teachers typically encounter resistance to this approach as illustrated by an account of a lesson on “La Cucaracha” in a fourth-grade general music class. The teacher has introduced the song as “Spanish” and would like the class to remember the English translation she reads to them before they begin to sing. She explains the song is about a common bug called a cockroach. Laughter all around. The children imitate her pronunciation of the title with a delight over the rhythm and sounds of the word itself. After rehearsing the Spanish language text, the teacher asked if anyone in the class understands the Spanish words to the song. No one answers. A brief discussion ensued between the teacher and I after class was about whether the three commonly taught songs were the right ones with which to acknowledge the diverse ethnic backgrounds present among the children, several of whom she assumes are “Latino.” She commented that rap and hip hop are often mentioned by these students when she asks about personal choices. She was reluctant to include these genres in the classroom as they have controversial and provocative lyrics. Yet, like rap and hip hop, folk songs such as “La Cucuracha have provocative lyrics. “La Cucaracha” had antecedents in ancient rebellions and was featured by Mariachi bands during the 1910 Mexican Revolution to mock enemies of Mexican independence.

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Mariachi is but one example of an ethnic musical form that springs from intersections over centuries with many performance practices (Peña 1985, 1999; Robertson 1992). While it acquired its characteristic conjunto or band instrumentation, including a somewhat larger orquesta structure, through contact with multiple musical traditions across Europe, Southwestern United States and parts of Mexico, these ensembles have taken on the global image of Mexicanness through the Internet, radio, and television networks broadcast around the world. Ironically, Mariachi’s success as a commoditized folk form also confers the status of music without history, frozen in time of el charro (cowboy) revolutionary heroes that live unchanged in the imaginations of nostalgic audiences. This imagery has endured through eras of enormous socioeconomic upheaval for both Mexicans and Mexican Americans as they continued to battle the inferiority assigned to them as Mexicans within the territories where they were native, but unfortunate enough to receive statelessness through war, immigration restrictions, and racist protocols. Today, revolution and independence from Spain continue as subjects of patriotic songs, but according to recent Nielsen statistics in the present decade, people identifying as Latinos/as listening online or on Am/FM radio favor crossover mixes sung in Spanish and/or English in the style of Pop and R&B such as those by Ozuna and Ariana Grande. The most popular hit for several years had been “Despacito” in both versions, the Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee video recording and a dvd by Justin Bieber (Nielsen.com 2017; Bilboard.com 2017). What remains unaddressed is whether this approach broadens Latino/a participation in elective school music programs at higher grade levels. While there are exceptions, for example, some instrumental music programs have had success with the Mariachi tradition, in general are not as popular within the Latin American region today with young audiences, nor are they popular with Latino/as alone. But they do have currency in traditional festivals, weddings, and anniversary celebrations as markers of identity of the persons attending those events. They have a nostalgic ring, especially for those identifying as Mexican Americans and those who live elsewhere (Peña 1985: 160). From a diasporic perspective, songs like “La Cucuracha” and Mariachi band music are celebrations of historical and family events even while its performances today are more broadly a means to stress the Mexican, Tejano/a, Chicano/a, Latino/a, or Mestizo/a heritage(s) of audiences. The point is that teaching traditional folksongs such as “La Cucuracha” are not entirely wrong-headed. The song can

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open a door to Latin music, history, and perhaps to new favorites in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. In an article in the International Journal of Music Education, “Mariachi Music as a Symbol of Mexican Culture in the United States,” Sylvia Clark argues that offering mariachi training in instrumental programs in public schools insures the transmission of a genre that is vital to Hispanic, specifically Mexican American students (2005). Clark cites a number of dynamics leading to Mariachi’s iconic status as a symbol of national spirit. She also documents its adoption (in various forms) as an instrumental elective for school music programs. Mariachi performances are prevalent as entertainment in both formal “concert” venues, restaurants, hotels, in public displays of dancing and music on holidays, and in family celebrations. As an advocate of transmitting the Mariachi tradition, Clark writes that a program of training in this tradition has been found to lower the dropout rate in some cities such as San Diego, California and Austin, Texas. Teaching Mariachi music, she comments, in city public schools is broadening participation. But as the author indicates, establishing the elective requires abundant resources from the school and district. One of the first steps to building a program is to familiarize all elementary students with this genre via recordings, using this method as the chief means of acquainting students of all ages with Mariachi. There are several issues left unexplored in Clark’s work: namely, how Mariachi became central to a Hispanic/Mexican identity, overshadowing peasant styles such as small band conjuntos prevalent in ranchera and jarocho performance traditions. The story of Mariachi is that its commercial viability overtook and erased the musical traces of different socioeconomic and cultural groups within Mexico who carried the campesino spirit through and after the time of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1917) in the western regions of Mexico. The word mariachi has indigenous, either Mayan or Aztecan, pre-Spanish etymology. One theory is that the expression comes from the name of the wooden platform on which indigenous performers danced to the music of village musicians. Both “La Cucuracha” and “Cielito Lindo” are a part of Mariachi repertoire. The songs have many antecedents. Some come from the region of Andalusia under Muslim rule in the eighth century when, as today, transformations of melodies from North Africa and the Middle East travel/ed across Europe. According to Manuel H. Peña, the armed figure of the countrydressed heroes (campesinos ) of the Revolution who resisted the pressures

