Preaching from the Choir: Music Departments and Their Discontents

Anyone reading JSAM's inaugural issue of colloquy essays on “Anti-Racism in Reforming Undergraduate Music Curricula in Departments and Schools of Music” should begin with “The Possessive Investment in Classical Music: Confronting Legacies of White Supremacy in U.S. Schools and Departments of Music” and rejoin us once you've digested his insightful—and inciteful—essay.1 I will confess that despite the many conversations with colleagues about all of the issues Kajikawa lists in “Possessive,” it shaded a tad more alarming swallowed all at once, in example after example, in numbers too big to ignore, as Helen Reddy once sang. Carter notes a similar dynamic in the discussion with Philip Ewell in which the City College of New York students, despite being invested in popular music as composers and performers, pushed back against the idea of dismantling the pedagogical status quo. Musics deemed “traditional” seemed to dominate the most prestigious ethnomusicology programs, but I was interested in popular music.2 And so, I found myself in the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz reading theory of a decidedly non-Schenkerian kind—Frankfurt School critique, critical race theory, Black feminist studies. [...]I am deeply invested in reshaping musicology, broadly speaking, so that prospective graduate students will no longer think the way that I did about pursuing advanced academic music scholarship.