Inclusive Histories of Music: Scholarly Challenges and Pedagogical Responsibilities

This project joins an expanding international conversation about why certain musics continue to be privileged in academic study, whose histories are taught in the post-secondary classroom, and how research methodologies shape knowledge production. The voices in this conversation are varied, with conservative, moderate, and radical ideas influencing each other. This discussion is increasingly taking place in the context of calls to decolonize, diversify, and address structures of exclusion that minimize or devalue historically marginalized groups.

Prior Activity: Our recent IDG, "Changing Colonial Narratives in Eurocentric Music History," joined this conversation by addressing the Eurocentric narrative in two ways. We added to research on the colonial impact on music performance and analyzed secondary research sources that provided data challenging the canonic story of Western art music between 400-1700 C.E. This work produced 3 articles, 3 chapters, 2 recorded presentations, 2 student articles, and a special online theme issue of 6 UG RA essays overseen by two PhD RA editors. We presented 5 individual and 3 joint papers at Canadian and international conferences; our RAs presented 9 papers and created 196 entries for the Inclusive Early Music (IEM) platform.

Goals: Given this success, this proposal aims to investigate the entangled perspectives and voices of the present moment. We are interested in how types of knowledge production and dissemination intersect with inclusive frameworks such as decolonial, gender, and race theories, and how these intersections can shape scholarship and postsecondary teaching in the discipline of music history. The questions that arise from this matrix have international perspectives and global implications, but also a vigorous Canadian context with which we will engage.

Outputs: Our project will prepare and transfer secondary source reviews and course design materials to the IEM and Beyond Tokenism platforms. We will undertake ethnographic study by interviewing Canadian music professionals, students, and scholars; facilitate focus group discussions, and gather responses from stakeholders within and beyond the academy. We will train and mentor numerous types of students and actively involve them at every stage of the project. We will publish articles and an open-access co-edited volume with five leading scholars, Musical Bridges: Global and Local Pedagogies in Music History. Our team's scholarly publications will offer practical models for scholars keen to translate these perspectives into their own work or their classrooms. Informal essays and social media outreach through the Sackville Undergraduate Music Research (SUMR) Diversity Lab will engage non-academic audiences.

Impact: This innovative, yet ultimately pragmatic, research will have impact by making the entangled strands of scholarly and pedagogical activities on inclusive music histories in recent years more visible, tangible, and accessible. Our bibliographic and curricular contributions will enable researchers and pedagogues to access a growing literature and body of pedagogical supports. The ethnographic research will both amplify these voices and also allow us to learn from those most impacted by colonial structures of exclusion.

We expect the outputs of this work to influence and further support the unfolding paradigm shift in music history research and pedagogy at this crucial moment of widespread efforts to quantify inclusion; it will galvanize the current momenta of the scholarly community broadly conceived. The intersections of our methods are key to both our anticolonial goals and our aim to productively contribute to contemporary scholarly conversations animating music studies, and particularly the field of music history.