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of modernity evaporates under the upgraded and commercially successful recordings of the music of the Mariachi as “el charro” (cowboys). Wearing the elaborate regalia of a formally dressed Mexican general, the costume fits the image of a daunting self-sufficient male hero, reflecting the Hollywood images of cowboys in contemporary American life. Peasant campesinos who championed the Revolution a hundred years ago are out of place and favor among culturally assimilated Mexican Americans (1999: 124–126). While Mariachi style is not included in the national anthem, the anthem itself represents the ascendance of European harmonies and instrumentation in symbolizing the nation as a whole. Negative policy toward Mexicans, has grown more ominous under draconian immigration policies in the United States. Under threat from the US government, musicians, among so many others, have curbed inter changes that involve crossing the southwestern border. Since the negative atmosphere established in the 2017 changes of policy, Mexicans have become reluctant to hire Mariachis for parties if the risk is to draw the attention of police or US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Those who speak Spanish are viewed as “illegals,” and law-breakers. Latinos, as a group, become suspect. Along the East coast a “Spanish” person may refer to either a Puerto Rican, Cuban, or Dominican. For different reasons, people living in New Mexico, Colorado or Texas may prefer a Spanish identity as a way to avoid stigma. With regard to music, the labels above have economic consequences. When cds and videos, for example, highlighting Latin or Latino Rock in marketing strategies alongside categories such as Raza, Tex-Mex, or Tejano. These arbitrary divisions, as Roberto Avant-Mier writes, expose the unresolvable complexities of identity underlying the commercial and political positioning of recording labels, audiences, and musicians necessary to the careers of professional musicians (2010: 7). Added to this, is the role of Latin neo-classical music with its blend of European organizational structure and folk music brought from Spain to Latin America. Classical genres are considered elitist by popular artists and audiences even when they feature folk idioms or popular folk music. Paradoxically, classical ensembles were encouraged. Often state-generated, governments throughout the region. One well-known example is Venezuela’s El Sistema movement and the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra. Its founding rested on a national identity closely aligned with the prestigious European heritage and a commitment to universal music education within its borders (Fernandez 2006; Roberts 1999).

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The musical richness of Latin America and Latin-inspired music from the disparate sectors of the Caribbean and North, Central, and South America is astonishing. Even so, the greatest share of their impact on the musical life of the United States is funneled through Jamaican and Puerto Rico as well as other Caribbean sources, itself a region consisting of over 700 islands and bordering eastern Mexico and coastal Colombia. As sources for distinct musical types, however, the Caribbean fails to yield to one description. The cross-territorial and cross-island travels of the music produce no single theme that would unite the Caribbean basin or signify a common origin for its variety. Considering that the many loosely traceable European, indigenous, and “African” elements often traveled by way of New Orleans. John Storm Roberts writes about the difficulty in tracing the precise journey of musical exchanges and migrants going back and forth across borders and oceans. Black American music has frequently been the channel by which the Latin tinge entered mass-popular styles … Latin strands are often difficult to disentangle with any certainty. First, New Orleans Creole music itself was sufficiently similar to cause problems. …. Second, the jazz men who provided most of the information often referred to both Latinos and Spaniards as “Spanish”. (Roberts 1999: 34)

As Alan Lomax described in his book, Mister Jelly Roll, a similar kind of entanglement gave rise to early twentieth-century jazz which began as a mix of Cuban, Haitian, Creole, Spirituals, blues, ragtime, and other popular music (2001). A common starting point for discussions of Cuban music have been salsa, danzon, and the son, terms that defy searches for traceable roots. These terms exceed simple definition as they are combinations of what has been called working people’s music from the 1500s in the Caribbean and the mix of Latino urban populations with the international music scenes in US cities such as New Orleans in the twentieth century. The danzon, a slow, partnered ballroom dance common in Cuban dance halls points in the direction of what some have called the Cuban “son,” a form with so many geographic, ethnic, and linguistic variants as to require disentangling strands leading back in time to the Spanish settlement and the forced migration of Africa in eastern Cuba in the 1500s. In what is now Cuba, the indigenous Tainos with their Arawak language and dance traditions, as well Jamaicans and laborers of many cultures from Hispaniola

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(divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic) have contributed to the transmission of son like motifs to points all over the Caribbean. The contradanza, known as a Cuban ballroom dance, is similar to the partnered contredanse of French, Spanish, and English country dances. Its complex structure allowed for improvisation in some renditions and fostered innovations in dance patterns over time. In part, these variations now exist under the term “salsa” (Fernandez 2006: 22–41, 164). The recognition of son or salsa as singular genres is further complicated by the fact that a key rhythmic motif, the “habanera,” which traveled, it is thought from Africa, across the Caribbean and Spain and the Central, South, and North Americas. In the tango it is built upon units of three beats alternating with 2 beats. This gives a syncopated feel to the music which has been traced to the illicit slave trade linking Cuba to the Southern United States and eventually to the advent of jazz. Habanera circulated widely in the Caribbean and in the migration flows from Mexico to the north, making contact with musicians across the region including the United States at various points east and west along its southern border(s). There is evidence that popular “rockabilly” music (a precursor of rock and roll) contained the habanera rhythm that had arrived in the South via the route described above. Regardless, “Rockabilly” has been identified as white through its association with musicians such as Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly (Brewer 1999: 300, 314). The mix of Black and Latin sounds with the melodies of nostalgic whiteness in rockabilly developed from the entanglement of regional and cross-Atlantic strands of musical motifs and rhythms such as the tango’s 3 plus 2, habanera, and the clave rhythm played on wooden blocks. The basic elements of the latter are a long note, followed by a much shorter note in syncopated fashion, sometimes with two notes of moderate length ahead of the shorter beat or following close behind:

There are variants to this rhythm and it is heard in many forms of music, but the rhythmic quality identifying salsa, son, rockabilly, or tango is the syncopated feel generated throughout the piece. Melodies can be of an entirely different rhythmic pattern and tempos also vary from quite slow to fast. The tension makes this combination of syncopation and on-thebeat rhythm between melody and accompaniment danceable. Habanera

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entrains the body to its rhythm due to the contrast of different parts as well as from the contrasting sounds of the instruments. Scholars have also noted that the rhythmic tightness of the different instruments in an ensemble is primary to judging its qualifications as authentic salsa, son, or other genres by dancers and listeners. Marisol Berrios-Miranda explains that in salsa performance afinque is the most important [rhythmic] term, meaning everything is one even while there are several rhythms playing against one another, a technique called “polyrhythm” in Western musical analysis: Everything in the band is “locked” to perfection. Rhythmic thinking is crucial for everyone, because both melodic and percussion instruments are approached like drums. So when musicians complain that the music is not afincao it means that if the rhythms are not locked together, the music is not happening. (2002: 33)

Berrios-Miranda notes that regional differences are often recognized as “national” differences through the performance of specific rhythmic idioms and instrumentation. With some audiences, rhythm can function as a marker of identity, but it is important to note that Latin Americans vary enormously in opinions on music. Consequently, the regional or national identity based on rhythmic motifs of much of Latin American music is fluid. Multicultural approaches to music teaching sometimes use phrases such as “culture group” or “mixed culture” as a way to characterize diverse musical types, but, overall the default category is the nation or geographic region such as Latin America, a collective that is represented through the choices of popular folk music inscribed in teacher guides. In a chapter in Multicultural Perspectives in Music Education by Quesada, Olsen, and Soto entitled “The Music of Latin America and the Caribbean” (2010: 79–103), rhythmic marking indicates ethnicity, nationality, or race or a combination of these and their influences. Yet, with regard to rock groups and popular dance bands, salsa and other genres there is only an assumed tie to Latin people whether residing in countries other than the United States or within the United States. Such is the case, for example with Cubans and Cuban-Americans. While the son dance forms are an amalgamation of rhythms traceable to Cuba via Africa and points from all over the Caribbean, the son’s derivatives are a collective music belonging to everyone, a “transcultural creation” (Fernandez 2006: 27), not belonging

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to any single group. Out of the concept of identity by country, nationalist music emerged across Latin America, each of which would be a country’s anthem even though most gave slight recognition to popular forms or local “folk” music. Commercial and political forces imagine homogeneous nations, peoples, and hybrids of populations and music. In global terms, one family of Peruvians may encompass, for example, Japanese, Swedish, Eastern European, Irish, and Scottish immigrant roots with an amazing array of different musical experiences. A “transcultural creation” like son is also timeless in the sense that it changes with time but is frozen in time as if it has always been the same. Anthems appear at the historical moments of independence from colonial powers. There are ironies in the musical style of these anthems as they were not, at bottom, representative of the music practiced by natives or most settlers, but they are awkwardly similar in style and content to former colonial compositions: European harmonies, modern instrumentation modeled on symphonic ensembles, sometimes with the addition of folkloric motifs. Most in Central and South America were composed by Italians (National Anthems of the World 2020). The nationalist genre or anthem was seen as a way to culturally challenge ruling oligarchies, usually comprised of a hacienda or plantation system run by a single family. Oligarchic families were similar to the feudal land ownership practiced in Europe and its colonial territories centuries ago. Land reform begun in Mexico in 1915, culminating in the 1970s. These reforms served transstate capitalism despite attempts at the mass organization of local labor, and the once popular progressive policies of redistribution of land ownership. Corporate interests overshadowed local market-centered approaches. This forced indigenous farmers to engage with global markets in which the wages for hand labor created sub-standard living conditions in several regions of Central and South America (Rodriguez 2012; Turino 2003: 170). Economic and political change has been a constant feature of Latin American life. Music reflected both the hardship and pride of different regions, yet the typical national anthem or the himno nacional of Mexico, Central and South America tends to envision nations founded by Europeans, relegating indigenous populations to pre-civilized societies. Overcoming colonial rule resulted in aggrandizing the heroism of particular patriots and downplaying the role of local peasants (Neustadt 2011: 1–19). As Benedict Anderson writes, the act of singing in a group, as we see with “The Star Spangled Banner,” creates the illusions of community

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or “unisonance” an imaginary of homogeneous sentiments and musical practices as well as socio-political and economic harmony across the nation (1994: 145). However, national anthems can also be performed as an ironic response. Such is the case with the Costa Rican adaptation of a common greeting based on the line in the anthem, “la lucha tenaz” intended as the fight for independence. It is used today to signify the tenacious economic struggle for the needs of daily life by ordinary citizens in Costa Rica. This demonstrates how music can serve as a flexible marker of social class, race, and gender (Aparicio 2000: 95–112). Taken together the discussion of the idea of a national music demonstrates how Gilroy’s phrase “a clutch of rhetorical strategies” can create a sense of racial and geographical origin for musical practices (1993: 3). A salient example of the diaspora in action within Mexico comes from the region around Veracruz in the southeast, a major port since the 1500s under much less rigorous Spanish rule than other parts of the country. Located distantly from the western cities such as Monterrey where Mariachi was popular, Veracruz musicians developed their own style—a mixture of African and African-Caribbean and Spanish verse structures. The ancient indigenous population had been displaced by Africans during the centuries of the slave trade while immigration from the Caribbean and Europe steadily increased. Music associated with the Veracruz region is referred to as “jarocho,” meaning rough, sometimes earthy of even vulgar country music. Jarocho is chordophone, generally consisting of a variety of string instruments, sometimes tambourine, but omitting instruments such as the characteristic brass, wind, accordion, and percussion featured in Mariachi music. Jarocho musicians who perform in Mexico City, for example, may wear costumes and use instruments in accord with popular tastes of central and eastern Mexico (Sheehy 1979). Guatemalan and Nicaraguan music, on the other hand, employs the consistent participation of the marimba thought to be an early import from Africa. Marimba styles identified with two different countries overlap considerably. The Nicaraguan ensembles with marimba sometimes contain a two against three rhythmic motifs created in counter-posing guitar line with the marimba beats (Scruggs 1999: 81, 104). While the differentiation between Central American countries circulates around the use of the marimba and a typical alteration of the pipes featuring a buzzing sound, various narratives and myths have adhered to use of the marimba in Latin America due to its presumed origin on the African continent The most common mention of the marimba’s origin attributes its arrival in Central

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America as during time Africans were brought to the region as slaves. More recent research has corroborated evidence of material and music exchanges between parts of Africa and Indonesia, the latter region now serving as a point of origin for the marimba (DeLise 2008). Its genealogy stops there for the time being. For Nicaragua, Brazil, other countries in Latin America, and the Global South, for that matter, the United States, race has become a dominant aspect of music due to its purported connection with African rhythm and the entrainment of the body to syncopated rhythm. Elite northern European notions of nobility have created a template of the still, contemplative body as superior to one that moves with the music (Gustafson 2009). As folk music became associated with lower social rank, the hierarchical logic of white versus black stigmatizes Latino/as whose music carries, as imaginary, the taint of African origin. A prime example emerges from the history of Brazil and the categories of ethnicity dedicated to keeping track of the immigration of Europeans so as to outweigh African labor. Complicating the number of categories were the forced migration of male slaves to the far reaches of Brazil throughout Portuguese rule and the intermixing of indigenous females with migrants. The result is the invention of a plethora of racial categories used to distinguish European “blood” from Indian and/or African peoples. Yet, music historians note, European musical culture, e.g., songs, hymns, and dances, became tools for plantation owners and Church leaders to socialize African slaves and indigenous populations to European traditions of faith and conduct. Thus, the vernacular music traditions from distant points in the northeast of Brazil intermixed with music from the religious centers of Europe, following the well-marked paths of Atlantic crossings to and from Africa, Europe, and other locations within the southern United States. While contradictory narratives arose concerning the origins of the fife or transverse flute music in Brazil, for example concerning novenas or Church-inspired services for saints, indigenous instrumentation, including flutes, diffused musical languages and material equipment back and forth cross the Atlantic. Brazilian Church festivals or services, depending on how they were organized, were performed by zabumbas or small ensembles that traversed Brazil during saint worship events over much of its enormous land area. While there appears to be a resemblance between festival music groups, it is problematic to assign ethnicity or racial origin to the nocena/zabumba services or to have any one of these performances represent Brazil as a whole (Crook 1999: 192–235). When festival

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performances serve as exemplars of Brazilian music, as occurs in teaching manuals or “world music” websites, for example, study.com 2019. “A Brazilian Music Lesson,” they appear to racialize the “influences” making up a Brazilian essence that is part Indian, part African and part European. As some music historians point out, a model of “integration” of racial musical types can devolve into a tale of essential racial origins. A diasporic view attempts to move beyond racial rhetoric and, in so doing, moves into a realm in which “music” itself is a European construct and a marker of racial difference spawned by European colonialism. This presents a conundrum for discussions of race and music that inescapably compel a diasporic paradigm to acknowledge the default to a Western point of view, identifying differences by origin while seeking to move beyond notions of us and the “other” (Radano and Bohlman 2000: 11, 23–25). As a paradigm for the organization of curriculum in music in the United States, multiculturalism is an attempt to break up the EuroAmerican collective musical identity dominating public school music teaching from its inception in the early 1800s. Multiculturalism has, instead, functioned as a bulwark of nationality, race, and ethnicity. Its methods fall back on presenting sound in the mode of cultural nationalism. National genres are funneled through recordings, Internet websites, and scores of transcribed folk music and traditional festival or holiday dances and songs. In each case, whether of the United States, Europe, Africa, Central America, South America, or the Caribbean, exemplars hover around racial origins, influences, or hybrids such as Afro-Latin Americans or Euro-Latin Americans. A diasporic perspective contests the fabrication of ethnically and nationally based musical character. The language of nationalism appears to suggest a “natural” origin because it is identified with a unique geographical location. But we have seen above how, under the construction of cultural nationalism, indigenous music lacks a path of change. For example, although the Mariachi tradition is a marker of Mexican cultural roots or sometimes as type of “world music,” it is most commonly found under the umbrella of multiculturalism in US schools. In some schools, it has been possible to form mariachi bands with students who identify with a Mexican heritage and others who probably do not identify as Mexicans. Because Mariachi bands are part of the music curriculum in some cities, the door is open for anyone interested in participating (Clark 2005: 232). In contrast to Clark’s analysis of Mariachi as evidence of a multicultural inclusion of Mexican cultural identity, her observations demonstrate the power of music in diaspora as it engages the

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interests and action of many students of varied identities. In this respect, music in diaspora is a fitting paradigm for framing Mariachi as a genre to engage aspiring musicians at many levels of skill. As Julio Estrada writes about what is now called Mexican culture, much has been lost through change and the passage of time: “To look for oneself in pre-existing signs is an intimate adventure necessary for life and thought. However, when one’s purpose is to recover something that has been lost, one knows beforehand that this something is alien to … the immediate present” (1992: 342). This feeling of loss and of impossible recovery, raises suspicion that a single piece or genre of music represents Mexicanness even while, for some, it may serve as a touchstone with the past. Looking at the present as a tie to the past, Mariachi music has, like Latin jazz, to have transformed its sound and visual appearance as it traveled through time and space, retaining, acquiring, or shedding ethnic and national belonging. As Radano and Bohlman write in their Introduction to Music and the Racial Imagination, this is a process, integrally related to European thought dominating the world, that continually reconstructs musical identities along imaginary lines of race and place (2000: 11). Such was the case with my interviewing a group of students about their affinity for different kinds of music. While some recalled hearing Mariachi music on the radio at home, it can seem to be, at times, as one student put it, “Grandpa music.” I will call this student Gustavo. He was reluctant to identify with Mariachi and would rather listen to his ipod with a play list of the hits on Latin radio stations and popular music on local Anglophone radio outlets. In spite of the ubiquitous presence of Mariachi music in local restaurants and festivals and his viewing of “Coco” a 2017 Disney film about a boy who wishes to become a Mariachi musician, Gustavo rejected these cultural symbols for himself. Sports is his main interest. Another male student with the first name, Hideki likes to be called by the shortened version, Deki. Somewhat dark-skinned the teacher thought of him as “Hispanic.” His mother is Japanese, but Deki identifies himself as white, devotes his spare time outside of school to bicycle racing. Gustavo and Hideki’s teacher cannot be expected to be sensitive to the complex lineages and cultural interests of her many students. One parent may be of Somalian, Mexican, Hmong, or Guatemalan descent while the other parent is descended from a settled line of Irish/Swedish immigrants in the United States. These realities demonstrate that not only are racial, national origin, and ethnic differences complex and subject to the reduction of identity to a single cultural/physical type. Musical tastes may

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diverge greatly from home environments and/or ethnic backgrounds. While the success of Mariachi programs described by Clark have been cited as evidence of the efficacy and value of a multicultural approach, specifying Mexican identity through music presents significant dilemmas and obstacles. For example, aside from other factors, there is now reason for students to keep their identity as defined in conventional terms such as Latino or Hispanic to themselves as they fear Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) which, in the present political climate might expose their families to incarceration or deportation. Additionally, there are antagonistic relations between demographic groups. Given the participatory success of Mariachi bands in public school music programs and the ambiguous correlation of that genre to national belonging, how does a diasporic perspective find a way to frame differences in cultural backgrounds while offering a broader participatory palette to public school students? In an article on general education, Line Saint-Hilaire, a professor at CUNY Queens College, cites shows that under the umbrella of multicultural education there are ways to achieve harmony and understanding among diverse groups of students. His approach is influenced by the research of JoAnn Phillion’s technique for teaching called “narrative multiculturalism” (Phillion 2002a, 2002b; Saint-Hilaire 2014: 599–600). Reading Phillion on this subject, Saint- Hilaire describes what can only be called a dissenting interpretation of the dominant multicultural script: avoiding categorization of students, curriculum, and pedagogical methods in terms of culture, race, religion or nationality. Saint-Hilaire’s understanding of Phillion’s classroom observations are useful to the project of building a diasporic framework for music teaching. In their view, pedagogical methods and subject matter are about learning how to cooperate together as a group. But there is more to narrative multiculturalism than at first meets the eye. A closer look at Phillion’s classroom is called for if it is to be relevant to a diasporic approach to music teaching. First, in Phillion’s classroom, teaching multiculturally is not about different ethnic holidays, food, dress, or music that may or may not be familiar to many students in this urban fourth/fifth-grade classroom (2002b). Her method is to focus on completing a project with concrete problems such as disagreements arising over their designing a mural or conflict over the disappearance of some highly valued stickers belonging to a classmate. The narrative element allows the emergence of equitable relationships between classmates while pursuing the tasks they set out to do.

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Secondly, Phillion’s observations treats differences among students from a perspective counter to multiculturalism. Family backgrounds, national origins, and color of skin as if they were irrelevant, to solving the practical questions arising in an art project. As an anecdotal study, categories of identity that have become routine to multiculturalism were not addressed. What is clear is that the inclusion of difference within her class is paradoxically achieved and valued by assuming equal intelligence. Phillion’s and Saint-Hilaire’s work points towards working together on problems, whether in art projects or moral dilemmas. The concrete acts of airing differences about art and sorting out the priorities of friendship amid the disappearance of valued objects verified, in her eyes, the equality of intelligence and knowledge one would hope to establish within a multicultural agenda. How does narrative multiculturalism relate to imparting a diasporic perspective in music teaching? What comes to mind, for instance, is the position of the music teacher, in an effort to be culturally inclusive, as he/she might wish to present some of the fine distinctions between Tejano, Jarocho, and Mariachi music familiar to the experiences of some students in his/her classroom. Such a variety of music assumed to have originated in different regions of the United States and Mexico is not, practically speaking, suited to music classrooms as they require research into these musical types to present the instrumentation and musical skills not readily available to general music teachers. Teachers do not often have a way to expose their students to the variants of songs, rhythms, and instrumentation within the South, Central, Caribbean, and North American soundscape. Most teachers cannot marshal the resources necessary to establish a Mariachi curriculum. On the other hand, a diasporic perspective illuminates a path to recognizing difference without framing persons or music as symbols of ethnic, racial, or national belonging. Phillion’s observations are a way to sidestep identity issues while keeping common goals and interests in the forefront (2002a). Her work points towards working together on problems, whether in art projects or moral dilemmas. Gilroy writes, “the instability inherent in designating racially circumscribed ownership” helps to avoid contradiction and conflict over who or what is authentically able to speak for racial origin. Selecting particular genres as ethnically or racially “owned” can be provocative and politically futile where the issue of race is fraught with conflict (1993: 1).

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Stepping away from the knotty problem of ownership, even an assignment of viewing a selection from an early European opera can lead to making connections of this genre with other forms of music. In a music appreciation class required of future general education teachers who were not music majors, the professor played a video clip of Gluck’s eighteenth century “Dance of the Furies” from a Royal Opera House performance in 2015. After the professor’s comments on the work, she asked students to bring cds or video recordings of their own music preferences to class that they felt were related, in some way, to Gluck’s piece. In the following class session, these selections were a starting point for discussions of differences and likeness between their choices and Gluck’s “Dance of the Furies.” For example, one student brought in a video recording of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.” Another played excerpts from the modernist ballet “The Rite of Spring” Other choices were salsa and tango music, Simon and Garfunkel songs, and even a punk band recording. No matter how close or far in resemblance to Gluck’s opera the choices were, the selections led to a discussion of how music invites dancing through rhythmic repetition and how groups of dancers with orchestras or bands instill emotions and a sense of movement in the listener. The idea of music as having a racial and geographic “origin” gave way to the idea that the diasporic travel of music spawns an array of danceable expressions whose relation to music of the late Baroque/Classical style can be as deeply felt in twentieth-century ballet as well as in popular songs or music videos. The main point of the exercise with the music appreciation class was to demonstrate the interrelatedness of music, loosening it from evolutionary theories of development, singular origins, and national styles by engagement with the unknown. As with narrative multiculturalism, what is offered is reciprocated not on the basis of quantum or fact of racial or ethnic difference, but in fresh relation to experiencing “Dance of the Furies.” In this sense, narrative multiculturalism and the concept of diaspora are both concerned with something new arising in a situation in which there is a break from the known or pre-existent order. Too often I have seen some of the difficulties of teaching the mechanics, quanta or facts of music, e.g., Western notational systems, genres, and style to students who are new to music literacy and its traditional pedagogical methods. These narratives reflect concerns circulating in the broader arenas of education, the media, and government policy inspired by the Nation at Risk calls for standards of student and teacher performance (National Commission on Excellence in Education 1983).

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Specific to music education, curriculum specialists drew up national standard for music teaching and learning by grade level. These standards have had a profound effect on music teachers as they focused their curriculum and pedagogical methods on attaining passable scores for themselves and their students by teaching music literacy. Where the national standards have forced multicultural concerns to take a backseat to testing, multiculturalism remained a concern for teachers who were aware of the steep attrition rates of minorities in music programs at the middle and high school levels as well as the tendency to affectively withdraw from elementary classroom activities. The following scenes are anecdotal evidence of unintended exclusion of musical sensibilities in classrooms even while efforts to be inclusive in a multicultural sense remained an important feature of the curriculum (Gustafson 2001 unpublished). In the first excerpt from a study I undertook in the 1990s, the exercise is to have students imitate a melodic line in the song, “Follow the Drinking Gourd.” David volunteers to sing the melody while adding an improvised flourish to the line. The reaction is as follows: David, a fourth grader, sits in the last row of the music class. They had just finished singing, “Follow the Drinking Gourd.” After the song, Mr. Hight, the music teacher, played a fragment of its melody on the xylophone. He asked the class following questions: “Is this part of the melody going up or down? Which notes are higher; which are lower? Can I trick anyone? Who has good listening ears?” He then asked, “Who can sing this back to me?” Raising his hand, David sang back the main melody with slight alterations. “David, you changed the melody …. can you sing this just like it is?” David’s eyes narrow. He turns toward the window, remaining in this position for the rest of class. In discussion with me after the lesson, Mr. Hight explained that he was trying to assess the ability of students to hear and repeat melodies accurately as part of the criteria for formal evaluations at the end of each grading period. He also pointed out that the repertoire he works with is multicultural since he teaches Hispanic songs and Negro Spirituals. (Gustafson 2001 unpublished)

Below is an example of a 2nd grade lesson on rhythm. Here, again, a student improvises. The lack of recognition of his contribution serves to emphasize how dedication to the narrow confines of a curriculum designed to meet testing standards, outweighs attempts at full participation.

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The teacher, Ms. C., has tried to interweave the ideal of cultural diversity with the demands of testing, and grading students on musical elements such as rhythm to her second graders. In one lesson she put four equalsized slashes on a musical staff. Then she drew four notes of equal value, ♩♩♩♩, on the blackboard. She clapped and the class clapped with her. One student, Matt, purposefully inserted claps between the series of claps. These are called “off-beats” (a term that undermines their musical importance): // // // //. Ms. C. ignored Matt’s additions, resuming her lesson objective which was the emphasis and time equivalence of the four slashes as quarter notes. Matt laid his head on his desk. As Ms. C explained to me later in a one-on-one interview, she was fully aware that she followed the curriculum without attending to Matt’s distress. Her reason was to avoid complicating the lesson even though, she added, “Matt’s background [African American] would have made it natural to clap off-beats.” She thought “that switching gears,” was not something she felt she could introduce to 2nd grade students. (Gustafson 2001 unpublished)

In preparation for my classroom observations, I looked over the current academic goals of the curriculum. They closely resemble those I was aware of in that they provide models for testing Western concepts such as pitch and rhythm. The events in Mr. Hight’s and Ms. C.’s classroom underline the tendency for a technical agenda to overwhelm the more inclusive intentions that many teachers want to bring about. Mr. Hight’s and Ms. C’s conundrums were not uncommon among the teachers I observed in the two-year study of music classrooms I conducted. As she alludes, it was not simply a matter of teacher training but the rhetoric of emergency in the Nation at Risk documents that had roiled public opinion about failures in schools. States and school districts followed quickly on government leadership, administering tests of musical knowledge to all grade levels. Test results affected teacher evaluations. At the same time, the mission statements of school district included recognition of the multicultural identities of its students as ascertained by race, gender, disability, and language. (Differences of sexual orientation appeared in curriculum guidelines in recent decades). Ms. C.’s dilemma of whether or not to teach “off beats” was not far from the difficulties Euro-American musicologists and transcribers report when they attempt to give notational form to what they call “Lyra Africana” or African lyrics which exceed the capacities of European/Western notation (Radano 2003: 214; Austerlitz 2003: 99).

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The broader point of these classroom vignettes is not only does the sense of emergency overwhelm other democratic objectives, but that the multicultural agenda buckles under the weight of Eurocentric pedagogic methods of teaching rhythm and melody. Auspiciously, as I learned from my observations of another general music teacher, Mr. Mclean, there are ways to put the dictates of testing aside. For one lesson with a fourth and fifth-grade group of students, he played a Bob Marley recording, marking offbeats with his own clapping, with red indicating off beats: // // // //. Mr. Mclean started with teaching both “off-beats” and “main beats”: a count of four regular main beats, each followed by a single offbeat. His pedagogical approach, as he described it, was “multicultural,” but there was a significant difference between his approach and both Mr. Hight’s and Ms. C’s. Dividing the class in half he had one side clap the four main beats (as indicated above) while the others clapped in between (red slashes) as he joined. Then he played the recording again and all participated in the same way. While the higher grade level of this class compared to the classes of Mr. Hight and Ms. C. surely makes it easier to incorporate offbeats in teaching, it is also noteworthy that, following the music itself, Mr. Mclean talked about the djembe drum as an instrument built by the Africans who were brought as slaves to Jamaica and that the language of Marley’s songs, English, had become standard during British rule of Jamaica while it was a colony of Great Britain. He also briefly touched on the distant past of Jamaica, including its indigenous population who had migrated from South America before Spanish rule—150 years preceding the British. His last remarks were that “reggae,” famous as a Jamaican invention also incorporated jazz and blues tunes from the New Orleans area. During the question session following a young girl asked whether Marley was “black” or “white.” Mr. Mclean remarked that he did not know what Marley called himself and he explained that people who may have dark or light skin color may identify themselves in different ways. He pointed to the map drawn down over the chalk board, drawing lines between Jamaica, South America, the United States, and Africa and Great Britain, asking the student what she thought. “Can’t decide,” she said. By refusing the assignment of a racial or geographic point of origin for reggae or Marley’s participation, the class occupied itself with how such labels are assigned given the complexity of race, geography, and music interchange. Lack of specifying origin opens up new avenues for teaching. In fact, I found examples in music classes where holidays fostered group activities that enhanced appreciation of rhythmic variation. On one occasion,

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young children enacted “The March of the Toy Soldiers” scene from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet. Many children clapped to main beats, many to off beats. There was no testing or questioning afterwards. Remembering this event renewed in me what Randall Allsup has called the “openness” of music teaching that foregoes conclusion and leaves off reiterating the teacher’s own musical knowledge (2016: 84, 141). As a researcher in the field of music education, I started my work by observing elementary music classrooms in the middle of school year. Back then, however unwittingly, I took part in a collective mythology; namely, that culture and race were interchangeable, and worse, that music had racial and cultural origins. Such origins reiterated the orthodoxy of music history that found its way into multicultural music manuals for teachers. It was often blatantly mistaken, over-generalized, and outdated with respect to recent scholarship. Multiculturalism appeared to fulfill the promise of welcoming and retaining minority in elective school music programs such as band and orchestra. But it is a collective myth that has spawned hundreds of philosophical endorsements, methods, and teaching materials. Each, in lesser or greater degree, lacks evidence that identifying music by origin, demographic popularity, language, ethnic group, or race equalizes participation. Dysconscious racism stalks multiculturalism despite efforts to democratize schooling.1 Lack of consciousness of the way racial ideology postpones equality of ability and intelligence is symptomatic of thinking of intelligence as a yet-to-be-attained state. In her introduction to Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Kristin Ross, has argued that equality is useless as a future goal. It must be the foundation of acting, teaching, and thinking: She writes, “What if equality … were to provide the point of departure? What would it mean to make equality a presupposition rather than a goal, a practice rather than a reward situated firmly in some distant future …?” (Ross 1991: xix). As I have shown with the classrooms of JoAnn Phillion and Mr. Mclean, differences of background and origins were overshadowed by assuming equality, putting aside suppositions of difference, and focusing on the tasks and problems at hand. Acting upon an assumption of equal intelligence, a diasporic perspective allows an exchange of ideas and actions in which there was a break from the existing order. Through its undecidability of origin, a diasporic

1 See discussion of dysconscious racism in Chapter 4, p. 24.

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perspective can provide the space and time for students to engage deeply with content, form their own positions, and hear arguments about their own opinions as equals among classmates.

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Index

A Aesthetic, 3, 6, 12, 14, 27, 31, 34, 38, 39, 55, 60, 61, 66, 76 Africa, 9, 10, 43, 78–81, 95, 97–99, 101–103, 110 African American music, 2, 4, 15, 66, 69, 73, 75, 76, 81 African music, 73, 78, 79 Agamben, Giorgio, 23, 28, 38 Andalusia, 51, 53, 54, 95 Argentina, 47–50

B Bohlman, Philip V., 6, 7, 9, 10, 15, 38, 45, 46, 49, 50, 61, 73, 77, 92, 103, 104

C Caribbean, 6, 15, 28, 43, 44, 81, 89, 91, 97–99, 101, 103, 106 Carmen, 53, 54 Clark, Frances E., 34, 62, 71, 76, 90, 95, 103, 105

classical music, 4, 25, 37, 48, 61–63, 65, 96 Cuba, 91, 97–99

E Eugenics, 63–65, 76 European music, 2, 4, 44, 66, 73, 77, 81

F Flamenco, 4, 51–56 folk music, 3, 6, 10, 12, 15, 37, 44–46, 52, 55, 62, 63, 74–76, 89–92, 96, 99, 102, 103 Foster, Stephen, 67, 69–71, 75, 76

G Galton, Francis, 64, 76 Gaucho, 4, 46–50, 52, 55, 56

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 R. I. Gustafson, Exploring Diasporic Perspectives in Music Education, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52105-9

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INDEX

H Herder, Johann Gottfried, 44, 45, 48, 49

I Irish, 9, 15, 23–26, 28, 29, 50, 66–69, 71, 100, 104

J Jarocho, 101, 106 Julia Koza, E., 10, 33, 52, 55, 64, 65, 76

L Latin American music, 89, 99

M Mariachi, 4, 89, 92–96, 101, 103–106 Mexico, 13, 91, 94–98, 100, 101, 106 Multiculturalism, 1–3, 5, 8, 10, 11, 14, 15, 21, 37, 38, 52, 56, 59, 60, 65, 67, 75, 77, 78, 81–83, 91, 103, 105–108, 111 Music Appreciation, 5, 15, 25, 30, 31, 33, 36–38, 59–65, 67, 69–71, 75–77, 82, 83, 107

N Nationalism, 13, 45, 48, 49, 51, 53, 90–92, 103 Negro Spirituals, 4, 71–73 R Racism, 7, 8, 11, 71, 82, 83, 111 Radano, Ronald, 3, 4, 7, 8, 12, 15, 31, 38, 50, 61, 66, 69, 70, 72–74, 76, 77, 103, 104, 109 Radio Corporation of American (RCA) Victor, 62, 63 Rancière, Jacques, 2, 111 Reimer, Bennet, 5 S Salsa, 90, 98, 99, 107 Seashore, Carl, 64 Spain, 4, 9, 46, 47, 51–54, 90, 94, 96, 98 T Tejano, 12, 13, 96, 106 W World Music, 9, 15, 46, 50, 54, 56, 59, 60, 65, 75–78, 80, 82, 83, 92, 103